Shakespeare and Queer Representation 9781138389601, 9781138389618, 9780429423802

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Shakespeare and Queer Representation

In this engaging and accessible guidebook, Stephen Guy-​ Bray uses queer theory to argue that in many of Shakespeare’s works representation itself becomes queer. Shakespeare often uses representation, not just as a lens through which to tell a story, but as a textual tool in itself. Shakespeare and Queer Representation includes a thorough introduction that discusses how we can define queer representation, with each chapter developing these theories to examine works that span the entire career of Shakespeare, including his sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, King John, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. The book highlights the extent to which Shakespeare’s works can be seen to anticipate, and even to extend, many of the insights of the latest developments in queer theory. This thought-​provoking and evocative book is an essential guide for students studying Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, gender studies, and queer literary theory. Stephen Guy-​B ray is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Spotlight on Shakespeare Series Editors: John Garrison and Kyle Pivetti

Spotlight on Shakespeare offers a series of concise, lucid books that explore the vital purchase of the modern world on Shakespeare’s work. Authors in the series embrace the notion that emergent theories, contemporary events, and movements can help us shed new light on Shakespeare’s work and, in turn, his work can help us better make sense of the contemporary world. The aim of each volume is two-fold: to show how Shakespeare speaks to questions in our world and to illuminate his work by looking at it through new forms of human expression. Spotlight on Shakespeare will adopt fresh scholarly trends as contemporary issues emerge, and it will continually prompt its readers to ask, “What can Shakespeare help us see? What can he help us do?” Spotlight on Shakespeare invites scholars to write non-exhaustive, pithy studies of very focused topics—with the goal of creating books that engage scholars, students, and general readers alike. Available in this series: Shakespeare at Peace John Garrison and Kyle Pivetti Shakespeare and Queer Representation Stephen Guy-Bray For more information about this series, please visit: www. routledge.com/Spotlight-on-Shakespeare/book-series/ SOSHAX

STEPHEN GUY-​BRAY

Shakespeare and Queer Representation

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Stephen Guy-​Bray The right of Stephen Guy-​Bray to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​P ublication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​P ublication Data Names: Guy-Bray, Stephen, author. Title: Shakespeare and queer representation / Stephen Guy-Bray. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020007207 | ISBN 9781138389601 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138389618 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429423802 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616–Criticism and interpretation. | Gender identity in literature. | Sex role in literature. | Sex in literature. | Queer theory. Classification: LCC PR3069.S45 G89 2020 | DDC 822.3/3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020007207 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​38960-​1  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​38961-​8  (pbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​429-​42380-​2  (ebk) Typeset in Joanna MT and DIN by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction

1



Cymbeline 

One

23



King John 

Two

46

Three

70

Four

99

Five

127

Six

148

Coda

175

Bibliography Index

183 194





Macbeth  The Rape of Lucrece 

The sonnets 

Venus and Adonis 

vi Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

My first thanks are due to John Garrison and Kyle Pivetti, the editors of the Spotlight on Shakespeare series, for encouraging me to submit a proposal for this book. At Routledge, Polly Dodson and Zoë Meyer have been unfailingly efficient and pleasant. At Newgen, Kelly Winter has skilfully guided me through the production process. In many ways, this project began with a talk called “Shakespeare Without Drama” that I  gave at a colloquium at the University of Alabama in February 2016. I  thank Sharon O’Dair for this invitation and my fellow participants for their papers and comments. After this colloquium, I developed this talk into a course that I  taught twice. I  am very grateful to the students in these classes for their comments and questions, which helped me to define my ideas more clearly. I tested my ideas about the poems and about King John in several other classes as well and I thank these students also. An earlier version of Chapter  2 appeared as “Locating Queerness in Cymbeline” in Queer Shakespeare:  Desire and Sexuality, edited by Goran Stanivukovic. I  am grateful to Professor Stanivukovic for providing the permission to use this material and for inviting me to participate in the seminar on Shakespeare and queer theory at the 2015 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America that provided the impetus for his edited collection.

vii  Acknowledgements

Some years ago the late Russ McDonald did me the honour of commissioning me to write an essay on Shakespeare’s style for the Shakespeare Association of America volume commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. This invitation was the beginning of my research on Venus and Adonis. I hope that he would have been interested in what I’ve written here. I also thank Lynn Enterline for her invitation to contribute an essay to her recent collection Elizabethan Narrative Poems: The State of Play. Writing that essay helped me to refine further my ideas about Venus and Adonis. I gave talks based on parts of this book in 2018 at the British Shakespeare Association conference in Belfast, the Society for Renaissance Studies conference in Sheffield, and the Sixteenth-​ Century Society conference in Albuquerque; in 2019 at the Geographies of Gender conference in Winchester and the symposium on women and power at Shakespeare’s Globe; and in 2020 at the Renaissance Society of America in Philadelphia. I had the privilege of presenting versions of the introduction in invited talks at Cardiff University and Oxford University in 2017, at West Texas A&M University in 2018, at Queen Mary University of London in 2019; my thanks are due to Josh Robinson, Emma Smith, Robert Stagg, Matthew Harrison, and Charlie Pullen for these invitations. I am especially grateful to Philip Schwyzer of the University of Exeter for inviting me to be the Gareth Roberts Visiting Professor there in November 2017. My stay in Exeter gave me a chance to work through some of the main ideas of the book. All these audiences and their comments and questions helped me greatly as I  was writing this book. I  am also grateful to Ben Broadribb and Jodie Smith, who asked me to give a plenary at the 2020 British Graduate Shakespeare Conference. Unfortunately, the pandemic resulted in the cancelling of this conference.

viii  Acknowledgements

newgenprepdf

My partner, Tom Kemple, was supportive and helpful throughout the writing of this book, as he always has been. I  profit from a lively intellectual community at my university: I’m especially grateful to Patsy Badir, Siân Echard, Kyle Frackman, Greg Mackie, Ervin Malakaj, Renisa Mawani, and Vin Nardizzi. I  owe a special debt to my colleague Tiffany Potter: two years in a row she gave me a teaching schedule that allowed me to get a lot of writing done. I have also relied on friends and colleagues elsewhere for advice and support; in this connection I  thank Alicia Andrzejewski, Stuart Barnes, Mark Berry, Jason Farr, Jennifer Ingleheart, Andy Kesson, James Loxley, Lucia Martinez Valdivia, Mark Masterson, Corey McEleney, and Kostya Tsolákis. At the very beginning of this project, before I  even realized that it would be a book, the comments of my former colleague Anthony Dawson were very useful and I  thank him. I  am grateful to my superb doctoral student Alex Cosh. My undergraduate student Lauryn Collins gave some helpful advice and the librarians at my university were of great assistance. I owe a particular debt to those friends who read versions of some of the chapters here: Huw Griffiths, Richie Hofmann, Wendy Beth Hyman, Benjamin Madden, Vin Nardizzi, Jared O’Connor, Melissa Sanchez, and Will Tosh. Their advice was of great use to me, even if I didn’t always take it. As well, my Twitter community (a number of whom are thanked by name in these acknowledgements) has been a great source both of practical advice and of always welcome diversion. Thanks especially to Dylan Lewis for his exhortations. I am very happy to dedicate this book to my friend Craig Patterson, in recognition of over 30 years of friendship and fun both academic and otherwise.

The tradition in scholarly books is to have a first chapter that is both general and theoretical before proceeding to the literary discussions in the succeeding chapters. While this is often a good model (and I have certainly used it myself), my primary focus in the first part of this introduction will be on three recent poetic examples (one from the twentieth century and two from the twenty-​first century) as a way to set up my discussion of what I think queer representation is. I have been heartened by the work of the poet Lyn Hejinian. In the introduction to a collection of her writings on poetry, Hejinian warns that It would be a mistake to regard the poetics represented here as a discourse for which poetry is merely exemplary, one for which poetry stands at a distance, objectified and under scrutiny. Rather, these essays assume poetry as the dynamic process through which poetics, itself a dynamic process, is carried out.1

For Hejinian, who is both a poet and a critic, the connection between poetry and poetics seems obvious, but I  think it should be similarly obvious even to those like me, who work on poetics without writing poetry.

1  Introduction

Introduction

2  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

As readers will be aware, it is also the tradition to begin books by defining the subject, but what exactly is queer about representation turns out to be a difficult question to answer. In fact, I  would say that it is a question that is impossible to answer definitively. Different people will come up with different definitions of queer representation and they will do so with regard to different texts and phenomena. In this book, I’ll present my own definition of what I think queer representation is (or, more precisely, what I think queer representation is in the context of some of Shakespeare’s texts). Hejinian’s argument that poetry “is that language in which a writer (or a reader) both perceives and is conscious of the perception” is a useful starting point.2 In my discussions of poems in this introduction and in my longer discussions of some of Shakespeare’s texts, I  want to concentrate on this consciousness, to show, for instance, that Shakespeare’s subject is often the act of perceiving and the means by which that act is represented at the expense of whatever is perceived. In many ways, the model for this book on one aspect of Shakespeare’s queerness has been a far more comprehensive look at the subject. I refer to the collection edited by Madhavi Menon called Shakesqueer, which contains short essays on each of his texts. Of particular interest to me here is the introduction. Here Menon resists—​queerly resists, I would say—​the hierarchies of theory and literature or past and present. Near the beginning, for instance, she argues that by reading the textual Shakespearean body as queer, we interrupt and disrupt queer theory as we know it today, expanding the parameters within which it has confined itself. For this to happen, it is not enough simply for Shakespeare to be queered: queer theory, too, needs to be Shaken.3

This disorienting experience—​when we queer texts that have no gays in them—​takes queerness away from its primary affiliation with the body and expands the reach of queerness beyond and through the body to a host of other possible and disturbing configurations. Even as queerness is informed by its historical association with sexual irregularities, it cannot be reduced to or located in their embodiment.5

Menon’s separation of queerness from its somatic or emotional manifestations—​a separation that is still controversial—​is a useful precedent for my own work here.6 This book will deal with representation as sometimes queer in and of itself: my subject for the most part will be queerness at the level of form (broadly speaking) rather than at the level of content. A useful recent expression of this point of view comes in Kadji Amin,

3  Introduction

One of the things that is most useful to me about this passage is that Menon explicitly challenges the standard model according to which a literary text is a passive object on which the critic operates, and instead suggests that the literary text may reciprocate this operation and change the method used to examine it. That is, for Menon a literary text is not only an object to be examined but also something to think with—​just as, for instance, critical theories are things to think with. This means that the poem itself might also be queer theory rather than only something on which queer theory can be used.4 Slightly later in this introduction, Menon raises another point that is important to my research in this book. A number of Shakespeare’s texts are assumed to depict homoeroticism, but of course a book like Shakesqueer that aims to be comprehensive has to confront the absence in many of his texts of what we might think of as gay content:

4  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez’s introduction to a special issue of ASAP/​Journal:  “Form informs queerness, and queerness is best understood as a series of relations to form.”7 To some extent, my discussions of Shakespeare here will deal with his texts’ varying and various relations to forms. My first poetic example is a poem from Second Empire, the first book by the American poet Richie Hofmann. The poem is called “Allegory” and as it is short I’ll quote it in full here: As it was for the ancients, it would be for me: songs written down in pictures. The one about the trees on fire When I came upon them, and the grass flattened around me—​ that was what I saw.                 The trees are like a fresco, I thought, insofar as they are gold and tell a story.8

This poem is about representation, but it also complicates—​ queers—​representation since it is difficult for readers to tell what is going on, what is being represented. Even the title becomes ambiguous: does it mean that the poem is itself an allegory or is it instead about an allegory? The latter reading might seem plausible partly because the poem is a kind of ecphrasis, but this reading presents further problems. An allegory is presumed to point to its real subject: in the Divine Comedy, for instance, the middle-​aged pilgrim is Dante and the dark wood is our world and so on. In Hofmann’s poem, however, it is impossible to assign clear meanings to the words. For instance, to what does “it” in the first line refer? Is it the speaker’s own poetic practice? And for that matter, to what does the phrase “songs written down /​

5  Introduction

in pictures” refer? Our standard model of ecphrasis is a written (typically poetic) description of a visual object, but in Hofmann’s poem we are dealing with three forms of art: song, writing, and pictures. And is “song” the familiar metaphor for poetry (even poetry that only exists in a written form) or does it have its more usual contemporary sense of a form that combines words and music? One possible reading of “songs written down /​in pictures” that would clarify matters would involve taking this as a description of imagistic poetry. The problem with this reading is that Hofmann’s work in general is not particularly imagistic, however much he may display a strong visual sense. As well, I  would say that “Allegory” refers to images rather than presenting them in the sort of terse and evocative way we expect from imagistic poetry. This is a poem about images rather than one that gives us images. I would argue that our sense of the confusion of art forms in the poem is increased when Hofmann writes “that was what I saw” and we realize that he is referring to “The one about the trees on fire.” In other words, he sees a song (or a poem? or a poem “written down /​in pictures”?; the word “about” is typically used with texts rather than with images). There is also a confusion between art and reality here, as the speaker tells us that the trees were on fire “When [he] came upon them.” The present tense of the speaker is simultaneously the past tense of a song, of whatever kind, that is sufficiently well known to be referred to as “The one about,” a formulation that indicates general familiarity. The reference to the ancients at the beginning of the poem might well lead us to interpret the burning trees and the flattened grass as the sign of a divine apparition in a myth of some kind, and this may be the case, but it is also the case that it is the poet who appears to have

6  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

caused these portents. One way to read this poem would be to say that the poet describes a situation in which a work of representation—​a depiction of burning trees—​becomes a real thing. The poet comes upon this scene as a picture or text, but it is also simultaneously (or subsequently) a real scene in which he finds himself. He is representing himself in the representation he creates. By this point, it should hardly be surprising that the poem’s conclusion does not solve all these puzzles:  “The trees are like a fresco, /​I thought, insofar as they are gold and tell a story.” It seems almost too obvious to say that trees are not in fact gold and neither do they tell a story, but then frescoes aren’t typically gold either and they don’t all tell stories. What is most important here, I think, is the blurring of the line between the art form and the natural thing. This blurring strikes me as especially queer. We could say that much art is allegorical in that it purports to represent, for instance, nature, but here nature represents art by resembling frescoes and being narrative rather than (merely, I would say) being vegetable. Art is primary: nature is secondary. For me, Hofmann’s poem is an example of queer representation in that it queers the relationship between the work of art—​whether poem or song or picture—​and the thing represented. In its etymology, the word “allegory” tells us that something other is being represented. My argument about Hofmann’s “Allegory” is that this other thing that is being represented is neither an ancient myth nor an actual stand of trees but rather representation itself. Hofmann’s poem does something that I  think queer representation often does:  it exposes the almost invariably overlooked queerness of trying to present something by presenting something else and it makes representation its

7  Introduction

subject. To some extent, then, we can see representation as inherently queer. Admittedly, most representation is intended to convey something, but queer uses of representation of the sort that I  identify in the texts I  discuss in this book interfere with this intention. Here, I am thinking of Sara Ahmed’s recent discussion of queer use:  “To leave a straight path is to encounter things that are in the way; it is to be slowed down by what you need to progress.”9 Slightly later, she states that “Queer use can be about lingering over things, attending to their qualities.”10 For my purposes here, I would say that representation is generally intended to be a path that leads somewhere:  to an emotion or image or to a narrative progression. Queer representation lingers over the process of representation and often fails to lead to anything. It may slow down or even frustrate entirely the aim that it is ostensibly intended to have. For instance, Hofmann’s “Allegory” is a poem that never speaks clearly about what it represents and that does not give us access to the other thing that its title gestures towards. My next poetic examples come from the French poet Francis Ponge.11 The first of these is “The Landscape.” As was the case with Hofmann’s “Allegory,” this poem might appear to be an ecphrasis, but it is not clear from the title whether the landscape described in the poem is some rural vista or rather a painting of a rural vista (the ambiguity of the English “landscape” is also present in the French “paysage”).12 In any case, the first sentence of the poem describes the landscape as if it were a text: “The horizon, ruled with misty accents, appears written in small letters, whose ink is more or less pale depending on the play of light.”13 The speaker perceives the natural scene as a human artefact. Nor is this only an effect of distance:

What is closer I take pleasure in now only as I would in a painting. What is closer still only as in sculpture, or architecture. Then in the utter reality of things right up to my knees, as in

8  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

foodstuffs, with a feeling of total indigestion.

