Queering the Renaissance 9780822382607

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QUEERING THE RENAISSANCE

Edited by Michele Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Second printing, 1994 © 1994 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Typeset in Centaur by Keystone Typesetting Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Cover Art: Fran~ois Perrier, etching after the Borghese hermaphrodite, from Segmenta Nobilium Signorum et Statuarum (Rome 1638). Reproduced by permission of Officina Musae, Montreal.

Contents

Introduction

JONATHAN GOLDBERG

Bowers v. Hardwick in the Renaissance

JANET E. HALLEY

Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England ALAN BRAY The (In)Significance of HLesbian" Desire in Early Modern England VALERIE TRAUB

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Fraudomy: Reading Sexuality and Politics in Burchiello ALAN K. SMITH

Practicing Queer Philology with Marguerite de Navarre: Nationalism and the Castigation of Desire

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CARLA FRECCERO

Erasmus's HTigress": The Language of Friendship, Pleasure, and the Renaissance Letter

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FORREST TYLER STEVENS

John Bale and Early Tudor Sodomy Discourse DONALD N. MAGER

UTo Serve the Queere": Nicholas Udall, Master of Revels

162

ELIZABETH PITTENGER

Into Other Arms: Amoret's Evasion Romeo and Juliet's Open Rs

DOROTHY STEPHENS

JONATHAN GOLDBERG

218

Vi

Contents

The Epistemology of Expurgation: Bacon and The Masculine Birth oj Time GRAHAM HAMMILL Pleasure and Devotion: The Body ofJesus and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric RICHARD

253 RAMBUSS

My Two Dads: Collaboration and the Reproduction of Beaumont and Fletcher JEFF MASTEN Fighting Women and Loving Men: Dryden's Representation of Shakespeare in Alljor Love

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310

MARCIE FRANK

New English Sodom Afterword

MICHAEL WARNER

MARGARET HUNT

Notes on Contributors Index

33° 359

QUEERING THE RENAISSANCE

Introduction JONATHAN GOLDBERG

N the more ordinary understanding of the title of this collection of essays, the process ofqueering the Renaissance has been under way for some time. Perhaps since Joan Kelly resolutely answered the question "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in the negative, the period has been under scrutiny in ways that have called into question the accomplishments of the Renaissance as foundational for modernity, or, at any rate, that have revealed aspects of that foundation that need to be scrutinized. I Thus, to take one example, it is now often observed that the humanism of the Renaissance-an accomplishment so often celebrated in the past-was available to only a limited segment of the population (not to all of "humanity"), for the most part males within fairly limited socioeconomic strata and a small number of women, almost all from the highest social stratum. 2 Hence, in the past decade and more, various antihumanist agendas have been brought to bear upon the period, and the collective work of feminists, materialists, new historicists, and theorists of a variety ofkinds has made it difficult to turn to the Renaissance as a site for the creation of an "individual" (to recall Burckhardt's thesis) whose nature is a site for celebration; rather, for contestation. Indeed, as Margaret Hunt suggests in her afterword in this volume, it is precisely when anyone other than a privileged white heterosexual male makes claims to a supposed "universal" individuality and humanity that the contestatory nature of the claim is most clear. It is, in part, for that very reason, as Hunt urges, that more work is needed to investigate the relations between questions of race, gender, and sexuality as they intersect with the projects of nation-building, colonialism, and

