Fear of a Queer Shakespeare
(This was originally sent out as an e-mail to a group of AOL users who frequented the Life - Philosophy chatrooms. It was an answer to several issues that were being raised in that group.)
I can see some people have decided to focus on an issue I figured was relatively tangential to my original posting, and one that's relatively settled territory. This issue is whether or not Shakespeare was straight.
Before diving into the meat of this particular argument, I think a defining of terms might be in order, as the waters seem a little murky, at least to me. Perhaps after my definitions, which will only be working definitions for this particular e-mail, the waters will clear up. Or, perhaps they'll remain murky.
I. Hetero-glossary: an Archa/etymology
Homosexual: This term did not exist prior to 1869/1870 (there's some dispute as to the exact date between the two). At this date, it entered the German sexological lexicon. Prior to this time, people engaged in certain sexual acts, but were not known to be homosexual for doing so. Foucault wrote that "the nineteenth century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology" (43). Further, Foucault argued, "homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" (43). The term was largely psycho-medical in nature, and the psycho-medical connotations to the term still linger today. Furthermore, today, as when the term was coined, it largely referred to male homosexuals, although sometimes to female homosexuals. One can see this in the vulgarized form of the term, "homo," which is rarely used as an epithet against lesbians.
Gay: Used to refer to both homosexual men and to prostitutes around the turn of the century, the reference to prostitution with regard to this term got dropped early on in the 20th century. In the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, this term was picked up by the Gay Liberation Movements in both the U.S. and Europe as an alternative to the term homosexual. During that period, the term gay held a certain leftist political charge to it. Hocquenghem noted that "there is no innocent association between the two words ['homosexuality' and 'revolution'], no chance of a peaceful coexistence between the gay movement and the more traditional forms of politics" (145). For Hocquenghem, the term gay signified leftist/radical politics. It has since lost most of this political charge in the late 1980s and 1990s. As with the term homosexual, it is often used to describe men, but occasionally it is used by gay women who choose not to adopt the term lesbian.
Queer: This term has been around since the late 19th century as an epithet against homosexuals, drag queens, bisexuals, transgender people, and transvestites, among others. In the early 1990s, with the coaltion-building between gay men and lesbians, and the dissolution of the political meaning of the term gay, the term queer became adopted by many queer leftists and left leaning organizations, inaugurated by Queer Nation in 1990. This term is being reclaimed by many radical activists for a number of purposes, including robbing it of its power for violence, and further, to express unity. It has largely become an umbrella term to include lesbians, bisexuals, gay men, AIDS activists, transgender persons, and straight allies, as well as other sexual dissidents. Warner wrote that "for both academics and activists, 'queer' gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual" (xxvi).
Bisexual: This term has been in use at least since Freud was writing, and its meanings are so many and varied, one gets boggled by them. Some say that Freud's polymorphously perversity is bisexuality. Others say that Kinsey's 3 is true bisexuality. A large number of questions get raised in this particular territory, such as whether a person who does have sexual relations with both men and women at the same time is bisexual in the same way as someone who has sexual relations with men and women but at different times. Marjorie Garber writes that "it is that very identity that disrupts. Bisexuality unsettles certainties: straight, gay, lesbian. It has affinities with all of these, and is delimited by none. It is, then, an identity that is also not an identity, a sign of the certainty of ambiguity, the stability of instability, a category that defies and defeats categorization" (70). In the late 1990s, bisexuals have been organizing politically, both within and outside the gay & lesbian communities.
Heterosexual: This term wasn't coined until 1880 in German, making its debut in English in 1889 (twenty years after the term homosexual was coined). Furthermore, Katz wrote, it was originally defined a form of perversion, "associating [heterosexuals] with nonprocreative perversion" (54). Garber noted that "in Dorland['s Medical Dictionary of 1901], 'heterosexuality' is defined as an 'abnormal or perverted sexual appetite towards the opposite sex'" (41). It would take the intervention of Freud to begin to normalize the heterosexual, which was not fully successful until about the 1960s.
II. Shakespeare and Sexuality
We know very little about Shakespeare's actual life. We know when and where he was born. We know when and to whom he got married. We know when he died. There's some controversy about whether he was responsible for the plays and/or the sonnets written in his name. Usually, in these theories, Christopher Marlowe (who has been documented to have been a frequenter of London's molly houses [a "molly house" is where men who had sex with other men in London hung out, similar to the bathhouses of the 1970s]) is the ghost writer. If you've ever actually read Marlowe and Shakespeare side by side, you'd wind up thinking quite differently--Marlowe's a very competent playwright, and would have been considered great if he weren't Shakespeare's contemporary. But he was, and he's not quite as good.