The speaker consumes nature as if it were art, and the metaphor of consumption becomes literal. The conclusion of the poem completes this process: “Till at last, everything gets sucked into my body and flies out my head, as through a chimney, its mouth to the sky.” The process of (in)digestion moves from bottom to top, a reversal—​a queering—​of the normal process of digestion. What is more, in becoming like a chimney the speaker has now become part of the landscape, although crucially for my purposes not a natural feature such as a grove or hill or stream. What is queer to me about this poem—​and I feel that this is a similar queerness, in some respects, to that displayed by Hofmann’s “Allegory”—​is Ponge’s focus on the human reaction to nature. The speaker can only perceive the natural scene in front of him as if it were already a depiction of that scene. Instead of attempting to convey the particular features of a landscape vividly to the readers, Ponge stresses how the viewer sees this landscape and we learn that he sees it as a representation. The poem’s initial emphasis on writing and ink is, I think, meant to remind us that we cannot confront or experience nature directly, as nature is already an idea to us, something that has been represented. Ponge does not try to hide his art; instead, he focuses on the production and consumption of representations at the expense of the things represented, effectively interposing himself between the natural objects of the landscape and us. I  think this is typical

of queer representation: it inverts William Carlos Williams’s famous line and says instead “no things but in ideas.”14 Another aspect of queer representation illuminated by Ponge’s writing can be seen in his “Unfinished Ode to Mud.”15 As the ode is a poetic form generally used for celebrating something or someone magnificent, the choice of mud as a subject is notably odd, something that Ponge confronts in his first line:  “Mud pleases the noble of heart because it is constantly scorned” (81). He goes on to make this attitude personal: “Despised mud, I love you. I love you because people scorn you” (81). Ponge praises mud and finds pleasure in many of its qualities that are usually most disliked, such as its tendency to adhere to things as it dries. Just how thoroughly he inverts traditional schemes of value can be most clearly seen near the end of the poem:

which, in its day, did all the good and bad it was capable of (for a long time it was considered holy writ), claims man was made of mud. But clearly this is nonsense, insulting to man and mud alike. (83)

This invigoratingly brisk treatment of the Bible clearly signals the poem’s distance from received opinion and its inversion, at the most basic level, of the normal standards of good and bad in our society. One way to describe what is happening in “Unfinished Ode to Mud” would be to characterize the poem as camp, one of the best-​known forms of queer representation. In particular, I’m thinking of Susan Sontag’s statement, when she distinguishes the person interested in camp from the

9  Introduction

A certain book, which has been around for a while, and

10  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

more familiar figure of the aesthete, itself a kind of person associated with queerness:  “The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures.”16 The pleasures of the aesthete are associated with a finely tuned critical sense, but as Sontag points out, camp “is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—​ not judgement.”17 Ponge’s ode to mud amply demonstrates enjoyment and appreciation in its rejection of conventional standards (even those associated with the Bible) and finds pleasure in the very coarseness and commonness of mud. This is in some ways a distinctively queer activity, as Ponge argues that artistic representation—​even artistic representation in the form of an ode, one of the grandest of poetic forms—​can be extended even (or especially) to that which is lowly or abject. Queer representation can be a way to assign new values to the things that surround us, however dirty they may be. The conclusion to the ode displays what I  would consider another form of queer representation. After specifically rejecting the usual lyric tactics (“were I  a poet, I  could … speak of the lassos, of the ivy, of the fallen wrestlers of mud” [85]) and thus refusing to make his subject pretty, the speaker gives up on the poem altogether: “But since I am fonder of it than of my poem … I’ll give it a chance, not turn it into words too much” (85).18 He ends by saying “I cannot do better, to its glory, to its shame, than to write an ode diligently unfinished …” (85); the ellipsis is Ponge’s own conclusion. It is important to note that the poem is not intended simply to invert our system of valuation. Ponge’s point is not that we thought mud was bad but we should instead think it is good, but rather that we should see it as both good (glory) and bad (shame) and that only a poem that reflects this ambivalence,

11  Introduction

splendidly echoed by the final oxymoron “diligently unfinished,” can be fitting. Queer representation, then, does not have to be simply an inversion, a turning of the tables. Instead, it can be something more interesting. It can teach us a way of looking at the poetic subject in a way that acknowledges both glory and shame and perhaps even sees them as interdependent. And it can also be a way to signal the limits of artistic representation: perhaps it is better to trail off than to conclude. My final poetic example in this chapter comes from the English poet Richard Scott’s début book, which is called Soho, after the neighbourhood that is the historic centre of gay life in London. Scott divides his work into four sections, each with its own title, each concerned primarily with contemporary queer life in London. The first poem in the book is not part of these sections, however. It is called “Public Library, 1998.” Thus, both in its chronology and in its placement in the book, this poem is an outsider: in a book that is already queer (the cover is hot pink), the opening poem is in some ways the queerest of them all. It is also different in content: while many of the poems that follow demonstrate Scott’s wide reading, this is the only poem that is really about reading. And it is about a particular kind of reading. The speaker is looking for gay content, by which I mean both gay poetry and gay sex insofar as they can be distinguished for Scott or indeed for me. I  think a suitable epigraph for this poem would come from Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text. While almost anything from this book would be apposite, perhaps the two best occur early on in his account of the connection between the writer and the reader: “I must seek out this reader (must ‘cruise’ him) without knowing where he is” and “The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is

12  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

writing.”19 But while Barthes is chiefly concerned here with the writer, Scott presents a reader who trusts that such a writer might exist. His focus on readers is clearly demonstrated at the end of the poem when he changes Walt Whitman’s “Poets to Come” into “readers-​to-​come.”20 This poem is not exactly a sonnet, but it has 14 lines and is certainly sonnet adjacent. It’s a form that Scott uses several times in the book and that expresses what we could describe as a queer relationship to traditional poetic form. “Public Library, 1998” begins with a picture to which every bosom returns an echo (at least, mine does). The young reader is reading poetry in search of gayness, hoping as I did to find the two together: In the library where there is not one gay poem, not even Cavafy eyeing his grappa-​sozzled lads—​I open again the Golden Treasury of Verse and write        COCK In the margin. (1–​4)

The obscene word “COCK” fits grammatically into the poem understood as a sentence but not into the poem as it is printed according to publishing norms. The unmistakably sexual word appears in the margin of the poem as a kind of gloss as the reader decides to make even unpromisingly heterosexual poetry appear gay—​to queer the canon. A gloss is usually either an explanation of a difficult word or allusion or a translation; this gloss should perhaps be seen as a translation into gay. The reader goes on to describe how he superimposes his highly sexual vision onto the uncompromisingly heterosexual raw material provided by the anthology. It is significant

that while the word “COCK” was written in the margins, the images he draws make contact with the printed poems themselves: Ink stains my fingers. Words stretch to diagrams, birth beards and thighs, shoulders, fourgies. One biro-​boy rubs his hard-​on against the body of a sonnet, another bares his hole beside some Larkin. A blue sailor spooges over Canto XII.

Each poem is queered: sonnets, Larkin (surely one of the most heterosexual of poets), and—​presumably—​Ezra Pound, all receive vividly accompanying pornographic images, that are not illustrations but rather versions of what it is that poems should contain and what, as we shall go on to discover, the poems in Scott’s book will frequently contain. This is one solution to the sad absence of queer content in the anthology: the disappointed reader can create his own content. In a very effective enjambment, the speaker says that his “Words stretch to /​diagrams,” making the movement from text to image seem like a kind of tumescence. Tumescence is unmistakably part of what he wants, but he also wants a gay textuality and he ultimately discovers it: “Then I see it—​ nestled like a /​mushroom in moss, tongue-​t rue and vaunt—​a queer subtext” (8–​9). This phrase brilliantly demonstrates what a queer subtext is: the poet passes from the reference to “a /​mushroom in moss,” which is obviously a description of a penis in pubic hair, to words that have no immediately recognizable gay content. The queerness here, as the poet indicates, is subtextual.21 It is sexual, like the phallic mushroom it evokes, but it is located not in sexually explicit drawings or

13  Introduction

(4–​8)

14  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

sexually explicit words but rather in poetic vocabulary itself, and even in vocabulary that is noticeably old-​fashioned. While the reader will go on to write the strongly sexual and queer poems that fill the rest of Soho, he wants at this early stage in the collection to show that queerness can exist even in the absence of any content that we would recognize as gay. It is important to note, however, that the poem does not present the movement from the explicitly sexual drawings to the queer pleasures of poetic vocabulary as any sort of progression: both are equally queer. Queerness is poetic as much as it is sexual, a point that resonates with the passage from Menon that I quoted above. In the final lines of the poem, the speaker describes going through the anthology underlining words in order to acknowledge “these men /​hidden deep within verse” (11–​12) and by way of “illuminating the readers-​ to-​ come” (14). The textual work he describes in this poem thus extends back into the past and forwards into the future. The two other poets I’ve discussed up to this point have demonstrated various kinds of queer representation: revaluing things in the world, making representation itself the subject rather than only the medium or method, and blurring the line between art and nature, or more generally between representation and the things that are represented. Scott’s concern is with reading and it is reading that he represents here—​at least in this poem; the same is not true, or not equally true, of most of the other poems in Soho. His poem helpfully queers representation and represents that representation as something that is simultaneously sexual and textual; indeed, it suggests that sexuality and textuality are not ultimately separable. In doing so, it points the way towards a more expansive vision of what queer representation might be, one that is useful to me in the context of this book, in

15  Introduction

which most of the texts I look at do not have much in the way of content that could be described as specifically gay or homoerotic. The text that follows this introduction consists of three chapters on poetry and three on plays, a selection made because of my own interests rather than out of any concern for balance. Over the course of these chapters, I’ll look at the various kinds of queer representation I’ve mentioned so far (and others as well). My concern throughout will be to show that Shakespeare’s writings (like those of Hofmann, Ponge, and Scott) demonstrate that representation is often not a means to an end but rather something that interposes itself between us and what it purports to represent. As well, I shall for the most part be concerned with how Shakespeare’s work theorizes the queerness of representation through form rather than through content, just as the poems by Hofmann and Scott do in their admittedly very different ways. Because of this, there will not be much discussion of what now appears to us as recognizably queer narrative content. As well, in my discussions, I  won’t be particularly concerned with the existing critical discourse, not because it isn’t good but because it is voluminous. I  want to advance my own arguments here rather than enter fully into the existing critical discourse in a way that would inevitably make this book at least twice as long. In my discussion of Venus and Adonis, I’ll be concerned with the poem’s excess of representation and, in particular, with the ways in which the poem’s numerous metaphors and similes impede narrative progression in a way that rhymes with—​but is not the same as—​the narrative’s predestined inability to deliver a sex scene between its eponymous protagonists. With The Rape of Lucrece, I’ll look at how Shakespeare makes the question of representation—​and specifically the representation

16  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

of women—​a central concern in his retelling of this familiar story. This retelling itself runs the risk of being a further act of violence against Lucrece, a fact of which Shakespeare is powerfully, if tacitly, aware. And with the sonnets, my main concern will be with how what now appears as a shift from heterosexuality to homosexuality is also, and to me primarily, a shift from sexual reproduction to artistic representation. As a playwright, Shakespeare was a writer who worked in a medium that is perhaps as visually oriented as it is textually oriented. Considered together, the sonnets and the narrative poems can be taken to provide an interesting look at how Shakespeare dealt with the lack of a visual element. The strategies he found were queer indeed. The poems I  discuss make up almost all of Shakespeare’s poetic output. The plays, on the other hand, provide rather too many opportunities for one book. While examples of what I  would call queer representation can be found in many of the plays, for my purposes here I have selected only three: King John, Macbeth, and Cymbeline, a selection that covers early, middle, and late Shakespeare and that has the merit of including one of his most popular plays, one of his least popular plays, and, in Cymbeline, one that falls between those categories. With King John, my interest is in the play’s obsessive emphasis on texts—​both real, as in the peace treaty, and metaphorical, as in the battlefield and in people’s looks. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that textual representation and its consequences are the main subject of the play. With Macbeth, I am concerned with the three weird sisters, arguably Shakespeare’s queerest characters both in their appearance and in their refusal to become fully part of the narrative whose ending they already know. And in Cymbeline, I look at the play’s focus on representation through clothes and bodies

17  Introduction

and in the orgy of narratives that concludes the play and that interferes with what we might think of as the usual pleasures of a dénouement. In these paragraphs, I  have presented the texts of Shakespeare’s that I’ll be discussing in an order that is conventional in two ways: first, because I placed the poems before the plays, according to the teleological narrative in which Shakespeare’s poetry is early and leads to the great plays of his mature period, and second because my list followed (roughly) chronological order. In the book itself, however, the order is different; I gave the conventional order first in order to stress this difference. I have decided to take Barthes’s organizational strategy in The Pleasure of the Text as my model and deal with the works alphabetically: Cymbeline, King John, Macbeth, The Rape of Lucrece, the sonnets, and Venus and Adonis. 22 In this order, the plays precede the poems, which I  prefer. Furthermore, the alphabetical order distorts the chronology: the effect of this order is to put the latest work first and the first work last. In other words, one of the results of this order is a hysteron proteron, that notably queer figure of speech. Many books on Shakespeare place his books (consciously or unconsciously) in a narrative of development, of increasing mastery and complexity; my order—​more suitably for my approach—​in effect queerly represents those works of Shakespeare’s that I shall be discussing.23 I want now to return to the distinction I  made earlier between poems, which consist entirely of words, and plays, in which the words are fleshed out with the visual and aural resources of the stage.24 As well, the words themselves are spoken and thus subject to the powers and limitations of the actors who speak them. While it seems clear to me that this distinction was crucial to Shakespeare, we should also

18  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

consider that poetry, precisely because of its lack of a visual element, may serve to remind us of an important aspect of language itself. In Camera Lucida, Barthes compares photography to writing and writes that “It is the misfortune (but also perhaps the voluptuous pleasure) of language not to be able to authenticate itself.”25 That is, a photograph is its own authentication:  it depicts what is or was really there. Language, on the other hand, cannot be confirmed, however credible we may find any individual example of it. Barthes goes on to note that “language is, by nature, fictional; the attempt to render language unfictional requires an enormous apparatus.”26 The tricks and techniques of the so-​called realist novel constitute one such apparatus and another is theatrical presentation. Deprived of these elaborate processes for faking verisimilitude, poetry could be said to afford only fiction. For me in the context of this book, this means that representation in poetry is always inherently queer to some extent; in contrast, the queerness of representation in a play is something that requires a certain amount of work. I have left until the end of this introduction the question of what non-​queer representation might be:  “Great thing of us forgot,” as they say.27 For me, the best definition is suggested by a passage in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers. Describing the sartorial strategy of Mrs Stanhope, he writes that “She well knew the great architectural secret of decorating her constructions, and never descended to construct a decoration.”28 Mrs Stanhope’s success is in being dressed in a manner appropriate to an English lady married to a senior clergyman in the middle of the nineteenth century: she perfectly represents the upper class matron that she is, and we can take this representation as a paradigmatic example of what straight representation does—​as it happens, Mrs Stanhope’s

19  Introduction

role in the novel consists almost entirely of providing this representation. I  would say that queer representation, on the other hand, inverts this model. To some extent—​and not equally at all times—​the texts I consider here could be said to construct their decorations. Indeed, some of them could be said to be chiefly decorations. What is more, what these texts by Shakespeare give us is not only the constructed decoration but often also some indication of the labour that goes into this construction. The texts I  discuss in this book are the ones I  thought most interesting to consider from the point of view of my topic. Certainly many other of Shakespeare’s texts contain moments that could arguably qualify as queer representation according to the ideas I have sketched here: the stress on letters and substitution in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Edgar’s description of the cliffs of Dover in King Lear, and Hamlet’s instructions to the players, for example.29 In fact, I would be very pleased if other scholars did make these arguments. To me, non-​queer representation—​I’ll borrow a term from linguistics and call it unmarked—​is representation that serves to assist either narrative movement or characterization or indeed both. My interest is in representation that is extra and excessive, that calls attention to itself, that impedes the smooth functioning of the narrative. These kinds of representations I call queer: they do not contribute to teleological narratives and they suggest that pleasure may be found in verbal display rather than in the relentless motion of the plot. I would connect this kind of representation to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as queer people’s childhood attachment to “a few cultural objects … whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relations to the codes most readily available to us.”30

The “codes most readily available” are of course the dominant and dominating codes of heterosexuality and, for me, especially, those codes that govern the unmarked strategies of representation. I would even be pleased if other scholars wrote on unmarked representation, but that is not my interest here: let other pens dwell on narrative and normativity.