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Jonathan Goldberg

imperial expansion that mark the Renaissance. The recent deluge of important work on the New World, it has to be remarked, while attentive to some aspects of these questions, has remained all but silent on the questions of sexuality that this volume raises. It is nonetheless the case that the essays gathered here draw some of their energies from the pressure that has been put on Renaissance studies in the last decade or so. Allegiances to feminism shape many of them, and their commitment to historicization couldn't be clearer. Antifoundational work of the kind I have invoked is also continued in this volume, in Jeff Masten's essay, for example, when it calls into question the very notion of the availability of the concept of the individual for the Renaissance texts he considers; in Carla Freccero's essay, whose inquiry into the conditions of national subject-formation and textual formations is informed by a historicizing gesture that seeks to mark a crucial and potentially disruptive moment in the foundations ofa modern sociosexual order guaranteed by ~he Phallus; in the essays by Valerie Traub and Graham Hammill, where the non-self-identity of the subject, familiar enough from psychoanalytic or Derridean theory, requires a rereading in a historic period that does not operate under the aegis of the homo /hetero divide, where the divisions, as Freccero suggests, cross boundaries of gender and class. Hence, the kinds of questions these essays seek to raise, and the ways in which they would queer the Renaissance, go well beyond the ordinary protocols of a great deal of the criticism in the field. Valerie Traub, in "Desire and the Difference It Makes;' an essay related to the one that appears here, has shown, for instance, how heterosexist the assumptions of much feminist criticism have been, and therefore how kinds of lesbian possibilities in Renaissance texts have gone unread or, at times when recognized, have been demeaned. 3 This is a critique that I follow in my contribution to this volume, showing how straitening such views can be when considering ways of organizing desire, even in a text as fundamental for the heterosexual imaginary as Romeo and Juliet is taken to be. Richard Rambuss makes a parallel point in his essay on devotional poetry, noting how the policing of sexuality in earlier periods (when "they couldn't have meant that") is often most stringent when the sexuality in question is not straight. Thus, while considering how enabling Caroline Walker Bynum's work has been in proposing cross-gender transformations in medieval piety, he takes her to task for drawing back from countenancing consider-

Introduction ations of sexuality, for instance in the spectacle of a female worshiper contemplating a feminized Christ, and above all, it would appear, from granting the lesbian possibilities at play in such devotion. Of course, one would not want to give the impression that feminists err most in this area (indeed, criticism of such work proceeds from the opposite assumption, that feminist critics working in the Renaissance should have no investment in the reinforcement of compulsory heterosexuality), and in her essay in this volume, Traub pauses to note how Stephen Greenblatt's efforts in the field ofgender and sexuality have operated within the syntax of a normative heterosexuality; Rambuss similarly treats a range of critics of seventeenth-century devotional poetry (including Stanley Fish) who seek to efface the homoerotics that he powerfully suggests surrounds images of the penetrated male body in the texts of Crashaw, Herbert, and Donne, while I look at ways in which a supposedly neutral formalist criticism carries heterosexist assumptions. These are lapses that can be performed in the name of being true to the texts at hand, but it is more often the case that they arise from a failure to scrutinize presumptions that we carryall too unthinkingly. Thus, I am happy to stand corrected, as I am in Dorothy Stephens's essay, for my own blindness in Endlesse ltOrke to female-female sexual possibilities in The Faerie Queene. What I would therefore suggest is that however much we have learned to queer the Renaissance in the past couple of decades, we are still on the verge of a major reassessment of the field to which these essays seek to contribute. As Alan K. Smith points out in his essay on Burchiello, sodomy in fifteenth-century Italy was associated with modernity; Alan Bray suggests in his essay that the disruption of the traditional parameters of friendship by the emergence, however limited, of the so-called new men in the course of the sixteenth century in England brought sodomy into visibility as the emblem of social disruption; Graham Hammill argues that the new model of scientific knowledge that Bacon offers is intimately bound up with sodomitical sex; Carla Freccero glimpses a utopian possibility for lesbian separatism even as a compulsory heterosexuality seems to be legislated as a condition of the modern state; Michael Warner contends that there is a warrant for sodomy in the founding of the new nation on this side of the Atlantic. All of these might be seized as our license here for yet another rewriting of the Renaissance-one that, I believe, answers the caution voiced in Margaret Hunt's afterword, that

