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Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism.

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Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism by Alan Sinfield. London: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xii + 225. $110 cloth; $33.95 paper.

Without succumbing to theoretical cliches or predictable conclusions, in eleven essays that make up this book Alan Sinfield places Shakespeare (the queerest of early modern writers) at the center of his analyses of gender, desire, textuality, and history. Sinfield's book revives a field--early modern queer studies--that has started to show signs of critical exhaustion, and represents a brilliant example of how much new and stimulating can still be said about the obvious and the familiar--and in such an appealing critical language. Sinfield reads Shakespeare contextually, through other writers, by placing his work "among plays that have not been much considered hitherto" (21), not reading his works against (or within) the social or political background of his period in which Shakespeare has often been read. Reading Shakespeare in relation to other writers is a more immediate way of historicist and materialist contextualization meant to avoid timelessness and universality. Sinfield's argument for this approach is that "in literary history the acceptable context is other literary texts, allowing the advantages of historical location while preserving the transcendence of literature as a category" (31). This is a welcoming statement (and powerful in its crisp...

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