20  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

NOTES 1 Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry, 1. 2 Ibid., 3. 3 Menon, “Queer Shakes,” 2. 4 We could also think of Hayden White’s remark that if our task is to find “the conditions of possibility” (for me specifically the possibility of seeing queerness in texts) then conceptual thought is not the only way: “figurative thinking is another means, and poetic utterance is its instrument.” White, “Afterword:  Manifesto Time,” 230. For a recent and persuasive argument that Victorians used aesthetic experience in precisely this way, see Friedman, Before Queer Theory, especially 1–​23. 5 Menon, “Queer Shakes,” 4. For a similar view, see Hammill, “Are We Being Homosexual Yet.” 6 Queer theory, perhaps especially in Renaissance studies, continues to be a field in flux, marked by debates about the nature of queerness and of the things that queer scholars should study. For an excellent overview, see Sanchez, “This Field That Is Not One.” 7 Amin, Musser, and Pérez, “Queer Form,” 228. I  am indebted to Professor Chad Bennett for this reference. 8 Hofmann, Second Empire, 21. 9 Ahmed, What’s The Use?, 204. 10 Ibid., 206. 11 I’ll cite (with one modification) the excellent translations done by Beverley Bie Brahic in her dual-​ language edition of many of Ponge’s prose poems. For an interesting essay that connects Ponge to Shakespeare’s sonnets through Derrida, see Aquilina, “The Event of Style in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” 12 The ambiguity is arguably greater in English, as the word “landscape” enters the English language around 1600 as a term associated with

21  Introduction

painting. The use of the word to mean “view of a natural prospect” is first attested over a century later. See Oxford English Dictionary, “landscape,” n. 1 and 2. 13 Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud, 62–​3. In this edition, even page numbers indicate the original French text, and odd page numbers, the English translation. 14 For the original, see Williams, Paterson, 6. 15 This poem goes from page  80 to page  85; I’ll cite page numbers parenthetically. 16 “Notes on Camp,” 289. Sontag’s famous essay was first published in 1964. Much has been done in camp studies since then and much of what she says now seems outdated. Nevertheless, this was a groundbreaking essay and I want to pay tribute to her innovation here: to an extent that we probably forget, talking about camp in a serious way was itself an act of camp in 1964. For an excellent recent look at theories and examples of camp, see Dango, “Camp’s Distribution.” 17 Ibid., 291. 18 I have added “too much.” The original reads “ne pas trop la transfèrer aux mots” (84). Brahic decided not to translate “trop,” but I think the sentence makes better sense with this word, as by this point in the poem Ponge has already produced a lot of words on the subject of mud. 19 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 4, 6. 20 “Public Library, 1998,” 14. The poem is actually printed as four triplets with a final couplet; I  have not observed these stanza breaks in my quotations. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text. For the Whitman, see The Works of Walt Whitman, vol. 1, 50. 21 Here are the words in their original context in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Bugler’s First Communion”: “Tongue true, vaunt—​and tauntless; /​Breathing bloom of a chastity in mansex fine” (15–​16). The subtext is clearly not deeply buried in these lines or in the rest of this fervent poem; indeed, one might say that the queer subtext bulges visibly into the text itself. 22 I acknowledge that The Rape of Lucrece was originally just called Lucrece and that the shorter title is the one chosen by the editors of the edition of Shakespeare that I use, but as I first read and studied the poem by the longer title I wanted to remain true to my own queer experience of Shakespeare.

22  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

23 I was happy to see that Jeremy Noel-​Tod organized his recent Penguin Book of the Prose Poem in reverse chronological order. 24 And, in certain theatres, olfactory as well. In Playing Indoors, his remarkable book on the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London, Will Tosh frequently mentions the scent of the candles that are used in this indoor theatre that has no electric lighting. 25 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 85. 26 Ibid., 87. 27 King Lear, 24.232. All references to Shakespeare’s works are to the New Oxford Shakespeare. They will appear parenthetically in the text. 28 Trollope, Barchester Towers, 63. 29 I’ve already published on the first of these topics. See Guy-​ Bray, “Shakespeare and the Invention of the Heterosexual.” 30 Sedgwick, Tendencies, 3.

Cymbeline

In some ways, Cymbeline might seem like an obvious choice for a queer analysis: its status as relatively obscure and lesser Shakespeare (even in relation to the other romances, now increasingly popular—​even Pericles!); its focus on disguise, on fractured families, on disobedience at various levels; its frequently tortuous language; and its almost crazily elaborate narrative, might all seem to make the play inescapably queer. In one of the best essays on this play, Amanda Berry—​referring to Dr Johnson’s notorious critique of the play—​comments that “Cymbeline is a staggeringly excessive play.”1 This excess can be understood as queer (as can the dramatic adverb “staggeringly”). My interest in this chapter is in narrative excess rather than in the play’s linguistic excess, although this is remarkable too. As Ros King points out in her book on the play, Cymbeline “has a plot of such complexity that there are some thirty denouements in the final scene, except that they are not revelations to the audience, who know all but one of them already.”2 Thus—​and crucially—​it is not merely the case that the narrative is very complex, but that Shakespeare emphasizes it and in the play’s final scene gives us a complexity that is no longer necessary so that it can only appear like complexity for its own sake. Both this narrative excess itself and the remarkable and drawn-​out emphasis on this

23  Cymbeline

One

24  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

excess in the entirely excessive final scene are things that we have learnt to recognize as queer.3 On the other hand, the play contains no homoeroticism and even remarkably little homosociality, at least by the standards of Renaissance drama. The most promising potential site of homosociality is perhaps the relationship between Posthumus and Giacomo. Still, even in this case the implications of their relationship remain latent and they get very little time together on stage. The frequent comparison between Giacomo and Iago is instructive here: Iago is present throughout the play and has deep homosocial bonds with Othello and with other male characters, while Giacomo’s role, although crucial to the narrative, is brief: he has very little time on stage beyond what is needed for his narrative function. Perhaps a more promising source of homoeroticism is suggested by King: “Belarius and the boys, aided by the disguised Posthumus, win victory over the invading Romans in a ‘narrow lane’ by effectively threatening the rape and effeminization of their fellow Britons.”4 In this persuasive reading, the spectre of male–​male sexuality plays an important part in the British triumph and produces an all too familiar image of British masculinity and continental effeminacy. Nevertheless, this spectre is no sooner invoked than put aside: the image is not taken up in the rest of the play, nor is it echoed by the other events of the narrative, and I think it is altogether forgotten in the play’s final presentation of the conflict between Britain and Rome. What is more, I  would argue that Cymbeline ultimately reaffirms marriage, the family, and the naturalness of the social hierarchy; or, at least, I would argue that the idea that the play is socially orthodox is a reading of the play’s conclusion that is easy to defend.5 The marriage between Innogen and Posthumus becomes a regular union after having a

25  Cymbeline

somewhat uncertain status throughout the play, primogeniture is re-​established, and the inherent nobility of the two princes who have been brought up as mountaineers demonstrates that social rank is natural (a point also made in The Winter’s Tale and Pericles, of course).6 From this point of view, then, it could be argued that the play ranks as one of Shakespeare’s more conventional plays. My purpose here is not to settle the questions I have raised so far: that is, I do not intend to pronounce that Cymbeline either is or is not queer Shakespeare (or, at least, queerer than any other of his plays). Instead, I  want to use the play to think about the ways in which we define queerness: subject matter, which, as I have shown, does not really apply here, is the most obvious of these, but we should also include the use of language and narrative and the relationship among these and other factors. My argument is that Cymbeline gives us the opportunity to consider the extent to which what we think of as queerness and what we think of as normativity can coexist. To put it another way—​one that is most relevant in the context of this book—​the play is queer in its representative strategies, but not in its content.7 Before looking at the major issues raised by the plot and Shakespeare’s presentation of it, however, I  want to point out that the play focuses on representation from its opening lines. The first scene begins with a conversation between two gentlemen, one of whom is unaware of what is happening at court. The first words spoken in Cymbeline are “You do not meet a man but frowns” (1.1.1). This line directs our attention to how people represent their emotions. At this point, there appears to be a simple correspondence between inner and outer, but complications arise very quickly. The first gentleman explains that the frowning is caused by Innogen’s

refusal to marry Cloten and her decision to marry Posthumus; he goes on to say that           All Is outward sorrow; though I think the king Be touched at very heart.

26  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

(1.1.8–​10)

These lines introduce a split between how people feel and how they represent their feelings, and this split is emphasized when he spells out the implication of the lines I’ve just quoted by saying           not a courtier—​ Although they wear their faces to the bent Of the king’s looks—​hath a heart that is not Glad at the thing they scowl at. (1.1.12–​15)

Thus, Cymbeline draws our attention to representation and its potential unreliability from its beginning, establishing a perspective that informs the play’s serious issues. I’ll begin with the issue of identity. In Lee Edelman’s influential formulation, queerness is not to be seen as an identity, but rather as something that troubles identities of all sorts.8 And indeed, identity is arguably the most important issue in Cymbeline and is usually troubled. Nancy Simpson-​Younger has pointed out that “Cymbeline is a play about the construction of identity, but it never seems to have a stable identity itself.”9 Identities of all sorts are troubled in the play, including the generic identity of the play itself (although this will not be my concern here), so I want now to look at some of the ways in which the play puts

27  Cymbeline

identity in question. We could say that the primary source of identity—​especially in a patrilineal society and especially at the royal level—​is the family, but families in Cymbeline are noticeably odd and incomplete. Cymbeline himself, for instance, has only a daughter to inherit his kingdom; his wife is dead and his sons are missing and presumed dead. On the other hand, his wife has a son from her previous marriage. Cloten’s existence complicates the royal family and the question of the succession; it also puts him and Innogen in a very queer relationship indeed: he and Innogen are siblings, more or less, but this bond apparently does not rule out the possibility of their marriage: the only objections to their marriage raised in the play are that Innogen is already married and that Cloten is unworthy of her. The fact that they are step-​siblings does not seem to bother anyone in the play. The character of Posthumus troubles identity even further. For one thing, his family is even more incomplete than the British royal family: not only does he, like Innogen, have two dead brothers (of course, it turns out that his brothers really are dead), but both his parents are dead as well. In fact, his father died before he was born and his mother died at the moment of his birth. In other words, Posthumus has as little family as it is possible for a person to have. While Innogen seems to illustrate the ways in which royal succession can become complicated (certainly a common enough theme throughout Shakespeare’s career), Posthumus seems to be situated at the very limits of biological possibility. Furthermore, although marriage is presumed to create a socially legible and meaningful relationship, his own marriage to Innogen fails to do this. While the marriage of Innogen and Posthumus will ultimately be celebrated and reaffirmed by the play’s conclusion, its status throughout the play—​especially since it has not

28  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

been consummated—​makes it difficult to know exactly what and how it means. Even the possible political importance of the marriage between a British princess and a Roman patrician never emerges as an important issue in the play despite the war between these powers. Finally, for most of the play what we learn about his character is not encouraging, so his emergence as a suitable husband is arguably problematic. For most of the play, then, marriage seems to be rather a queer thing instead of the epitome and guarantee of normalcy. Berry’s persuasive analysis focuses on precisely this fact, and specifically on the oddness of what she calls “marriage time” in the play. Pointing out that Posthumus remains in Britain for some time after his banishment by Cymbeline and that Innogen is not punished for this, Berry argues that “the gap between the past act of banishment and the present not-​consequences of it characterize the work of marriage time throughout Cymbeline, a temporality produced between performative utterance and the state of being that utterance presumably confers.”10 This gap is emphasized by the gap between the representation of the couple on stage and the summary we are given in the opening exposition. As Heather Love suggests in her essay on Macbeth (published, like Berry’s, in Shakesqueer), “Given the fact that the time of the family and the time of the couple define time itself, we might understand deviations from normative time—​rather than any specifically sexual form of transgression—​as queer.”11 The queerness of the marriage of Innogen and Posthumus, who are, after all, the play’s central couple, queers the whole world of the play. The shifting meaning of their marriage bond, the difficulty involved in figuring out its weight in the world of the play, makes the play’s meaning as a whole difficult to determine. The marriage of a princess, especially of one who is the heir

29  Cymbeline

to the kingdom as Innogen is at the beginning of the play, should be firmly a part of dynastic time, but this appears to be impossible in Cymbeline. Identity does not only inhere in the descent and pedigree enabled by marriage, however. In a society like Shakespeare’s, with its sumptuary laws, clothing also marks—​and may even establish—​the rank that is a basic part of Renaissance identity.12 Cymbeline has an unusual focus on clothes and accessories, particularly in relation to Cloten and Innogen. In Innogen’s case, the primary accessories are the bracelet Posthumus gives her as a token of his love and the ring he wagers on her chastity—​ both, in their perfect circularity, attesting to the untouched vagina that Innogen, the wife who is still a virgin, must simultaneously embody and represent in order to keep Posthumus’ favour. This dual function is, I  think, precisely the problem in Cymbeline. The point is that embodiment is not enough in the world of the play (and perhaps not in any world): as the play demonstrates numerous times, that which is true in the body must also be represented so that it is apparent to sight. To some extent, it is in the turn to representation made so frequently throughout the play that Cymbeline is queerest. The action of the play serves (however temporarily) to separate embodiment and representation and to substitute (again, temporarily) a queer world of ever-​ shifting relationships, statuses, and genders for the patrilineal descent on which the world of the play depends. The representation is seen in clothes as well as in jewellery, of course. The most obvious example is Innogen’s disguise as a boy, but more interesting to me in the context of this chapter is her insult to Cloten and its consequences. Fairly early on, Innogen, at the end of her patience after Cloten’s attempts at courtship, compares him unfavourably to her husband:

            His meanest garment That ever hath but clipped his body is dearer In my respect than all the hairs above thee.

30  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

(2.3.124–​6)

The insult rankles, as we see when Cloten repeats it after she leaves. Later on, when he goes in pursuit of her he actually wears Posthumus’ garments; and when he faces Guiderius, whom he takes to be a peasant, he attempts to overawe him with these borrowed clothes: CLOTEN Thou villain base, Know’st me not by my clothes? GUIDERIUS No, nor thy tailor, rascal, Who is thy grandfather. He made those clothes, Which, as it seems, makes thee. (4.2.83–​6)

Both men are right: Cloten’s borrowed clothes do accurately show his noble rank, but as Guiderius points out, Cloten’s nobility inheres only in the clothes. What is more, it is clear that when Cloten asks “Know’st me not by my clothes,” he refers only to the fact that the clothes are suitable for someone of high rank. Within the context of the play, however, it is significant that Cloten asks in this way, as the line could be taken to suggest that identity (who Cloten is) originates in clothes or exists solely in them. And while Innogen would recognize that Cloten is of high status, he is not Posthumus and can never replace him; Cloten’s status cannot compensate for his meanness of character. On the other hand, for Guiderius, Cloten’s high status is both inauthentic and beside the point. The dramatic

A headless man? The garments of Posthumus? I know the shape of’s leg; this is his hand, His foot Mercurial, his Martial thigh, The brawns of Hercules. (4.2.310–​13)

Innogen slips from representation, in accurately recognising her husband’s clothes, to embodiment, insofar as she infers that it is her husband’s headless body that she sees.13 It is a queer error, and one that threatens to undermine the union of representation and embodiment that Shakespeare must bring about if the play is to end happily. Cloten is in many ways the crucial character from this point of view, as the

31  Cymbeline

irony here is that Cloten’s nobility is in fact solely a matter of things external to him such as his (borrowed) clothes and his mother’s marriage to the king, but it is also an example of dramatic irony that when Innogen wakes up beside his headless corpse she assumes that he is her husband based chiefly on his clothes. The point is not that Innogen is superficial but rather that we live in a world that relies on exactly this kind of superficial judgement. The play will move towards embodiment as providing a more genuine kind of identity and of identification, but Shakespeare nevertheless draws our attention to the power of the superficial. Guiderius accurately estimates—​or diagnoses—​the difference between what Cloten represents and what he embodies. It is harder for Innogen to see this, however, and I want to look more closely at her misrecognition of Cloten’s corpse now. When she wakes out of the trance into which the drugs have put her, she sees Cloten’s headless body and makes a mistake that is very nearly fatal:

32  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

contrast between his high status and his extraordinarily low-​ grade nature would appear to indicate a serious problem with Cymbeline’s social hierarchy. This problem is solved both by the fact that he is only the king’s stepson and by his death. That it is Guiderius who kills him is itself significant, as the split between representation and embodiment is enacted in this scene by the difference between Cloten, who enjoys the rank of prince without deserving it, and Guiderius, who is inherently princely but enjoys none of the benefits of that rank. Perhaps the most important example of the problem of representation in the play (or, at least, the example that sets the greater part of the play’s plot in motion) arises in Giacomo’s visit to the chamber of the sleeping Innogen, or rather in his representation of this visit to Posthumus.14 First he describes her jewels, which he employs as testimony to Posthumus that he really was in her chamber. As Katherine Gillen has pointed out, however, Giacomo’s sense of what representation means is mistaken: Giacomo has misrepresented the proper relationship between Innogen’s chastity and her jewels. He reconfigures what should be a relationship of signification, with the jewelry representing but not replacing Innogen’s value, as a commercial relationship of exchange, with Innogen’s chastity presented as a fungible commodity.15

Like Innogen in the scene in which she discovers the headless corpse, Giacomo is mistaken not in what he sees but in the conclusion he draws from what he sees. His theory of representation is that it forms part of a general and economic system of exchange, which leads him to regard women’s sexuality as

only an element in this system. In contrast, Innogen jumps to the wrong conclusion based on evidence that should not be regarded as conclusive. These two errors can be seen as paradigmatic for the way in which Shakespeare presents representation in Cymbeline. The process of looking at something and making a judgement based on it, something that is obviously essential for theatre audiences, is queered in the play. When Giacomo sees the birthmark, he instantly recognizes that this will serve as decisive proof of her infidelity:           On her left breast A mole, cinque-​spotted, like the crimson drops I’th’bottom of a cowslip. Here’s a voucher Stronger than ever law could make.