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Jonathan Goldberg

such a rewriting must not be a reinscription of the Renaissance or a discovery there of some realm of freedom lost with the advent of modernity and its carceral regimes. It would be a falsification to claim that questions about sexuality in the Renaissance have been raised only quite recently. However, it is true that the engagement with such subjects by academics is new, and it would be uncontentious to state that the impetus behind this work lies with the introductory volume to Foucault's History oj Sexuality. Its conceptualization of the field announced in its title opened a domain for study and provided tools for analysis. In Foucault's work, as in this volume, the aim is not to "find" gays and lesbians hidden from history, which is to say that the assumption of a transhistorical homosexual identity is not the motivation behind this work. Jeff Masten's programmatic statement at the end of his essay, avowing that the task of criticism in queering the Renaissance is not that of "outing" authors (not even Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote together, kept house together, and, as Aubrey reported, "lay together"), is a position to which most of the contributors to this volume would subscribe. It explains why Valerie Traub's essay, which delivers possibilities for a number of kinds of lesbianism across a range of sites-differentiated by nationality, literary genres, disciplinary domains-nonetheless puts the word lesbian in scare quotes (Carla Freccero ventures a question mark after she invokes the word to describe the Virgilian warrior Camilla that lurks on the edge of the tale from Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron upon which she focuses). So too it motivates the call for tact and caution in Forrest Tyler Stevens's essay when facing the question of Erasmus's alleged homosexuality; Stevens argues that by vacating that term and its definitional relation to heterosexuality a route to an answer about Erasmus's sexuality can be found. It is with similar concerns and with an equal display of tact that Dorothy Stephens observes of the highly charged night that Amoret and Britomart spend together at the opening of Book Four of The Faerie Queene that "it is wonderfully puzzling that the one happy bed scene in the whole poem appears here;' the puzzle-and the delight-lying precisely in how far one can impute sexual activity to this moment and how one is to read it. As these examples might suggest, the work of Alan Bray has been indispensable for most of the contributors to this volume; his Homosexuality in Renaissance England 4 remains the groundbreaking and unsurpassed historical investigation for the period; its signal contribution was to find

Introduction

5

ways of talking about homosexuality before the advent of the homosexual. Bray charts a path to the unacknowledged availability of homosexuality that is coextensive with social organization itself. Thus, in his essay, recast for inclusion in this volume, it is the unspeakable proximity of the most exalted bonds between men-friendship-and the most excoriated terms for male-male relations-sodomy-that concerns him, and the task ofhis essay is to articulate and make visible relations which the period sought to occlude and yet could not help seeing. As my framing of Bray's work might suggest, his investigations, keenly attuned to historic differences as they are, also formidably engage and provoke theoretical and epistemological questions. It is thus not all that surprising to find that many of the contributors to this volume move between his work and that of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose paradigm of homosocial relations complements Bray's sense of the ways in which male-male intimacies were furthered by the power structures that organized households, schools, and patronage networks. These are a few examples of the social domains that come under consideration in his work as well as in the volume at hand-sites enlarged in Carla Freccero's consideration of a text authored by a woman in which a group of women serve as narrator and audience, and register thereby an alternative social scene. Moreover, Sedgwick's elaboration of an epistemology of the closet provides a supple analytic tool for investigating the regimes of unknowing and unacknowledgeability that structure the place of homosexuality in Renaissance culture. 5 Her work is valuably skeptical about any form of historical knowledge that makes the past unusable for the present; it also highlights, thanks to its rich engagement with the texts it treats, the coordinates of modes of social organization and ways of knowing that are anything but transhistorical. If Epistemology oj the Closet problematizes even as it details the installment of the modern regimes of homo/hetero difference, the essays in this volume work within and through the complex terrain of a period that does not know those organizing terms. Indeed, to follow Foucault a la lettre, the Renaissance comes before the regimes of sexuality, and to speak ofsexuality in the period is a misnomer. This is indeed the case ifsexuality is taken as a marker of identity, definitional of a core of the person, and these essays, as I have dlready suggested, take great care not to suggest that gay or lesbian identity can be found in the texts at hand. Yet this does not mean that the anachronism of speaking of sexuality in the Renaissance is not to be risked, especially ifthe failure to invoke sexuality means acting as

