Abstract
As chapter 2 demonstrated, early modern playwrights used cross-dressing as a convenient strategy when presenting images of female homoeroticism in drama. However, some scholars dismiss the cross-dressed character as a site of homoerotic investment. In his influential text, Sodometries, Jonathan Goldberg argued that homosexuality is not located in dramatic transvestism since homosexual tendencies are not acquired merely by a character’s appropriation of opposite-gender clothing. Goldberg proposes that models of friendship and the discourse on sodomy are more useful sites of investigation—that Marlowe’s Edward II has more to offer than As You Like It or Twelfth Night, or at least that one should focus critical attention on the relationship of Rosalind and Celia rather than Rosalind and Phebe.1 If one looks for sexual identities, then Goldberg is correct; however, if one investigates sexual representations a broader field of inquiry emerges than Goldberg’s theory suggests. For, while early modern playwrights did construct characters who might be considered to have a homosexual inclination like Emilia in The Two Noble Kinsmen, they more often represented homoerotic desires or homo-erotic tensions between characters without being constrained by peremptory qualifications of a character’s sexual identity.
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Notes
Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 142–43.
See also Denise A. Walen, “Constructions of Female Homoerotics in Early Modern Drama,” Theatre Journal 54. 3 (2002): 411–30.
Bruce R. Smith, “Making a Difference: Male/Male ‘desire’ in tragedy, comedy, and tragi-comedy,” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London: Routledge, 1992), 145–46.
Valerie Traub, “The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern Drama,” GLQ. A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.2 (2001): 260–61.
R. A. Foakes, “Tragicomedy and Comic Form,” in Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 82.
Verna A. Foster, “Sex Averted or Converted: Sexuality and Tragicomic Genre in the Plays of Fletcher,” SEL 32 (1992): 311–12.
Lee Bliss, “Pastiche, Burlesque, Tragicomedy,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 238–39.
Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher, Philaster; or, Love lies a Bleeding. As it hath beene diverse times Acted, at the Globe, and Blacke-Friers, by his Majesties Servants (London, 1622).
Samuel Daniel, Hymen’s Triumph, ed. John Pitcher, The Malone Society Reprints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) v–x. Pitcher believes that the play was not specifically commissioned for the Roxborough wedding.
Although the edited manuscript does not contain the word “instinct,” it appears in the early printed copies of the play. See Samuel Daniel, Hymens Triumph. A Pastorali Tragicomcedie. Presented at the Queenes Court in the Strand, at her Majesties magnificent entertainement of the Kings most excellent Majesty, being at the Nuptials of the Lord Roxborough in Samuel Daniel, The Whole Workes of Samuel Daniel esquire in Poetrie (London, 1623), sig. Ii6v.
Paul A. Cantor, “John Ford,” in Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists, ed. Fredson Bowers, Dictionary of Literary Biography 58 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1987), 95.
S. Blaine Ewing, Burtonian Melancholy in the Plays of John Ford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), 32–46.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 6, Commentary on the Third Partition, ed. J. B. Bamborough with Martin Dodsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 33–34. Burton references the ambassadorial letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq first published in Latin in 1589.
Critics have seen this play as a kind of pastiche of earlier dramas, including Philaster, King Lear, and of course As You Like It and Twelfth Night. See Cantor, “John Ford,” 96, R. F. Hill, introduction to The Lover’s Melancholy, by John Ford, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 9–10
Robert B. Heilman, “The Perverse: An Aspect of Ford’s Art” in Concord in Discord: The Plays of John Ford, 1586–1986, ed. Donald K. Anderson (New York: AMS, 1986), 45n
H. J. Oliver, The Problem of John Ford (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1955), 52–55.
John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Other Plays, ed. Marion Lomax, Oxford Drama Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 42. Subsequent quotations are from this edition.
James Bulman, “Caroline Drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 362.
James Shirley, Six New Playes, viz, The Brothers, The Sisters, The Doubtfull Heir, The Imposture, The Cardinall, The Court Secret (London, 1653), sig. D2v. Subsequent quotations are from this edition.
Celia Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–5, 51.
Sir John Suckling, The Works of Sir John Suckling: The Plays, ed. L. A. Beaurline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 184, 289–94; Harbage, Cavalier Drama, 115.
Charles L. Squier, “Sir John Suckling” in Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists, ed. Fredson Bowers, DLB 58 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1987), 274.
Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 18–19, 54–58
Daniel J. Vitkus, ed., Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1–16
Barbara Fuchs, “Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English Nation” ELH 67.1 (2000):45, 51–52.
Robert Daborne, A Christian Turn’d Turke: or, the Tragicall Lives and Deaths of the two Famous Pyrates, Ward and Dansiker (London, 1612). Subsequent quotations are from this edition.
Leonard Willan, Orgula: or, the Fatall Error. A Tragedy Composed by L.W. Whereunto, Is Annexed a Preface, discovering the true Nature of Poesie, with the proper Use and Intention of such publique Divertisments (London, 1658). Subsequent quotations are from this edition.
For discussions of homosexuality in popular cinema see Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet, Homosexuality in the Movies, rev. edn (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1987).
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© 2005 Denise A. Walen
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Walen, D.A. (2005). Anxiously Emergent Lesbian Erotics. In: Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981066_4
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