Throughout this scene we see Giacomo carefully making mental note of everything he sees in the chamber, but it is the birthmark that he sees as crucial and it turns out that he is right. When Giacomo returns to Italy and describes the chamber and Innogen’s jewellery in considerable detail, Posthumus continues to doubt his word, but the mention of the birthmark changes everything: GIACOMO You do remember This stain upon her? POSTHUMUS Ay, and it doth confirm Another stain as big as hell can hold, Were there no more but it. (II.iv.138–​41)

For Posthumus, the body is a kind of evidence that cannot lie.

33  Cymbeline

(2.2.37–​40)

34  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

In the last two paragraphs, I  have been concerned to represent—​among other things—​Giacomo’s visit to Innogen’s chamber, but it is important to recognize that he represents this visit himself in a very interesting way, or rather in several very important ways. His first representational mode is lyrical. After a brief allusion to Tarquin (which is of course also Shakespeare’s allusion to his own poem), he launches into a paean to the woman he poetically calls “Cytherea”: How bravely thou becom’st thy bed! Fresh lily, And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch! But kiss, one kiss! Rubies unparagoned. (2.2.15–​17)

And so on for several more lines.This passage is in Shakespeare’s highest romantic style, familiar to us from many of the plays. The next mode is businesslike, however:             But my design—​ To note the chamber. I will write all down. Such and such pictures, there the window, such Th’adornment of her bed, the arras, figures, Why, such and such; and the contents o’th’story. (2.2.23–​7)

The first part of this scene is a rapturous pouring out of Giacomo’s feelings, but the second is a representation of a representation: the repetition of “such” reminds us that there he is writing a document that would actually represent the room more precisely. Presumably realizing that this dry notation of the room’s features, however detailed it may be, will not serve his purposes, he decides to describe her body:

Ah, but some natural notes about her body Above ten thousand meaner movables Would testify t’enrich mine inventory.

The word “inventory” at the end of line 30 rhymes with “story” at the end of line 27 and puts in tension two kinds of representation: the prosaic and thorough rendering of objects and the narrative that employs these objects. In context, we can take “natural notes” as a kind of oxymoron and also as a synonym for verisimilitude: what matters about a story is not whether or not it is true but whether or not it is plausible and persuasive. It is tempting to say that the person Giacomo most resembles here is Shakespeare himself, the artist whose task is to weave a convincing narrative out of objects, to make the notes he takes seem natural. The artificiality of these natural notes on which both Giacomo and Shakespeare depend is underlined by the fact that after declaring that his subject should be Innogen’s body rather than the furnishings of her room, he begins by focusing on her bracelet before proceeding to the birthmark. As Giacomo suspects, Posthumus will be convinced by the description of the birthmark. But the scene does not end with Giacomo’s description of it; instead, he resolves to give up representing:           No more. To what end? Why should I write this down that’s riveted, Screwed to my memory. (2.2.42–​4)

As he is confident in his ability to represent the birthmark in speech, he feels he does not need to do so in writing.

35  Cymbeline

(2.2.28–​30)

Instead, he turns to another form of representation, this time a literary one:           She hath been reading late, The tale of Tereus; here the leaf’s turned down Where Philomel gave up.

36  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

(2.2.44–​6)

Thus, there are classical allusions both at the beginning and the end of this soliloquy:  Tarquin and Tereus, the alliteration emphasizing their connection. I  would argue that the references to literature give us yet another kind of representation in this scene. Significantly, however, this is a false representation of what happens in the scene itself as Giacomo does not actually rape Innogen. For my purposes in this book, this short scene is perhaps the crucial one in Cymbeline. It presents us with a number of modes of representation, each of which is simultaneously useful and insufficient, simultaneously excessive and inadequate. In other word, it suggests that all kinds of representation may be queer. Returning to the effect of this visit to Innogen’s chamber, we can see that Posthumus is wrong, as are Giacomo and Innogen at different times, but also that it is easy to be wrong in Cymbeline, a play that queers our sense of what dramatic representation means. I have already mentioned Berry’s point about the discrepancy between what we learn from the (unusually long) exposition at the beginning of the play and what we actually see on stage; other examples can be found throughout the play. Nor are these discrepancies restricted to the audience. For instance, Bruce Smith notes that at one point “[t]‌he onstage spectators see Posthumus strike to the ground a man he takes to be a traitor; the onstage audience hears a

37  Cymbeline

different story from Posthumus’s servant Pisanio.”16 This split between what we see and what we hear—​the two modes of dramatic representation—​is crucial to the play. In fact, Smith suggests that “the real issue in the final scene of Cymbeline is ‘seeing versus speaking.’ ”17 Given that there is no real suspense left in the plot (at least for us; the characters are still in the dark), he has a point. For me, the implications of this point are highly significant. In so often and so decisively divorcing what we see and what we hear, Shakespeare prevents us from seeing dramatic representation as something that is relatively unproblematic for the audience and forces us to consider representation separated from what it represents. In making the two modes of dramatic representation non-​ self-​identical, Shakespeare queers representation in Cymbeline and makes it the focus in much of the play. Jeremy Lopez has argued that this focus on representation is to some extent typical of Renaissance drama: he writes that “language, character, action become, rather than the subject of representation, sites for admiring the act of representation itself.”18 But while it is certainly the case that representation in Renaissance plays often appears to be doing much more than simply conveying facts or emotions, representation emerges as the subject of Cymbeline to an extent that is unusual and, I think, unprecedented.19 In this play, we are certainly invited to admire the act of representation, but we are also reminded again and again that we cannot be sure either of exactly what is represented or of whether the visual or the verbal mode of representation is to be regarded as more trustworthy. A useful comparison is with the Dover cliff scene in King Lear. There is an obvious difference between what Edgar describes and what we see, but we are never in doubt that what we see can be trusted. In contrast, Cymbeline returns obsessively, over and over, to

38  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

doubt. The queerness of representation is not something that the play can ever overcome. A particularly good example of this comes in Posthumus’ soliloquy just before the battle. Addressing the bloodstained cloth that he has been told proves that Innogen is dead, he says “Yea, bloody cloth, I’ll keep thee, for I  once wished /​ Thou shouldst be coloured thus” (5.1.1–​2). He now repents telling Pisanio to kill Innogen, but although his belief that the cloth is stained with her blood is false, his repentance is sincere. In this respect, the cloth is an advance on his garments that led Innogen to believe that he was dead: those garments falsely indicated that Posthumus was dead, this cloth truly represents Posthums’ repentance, the first step on his progress to becoming arguably the leading male character in Cymbeline. The cloth that seems to him to represent her death prompts him to take a decisive step:             I’ll disrobe me Of these Italian weeds and suit myself As does a Briton peasant. So I’ll fight Against the part I come with; so I’ll die For thee, o Innogen. (5.1.22–​6)

Here, the clothes are simultaneously a false representation, as Posthumus is both Italian and noble rather than British and a peasant, and a true representation, as Posthumus’ British clothing accurately represents his loyalties. His decision to fight as a Briton is a crucial step towards the play’s happy ending:  in disguising himself as a Briton he truly represents his loyalties. In this sense, clothing is more reliable than embodiment, or at least the embodiment represented

            He, sir, was lapped In a must curious mantle wrought by th’hand Of his queen mother, which for more probation I can with ease produce. (5.6.361–​4)

The proof that the supposed Cadwal is actually Arviragus, second in line to the throne, can be established by a piece of representation, a garment like those that deceived Innogen.

39  Cymbeline

by Innogen’s birthmark, Giacomo’s knowledge of which is sufficient to persuade Posthumus of his wife’s infidelity. In a way that is paradigmatic for the play as a whole, Posthumus’ soliloquy before the battle presents representation as simultaneously accurate and inaccurate. Furthermore, although we all know that Posthumus is wrong in his reaction to Giacomo’s speech, the play does endorse the idea of the body as a voucher—​or, to put the point in the terms I have been using in this chapter, it endorses the idea that embodiment trumps representation. A particularly good example is provided by the identification of the two lost sons of Cymbeline in the last scene. Belarius, whenever possible, has tirelessly pointed out that these young men act like princes and not like the mountaineers they appear to be:  that is, they embody their royal status instead of, or at least to a greater extent than, their humble upbringing. Confirmation of their status is also found in the immediate emotional connection (highly stressed in the play) between the princes and the boy who will turn out to be not only a woman but also their sister. But in order to be accepted as princes, their embodiment must be represented to Cymbeline himself. Belarius begins with the younger son:

We could perhaps see this turn from false to true representation as a hopeful sign in Cymbeline. For Guiderius, who will after all be the next king, the burden of proof is higher, however. Immediately after the lines I quoted above, and without responding to them, Cymbeline refers to this proof: CYMBELINE Guiderius had 40  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

Upon his neck a mole, a sanguine star. It was a mark of wonder. BELARIUS This is he, Who hath upon him still that natural stamp. It was wise Nature’s end in the donation To be his evidence now. (5.6.364–​9)

When Innogen mistook Cloten’s headless corpse for her husband, she let embodiment depend on representation. Now, in this final scene, at the political climax of the play (if not the emotional one), we pass from representation to embodiment once again, but this time not logically—​if this corpse wears my husband’s clothes, it is my husband—​but sequentially—​ first, the less important son can have his status proved by representation and then the more important son can have his proved by embodiment. What’s true of this passage is true of the play’s conclusion as a whole: an embodiment that is ultimately heteronormative is paramount, but the queer power of representation is not completely excised. The importance of this queer representation to Cymbeline (despite its triumphant re-​establishment of patrilineal descent) can be seen in two aspects of the conclusion. The first of these is the story of Posthumus. It is important to remember

41  Cymbeline

that one of Shakespeare’s tasks in the conclusion of the play is to make Posthumus a more estimable character after what has been a very shaky start. Part of this task is done through his success at fighting and part through his resignation in the face of death. But what is most important in this connection, I think, is the masque in the penultimate scene.20 This masque features Posthumus’ entire family (i.e., people he has never known and to whom the audience has no connection) and the god Jupiter himself, who puts what he calls a “tablet” (5.5.203) on Posthumus’ chest, after which they all vanish. When Posthumus awakes, he remembers the masque as a dream; the only tangible sign of it is the tablet, which he calls a “book” (5.5.227). Significantly, he hopes that the tablet or book will not be “as is our fangled world, a garment /​ Nobler than that it covers” (5.5.228–​9). Everything leads us to see the text as something that embodies the truth, but the shifting terms used for it—​as well as the fact that Posthumus is unable to understand it—​should be enough to let us know that this text—​potentially, as his language suggests, a garment that anyone could wear—​is yet another example of queer representation. The text, which Posthumus in the final scene calls a “label” (5.6.431)—​or, in other words, either a small part of a garment or an addition to a text (both meanings would have been available to Shakespeare)—​is interpreted in the next and final scene by Philarmonus, the court soothsayer, so the meaning is ultimately fixed even if the name is not.21 The lack of fixity here is significant. As the audience would of course be able to see the text, the use of multiple synonyms, not all of whose connotations can easily be reconciled, would have the effect of keeping the gap between embodiment and representation (literally) front and centre. The main importance of this text

42  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

is that it ties Posthumus and his marriage to Innogen directly to the restoration of the princes and the prosperity of the realm. On the other hand, that’s not saying much. As everyone has recognised, the final scene of Cymbeline is crowded with revelations—​indeed, far too many and done in far too much detail.The interpretation of the text would not have been missed and really contributes nothing to the play’s ending. Sarah Wall-​ Randell has argued that “[t]‌he last scene of the play underscores the sense that Posthumus’s book represented a false or empty interpretive crux.”22 Indeed, I would argue that its unimportance is stressed by the fact that it is the final revelation in this crowded scene, coming just before Cymbeline’s final speeches. This position might seem like the place of honour, but I think instead that it is anticlimactic and is experienced primarily as yet another delay before the conclusion that has seemed both inevitable and imminent for some time. The role of Jupiter’s text in this concluding scene is part of the second way in which the queerness of representation remains important to Cymbeline despite the re-​establishment of a patriarchal order that had often seemed to be in jeopardy through the play. Here, I refer to what I see as Shakespeare’s foregrounding of telling (rather than showing). This foregrounding begins at the beginning of Cymbeline, which features a lengthy scene of exposition. At this late stage in his career, Shakespeare was obviously capable of conveying the information necessary for the spectator more briefly and efficiently, so I think we must see the long and clumsy exposition as a deliberate choice. At the end of the play, telling has gotten entirely out of hand. First, there is the elaborate masque I mentioned above. While masques were undeniably very popular at this point and the inclusion of a masque could arguably be seen as a crowd-​pleasing strategy, a comparison

43  Cymbeline

with The Tempest, written quite soon after Cymbeline, is instructive. The masque in that play is part of the marriage ceremony and thus functions as a way to heighten the importance of the scene: it makes perfect dramatic sense. In this case, however, as I have already pointed out, the information is not especially important and the masque feels more like an interruption towards the end of what is already (by Shakespeare’s standards) quite a long play. As should be clear to everyone, the final scene carries the idea of telling to an extreme that could be considered ridiculous.23 It is generally the case that a play’s final scene solves narrative complications, but in the last scene of Cymbeline more narrative complications are solved than is strictly necessary and they are solved in much greater detail. At this point, we could speak of a split between the narrative and the way in which it is conveyed. If we paraphrased Cymbeline’s narrative, we would have a story about how a family—​and not just any family, but the central family of the world of the play—​is re-​established and both social and political orders are safeguarded; if we described the way in which the story is presented, explicated, and resolved, we would be obliged to speak of baroque complexity, delay, and what Renaissance people would have called ambages. From my point of view here, I  would characterize the narrative as heteronormative and the method of conveying it as queer. Returning to the choice I  mentioned in the first paragraph, I  would say that the play is thus at once queer and not queer. But perhaps the important choice is not whether we see Cymbeline as queer or not but rather whether we see the play as an example of how heteronormativity can use queerness for its own purposes or as an example of how queerness always underpins (and possibly subverts) its other.

44  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

NOTES 1 Berry, “Cymbeline: Desire Vomit Emptiness,” 90. 2 King, Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain, 1. 3 Callan Davies has recently discussed these aspects of the play under the heading of theatrical self-​consciousness. See “Matter-​Theatre.” 4 Ibid., 93. For King’s larger discussion of troubled masculinity in the play, see 93–​104. 5 A good discussion that complicates our sense of Cymbeline’s presentation of gender is León Alfar, Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays, 185–​200. 6 For the suggestion that the characters of the king’s two sons are also shaped by the landscape in which they grow up, see Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology, 126. 7 In a persuasive recent essay, Tracey Miller-​Tomlinson has argued that queerness characterizes the play’s historiography. See “Queer History in Cymbeline.” 8 Edelman discusses this topic in various places; see especially No Future,  1–​31. 9 “The Garments of Posthumus,” 177. 10 Berry, “Cymbeline: Desire Vomit Emptiness,” 92. 11 Love, “Milk,” 201. 12 For an interesting discussion of the importance of clothing in the play, see Colaiacomo, “Other from the Body.” For a discussion of the gendering of legibility and plausibility in the final scene. 13 See Simpson-​ Younger, 178–​ 80, for a discussion of the corpse in the play. 14 For an interesting and persuasive reading of this scene as Shakespeare’s rewriting of Lucrece, see Nicholson, “Learning to Read with Lucrece,”  131–​7. 15 Gillen, “Chaste Treasure,”  n.p. 16 Smith, “Eyeing and Wording in Cymbeline,” 51. 17 Ibid., 63. 18 Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama, 128. For Lopez’s discussion of the exposition at the beginning of Cymbeline, see 89–​94. 19 For my earlier discussion of the relationship between seeing and hearing (with reference to Pericles), see “Sources.” In Pericles, however,

21 22

23

45  Cymbeline

20

the issue is of much less importance to the play as a whole. For another discussion of seeing in Cymbeline (particularly in the final scene), see Yachnin, “The Publicity of the Look.” A good discussion of the masque is in Garrison, Shakespeare and the Afterlife,  82–​5. For a good discussion of the different terms and what they mean, see “Eyeing and Wording in Cymbeline,”  54–​5. Wall-​Randell, “Reading the Book of the Self in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Wroth’s Urania,” 111. For her discussion of the book as a whole, see 109–​12. An excellent discussion of the final scene (very different from mine) is given by Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness,  122–​6.

