Criticism

Volume 56 | Issue 1 Article 7

2014 From Identities to Types Will Stockton Clemson University

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Recommended Citation Stockton, Will (2014) "From Identities to Types," Criticism: Vol. 56: Iss. 1, Article 7. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol56/iss1/7 From Identities One question currently dogging Renaissance scholars is how to to Types discuss sexuality without also dis- Will Stockton cussing identity, especially gay and lesbian identity. In their provoca- Sexual Types: Embodiment, tive 2005 essay “Queering History,” Agency, and Dramatic Character which opposes the time-disturbing from Shakespeare to Shirley by force of queerness to the presump- Mario DiGangi. Philadelphia: tively teleological imperatives of University of Pennsylvania Press, historicism, Jonathan Goldberg 2011. Pp 304, 30 illustrations. and Madhavi Menon complain $65.00 cloth. that “modern sexuality studies has become really only a field about lesbian and gay male identity.”1 Goldberg and Menon picture a field in which scholars focus almost exclusively on the history of homo- sexuality and read characters who have gay sex or express homoerotic sentiments as either anticipatory of, or legible only in their difference from, modern gays and lesbians. Certainly, the difference that cen- turies of sociological, scientific, and juridical change make to sexuality, and consequently to the concept of sexual identity, has been a topic at the forefront of the field at least since Michel Foucault undertook the project of historicizing sexual- ity itself. Whereas the authors of some recent studies in Renaissance sexuality seek to distance them- selves from any sort of teleological history of (homo)sexual identity, preferring instead to focus on the erotics of temporality, affect, and materialism, others have kept their histories more tightly linked to modern identities without assum- ing that these modern identities

