Nicholas F. Radel

Havelock Ellis's Literary Criticism, Canon Formation, and the Heterosexual Shakespeare

Famous as the author of an early full-length scientific study of sexual inversion or homosexuality, English sexologist Havelock Ellis was also a literary critic responsible for initiating publication of the famous Mermaid Series of “The Best of Plays of the Old Dramatists” in the late-nineteenth century. Personally editing the first volume of plays by Christopher Marlowe and a later collection by tragedian John Ford, Ellis associated these playwrights here and in his scientific work, Sexual Inversion, with ideas about normative and so-called abnormal sexualities at the start of the twentieth century. Ellis, thus, helped give expression to a literary canon of early English dramatists in which modern, anachronistic ideas about sexual subjectivity play a part. While this article does not claim that Ellis was the necessary source for later criticism, it shows how, over the whole of the twentieth century, Shakespeares priority in the literary canon came to be posited at least in part on his apparent sexual normality in contrast with a supposedly homosexual Christopher Marlowe and other playwrights such as Ford or Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher associated with varying degrees of sexual difference.

Queer Shakespeare: desire and sexuality

A recent offering in the Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare series, Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality is not an entirely satisfying collection. Containing essays by both well- and lesser-known scho...

Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (review)

ter, “Tragical Mirth: Framing Shakespeares Hippolyta,” Schwarz explores the paradoxical weight of the “defeated Amazon” whose nuptials frame A Midsummer Nights Dream and who seems to “encapsulate . . . the right relations of gender and the government of desire” (207), but whose presence also signals the ongoing process of suppression necessary to heterosexual comic conclusions. However, in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Schwarz observes in her Epilogue,“the perversity of amazonian endings becomes fully clear. Heterosexual desire breaks up a homosocial utopia; heroic masculinity is selfdestructive in its triumph; the winner dies, and the loser gets the Amazon” (238). Tough Love is a skillfully crafted and inventive example of current critical practice, with a strong theoretical framework, adroit integration of contemporary writing and a broad range of early modern texts, and discerning readings of the Amazonian canon from Knox to Plutarch. Moreover, Tough Love is enlivened by a nimble, raffish wit: “The Faerie Queene,” Schwarz observes drily, “is a world of arm candy” (161). A certain inevitability in argument, assumptions, and trajectory is characteristic of the critical genre, but in its fresh, resourceful readings and energetic textual decoupage, Tough Love provides a buoyant addition to the scholarship on Amazons and a felicitous contribution to an understanding of the reproduction of female eroticism in the Renaissance.

(E)Racing Edmund White: Queer Reading, Race, and Sexuality in A Boy's Own Story

A history of racialized sexuality in the US suggests that sexuality is saturated by race even in American literature written by white gay men. Reading Edmund White’s coming out novel, A Boy’s Own Story, in relation to a little-known work of gay pulp fiction, André Tellier’s Twilight Men, the essay provides a fictional example of the ways white gay identities might be seen simultaneously to collude with and undermine the history of whiteness. The essay also elaborates a strategy for queer reading of the incoherencies of sexual identities within multiple historical discourses.

Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (review)

the mode of reading it, are both theatrical” (218–19). But in order to reach this point in the book the author has had to loosen his key terms until Encyclopedia becomes a metaphor for any form of knowledge, ordered thought, sequentiality, combination, containment, and theater can mean anything that is ritualized, dramatic, visual, public, demonstrable, ironic, mimetic . . . and so on through a series of substitutions that eventually threatens to undermine the field of study. In fact, the success of the book is due chiefly to the fact that it is more concerned with these larger issues represented by the metaphors of encyclopedia and theater than with the history and connection between the things themselves.