King John

46 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

Two In this chapter, my primary interest in that notably odd play King John will be in its focus on texts of various kinds and what and how they represent.1 The play returns again and again to texts, but as we shall see these texts are frequently difficult if not impossible to interpret with any confidence:  the representation provided by these (literal or metaphorical) texts does not, as a rule, lead to an unambiguous or, at least, a permanent meaning. What is more, the history of the play has led to its being connected with two further texts:  the Magna Carta, now and even in Shakespeare’s time the primary association with John’s reign, and the anonymous play The Troublesome Reign of King John. With the Magna Carta, the issue has been the puzzling absence of any reference to this document from the play itself.2 In the case of The Troublesome Reign of King John, the question has been whether it precedes Shakespeare’s play, in which case it must have influenced him, or whether his play preceded it, in which case it must have been influenced by him.3 These matters have been thoroughly canvassed elsewhere and they will not concern me here other than to occasion the remark that it seems fitting that a play that returns again and again to textual instability and that frequently presents us with two opposing interpretations that seem equally plausible or implausible should itself have come to be associated with textual questions. As well, King

John’s contemporary status as lesser or even bad Shakespeare underlines the extent to which texts are more likely to be characterized by mutability than by fixity: while the play has been quite popular at various times in its history, it is not now generally considered a good representation of Shakespeare’s achievement. The play begins with a text, although not a written one.4 I refer to the King of France’s message to the King of England, delivered by the French ambassador Chatillon: Thus, after greeting, speaks the King of France, In my behaviour, to the majesty, The borrowed majesty, of England here.

In the message that follows, Philip tells John to give up the English throne in favour of his nephew Arthur; this sets in motion the war that will continue for the rest of the play. More importantly for me in the context of this book, the play thus begins with representations: Chatillon represents both Philip and Philip’s message and Philip and John represent their countries.5 As well, Shakespeare calls attention to the representation performed by Chatillon. When he says “after greeting,” he draws attention to his failure—​refusal? inability?—​ to utter the courtly phrases with which a message from one monarch to another would typically begin. And in saying that Philip speaks “In my behaviour,” he draws attention, however briefly, to his own performance as someone involved in the work of representing. I would note that this work is done simultaneously by Chatillon in his role as ambassador and by the actor playing the role of Chatillon in performance.6

47  King John

(1.1.2–​4)

48 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

The opening of King John prepares us for what follows both by focusing our attention on the conflict between the two countries and by presenting us with an impasse. Is John the rightful king because he is the oldest living brother of the dead king or is Arthur the rightful king because his father was one of John’s older brothers? Each side represents its own answer to this question, but neither side is able to prove that its representation is correct. The resulting impasse will turn out to be typical of the play, and in fact shortly after Chatillon withdraws, we are presented with a further impasse that is also centred on the idea of inheritance. I refer to the question of which of Sir Robert Faulconbridge’s sons is his heir. Once again a text is crucial here—​in this case Sir Robert’s will. The will seems unambiguous in its completely standard bequeathing of his estate to his older son, but Robert claims that as his older brother is not actually the son of Sir Robert he should not be able to inherit the estate. Significantly, the question is chiefly settled by the faces of the two brothers. Here, we have a contrast between two kinds of representation:  the textual and the physical. The turn to embodiment that we can see in this scene might recall my discussion of Cymbeline, but the important difference is that while the physical turns out to be decisive in that play, in King John the representation afforded by faces—​referred to quite often throughout the play—​is often merely one variety of representation among others. Nevertheless, in this opening scene the older brother’s facial representation of his true father has a real effect, one that is crucial for the play as a whole. The first to notice this representation is Eleanor, who says to John

He hath a trick of Coeur-​de-​Lion’s face; The accent of his tongue affecteth him. Do you not read some tokens of my son In the large composition of this man? (1.1.85–​5)

On the one hand, physical resemblance is treated as a sign of patrilineage within traditional theological-​political discourses of identity …. On the other hand, embodied presence is viewed as the foundation for the self within emergent sociotheatrical discourses of identity as performatively produced through actions.8

Shakespeare begins the play by demonstrating the importance of bodies and performance as means of representation. As Lin remarks, “embodied presence” is key in this play, but I want to stress that Shakespeare does not set up a simple opposition between faces and texts (and in this respect the role of embodiment is very different than it was in Cymbeline). In this initial scene, it is certainly the case

49  King John

In context, Eleanor’s “composition” refers to the totality of the man’s appearance, but I think that it can also be taken to suggest that this appearance can be seen as a composition in the textual sense as well: she reads his face as if it were another (yet another) text. In short order, Philip Faulconbridge becomes Sir Richard Plantagenet (usually called the Bastard) and the text provided by his face and voice supersedes both the text of his name and the text of Sir Robert’s will.7 As Erika T. Lin has noted, this supersession here is part of King John’s larger interest in embodiment:

50 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

that the face supersedes the text, but I would say that rather than contrasting two modes of representation, Shakespeare instead brings the physical and the textual together. This equivalence, occurring as it does in the first minutes of the play, is significant for King John as a whole, given not only Eleanor’s reading of the Bastard’s face but his own harping on his face, his brother’s, and Sir Robert’s. But while in this scene the evidence of faces turns out to be more important than the legally authorized words of the will, the overall effect of the play, as we shall see, is to bring the physical and the textual together as modes of representation. That is, to some extent for Shakespeare the body is not like a text, it is a text. I’ll go on to look at more examples of this in King John, but perhaps the most famous example in his works comes from The Winter’s Tale when Leontes speaks to Florizel: Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince, For she did print your royal father off, Conceiving you. (5.1.123–​5)

Here the reproduction of humans and the reproduction of texts are conflated in a way that I  think is instructive for the consideration of the representational status of both in King John.9 The conflation of people and texts can be humorous as well as serious in the play, as the Bastard demonstrates in 3.1. The enraged Constance has questioned the right of the Duke of Austria to wear a lion’s skin, as it represents courage: “Thou wear a lion’s hide! Doff it, for shame, /​And hang a calf’s-​skin on those recreant limbs” (3.1.54–​5). The blustering Duke is

incensed, but of course he cannot fight with a woman and it is here that the Bastard makes one of his most effective interventions: AUSTRIA O, that a man should speak those words to me! BASTARD And hang a calf’s-​skin on those recreant limbs. AUSTRIA Thou dar’st not say so, villain, for thy life. BASTARD And hang a calf’s-​skin on those recreant limbs.

The Bastard’s delightful childishness—​which continues: he mentions a calf’s skin to the Duke three more times in this scene—​sets up a joke whose punchline comes at the beginning of the next scene when he walks on stage holding the Duke’s severed head. But a calf’s skin is not merely a sign of cowardice or foolishness: it also provides the most desirable writing material of the day, as the word “vellum” comes ultimately from the Latin word for “calf.”10 In this particular conflation of person and text, then, the Duke appears as a blank page, which seems a fitting criticism. I would say that in most cases, as for instance when John speaks of reading in Blanche’s face (2.1.496–​ 503), the equivalences between people (more specifically, faces) and texts are not especially significant. One that does stand out for me, however, is Philip’s comments on Arthur’s resemblance to his dead father in his first speech to John: These eyes, these brows, were moulded out of his; This little abstract doth contain that large Which died in Geoffrey; and the hand of time Shall draw this brief into as huge a volume. (2.1.100–​03)

51  King John

(3.1.56–​9)

52 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

In describing Arthur as an abstract, Philip uses a word with textual connotations, as Eleanor did when she used the word “composition.” He presents the young prince as an abridged version of his father, one that will eventually grow to his size. As in The Winter’s Tale, human reproduction is presented as textual representation. The textual implications of this metaphor permit us to see “the hand of time” not primarily—​as so often—​a hand that draws or sculpts, but as a hand that writes; the enjambments in these lines present time as a swift writer.11 Or perhaps it’s not a metaphor at all:  at a number of points during King John, and especially in the final scene, Shakespeare appears to be suggesting that the textual form of his characters is their real form. Perhaps physical embodiment is the metaphor by which textual selves are represented. Ultimately, faces and bodies are merely one form of representation within the play. The play keeps giving us representations of various kinds, convincing or otherwise, and often in pairs, most of which present interpretive dilemmas that are much less easy to decide than the case of the two brothers in the first scene. As Kathryn Schwarz has pointed out, in its plethora of representations with claims to authority among which it is difficult to adjudicate, King John’s “performative practice cites queer theory.”12 The relative ease with which the decision about Sir Robert Faulconbridge’s will was reached turns out to be the exception rather than the rule: in the play as a whole there are many claims to authority but very few unambiguous proofs of authority. I think it is for this reason that King John uses the word “form” so often: there are 12 instances in the play, more than in any other play of Shakespeare’s except for Hamlet, which has 13, although as King John is only about two-​thirds as long as Hamlet, the word is proportionately considerably more frequent. The word “form” is polysemous;

53  King John

I would argue that among the meanings that it takes in the play are not only body but also the representation of a body, custom, behaviour, and legal procedure. In the passages I have discussed so far, we have seen that the will is a form, as are a herald’s greeting and the faces of both the Bastard and Arthur. Perhaps the main thing to note here is that in the ambiguity of the first two meanings I gave above—​a body or the representation of a body—​we see again, as in the last paragraph, a complication of tenor and vehicle:  the representation may actually be the real thing. I want to look briefly at two uses of “form” in the play that I find especially interesting. The first comes in the fourth scene of the third act. Justifiably afraid that she will never see her son again, Constance enters with her hair dishevelled. This disarray and the speeches she makes all accurately represent her grief and fear, but the very accuracy of this representation offends the men on stage, who work to get her to bind up her hair and to moderate her language. The sincere female and maternal emotions felt and expressed by Constance are considered literally obscene:  something that should not be represented on stage. Although Constance does give in to Philip’s entreaty to bind her hair, she soon repents of this and unbinds her hair once more: “I will not keep this form upon my head, /​When there is such disorder in my wit” (3.4.101–​ 02). Constance makes the connection between external and internal forms and remains true to her ideas of representation. But this is the last we see of her: shortly afterwards she leaves the stage. Her death is reported to John later by a messenger who also tells the news that Eleanor is dead (4.2.119–​24). When these two female characters, equally strong, passionate, and outspoken, leave the stage, they take with them the possibility that women can express and represent violent emotions.

Constance’s equation of outward form and inner feelings is apparently not a type of representation that King John can allow. The second example comes when John, dying from poison, makes his entrance in the play’s last scene: There is so hot a summer in my bosom That all my bowels crumble up to dust; I am a scribbled form drawn with a pen 54 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

Upon a parchment, and against this fire Do I shrink up. (5.7.30–​4)

In his excellent discussion of this scene, Richard Wilson has said that “textual agency [is] a leading concern” of King John. 13 Here, what we see is the loss of textual agency. In a play that has tended to equate people and texts, it turns out that the ultimate fate is to become a text: not a text that is elaborate or powerful or even durable, but a text that doesn’t really represent anything—​it is “scribbled”—​and one that is in the process of being destroyed. The durable text that rises like a phoenix from the fire that consumes the fragile text that is the dying king is of course Shakespeare’s King John. The form that lasts is not the documents that feature in the play or the historical people understood as forms but rather literary form itself:  representation is more permanent than embodiment. This elevation of representation over embodiment is one of the signs of queerness. In King John, then, form is a word that usefully queers and interrogates the idea of representation. Shakespeare’s use of parallelism does much the same thing. In the first scene, the main parallel is between the two disputes about inheritance, one involving England itself and one involving Sir Robert Faulconbridge’s estate. The second scene begins by inverting

KING PHILIP ‘Tis France, for England. KING JOHN                    England, for itself. You men of Angers, and my loving subjects—​ KING PHILIP You loving men of Angers, Arthur’s subjects. (2.1.202–​04)

55  King John

the beginning of the first: we see the French royal court and then the herald Chatillon. This is antimetabole at the level of staging rather than at the level of the sentence.14 Antimetabole is arguably a figure of speech that queers representation in that it interrupts the forward flow of the sentence or narrative, and gives us a progression that goes both backwards (the same words or elements) and forwards (a different order of these words or elements). Here the oddness of the parallel between the beginnings of these two scenes is emphasized by the arrival of the English royal party directly after Chatillon: the structure of the openings of both scenes underlines Chatillon’s role in representing the intentions of both kings, while the advent of the English royals, not at all reluctant to state their case, makes his role superfluous. Shakespeare establishes these parallels early on in King John in order to demonstrate that representation in this play will never (or almost never) be an unmarked device for conveying information, but will instead be something that keeps assuming centre stage without necessarily moving the plot forward. In the second scene, both parallelism and representation become the centre of attention through the events at Angers, a town claimed by both kings.15 Philip orders that a trumpet be sounded to summon the town’s residents. When one appears, he asks “Who is it that hath warned us to the walls?” (2.1.201). It is typical of the play that this question, both natural in itself and easy to answer, leads not to a single answer but rather to a parallel:

56 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

And so on. After each king gives a fairly long speech, the citizen says “[i]‌n brief, we are the King of England’s subjects” (2.1.267); when challenged by John to let him enter, the citizen responds “That can we not. But he that proves the king, /​To him will we prove loyal” (270–​1). As the kings’ speeches here are so parallel, the issue cannot be decided by eloquence; the fact that both sides have good claims to the English crown means that it cannot be decided by a question of right either. What is most important to me here is that the phrase “King of England” has in effect become a floating signifier: it no longer represents a particular individual in whom the control of the land rests. I would add that the failure of representation here is typical of the play’s general queering of representation. Another example of the queering of representation can be seen in what follows. In order to solve the stalemate, the kings decide to fight a battle for the town. Once the battle is over, a French herald enters with trumpeters and claims victory for his side: “You men of Angers, open wide your gates /​And let young Arthur Duke of Brittaine in” (2.1.300–​01). The French herald speaks for 12 triumphant lines, noting the heaps of slaughtered Englishmen and calling on the citizens to help proclaim Arthur as king of England. This might sound convincing, but as soon as he is done, an English herald enters with trumpeters and makes a very similar speech (it is one line longer), proclaiming John’s victory and the slaughter of the French, and ending with an appeal to the citizens to open the city gates. The parallel between the heralds’ speeches obviously recalls the similar stalemate only a few lines earlier between the kings’ speeches. It appears that in King John even a battle, typically a decisive event that resolves or at least advances narratives, is unable to make things happen. To put it another way, we have now learnt that in the world of the

play apparently neither speeches nor actions can successfully represent anything other than themselves:  this queer representation seems to have replaced narrative motion. Within the play the sense that the battle is a failed representation is best expressed by the citizen, who appears once again on the city wall: Heralds, from off our towers we might behold, From first to last, the onset and retire Of both your armies, whose equality By our best eyes cannot be censurèd: Blood hath bought blood, and blows have answered blows, Strength matched with strength, and power confronted power; Both are alike, and both alike we like. One must prove greatest. While they weigh so even, (2.1.325–​33)

In watching the battle, the citizens of Angers have been like spectators at a play, but unlike spectators, who will typically prefer one character or resolution to another, they find themselves unable to pass judgement. We are even less able than the citizens, as the battle has not been represented on stage—​significantly, one of the things that the citizen’s speech represents is precisely this lack of representation. The speech represents another lack of representation as well, since it brilliantly conveys the impasse it describes. The citizen emphasizes the stalemate he and his fellow citizens have seen in the two lines (329 and 330) that refer specifically to the battle: there are four repeated nouns, the first two further stressed by the double alliteration of “bl.” These four

57  King John

We hold our town for neither, yet for both.

58 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

nouns—​blood, blows, strength, and power—​are themselves a summary of any battle, although they noticeably omit the victory and defeat that we expect a battle to produce. What is more, this summary is given in reverse chronological order, ending rather than beginning with the blood that is the result of the battle. This word order, which we could describe as an example of antimetabole in relation to the battle itself, exemplifies the narrative blockage that the battle has produced. In the next line, the citizen emphasizes this blockage by repetition—​“Both … alike … both alike”—​and then, and arguably even more strongly, by difference:  the repeated “alike” changes to “like,” but this variation only serves to restate the citizen’s inability to choose one side over the other. Fittingly, the citizen ends his speech with a paradox:  “We hold our town for neither, yet for both.” Despite the battle, the situation is thus exactly as it was when the citizen first addressed the English and the French and the use of paradox fittingly represents the lack of something to represent. We can read the citizen’s speech as a virtuosic example of queer representation, and I  do, but the French and English are unsurprisingly unsatisfied with it. What follows are two attempts to break the deadlock. In the first, the Bastard suggests that the English and the French should join forces to attack Angers. After John says he will attack the town from the west, the Duke and Philip promise their support: AUSTRIA      I from the north. KING PHILIP      Our thunder from the south Shall rain their drift of bullets on this town. BASTARD (aside) O prudent discipline! From north to south

Austria and France shoot in each other’s mouth. I’ll stir them to it.