Criticism Winter 2014, Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 129–133. ISSN 0011-1589. 129 © 2014 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 130 WILL Stockton are themselves stable formations analyzes: the sodomite, the tribade, against which one can measure the the narcissistic courtier, the citizen difference of the past.2 wife, the bawd, and the royal favor- Mario DiGangi’s focus on sex- ite. Sexual Types is also no polemic: ual types, rather than identities, in it offers no pugnacious response to, his historically rich and often ana- and even little engagement with, lytically surprising new book of- all the current queer pontificating fers a marvelous example of what about the perils of identity and tele- scholars can accomplish when they ology. It nonetheless offers a model stop worrying over the approxima- for how Renaissance sexuality stud- tion of early modern to modern ies can avoid both the traps of teleo- sexualities. If an identity is a sense logical thinking and the reduction of self, an I that coalesces in rela- of sexuality studies to simply the tion to others with a similar sense study of gays and lesbians. of self, then the type is recogniz- Given the sheer amount and able dramatic figure, a character: analytical thrust of previous schol- “These characters look familiar arship on the sodomite and the not because they (necessarily) rep- tribade, DiGangi’s challenge con- resented people likely to be en- sists in framing both figures not as countered in the daily lives of early protohomosexuals, but rather as modern English men and women, dramatic types. Even more chal- but because they were . . . recogniz- lengingly, he must argue for the able figures of literary imagination existence of each as a type although and social fantasy” (5). Expressions neither appears in character books of erotic agency by sexual types from the period. Both types accord- provide DiGangi with focal points ingly make curious choices for the for analyzing the formation and first two chapters, but these chap- transgression of gender, social, po- ters firmly anchor the book in the litical, and economic orders in the field of Renaissance sexuality stud- early modern period, while this ies and provide DiGangi, as the analytical shift away from under- subtitle of his book suggests, with standing dramatic characters as a point of Shakespearean depar- embodiments of variably modern ture. He reframes the sodomite as sexual identities keeps the book’s a “composite type, a hybrid figure historical inquiries tethered quite composed of elements from com- strictly to the early modern social mon social types such as the prodi- imaginary. Dramatists William gal, the epicure, the ‘good fellow’ Shakespeare and James Shirley de- (a gamester or a drunkard), and limit the historical trajectory of the the friend” (7). Analyzing religious book, which shows little to no con- commentaries on the destruction cern for the afterlives of the types it of Sodom in order to establish the On sexual types 131 variety of economic, sexual, and domination. The truly innovative, social norms the sodomite vio- if briefer, reading of The Winter’s lates, DiGangi turns to one of the Tale argues that Paulina is legible as theater’s most famous sodomites, a tribade whose sixteen-year, secret Troilus and Cressida’s Patroclus, relationship with Hermione, end- reading Thersites’s insults (“boy” ing with the restoration of Herm- and “Achilles’ male varlet”) as in- ione as wife, mother, and queen, dicative of the sodomite’s composi- challenges the “substitutive logic” tion of “idle, proud, prodigal, and (87) that informs anxieties about sexually transgressive” character the type. traits (43). Subtly but productively These first two chapters, on adopting the deconstructive ana- the sodomite and the tribade, re- lytic that many scholars of sodomy spectively, situate several of Shake- have employed, DiGangi’s reading speare’s plays in a network of other cannily reveals that the accusations nondramatic texts. Chapters 3 and brought against Patroclus are also 4, by contrast, not only move away “consonant with the dominant so- “from Shakespeare,” as the book’s cial values of the play” (43)—that subtitle promises, but also provide the sodomite condenses and em- extensive close readings of single bodies traits expressed by the more plays. DiGangi anticipates that this heroic characters. methodological shift will perplex Even more rewarding as a ven- some readers, but he states that ture through familiar territory is no hermeneutic of necessity gov- DiGangi’s chapter on the tribade. erns it. Rather, his own scholarly Drawing on Valerie Traub’s work, desire does: “The different mode as well as on an archive of anatomy of argumentation . . . reflects my books and travel manuals, DiGangi desire to explore different ways of argues that the representation of the situating sexual types among liter- tribade as usurping men’s superior ary and cultural discourses in an sexual role is sometimes undercut effort to understand the complex- by the simultaneous representation ity of their functioning” (14). While of female homoerotic relationships one still wonders how certain as egalitarian. One dramatic exam- modes of argumentation would ple is again a bit overdetermined: accordingly simplify the analysis Titania, in A Midsummer Night’s of particular types, the following Dream, bucks Oberon’s author- chapters lack neither complexity ity by refusing to relinquish the nor payoff as they jointly analyze changeling boy; and while her rela- the dilemmas attending typological tionship with her votaress remains discrimination. hierarchical, she asserts female-­ Chapter 3 reads Ben Jonson’s female eroticism against patriarchal Cynthia’s Revels as a play whose 132 WILL Stockton mockery of the narcissistic courtier John Fletcher’s A Wife for a Month, as a “mincing” imposter is com- Thomas Dekker and John Web- promised by Jonson’s characteristic ster’s Westward Ho, Thomas Mid- tendency to deconstruct his own dleton’s Women Beware Women, critique. That is, the play’s political and Shakespeare’s Pericles) with critique ultimately runs up against varying degrees of agency. She also the impossibility of distinguishing appears physically in ways that legitimate from illegitimate cou- only approximate her reputation as turiers. The novelty of chapter 4, grotesque. In the logic of her con- on the type of the citizen wife, lies demnation, the bawd threatens to in the fact that its interest in the make women common—that is, eponymous character of Thomas unchaste—and she does so through Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s the use of rhetorical commonplaces The Roaring Girl is only second- and proverbs. Observing that anti- ary. Moving the citizen wives and bawd rhetoric similarly relies upon their exchanges—financial and commonplaces, DiGangi plays bril- conversational—to the center of his liantly on the term common, read- analysis, DiGangi studies how the ing the bawd not simply as a figure sexual slander they deploy and re- punished by the law, but also as a ceive defines and disciplines them figure whose deployment of com- as wives who possess both erotic monplaces exposes the common and economic agency. This shift in rhetorical foundations on which focus enlarges our sense of a play the law rests. we already know to be about the The final chapter on the royal relationship between work and sex favorite examines a number of less because it reveals the citizen wife to familiar Caroline plays, includ- be a sexual type who walks—like ing Philip Massinger’s The Maid of Moll Cutpurse herself, albeit within Honor and The Great Duke of Flor- the context of marriage—the par- ence, Thomas Killigrew’s Claricilla, ticularly tenuous line between a and James Shirley’s The Royal Mas- working woman and a whore. ter, The Duke’s Mistress, and The The final two chapters survey Traitor, to chart the evolution of the multiple plays in their analysis of type from a Ganymede figure (like two sexual types who play inter- Gaveston in Christopher Marlowe’s mediary roles in heteroerotic rela- Edward II) whose relationship with tionships: the bawd and the royal the sovereign weakens the latter. favorite. Whereas the bawd is The Caroline favorite, DiGangi typically denounced as a decrepit argues, is a more monstrous, self- old woman who actively seduces aggrandizing figure whose me- a younger woman, the bawd ac- diating role in royal relationships tually appears in plays (including renders the king’s will illegible for On sexual types 133 other subjects who have a stake in prominent queer, I would claim the monarch’s relationships and the Sexual Types as exemplary of one affairs of the nation. The invective kind of wide-ranging, textually directed toward the monstrous fa- comparative, historically sophis- vorite is thus, DiGangi emphasizes, ticated work from which Renais- not necessarily a way of critiquing sance sexuality studies, as much the monarch’s sexual preferences, as character studies, can learn as it but a way of critiquing “the king’s seeks to move from Shakespeare to reliance on inscrutable affections . . . elsewhere. to govern the baffling network of al- liances and affiliations that comprise Will Stockton is associate professor of Eng- the political nation” (220). lish at Clemson University. He is the author of Playing Dirty: Sexuality and Waste I have framed Sexual Types as an in Early Modern Comedy (University of intervention in Renaissance sexual- Minnesota Press, 2011) and the coeditor ity studies that successfully shifts of Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze (Ashgate, 2009) and Sex the field’s focus from identity to Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early types, and from figures who em- Modern England (University of Minnesota body and express homoerotic de- Press, 2013). sire to the range of sexual figures who populate the early modern stage. DiGangi’s epilogue makes Notes clear, however, that he also hopes his book will intervene in the field 1. Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, “Queering History,” PMLA 120, of character studies, which remains no. 5 (2005): 1608–17, quotation on 1611. overwhelmingly focused on Shake- 2. For examples of the former, see Carla speare and his production of “vir- Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, Series Q tual personhood” (223). A more (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, robust sense of the kinds of types 2006); Madhavi Menon, Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shake- that populated the stage, of the spearean Literature and Film (New kinds of social and political change York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and in which the theater was involved, Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in and of the “modes of queer em- Renaissance Representations (New York: bodiment and dissidence that were Fordham University Press, 2009). For thinkable in early modern culture” an example of the latter, see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism requires “[l]ooking beyond the in Early Modern England, Cambridge Shakespearean norm” (225). To Studies in Renaissance Literature and the great extent that Shakespeare Culture, vol. 42 (Cambridge: Cam- remains early modernity’s most bridge University Press, 2002).