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Jonathan Goldberg

if texts of the period can always be explained in other terms, and in ways in which anything like sex disappears-into the "convention" of friendship, for instance, to take up a point in Forrest Tyler Stevens's essay, or into a lapsus calami, to take the extreme instance Elizabeth Pittenger notes, involving an editor's decision that where the record of the Privy Council on the case of Nicholas Udall reads buggery, it should have burglary instead. These essays do not know in advance where sexuality is or how it will manifest itself (indeed, there is pressure in several of these essays on the very crucial question of whether there is any such thing as sexuality in itself beyond its variegated historical manifestations), but they know that the failure to raise questions of sexuality in these texts has often meant nothing less than the tacit assumption that the only sexuality that ever obtains is a transhistorical heterosexuality. Moreover, to return to the examples just cited, these essays recognize that because something is a convention is no reason to assume that it bears no relation to experience (Bray's essay demonstrates how the idealized literary image of the friend, for instance, served real social-and, I would add, ideological-purposes), while, as Pittenger argues, the point is not to decide between buggery and burglary but to recognize the complicities between the supposed separate domains those words suggest, differentiated by scarcely more than a letter. The point is that sexuality is only phantasmatically cordoned off to some private sphere; in truth, sexuality structures and destructures the social. In the Renaissance, as Bray points out, bedfellows were publicly known; if it is not always clear what shared beds meant-whether the "right" or the "wrong" persons were in bed together-it is always the case that exchanges of power are anything but disembodied acts. Although Bray's work looks only at men, as has been suggested already, a number of essays in this volume are alert to possibilities between women hitherto overlooked. It is in Spenser's book of friendship that Amoret and Britomart share a bed, and everyone knows it, for the phenomenon was not uncommon: ladies and their servants slept together, and so too did women friends, as the impassioned speech that Hermia delivers in A Midsummer Night~ Dream (considered by Valerie Traub) certainly makes clear. The language ofthat speech approaches the language ofmarriage. This is indicative of another sort of phenomenon noted by many of the essays here. For in addition to extending queer territory beyond the all-male limits that mark much of the work in the field, the way in which these essays engage the sociohistorical imbrication of sexuality necessitates read-

Introduction

7

ings that are not confined to Hdiscovering" homosexuality or to the supposition that such unearthings would take place within some confined, marginalized position or locus. 6 These essays focus on homosexual relations in the full recognition that they cannot be studied outside questions of gender or aside from the understanding of the powerful interests that are served by the social organizations that shape sexual difference: reproduction, familial structures, and the like. That these are not structures that ought simply to be equated with each other or treated as if their definitional and institutional energies answered fully to their desire to map the social is suggested, for instance, by Jeff Masten when he details the ways in which male-male engendering (the phenomenon of joint, collaborative authorship that was a regular feature of writing for the English Renaissance theater) conflict with patriarchal and absolutist paradigms of authorship and textual ownership that emerge in the seventeenth century; his argument gains further resonance and complexity through its consideration of how male-male relations are related to the emergence of an ideal of companionate heterosexual relations, but also how the Beaumont and Fletcher folio may be compared to the limits and enablements that shaped Margaret Cavendish's literary production and her folio publications. A broadly related point emerges from an examination of the divided terrain that puritan America bequeaths to the liberal social imagination, as Michael Warner argues, contemplating the conflicts between principles of hierarchy and a potential egalitarianism. Likewise, the complexities in Marguerite de Navarre's texts, as Carla Freccero shows, are instances of a series of crossings: between a bourgeois character celebrated for her resistance to the attentions of a prince, and a prince thereby celebrated for his restraint-characters, however, who meet in a name, Fran'r0is/Fran'r0ise, that is not only the name of Marguerite's brother and the future Fran