The Bastard’s idea is good, but the military ineptitude of Austria and Philip suggests another plan to him, one in which their forces will destroy each other and allow the English to prevail. His plan thus becomes a representation of another plan altogether as soon as it is proposed. This instability of referent—​what exactly is being represented here?—​is a kind of queer representation. In another sense, so is his sexual play on words: in shooting (ejaculating) in each other’s mouths, Austria and Philip would perform a kind of sexual activity that cannot lead to children and through that to the larger systems of reproduction on which society depend and of which human reproduction is a necessary part. It is at this point that the tireless and resourceful citizen proposes another—​and related—​solution to the impasse:  he suggests that Blanche of Castile, John’s niece, should marry Philip’s son, thus uniting England and France. At this point we shift decisively from queer representation to heterosexual representation. As so often, the female body will represent an agreement between two men.16 The highly romantic rhetoric that surrounds this proposal (and this is the only love story in the entire play) cannot disguise its utilitarian nature. In fact, the Bastard ends this long scene with a soliloquy in which he criticizes commodity as the thing that makes the world go around. He even goes so far as to parody the romantic discourse we have just heard: “And why rail I on this commodity? /​But for because he hath not wooed me yet” (2. 586–​7). The language of love that has been used to obscure the practical motives for the marriage is

59  King John

(2.1.410–​14)

60 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

instantly parodied by the Bastard. As if to emphasize this fact, he ends his speech with a phrase that sounds very like a declaration of love: “Gain be my lord, for I will worship thee” (2.1.597). These first two acts are chiefly concerned with the dispute between John and Philip. While the proposed marriage brings the two kings together, it does nothing for Arthur, as Constance points out bitterly and at length, and neither does it make John’s control of the English throne more secure. However firm the agreement between him and Philip may be, it soon becomes clear that the Dauphin does not feel himself bound by this agreement and he goes on to pose a threat to John’s reign. The citizen’s comment that it was impossible to tell who the real king of England was arose from a particular situation that is apparently resolved by the end of that scene, but the uncertainty he expressed continues to be arguably the dominant motivator for the rest of the play. One way in which John attempts to shore up his reign is to have himself crowned again, as a coronation is the supreme example of sovereign power. Such at least is apparently John’s reasoning, although the earls of Pembroke and Salisbury energetically voice their disagreement. Using words that recall the central concerns of the play, for instance, Salisbury points out that “[i]‌n this the àntique and well-​notèd face /​Of plain old form is much disfigurèd” (4.2.21–​2). As so often in King John, there is a discordance between the form and its expression—​its representation—​in the play. In not being the proper representation of the form of a coronation, John’s second crowning exposes his own improper representation of a king. What chiefly interests me in the nobles’ comments is the extent to which they give us a look at permissible and impermissible forms of representation and at how ideology

functions in representation. The lines of Salisbury that I’ve just quoted are a good example:  the description of coronation as a “plain old form” is clearly inaccurate, as however gaudy John’s second coronation may have been (we aren’t told), it is clear that no coronation is plain. The best example of these things, however, is Salisbury’s first speech: Therefore, to be possessed with double pomp, To guard a title that was rich before, To gild refinèd gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-​light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

Of course, “wasteful and ridiculous excess” is itself an excellent definition of certain kinds of queerness, but what particularly strikes me here is that Salisbury’s speech simultaneously criticizes John’s excess and produces its own by beginning with a straightforward statement—​ “to be possessed with double pomp”—​and then manufacturing seven paraphrases and metaphors for it. The representation of queer representation is itself a queer representation.17 The second coronation turns out not to make any difference. John also attempts to shore up his power by having Arthur killed. This might seem a relatively easy thing to accomplish, but as it turns out John’s plans for his nephew quickly become complicated, and an important part of this complication in the play is expressed through considerations of representation. In fact, it is even difficult for John to order

61  King John

(4.2.9–​16)

his retainer Hubert to kill the boy. John summons Hubert to talk to him, but it takes two flowery speeches in which John expresses his love for his retainer in order for Hubert to say that he loves John So well, that what you bid me undertake, Though that my death were adjunct to my act, By heaven I would do it. 62 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

(3.3.56–​8)

Hubert has jumped a step here by realizing that the king’s emotional protestations are really the prelude to asking a favour. John tells Hubert that Arthur is his enemy and places him in Hubert’s keeping. When Hubert says that he will “keep him so /​That he shall not offend your majesty” (3.3.64–​5), John is still unsatisfied and he begins a remarkable line of dialogue: KING JOHN Death. HUBERT      My lord. KING JOHN          A grave. HUBERT                 He shall not live. KING JOHN                        Enough. (3.3.66)

John’s final word in this exchange gives the line an 11th syllable: his enough is also more than enough. Without taking a pro-​infanticide position, I think we can see that John’s tergiversations here—​his inability to represent his intentions clearly—​has a farcical side, and I think that the note of farce is present throughout the rest of the subplot about the unfortunate Arthur. When we next see Hubert, he

has gone to Arthur’s prison with a warrant that allows him access to the young prince. The scene between the hardened and ruthless villain and the innocent boy was famous for its pathos, but I  would argue that here again the emphasis is on inability—​specifically, Hubert’s inability to carry out his instructions because Arthur is lovable. The warrant thus becomes yet another text that is not efficacious. What strikes me most, however, is the curious stress on the warrant’s materiality. When Hubert shows the warrant to Arthur, they make the time to discuss the penmanship: HUBERT Can you not read it? Is it not fair writ? ARTHUR Too fairly Hubert, for so foul effect.

I think that the spectacle of the two admiring the handwriting is farcical; more seriously, it reveals a stress on representation at the expense of content (since Hubert turns out to be too kind to kill the boy) that is typically queer. Unfortunately for John, the warrant returns in the play (in fact, in the next scene). First, Pembroke identifies Hubert as the murderer of Arthur, who is presumed to be dead: This is the man should do the bloody deed; He showed his warrant to a friend of mine. The image of a wicked heinous fault Lives in his eye. (4.2.69–​72)

The warrant that Pembroke’s unnamed friend has seen is adduced as proof of Hubert’s guilt, but so is his own face: textual and physical representation coincide here. Later

63  King John

(4.1.37–​8)

64 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

in this scene, John, who by now wants Arthur alive after all, blames Hubert for the supposed murder and claims that Hubert misinterpreted his complaints about the boy. At one point, John foolishly uses the word itself, complaining about servants who take kings’ “humours for a warrant /​To break within the bloody house of life” (4.2.208–​ 09). Hubert’s response is eminently sensible: he produces the warrant and says “Here is your hand and seal for what I did” (4.2.214). Pembroke’s reference to the warrant is a verbal representation; John’s is a (very ill-​chosen) metaphor; Hubert has the thing itself. Nevertheless, what we might see as a shift towards from speech to materiality is qualified by the fact that the warrant—​for both John and Hubert—​no longer has its literal meaning of bringing about Arthur’s murder. It has become an important document, but its signification has shifted and we ultimately have an example of materiality without meaning. After all this bustle about Arthur, the boy himself dies accidentally from a fall at the beginning of the next scene; the event is either bathetic or a rare example of Shakespeare’s black humour. The trouble posed by his life—​something that has been one of the play’s main subjects since its beginning—​ is now ended. This is not a conclusion, however, as the danger posed by the French will now be the play’s main concern. Instead of a rival claimant for the throne who is one of his close relatives, John is now threatened by a foreign prince and his representation of kingliness is as dubious as ever. But the death does continue to cause problems for Hubert, who shows up to bring Arthur to John and instead runs into the nobles and the Bastard, who have just discovered Arthur’s corpse. This exceedingly awkward encounter leads to a further focus on representation. When Hubert enters with the news that Arthur is alive (something he believes to be true),

the Earl of Salisbury, assuming Hubert to be the boy’s murderer, says “O he is bold, and blushes not at death” (4.3.76). The implication is that Hubert is so hardened that he feels no shame at having killed the boy, whereas of course we know that he doesn’t blush because he is actually innocent: Hubert’s relatively untroubled expression is an accurate representation of his genuine concern for Arthur. When Hubert learns that Arthur really is dead he weeps and says “I honoured him, I loved him, and will weep /​My date of life out for his sweet life’s loss” (4.3.105–​06). His tears are also assumed to be a false representation, however, as Salisbury says Trust not these cunning waters of his eyes For villainy is not without such rheum, And he, long traded in it, makes it seem (4.3.107–​10)

For him, both Hubert’s lack of remorse when he entered and his tears now are equally signs of his brazen wickedness. Crucially, one aspect of this wickedness is apparently Hubert’s talent for false representation. From one point of view, we know better than Salisbury and the other nobles and we know that Hubert has been truthful throughout the scene. But from another, Salisbury is partially correct:  Hubert is convincing throughout the scene, not because he is such a hardened villain but because he is a trained actor. We might want to say that Hubert is really sorry for Arthur’s death, but that would also be wrong. The actor playing Hubert has done a good job. This is a metatheatrical moment that exposes the queerness of theatrical representation specifically, as it demonstrates that

65  King John

Like rivers of remorse and innocency.

66 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

in order to make judgements about characters and events on the stage we have to believe things that we know to be untrue. In focusing attention on representation here, Shakespeare exposes the falseness on which his theatre depends. In this exchange, the text in question, one that does not appear, is obviously King John itself, the text which the actors are performing. Just two scenes later, however, we have a literal text on stage: the treaty between the Dauphin and the English nobles pledging to overthrow John. This scene opens with a notable focus on the materiality of this text—​something that recalls Hubert’s and Arthur’s comments on the warrant. The Dauphin gives the treaty to Melun with instructions: My Lord Melun, let this be copied out, And keep it safe for our remembrance. Return the precedent to these lords again, That having our fair order written down, Both they and we, perusing o’er these notes, May know wherefore we took the sacrament And keep our faiths firm and inviolable. (5.2.1–​7)

The “sacrament” the Dauphin mentions is the oath solemnizing their alliance. These written versions whose preparation, distribution, and use are so carefully specified are supposed to represent the oath just as the Dauphin’s metaphor blasphemously represents the eucharist. Both the unsuitable religious metaphor and the overelaborate emphasis on the text’s materiality clearly (rather too clearly—​this is not one of Shakespeare’s subtlest passages) foreshadow the fact that this text will be only material: it will only represent itself.

Although the treaty is admittedly powerful enough to get the English lords to fight on the Dauphin’s side, its efficacy ends there. In the next scene but one, the dying Melun tells the English that they have been betrayed by the Dauphin, who plans to kill them once they have delivered England to him. When Salisbury doubts him, Melun asks Have I not hideous death within my view, Retaining but a quantity of life, Which bleeds away, even as a form of wax Resolveth from his figure ‘gainst the fire?

I wrote earlier about John’s comparison of himself as he dies to “a scribbled form” being consumed by fire; this image is anticipated here but with the difference that while John presents himself as the surface on which a text can be written, Melun presents himself as the wax that is added to the text once it is written, either to sign it or to seal it. Taken together, these two images can be seen as another example of antimetabole: a text comes before the wax, which is added to it, but in Shakespeare’s presentation we hear about the wax before we hear about the writing surface. In my discussion, I restored the normal order of preparing a text, but in terms of the play itself I created the queer figure of a hysteron proteron. With the failure of the French attempt to take over England, Shakespeare has finally solved the play’s problems, but of course he has accompanied this resolution with the death of John. In the last scene, as in the first, succession and inheritance are highlighted, suggesting that this history play can be seen as narrating stasis as much as narrative progression.

67  King John

(5.4.22–​5)

68 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

Considered from this point of view, King John’s relationship to the idea of the history play is itself somewhat queer. The Bastard, who has often seemed to be the only thing holding the kingdom together, gives a rousing final speech looking forward to future English glories, but it cannot be said that this speech is entirely convincing. I’m particularly interested in its last sentence: “Naught shall make us rue, /​If England to itself do rest but true” (5.7.117–​18). A  straightforward warning against treachery is always apposite, but the play itself, with its emphasis on the falseness of representations of various kinds, should lead us to question how we can know when a country (or a person—​ even ourselves) is being true to itself and whether we would be wise to believe in the representations of truth we are given. So while the Bastard’s speech is appropriately patriotic and even stirring, it cannot help but strike us as a queer representation of the play we have just read. NOTES 1 An excellent account of the play’s oddity is Robert Maslen’s aptly named “The Strangeness of King John.’ 2 I think that the best discussion of this issue isWilson, “A Scribbled  Form.” 3 To my knowledge, all editions of King John include some consideration of this question. As well, there have been numerous critical discussions. A particularly interesting one is Groves, “Memory, Composition, and the Relationship of King John to The Troublesome Raigne of King John.” Groves argues that Shakespeare’s play follows the anonymous play. I’m not so sure, but the question doesn’t affect my analysis either way. 4 For an especially interesting account of voice in the play (one very different from mine), see Bloom, “Words Made of Breath.” 5 For an excellent discussion of sovereign power and its representation in the play, see Griffiths, “Sovereignty, Synecdoche, and the Prosthetic Hand in King John.” 6 As we shall see, Shakespeare returns to the metatheatrical later in the play.

69  King John

7 To emphasize the importance of appearance, the Bastard makes a series of insulting remarks to his brother about his unfortunate resemblance to Sir Robert: 1.1.78–​83, 92–​4, 138–​47, and 151–​4. 8 Lin, “ ‘Lord of thy presence,’ ” 115. For her comparison of the recognition of the Bastard here to the recognition of Arthur later, see 116–​17. 9 For my earlier discussion of these and related issues, see Against Reproduction. For a contemporary example that might have influenced Shakespeare, see Samuel Daniel’s Delia, Sonnet 39: “Reade in my face, a volume of despayres, /​The wayling Iliades of my tragicke wo” (1–​2). 10 See Oxford English Dictionary (OED), “vellum,” n. and “veal,” n. 1. 11 The most obvious sense of “draw” here is the one associated with the visual arts, but in Shakespeare’s time the word could also mean to translate or to represent in words; see OED, “draw,” v. 19 and 60.c, respectively. I am indebted to Professor Huw Griffiths of the University of Sydney for this reference. 12 Schwarz, “Queer Futility,” 164. 13 Wilson, “A Scribbled Form,” 354. 14 For an excellent discussion of this figure of speech in King John, see Hunt, “Antimetabolic King John,” especially 383–​4. Hunt points out that antimetabole is mainly concentrated in the second and third acts of the play. 15 Hunt has a good discussion of this episode, see “Antimetabolic King John,” 389–​90. For a more detailed account, see Hertel, Staging England, 137–​42. 16 There are many examples of this and there has been much critical discussion as well. I want to single out the first of these and still, I think, the most influential is Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women.” 17 To speak personally, I think that most of Salisbury’s examples are worth trying and would definitely be improvements. As well, line 11 is one of Shakespeare’s most famous phrases and is usually misquoted as “to gild the lily.” I would like to point out both that gilding the lily seems like a very good idea and that the phrase describes the lilies on both the English and the French coats of arms at the time of the play’s composition.

Macbeth

70 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

Three As I  have shown, in King John representation is frequently (and often oddly) foregrounded. The same is true of Macbeth, although in this play for the most part the representation I want to consider is less a question of things within the play, such as the faces and texts that strew King John, and more a question of language and of theatrical production itself. After pointing out that over half of the play takes place in darkness despite the fact that it was written to be performed at the Globe Theatre and thus in daylight, Nicholas Brooke, the editor of the play for the Oxford Shakespeare, says, All theatre depends, in one way or another, on illusion …. The transformation of daylight into darkness is a tour de force which establishes illusion as, not merely a utility, but a central preoccupation of the play, dramatically announced by an opening unique in Shakespeare’s plays, the use of the non-​naturalistic prologue by the Weïrd Sisters.1

I take this to mean that from the beginning, Macbeth is a play that seeks, to an unusual degree, to get us to consider not just what is being shown and told to us but how it is being shown and told to us. In this chapter, my primary focus will be on the witches, but I’ll also consider other aspects of Macbeth’s representational strategies.

