Goran V. Stanivukovic

Shakespeare and the new aestheticism: space, style and text

The resurgence of aesthetic and rhetoric in Renaissance scholarship has drawn our attention to the interpretative power of formalist criticism and has revealed the problem of historicist evaluations of literature only as a materialist practice, a practice in which aesthetics and history are separated as objects of inquiry. Regarding pictures as a social discourse, and treating language as a conduit for political power and material construction of the world, historicists’ focus on facts, on an almost scientific assessment of a historical epoch and the literary texts it has produced, and materialist discourses as history, passes over the linguistic and rhetorical forms as marginal properties of literature of the past, as if these formal properties were not in fact the carriers of meaning, of social energy, and of the ideologies which historicists locate in literature. Crucial though historicism has been as a theoretical resource in Shakespeare criticism, it has tended to treat Shakespeare’s text as a material, not aesthetic, object within history in which it is ideologically situated. Re-evaluating the work of New Historicism, specifically, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt identify the touch of the real (real history) at the point at which literature meets ‘‘the imaginative force of the non-literary’’ (29). Yet questions concerning how an aesthetic form produces meaning in its own right rather than reproduces the narrative of social power and energy, how the compound reading of the pictorial and the textual expands and redirects analyses in different critical directions, remain unchallenged in historicist criticism. Historicist neglect of language and style, as if neither language nor style was a kind of materialist practice, as if neither was a historical category in its own right, represents a further remove from considering formal properties of artistic expression as objects of critical attention. If ‘‘the logic of historicism is to imply . . . that the point from which the critic speaks is as unsettled by historicism as the object he or she interprets’’ (Hamilton 17), then the logic of neo-formalism is to take literary criticism to the point at which it unsettles the historicist treatment of the object as situated within the historical time of an epoch and to erase the dividing line of history and aesthetics, and historical time, by engaging with other art forms and the afterlife of a historical artefact. Yet neo-formalist aesthetic criticism which this special issue promotes acts as the critical obverse of and an alternative to historicist scholarship because it approaches cultural history through different forms through which that history is rewritten in different spaces of expression.

Gaveston in Ireland: Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and the casting of queer brotherhood

ABSTRACT This essay explores Anglo–Irish relations in the early modern period as dramatised in Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 play, Edward II. Specifically, the argument emphasises the role Gaveston played as King Edward II’s Governor of Ireland, highlighting Marlowe’s interest in dramatising this history in sexual terms. Marlowe integrates two moments in the history of Anglo–Irish relations, one is the fourteenth-century history of the reign of Edward II and his political aspirations in Ireland; the other is Marlowe’s perspective of the history of Anglo–Irish contacts in the 1590s. Marlowe presents these personal and political themes through the affective and sexual ambiguities that characterise the relationship between Edward and Gaveston.

Queer philologies: sex, language, and affect in Shakespeare’s time

Queer early modern criticism has continued to thrive despite the occasional recent doubt about where queer theory is headed and whether it has even run its course. Masten’s wide-ranging, expansive ...

Between Men in Early Modern England

The life of a man, however modern he may be, is always a public event.2 For some time the historiography of early modern masculinity has explored masculinity in spaces that produce it as normative, ranging from the battlefield to the court, from parliament to pulpit, from travel to conquest. In early modern England (and Europe), these are spaces that enable masculine self-identification as powerful and central to the foundation of the early modern state, for in them man is constructed as hero, prince, preacher, lawyer, overseas explorer, master of the household. Yet once we start exploring both the center and the periphery of those very same spaces and institutions within which masculinity is constructed, and start looking at male sexuality outside the sphere of marriage and procreation, the historiography of early modern masculinity enters a zone of pleasure and horror. In the realm of male sexuality outside the boundaries of what Michel Foucault calls ‘the most intense focus of constraints’3 — of the body assured by marriage, early modern male sexuality is inherently transgressive.

Introduction: Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640

Immoderation and indiscretion, Montaigne suggests in an essay central to early modern ideas about sexuality, characterize the viciousness and force of pleasure. They could also be said to capture the essence of the representation of sexuality—in all its various guises—in early modern English prose fiction. Although Montaigne’s focus is not prose fiction explicitly, but literature more generally, his argument that “love” and its goddess, Venus, function to veil sexual desire provides a powerful foundation on which to construct an analysis of the narratival, linguistic, and symbolic implications of love in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century prose fiction, for beneath the narrative and rhetorical structures that seem to be grappling with notions of love and courtship, those amorous discourses, in fact, often serve as pretexts for more salacious arguments about the sexual practices and identities of men and women. Within the range of kinds of fictions produced during the period—popular, royal, and historical romances, novella, translations of Greek romances, and rogue literature—the protocols of normative and traditional discourse on love (and on courtship and marriage) contends with the persistent sexual incontinence of men and the transgressive sexual agency of women. The resulting ideological clash often manifests itself in actions and eloquent speech by male and female characters who excessively, and sometimes violently, pursue and consume desire in ways that defy traditional discourses on corporeal behavior.