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Article Excerpt
A salient development in Shakespeare studies over the past two decades or so has been the amount of attention devoted to the same-sex desire represented in the plays and sonnets. The topic is one that editorial and other commentators had failed to recognize or had suppressed for nearly two centuries, and its emergence was one of the many fortunate results of the gay liberation movement. That movement certainly had a pronounced effect on the direction my own scholarship would take. During the later 1970s and early 1980s I was at work on my study of the Sonnets, Such Is My Love, and I could not and would not have undertaken such a book, on what I called "the grand masterpiece of homoerotic poetry" (1), very much earlier. And even during those years the ascendancy, the strong academic presence, and the esteem since achieved by gay and lesbian studies and then queer theory were hardly foreseeable. Practitioners of the discipline(s), usually members of English departments, have by now created a considerable body of critical and scholarly work focused on Shakespeare's imagination of sexualities of different kinds. Here I propose to examine and evaluate some of that work. (1)
I must confess at the outset to finding much of it methodologically and hermeneutically flawed, so that, instead of celebrating it as I should prefer to do, I have to perform the regrettable task of disclosing its shortcomings. Too often the writers in question exhibit a deficiency in exegetical skills, with close reading generally contemned by them as new-critical formalism. Most of them insist on adopting a historico-theoretical approach to literature, the one that largely derives from writings of the social historian Alan Bray and of Michel Foucault as a historian of sexuality. Regarded as authoritative, they provide the conceptual grounds that enable lesbian and gay Shakespeareans to problematize the notions of "sodomy" and "homosexuality," with the first accepted, the second tabooed. My procedure will be, first, to discuss the conception of sodomy and its use and misuse in the Shakespearean commentary; next to discuss homosexuality and how it is dealt with there; and, in concluding, to venture some recommendations to whoever may take on future scholarly projects on the sexualities in Shakespeare.
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"Sodomy" (in Latin sodomia), or the sin of Sodom (Sodoma in the Vulgate), derives, of course, from the name of the city that, along with Gomorrah, is destroyed by fire and brimstone in Genesis 19. The word sodomia dates from the mid-eleventh century, originating in the theological discourse of St. Peter Damian. He conceived of the vice as restricted to males, and in his Book of Gomorrah listed the four increasingly grave sexual forms it may take: self-pollution, the mutual handling and rubbing of male organs, intercourse "between the thighs," and penetration "in the rear" (Jordan 29, 46). It would be another two centuries before the foremost medieval theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, provided his lucid and rigorous taxonomy of sexual sins. Those that preclude generation, the proper end of sexual acts, are thereby sins against nature (peccata contra naturam), and they are more grievous than the sins that do not preclude reproduction, such as fornication or adultery, and thus accord with nature (peccata secumdum naturam). He distinguishes four unnatural vices, which are, in an ascending order of culpability: 1. masturbation (mollities); 2. heterosexual relations where the reproductive organs are improperly employed; 3. the sodomitical vice (vitium sodomiticum), committed with someone of the same sex; and 4. bestiality, committed with a member of a different species. Within this category of violations of nature, sodomy signifies carnal relations between men or between women, though St. Thomas puts greater emphasis on the former, which he refers to as coitus masculorum, anal intercourse between men (Summa 2a2ae. 154,11), or else as concubitus masculorum, men's sleeping together (Jordan 146), which may designate a wider range of sexual practices.
The word "sodomy" entered the English language at the end of the thirteenth century. The OED defines it as "an unnatural form of sexual intercourse, esp. that of one man with another," citing six examples of this usage in English between 1297 and 1650; the definitions of "sodomite" and "sodomitical" cite further early examples.
During the reign of Henry VIII, in 1533-34, Parliament passed "an act for the punishment of the vice of buggery." This statute made sodomy a felony punishable by hanging, which replaced "the traditional biblical punishment of death by fire," then still in effect on the Continent. Sir Edward Coke, in a passage from his mid-seventeenth century Institutes, writes of buggery, which he elsewhere says is the English name for the "sin of Sodom," that it is "amongst Christians not to be named," a sin "against the ordinance of the Creator and the order of nature," and is committed "by mankind with mankind, or with brute beast, or by womankind with brute beast" (Smith 43-45, 50-51).
In the theological, lexical, and legal data assembled above, sodomy is conceived of as sex between men, though the conception also covers solitary sex for Damian, sex between women for Aquinas, and sex between humans and animals for Coke.
By now some readers may be thinking, but what is the point of this excursion into medieval and Renaissance sodomy, what has it got to do with Shakespeare? The answer is ... nothing--directly, at least, nothing at all. Shakespeare, despite his formidable vocabulary, nowhere uses the word "sodomy," or its siblings "sodomite" or "sodomitical," or its equivalent "buggery," or other related terms such as "catamite" or "ingle" (which were pederastic boy-toys), or "ganymede" as a common noun rather than a name, or pederast. He did not eschew these words because he neglected to write about same sex desire; it's rather that his more-than-tolerant, his humane, discerning, affirmative attitude toward that desire, when he chose to write about it in the Sonnets and elsewhere, ruled out the intrusion of such derogatory diction. Although never encountered in Shakespeare's works, sodomy plays a prominent role in the commentary of gay and lesbian Shake-speareans. As Gloucester asks Kent, "Do you smell a fault?" (1.1.16).
For information on this topic these commentators do not go to medieval theologians, or even to the OED, but they heavily rely on two sources: Volume I: An Introduction to Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality and Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England.
Most often cited in Foucault are the pages wherein he contrasts sodomy with its nineteenth-century substitute, homosexuality. The two are comparable because he thinks of both in terms of sexual relations between men. Of sodomy he writes that "it was a category of forbidden acts"--namely, male-with-male sexual acts--whose "[male] perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject" of "ancient civil or canonical [anti-sodomy] codes" (43). He also says that sodomy "was once 'the' great sin against nature," that is, one of several such sins, a Thomistic echo, though he suggests that it was deemed the gravest one; and he calls it "that utterly confused category." He apparently explains this when he goes on to observe how the "extreme severity" of the punishment (death by fire) went along with a widespread tolerance of the practice (101). But the distinction between the sodomite as a "temporary aberration" and the homosexual as a "species," between sodomy as "a category of forbidden acts" and homosexuality as referential to a "personage," an identity or orientation (43), is the point that gay and lesbian scholars have most eagerly seized upon and made axiomatic.
David Halperin offers in "Forgetting Foucault" a powerful and persuasive critique of their position. He maintains that practitioners of "queer theory" and "academic 'critical theory'" (111), from their "dogmatic and care-less misreadings" of An Introduction, misconstrue Foucault (100); they do so by mistaking his "discursive analysis" for "a historical assertion," one that
has licensed us ... to remake his strategic distinction between the sodomite and the homosexual into a conceptual distinction...
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