71  Macbeth

A little more than 30 years ago, Terry Eagleton began his bracingly brisk book on Shakespeare’s plays with Macbeth: “To any unprejudiced reader—​ which would seem to exclude Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audiences and almost all literary critics—​it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches.”2 Eagleton chiefly values the witches for their disruptive qualities; he argues that they “signify a realm of non-​ meaning and poetic play which hovers at the work’s margins” and that they “strike at the stable social, sexual and linguistic forms which the society of the play needs in order to survive.”3 Eagleton’s view has much to recommend it. Like him, I see the witches as ultimately the most important thing about Macbeth, although for me this has less to do with the disruption they provide—​a disruption that is limited after all, since despite the play’s high body count the Scottish monarchy continues—​than with how they get us to consider (and reconsider) the “social, sexual, and linguistic forms” that prevail, more or less, in the scenes in which the witches do not appear. In beginning the play with the witches, Shakespeare gives us different modes of representation, and perhaps a different world altogether. The witches only appear in a few scenes of the play, but their effect on the characters who see them and on the audience is immense, and perhaps incalculable. And perhaps in beginning of the play they can enable us to read Macbeth as a play that is about them at least as much as it is about the eponymous character.4 It is not so much that they queer representation when they appear but that they queer the play as a whole. The first scene is very short, but it accomplishes a great deal. For one thing, it begins the play with very strongly accented and rhyming dialogue.5 Most of Shakespeare’s plays—​and most Renaissance plays in general—​are written

72  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

in a mixture of blank verse and prose.6 The metre Shakespeare uses for the first scene of Macbeth is typically used for songs or charms; the most famous example is probably the moving dirge for Feste in Cymbeline. The use of the metre in the first scene of Macbeth is highly marked because it is not introduced by dialogue in prose or blank verse (as is usually the case) and also because it is both a song and a conversation. Thus, it is odd both as form and as content, insofar as those categories can be separated. Indeed, we could say that in the first scene of Macbeth, Shakespeare anticipates Maurice Merleau-​Ponty’s points that “the form is not the setting in which, but the means whereby the content is posited” and that “[f]‌orm integrates within itself the content until the latter finally appears as a mere mode of form itself.”7 As both song and dialogue, the verse that the witches speak—​or chant, or intone—​insists upon its form, even at the expense of its content, which is notoriously difficult to apprehend. There is a sense, arguably even greater than is usually the case in literary texts, that the witches’ speech cannot be paraphrased, cannot be rendered into prose without losing its most important characteristics. For the witches, the form is also the content. Our sense that the old standards no longer apply is precisely the subject of the couplet that closes this scene: “Fair-​ is-​Foul and Foul-​is-​Fair /​Hover through the fog and filthy air” (i1.1.11–​12). Ending a scene with a rhyming couplet is of course standard practice for Renaissance drama, but the couplet in those cases is iambic pentameter, so that the verse only changes by becoming, briefly, rhyming. Here, the couplet is especially marked because its first line is in the sing-​ song metre of most of the other lines in this scene, while the second, although perhaps intelligible as a four-​beat accentual line, has nine syllables, as if it tried to move from tetrameter to pentameter and gave up halfway. The content of these lines is,

73  Macbeth

if anything, even odder. The first line presents us with clearly paradoxical statements, which I  read as indicating that the witches are beyond human aesthetic distinctions—​that is, it is a further sign of their queerness—​while the second has no logical connection to the first. Form and content are perhaps united in this second line insofar as the four unstressed syllables between the first syllable of “Hover” and “fog” enact a kind of hovering, but any feeling that this might make sense is surely undone by Shakespeare’s use of the preposition “through.” People or witches might reasonably be said to hover in or on something, but if they’re moving through something we would say that they are no longer hovering. As well, the final couplets of scenes normally summarize what’s gone before or look forward to the next scene, but in Macbeth’s first scene the couplet mainly serves to increase our own sense of fogginess. But now to return to the first two lines of the scene and thus of the play: “When shall we three meet again? /​In thunder, lightning or in rain?” (1.1.1–​2). Perhaps the first point to make is that the play thus begins in medias res, but I  think it is even more than that:  not only are the witches already meeting, but as they are discussing when to meet again this encounter is presumably nearing its end. I think Shakespeare is suggesting that he is not giving us the whole of this scene or that the witches live in a time that is not the same as our time or perhaps both.8 What is more, after the first line we would expect some mention of possible dates and times, but instead we are given three examples of bad weather. Time is not weather, although perhaps it is for the witches, or perhaps at least bad weather is one of the conditions that makes it possible for us to see them. Vassiliki Markidou has argued that because of this opening “time and space are foregrounded and interrelated as the central axes of the play.”9 I think this is true, but I would add that time and space are importantly

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different for the witches than they are for us, even if we can never quite figure out what the differences are. I  read this opening couplet as showing us an experience of space and time that is fundamentally alien to us. We could certainly say that the witches offer us a notably queer representation, but it may also be the case that they are representing queerness on an ontological level. Here I am following Christine Varnado, who in a remarkable recent essay has argued for “a queer model of generation, and a queer model of nature, at work in the play.”10 Certainly time seems to be something that the witches experience differently from humans.11 The witches’ odd relationship to time as humans know it is part of their generally odd relationship to human experience, something underlined by the second witch’s response: “When the hurly-​burly’s done, /​When the battle’s lost and won” (1.1.3–​4). On the one hand, it is true that every battle is both lost and won; on the other hand, to speak of the outcome of a battle in this offhand way demonstrates an indifference to the vital difference that battles make to humans both personally and on the largest conceivable scale: for example, decisive battles both start and finish the human plot of Macbeth.12 But although the witches don’t particularly care about human events, they will still do what they have to do. Following the first four lines, the witches establish the time, place, and purpose of their meeting: THIRD WITCH That will be ere the set of sun. FIRST WITCH Where the place? SECOND WITCH           Upon the heath. THIRD WITCH There to meet with Macbeth. (1.1.5–​7)

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Significantly, these lines abandon the prosodic model established by the first four lines and display various metres before concluding in the failed rhyme of “heath /​Macbeth.” Descending to more practical and earthly matters has apparently impaired the witches’ ability to speak in their native dialect. After this brief scene, the play begins in medias res for the second time, as we see Duncan asking for news of the battle and speaking to his men. These two beginnings should underscore our sense that the witches might not be characters in Macbeth but rather in another play, one that is perhaps usually parallel but sometimes overlapping. The second scene is conducted in the fluent blank verse that we associate with Shakespeare and with which the contemporary audiences would certainly have been familiar. As well, instead of the witches’ cryptic utterances, we have a clear, if complex, account of the fortunes of battle, one that highlights Macbeth. In other words, in both form and content this scene is of a kind that Shakespeare’s audiences and readers would recognize and would have anticipated. Nevertheless, I  think the insistent rhythms of the witches have altered our sense of the theatrical norm. Whereas the metre they use typically represents a change to the form of the play’s dialogue and is often announced as such (as the dirge in Cymbeline is), for example, here it is open to us to experience the blank verse as the change. Shakespeare allows us to think that the witches’ dialect is the true or basic form of speech in Macbeth. Blank verse and prose would then be the marked form of Shakespeare’s dramatic language and it would be the human characters of the play who are visitors from another sphere.

In this connection, I’m especially interested in how this scene’s final rhyming couplet could make us look back at the play’s first scene: DUNCAN No more that Thane of Cawdor shall deceive Our bosom interest. Go, pronounce his present death, And with his former title greet Macbeth. ROSS I’ll see it done. 76  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

DUNCAN What he has lost, noble Macbeth has won. (1.2.63–​7)

Lines 65 and 66 form a perfect rhyming couplet in both form and content:  the couplet gives us important information about the eponymous character and, in its rhyme of “death” and “Macbeth,” it foreshadows the bloody events of the play. Furthermore, this exact rhyme is a clear improvement on the witches’ “heath /​Macbeth” in the previous scene. It is ruined by Ross’s short line, however.The resourceful king adds another line—​one that is conspicuously superfluous, since it merely rephrases the lines he has just delivered. Although redundant, his line does create a second exact rhyming couplet—​“done” and “won”—​but this one only works at the level of rhyme, as his pentameter line (regularly iambic except for the trochaic substitution in the third foot) is matched with Ross’s scant four syllables. I think that what we’re seeing here is that the witches do not merely represent another kind of dramatic verse and dramatic representation, but that they also affect those parts of the play that are not supernatural and that use more typical kinds of dramatic speech. The most obvious example of the witches’ power over the language of the human characters is the first line that Macbeth speaks:  “So foul and fair a day I  have not seen” (1.3.33). I  wrote earlier that the witches’ line “Fair-​ is-​ Foul, and

77  Macbeth

Foul-​is-​Fair” is a paradoxical statement; Macbeth’s recension of the line removes the paradox by suggesting that the fairness and foulness are not identical but rather different aspects of the same day. His version turns their utterance into one that can be paraphrased—​the weather was terrible but the battle turned out well, for instance—​or turned into a narrative—​ the weather was terrible in the morning but then the sun came out. As the witches’ speech queerly resists paraphrase and queerly interferes with narrative (both in their attitude to time and in their indifference to human narratives such as the result of a battle), I think that this change is significant. To put it another way, he takes the witches’ queer speech and makes it not queer: in effect, he gives a straight representation of queer representation. Thus, although it seems to be the case that the witches have some power over the human world, or at least some power over human language, this power is apparently somewhat circumscribed. We would typically see this turn to straight representation as a simplification and regularization, but if, as I have argued, the witches’ primacy of appearance means that we can see them as the default mode of the play, then Macbeth’s version of the witch’s line can be seen as a distortion. In the terms of Margaret Downs-​Gamble, who calls Macbeth “the single worst interpreter in the history of the theatre,” he is an anamorphosis “that requires the viewer—​to reflect the image in a mirror or to occupy a particular vantage point.”13 Queer is straight, and straight is queer. When Macbeth speaks his first line, the witches are already on stage, so we have learnt that the answer to the question posed in the first line of the play is “Act 1, Scene 3.” On the other hand, we have no idea how much time has passed since that scene. The first scene takes place before the battle ends, but we do not know how far before it ends or if it takes place even before the battle begins. Their conversation is not much

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help in this regard either: the second witch has been “Killing swine” (1.3.2) and the first has failed to obtain chestnuts from a woman and has decided to exact some revenge on the woman’s husband, who is a sailor and is currently at Aleppo; the other witches promise to help her. I’ve given this summary to point out two things. First, the activities described could have taken place in the time it took to perform the second scene of the play; they could also have taken place over days or weeks; and they could not have taken place at the theatre. Second, the story of the sailor’s wife is a pure distraction. Considerable scholarly effort has been expended in attempting to figure out whatever story or stories or topical allusions might lie behind the first witch’s tale, but I think that we should just take it as a further indication that although the witches might appear in Macbeth their participation is only part-​time: they have other swine to kill. They exist not only outside our time and space, but also outside our distinctions. Just as in the first scene they indicated that they were not concerned with which side won the battle, so here they seem to think tormenting a sailor is as important as interfering at the highest level of a nation’s politics. In thinking about the ontological status of the witches, I’ve been attempting to answer the questions posed by Varnado, which seem to me to be the most important questions to ask about the witches: Do [the witches] scenes … take place on alternate planes, which intersect only at liminal moments when witches appear to men? Or do the continuous figures of thunder and lightning indicate instead that the witch-​scenes and the human scenes take place in the same material world? Are the witches apart from or against “nature” … or are they part of it?14

          What are these, So withered, and so wild in their attire, That look not like th’inhabitants o’th’earth And yet are on’t? Live you, or are you aught That man may question? You seem to understand me, By each at once her choppy finger laying Upon her skinny lips. You should be women, And yet your beards forbid me to interpret That you are so. (1.3.34–​42)15

As we can see the witches and have seen them before, Banquo’s description is superfluous. Although it is obviously

79  Macbeth

I tend to think that the witches are apart from nature and only temporarily intersect with our world; as well, they are apart not only from our time and space, but also from our ethical concerns and priorities. In other words, they are queer, and we can see their speeches as queer representations—​not only in their form, but also in their indifference to the question of who will win the battle and in their apparently greater interest in the fate of an unnamed sailor than in the fate of the Scottish nation. Furthermore, as I  have already suggested, if we see them as the standard for the play and the human scenes a mere interruption—​ like the second scene, sandwiched between scenes in which the witches appear—​then they give us a way to see what we would usually consider normal characters and normal modes of dramatic speech as themselves queer. I think that we can see all this clearly once Macbeth and Banquo enter and the human and witch worlds interconnect. From the audience’s point of view, perhaps the queerest thing about what follows is that Banquo describes the witches:

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dramatically plausible, its main purpose is to draw attention to the act of representation, especially since it is logically Macbeth and Banquo, whom we have not seen before and whose names have not yet been used in this scene, who need to be introduced to the audience. The fact that they are not and that we initially see them as reacting to the witches arguably sets them up as less than the witches—​as supporting players. Banquo begins by drawing attention to their otherworldly nature. He wonders whether they are earthlings, whether they are alive, and whether humans can communicate with them. The last of these questions is reasonable enough and the first makes explicit a question I  have raised in my own discussion. The second is very odd indeed. If they are not living, in what state are they? Are we to believe that just as there is our world and other worlds, that there is a condition which is neither life nor death? It’s a good question, and like many other questions raised by the witches’ presence in Macbeth, it is never answered. One way to sum up Banquo’s questions is to say that he is asking what they represent—​what origin and what state of being and what message. His description of them placing their fingers on their lips also draws attention to representation, in that it describes a kind of representation that is not verbal. But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Banquo’s speech is his description of how the witches represent gender. Although he feels that they “should be women,” he also feels that this cannot be the case since they have beards. Because of these beards, he cannot interpret their representation of gender conclusively. As non-​binary people, the witches are queer in the contemporary sense.16 The use of the modal “should” here is partly an idiom, but I  think it also indicates Banquo’s belief that unambiguous gender is something everyone should have. Significantly, what the

witches demonstrate (and this proves important for the rest of Macbeth) is the fact that gender is something that has to be represented, like times of day or weather or Scottishness.17 Gender, that is, is a theatrical effect like any other.18 Once Macbeth asks the witches to speak, they greet him in a noticeably formal and ritualistic way: FIRST WITCH All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Glamis. SECOND WITCH All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor. THIRD WITCH All hail Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter.

Their salutations cover, in order, Macbeth’s past, present, and future, so although they do not appear to live in time as we do, they recognize it as sequence. What is more, they give their greetings in what is essentially blank verse, conforming to the metrical standard as they do to the chronology of narrative. They also conform to human precedence, responding to Macbeth, who is of higher rank than Banquo (as well as being the eponymous character, which seems like something they might well know), while ignoring his speech. Banquo remarks on this—​“to me you speak not” (1.3.52)—​before asking them to tell his future: If you can look into the seeds of time And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak then to me. (1.3.53–​5)

The witches speak to him in paradoxes, but the basic meaning is clear: “Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none” (1.3.62).

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(1.3.43–​5)

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What is perhaps most significant is that it is Banquo who reveals a more accurate sense of who or what the witches are rather than Macbeth. Another way to put all this is to say that is perhaps in his superior perspicacity as well as in the idea that his descendants will be kings that Banquo establishes himself here as a threat to Macbeth. Up until this scene, Macbeth has presumably been an honourable and well-​respected man (at least, there is certainly no indication that this is not the case). I  would argue that in revealing the future—​in representing it, however cryptically, to Macbeth and Banquo—​the witches have also helped to bring it about: their representation is thus also instrumental; their performance is also performative. In an excellent article published over 30 years ago, Donald W. Foster argued convincingly that the play can be understood as a war against time itself and wrote that “Macbeth’s rage against time, like his impulse to murder Duncan, lived hidden until that fateful meeting with the weird sisters on the road to Forres.”19 This meeting transforms Macbeth the loyal subject into Macbeth the murderous usurper. To return to Banquo’s evocative phrase, we should perhaps think of the urges that make Macbeth into a villain as seeds of time that only grew because of the witches’ representation of a future that might have been only one possible future. Perhaps it is representation, especially in the highly marked and noticeably queer form of the witches’ speeches and appearance, that is destiny for Macbeth and in Macbeth. Having delivered their cryptic speeches, the witches disappear. The reactions of Banquo and Macbeth to this disappearance are especially interesting: BANQUO The earth has bubbles as the water has, And these are of them. Whither are they vanished?

MACBETH Into the air; and what seemed corporal melted As breath into the wind. Would they had stayed!

Whatever the witches’ substance is, it is ephemeral. This is perhaps unsurprising, but Banquo’s explanation of them strikes me as highly unusual. As is generally the case, Banquo speaks more effectively and poetically than Macbeth—​ perhaps yet another motive for the murder. The commonest type of bubbles are of course water bubbles, formed when water is disturbed and air enters. Thus, a bubble would be the union of two opposed elements. Banquo’s description suggests that the witches are produced or summoned when earth is disturbed, either by violent weather or by the violent actions of men (or indeed by both, as both these conditions apply at the beginning of Act 1). But seeing the witches as bubbles also diminishes their agency and could be taken to imply that their appearances and disappearances are involuntary, in which case it would be chance rather than fate that drives the events of the play.20 I think that Macbeth’s frustration at how cryptically the witches represent the future leads him to the stress on representation that is arguably one of his major concerns for the rest of the play. One example of this concern is his famous speech about the dagger: Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation

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(1.3.74–​7)

Proceeding from the heat-​oppressèd brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw.