In considering the Sonnet sequence, one must put it into the context in which it belongs. Sonnet sequences are a literary tradition, beginning with Petrarch's imitation of Ovid's "Amores." Petrarch's sequence, dedicated to Laura, traces an unrequited love affair between the (presumably male) narrator and Laura, the object of the narrator's affections. In England, this would be taken up by Sir Philip Sydney's "Astrophil and Stella," but Sydney twisted the model: Astrophil kisses Stella in her sleep. Not much later, Edmund Spenser would write his sonnet sequence, the "Amoretti." But, much to Spenser's surprise, and unlike Laura and Stella, Spenser's lady did not rebuff him--instead, she married him. So, instead of ending the sequence tragically (as Ovid, Petrarch, and Sydney did), Spenser had to write the "Epithalamion," or wedding song, to end his sequence. Along comes Shakespeare, and it appears that all the good twists on this form have been taken already: unrequited love, kissing the object of the narrator's affection unbeknownst to her, and up-and-marrying her. What's a poor up-and-coming poet to do? He dedicates his sequence to a man. McNaron notes that "in fact, of the 154 sonnets in Shakespeare's sequence, 127 are to the young man, while only 27 are addressed to a 'dark lady' who saps the poet's self-respect as well as his sexual energy" (111).
Shakespeare's Son. 20 seems to be a very clear example of the homoerotic element in the sonnet sequence:
A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,How can we understand this homoerotic element in Shakespeare's work? Well, traditionally, we've denied it. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote that:
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine by thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.
At the most expansive, there is a series of dismissals of such questions on the grounds that:Someone brought up the heterosexual nature of Shakespeare's plays, to which I responded by arguing that some have argued that there is substantial homoerotic content in those plays. For example, it has been argued that there is a homoerotic element in the relationship between Mercutio and Romeo in "Romeo and Juliet." And, as I mentioned before, the sexualities of the characters in "Twelfth Night, or As You Will" are dizzying, with Viola in drag as a young man, her twin brother showing up, Duke Orsino falling in love with Viola-in-drag and Olivia also falling in love with Viola-in-drag. These issues get further complicated if you recall that young men played the roles of women in the Globe Theater in London during the Renaissance. In "Romeo and Juliet," Juliet would have been played by a young man. Also, in "Twelfth Night, or As You Will," you have a young male actor, in drag as Viola, in drag as a young man, who is the object of both Duke Orsino's affections and Olivia's (also a young man in drag). Well, isn't that queer? [Church Lady Voice] Ultimately, what this shows is that gender itself is a social construction, in this case, a construction of the audiences' collective imagination that Juliet and Viola are really women. Butler noted that "in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself--as well as its contingency" (138). Bornstein wrote that "queer theater steals heterosexual mating rituals and makes them gaudy, or strips them bare, or turns them inside out. Our men seduce their men, and this is embarrassing. Our women seduce their women, and live without their men, and this is unforgivable" (160-161). And, in Shakespeare, this is exactly what happens.
1. Passionate language of same-sex attraction was extremely common during whatever period is under discussion--and therefore must have been completely meaningless. Or
2. Same-sex genital relations may have been perfectly common during the period under discussion--but since there was no language about them, they must have been completely meaningless. Or
3. Attitudes about homosexuality were intolerant back then, unlike now--so people probably didn't do anything. Or
4. Prohibitions against homosexuality didn't exist back then, unlike now--so if people did anything, it was completely meaningless. Or
5. The word "homosexuality" wasn't coined until 1869--so everyone before then was heterosexual. (Of course, heterosexuality has always existed.) Or
6. The author under discussion is certified or rumored to have had an attachment to someone of the other sex--so their feelings about people of their own sex must have been completely meaningless. Or (under a perhaps somewhat different rule of admissible evidence)
7. There is no actual proof of homosexuality, such as sperm taken from the body of another man or a nude photograph with another woman--so the author may be assumed to have been ardently and exclusively heterosexual. Or (as a last resort)
8. The author or the author's important attachments may very well have been homosexual--but it would be provincial to let so insignificant a fact make any difference at all to our understanding of any serious project of life, writing, or thought. (52-53)
Works Cited
Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York: Routledge, 1994. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction: Volume I. Trans. Robert Hurley. 1978. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Garber, Majorie. Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. New York: Touchstone Books, 1995.
Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. Trans. Daniella Dangoor. 1972. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
Katz, Jonathan Ned. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Plume Books, 1995.
McNaron, Toni A. H. Poisoned Ivy: Lesbian and Gay Academics Confronting Homophobia. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1997.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.
Shakespeare, William. "Son. 20." The Sonnets. Ed. William Burto. 1964. New York: Signet Classics, 1988. 60.
Warner, Michael. Introduction. Fear of a Queer Planet. Ed. Michael Warner. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. vii-xxxi.