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(2.1.33–​41)

While the short answer to his first question here is clearly “no,” the nature of what has come before this passage in the play makes it rather more difficult to answer definitively. There is no actual dagger floating in the air before him, but then again he is not actually a medieval Scottish nobleman and the witches did not actually vanish into thin air. We can see this question as leading us to consider how far our willing suspension of disbelief extends. When Macbeth says “let me clutch thee,” he appears to believe in his own verbal representation of a dagger, and I  think the audience might well assume they are supposed to believe it as well (after all, it would hardly be the strangest thing the audience has been asked to believe). Following this, he distinguishes between two kinds of sensory evidence, making the distinction between the dagger as something that can be felt and the dagger as something that can be seen. The latter does not, as he learns, imply the former. But what then of the witches, who were clearly visible and yet vanished, as he put it “As breath into the wind”? As he is in a world in which what we would call natural laws do not invariably apply, perhaps he takes (and perhaps we should take) a dagger that is visible but not tangible as a real dagger. And if it is “[a]‌ dagger of the mind, a false creation,” then how different it is from those other things created by the mind, most notably the play itself? In his discussion of the dagger, Andrew Sofer writes that “although it is conjured by language, it is not reducible to language. Pointed to by the dialogue, it is no mere

85  Macbeth

trope or figure of speech.”21 I  would add that the witches’ speeches are also not reducible to language. In this passage, and in the many others like it in Macbeth, Shakespeare gets us to think about how real representations may be—​both the representations of the future that the witches have given and the representations that have already provided us with both indoor and outdoor locations in medieval Scotland and with the people in them. I think that these points are precisely the ones Macbeth makes when he says “I see thee yet, in form as palpable /​ As that which now I  draw.” The contrast between the real dagger that we can see because Macbeth has drawn it from its sheath and the imaginary dagger that only he can see no longer seems to matter. For one thing, we may already have vividly pictured this dagger to ourselves, adding our own representation to those provided by Shakespeare and by the actor. For another, the dagger he draws is unlikely to be a real dagger either—​it is a prop, a representation, and probably lacks the sharp edges that make daggers useful. When Macbeth opposes the object in his hand to the one he has conjured up, his verbal representation turns a piece of metal into a dagger and thus gives a good example of metatheatrical power. For another, when Macbeth calls the “dagger of the mind” a form and adds that it is palpable, he says things that should not be true. The imaginary dagger is a purely verbal representation: it has dramatic and linguistic form but not physical form; it is not an object in the world as the prop dagger is. Finally, his use of “palpable” is distinctly odd. This adjective means “capable of being touched” and derives ultimately from a Latin word meaning to touch.22 The metaphorical meanings of the word were certainly available to Shakespeare, but this is exactly my point. The use of the word

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here should cause us to consider the difference between the real and the metaphorical, which is also the difference between the thing that is present and the thing that is (only) presented. In drawing our attention to how we assess what is performed in front of us, the ambiguities of this passage illustrate the queerness of representation. I want now to look at Lady Macbeth’s first scene of the play, as this scene also focuses on representation. She enters reading a letter from Macbeth in which he describes his meeting with the witches. That is, her reading out loud is a representation of a representation. What is more, the thing that is being represented is something that we have just seen, so we are in a position to evaluate this representation for its fidelity to the scene on the road to Forres. The emphasis in this scene is thus initially on these acts of representation rather than on the message conveyed by the letter. The most important change between 1.3 and how Macbeth represents it is that he called the witches “imperfect speakers” (1.3.65) when he was frustrated by their opaque speech, whereas in the letter he says their supernatural knowledge has been confirmed by “the perfect’st report” (i.e., the information, received after the witches leave, that he has been made Thane of Cawdor; 1.5.2). In Early Modern English, “imperfect” and “perfect” were often used in their etymological sense of “incomplete” and “complete.” These are grammatical terms as well, however:  the imperfect tense expresses action in the past while the perfect tense expresses action in the present that results from action in the past. Macbeth’s use of these words displays a simple cause and effect model of narrative, one that—​to me, at least—​shows an imperfect understanding of the witches’ strange and ultimately unknowable relation to time and recalls his transformation of “fair and foul” earlier.

        Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o’th’milk of human kindness To catch the nearest way. (1.5.12–​14)

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Significantly, however, Macbeth writes to his wife that he was hailed as Thane of Cawdor by the king’s messengers before he writes that the weird sisters had already called him by this title. Thus, in his representation he displays a queer sense of time that seems more in keeping with the witches than the sense expressed by his progression from imperfect to perfect. His hysteron proteron here recalls his earlier aside, delivered when the messengers have arrived shortly after the disappearance of the witches: “Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor! /​The greatest is behind” (1.3.101–​02). In Early Modern English usage, “behind” could mean both “yet to come” and “in the past” in addition to its spatial meanings. As is the case with Macbeth’s arrangement of facts in the letter, the ambiguity of his phrasing—​that is, the fact that we could take him to mean simultaneously “I shall be king” and “I was king”—​ suggests that he is to some extent registering the disturbance in temporal flow represented by the witches. Macbeth’s own representation of his experience could thus be said to represent two experiences at the same time. The linear flow of time is the norm by which we all function: it is normal time—​we could even call it straight time. The figure of hysteron proteron employed by Macbeth signals the presence of queer time, of a time that goes backwards as well as forwards.23 Admittedly, these chronological issues do not concern Lady Macbeth. Instead, she worries that her husband is queer in another and more contemporary sense—​that he is insufficiently manly. Addressing her absent husband directly, she says

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One of the things to note about these lines is the use of periphrasis: “the nearest way” is clearly to murder the king, but Lady Macbeth declines to say so directly. She also used periphrasis just before these lines: “Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be /​What thou art promised” (1.5.11–​12). Of course, what Macbeth has been promised is the crown of Scotland. My point here is neither that her periphrases are impossible to understand nor that they are not dramatically plausible as signs of caution or superstition, but rather that they once again focus our attention on representation. Lady Macbeth presents herself as bolder and more daring than Macbeth, but her presentation also hints at a certain lack of nerve that will become increasingly apparent as the play progresses. In response to what she sees as her husband’s insufficient manliness, Lady Macbeth expresses her wish to become manlier herself. She does this partly by converting the metaphorical milk of human kindness that she sees as too prevalent in her husband into the literal milk that she as a woman can and has produced, asking for her milk to be converted to gall (1.5.44) and in a later scene expressing her willingness to replace breastfeeding with infanticide (1.7.54–​8). Most famously, she appeals directly to the supernatural:  “Come, you spirits /​That tend on mortal thoughts. Unsex me here” (1.5.36–​7). I want to make two points about this passage.24 First, I think that the spirits she invokes are the witches about whom she has just read and this is consequently another sign of the interpenetration of the worlds of the play. What is more, I think that the witches are potential role models for her, but although she appears to realize this here, she ultimately fails to live up to their example. Second, the passage is metatheatrical. We typically understand Lady Macbeth

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as seeking to be stripped of her feminine softness and to become as bold and bloodthirsty as a man, but when we consider that Lady Macbeth was originally played by a male, the passage has additional resonances. For one thing, the words would then call attention to their status as representation, rather than reality. As well, we can then understand the appeal as meaning that the boy actor wants to lose his gender so that he can be the woman he pretends to be or that he wants to exist beyond gender, as the witches appear to do, or that he wants to lose his imitation femaleness and return to being a male: all these meanings are in play. Lady Macbeth’s celebrated invocation should perhaps be seen as one of the play’s queerest representations. One way to put this is to say Lady Macbeth (or perhaps the boy actor playing her, or both) is tired of performing femaleness and finds it frustrating. But slightly later in the play, it turns out that performing maleness is not the answer: when Lady Macbeth urges her husband to kill the king, he responds “I dare do all that may become a man. /​Who dares do more is none” (1.7.46–​7). The important point here—​to me, at any rate—​is not that the Macbeths have different ideas of gendered behaviour, but rather that both tie gender to performance, to what can or cannot be done. As the play progresses, it turns out that Lady Macbeth reverts to more traditionally feminine behaviour, ultimately becoming the familiar figure of the silent and suffering woman, while her husband becomes increasingly murderous.25 That is, each comes to represent an extreme of gendered behaviour and these extremes will turn out to be fatal both to them and to most of the people around them: indeed, it is the simple truth to say that the Macbeths’ gender representations are fatal on a national scale. In the context of the desolation of Scotland by the end of the play

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(however promising the new king’s reign might seem to be), the witches’ queer representation of a state of being that is either beyond gender or that includes both genders may well look like the wisest course of action. In their final appearance in the play, the witches, at first just with each other and then in conjunction with three other witches and the goddess Hecate, produce three prophecies for Macbeth. When he first enters the scene, however, they have been making a potion composed of grim ingredients and described at length, chiefly in their usual rhyme and metre. Witches make potions for various reasons, but what interests me about this potion is that we never learn what it is for. Its purpose might be to summon Macbeth or to raise the spirits who will prophesy to him, but then again it might not: its purpose might be to torment the hapless sailor at Aleppo or another purpose altogether. As before, we have the sense that the witches are not entirely in the play. Their role in the plot of Macbeth is crucial, but their attention to what we think of as the play’s main plot comes and goes even when they are on stage. Although its use of the supernatural is more elaborate, this scene is markedly similar in structure to 1.3: we see first the witches, busy about their own concerns, then Macbeth and their delivery of prophecies to him, and then they vanish leaving Macbeth on stage to consider what he has learnt.26 I think that this similarity of structure should lead us to conclude that the potion here is like the discussion about the sailor and his wife in the earlier scene: it represents the portion of the witches’ lives that apparently has nothing to do with the events of the play. Macbeth is the main character of the play that bears his name and he obviously looms large in the Scotland in which the play takes place, but for the witches he is perhaps only a minor character in the story of their own

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lives, the majority of which is not represented. Perhaps it cannot be represented. Before I discuss the prophecies themselves, I want to note the emphasis on representation in this scene. First, Macbeth gives a speech whose form is in iambic pentameter but whose content, with its enumeration of disasters, recalls the witches’ own speeches and thus suggests once more the extent to which being with the witches has altered his nature (4.1.49–​60). Then, when he commands them to answer what he will ask, the first witch responds, “Say, if thoud’st rather hear it from our mouths /​Or from our masters’ ” (4.1.61–​ 2). He chooses the latter option, but I  think what is really noteworthy is that there is an option at all. Why should it matter? Why, at this late point in the play and after we are more or less accustomed to seeing the witches encountering Macbeth, are more supernatural beings introduced? There are many possible answers to these questions; what I think is important is that a further level of mediation is introduced. As well, the three speakers who appear are different from the witches both in their verbal representation and in how they are represented: instead of the witches, who seem to conform to popular stereotypes about what witches look like, we have an armed head, a bloody child, and a crowned child holding a tree. There turns out to be an obvious relation between how these apparitions look and what they say, which means that visual and verbal representations are linked in a way that has not really been the case in Macbeth before. Finally, although Macbeth says “answer me” twice (4.1.50 and 4.1.59), he never states his question. When he attempts to do so, the first witch tells him not to speak, an injunction that is repeated in various forms. Macbeth’s question, whatever it may be, is something that cannot be represented.

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The three warnings are delivered in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter:  the first consists of one couplet; the second consists of one couplet and a third line of four syllables; and the third consists of two couplets and a fifth line of five syllables. In their form, both the similarities and the differences of these prophecies seem carefully planned as a form of gradation—​a further difference is that this kind of rhyming couplet is one that the witches themselves have not employed before. It is in their content that these prophecies are most clearly distinguished, however. The first and second are essentially the same. The former tells Macbeth to “beware Macduff” (4.1.70) while the latter informs him that “none of woman born /​Shall harm Macbeth” (4.1.78–​ 9). To Macbeth and to us these seem different (and the second prophecy seems impossible to understand) until Macduff tells Macbeth in the play’s penultimate scene that he was “from his mother’s womb /​Untimely ripped” (5.10.16–​17). To some extent, this is a quibble: Macduff’s grisly birth clearly does not mean that he wasn’t born of woman. To say that it does is a kind of representation that is simultaneously true and false. As well, and crucially, in referring to the past in a phrase that we and Macbeth will not understand until the future, the second apparition draws attention to the queer time of the supernatural creatures of the play. In form, in content, and in their differences from the witches—​ with whom we are quite familiar by this point—​the three apparitions provide a number of examples of queer representation. The first apparition speaks of the present (as Macduff is already a character in the play) and the future, while the second speaks of the future and, as we learn at the end of the play, of the past, but the third speaks only of the future:

Macbeth shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill Shall come against him.

This is clearly an impossibility, but as was the case with the second prophecy, it comes true because of a quibble: under Malcolm’s orders (5.4.4–​7), the soldiers each cut a bough of a tree and carry it before them to disguise their numbers. The wood does not come to Dunsinane, but parts of it do. Malcolm’s stratagem highlights representation in more than one way. For one thing, we could say that the third prophecy does indeed come true, but as a metaphor rather than a fact: in this sense, Macbeth is defeated by a synecdoche, a figure of speech that has real-​life consequences. As well, representing a forest by means of a few boughs is the only sort of representation of a forest available to a stage production and the ruse thus affords us a further example of metatheatre. The first apparition issues a clear warning, but both the second and, especially, the third speak in ways that should cause us to think about how both language and staging can represent and misrepresent reality. In my discussion of Macbeth, I have looked at how the queer representation in the play is not only a mode or style used by some of the characters at certain points, as was the case in my discussions of Cymbeline and King John, but could almost be said to amount to a parallel play altogether. In some ways, Shakespeare focuses on representation in Macbeth to a greater extent than he does in any other play. In what remains of this chapter, I consider Malcolm’s speech, the final words in the play. The rightful king of Scotland, secure in the throne with the death of the usurper Macbeth, is clearly the right person

93  Macbeth

(4.1.90–​2)

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to give this speech, but as we shall see, his representation of the state of affairs at the beginning of his reign continues to be a queer version of events—​just as I  argued the Bastard’s was at the conclusion of King John. This queerness is set up by Malcolm’s curious representation of himself in his conversation with Macduff in Act 4, Scene 3, as a villain. He goes so far as to state that his reign will be worse than Macbeth’s (4.3.45–​ 50). Before long, Malcolm renounces these characterizations of himself and says that he was lying when he presented himself as wicked—​“My first false speaking /​Was this upon myself” (4.3.131–​2)—​but naturally his presentation of himself as a liar might well qualify everything he says afterwards. In my terms, we cannot be sure whether to characterize his description of himself in this scene as queer representation or whether that representation should be applied to his final speech. Or indeed both. For the most part, Malcolm’s final speech is exactly what anyone would expect it to be:  references to the evil of the Macbeths balanced with promises (notably vague ones, however) to reward loyalty. But there are a couple of odd elements. For one, he says that the thanes of his kingdom will “Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland /​In such an honour named” (5.11.29–​30).27 Instead of offering money or lands—​beyond a non-​specific promise to “make us even with” his loyal supporters (5.11.28)—​Malcolm focuses on naming or, in other words, on how his nobles are henceforth to be represented. The oddest elements come in the conclusion. The speech ends in not one but two rhyming couplets. First, he promises that “by the grace of grace” (5.7.38)—​ itself a rather odd phrase—​ he will do everything “[i]‌ n measure, time, and place” (5.7.39). Measure here most obviously means proportion, but the word also refers to metre

95  Macbeth

and consequently draws attention to the rhyming couplet in which it occurs and which is, oddly, not the final two lines of the play. What is more, “measure, time, and place” can stand as an accurate representation of the major concerns of Macbeth, or at least of that part of it that is concerned with the witches: the phrase alludes to the issues raised by the form and the content and the environment of the witches. Perhaps Malcolm, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in their different ways, is affected by the witches. The final couplet is perhaps even stranger, both in form, insofar as it is the second rhyming couplet in a row and thus inherently superfluous, and in content:  “So thanks to all at once, and to each one, /​Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone” (5.11.40–​1). The first thing to remark is how unsatisfying the first line of the couplet is. Malcolm’s attempt to thank everyone as a group while still showing that he appreciates their individual efforts only serves to stress the vagueness of his words. What particularly stands out for me is the rhyme of “one /​Scone.” In both standard English, in which the town where Scottish kings were crowned rhymes either with “gone” or with “bone,” and standard Scots, in which it rhymes with “moon,” this is a failed rhyme. In its content, Malcolm’s final couplet focuses on the elaborate representation of kingship provided by a coronation (an example of representation also highlighted by the second coronation in King John); in its form it recalls the double couplets at the end of 1.2, when Malcolm’s father’s attempt to end the scene with a couplet was foiled by Ross, prompting Duncan to make a second (metrically defective) couplet. The rhyme even recalls the earlier scene: “one /​Scone” in 5.11 and “done /​won” in 1.2. Malcolm’s attempt to provide a fitting conclusion to the play bogs down in a welter of representations. In the world

in which Macbeth takes place, it seems that representation will always be queered.

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NOTES 1 Brooke, “Introduction,” 1. For Brooke’s account of illusion and realism in the play, see 1–​6. For a similar analysis that focuses on how the play establishes locations, see Johnson, “Shakespeare, Architecture, and the Chorographic Imagination,” especially 122–​6. 2 Eagleton, William Shakespeare, 1–​2. Eagleton discusses 17 plays in just over 100 pages. For a discussion that sees the witches as corrupting the world of the play, see Manninen, “ ‘The Charm’s Wound Up.’ ” 3 Ibid., 2. 4 A good discussion of ideas about both witches and Scotland in the contemporary context of Macbeth is Floyd-​Wilson, “English Epicures and Scottish Witches.” 5 The best discussion of Shakespeare’s metre for the witches is Robert Stagg’s recent “Shakespeare’s Bewitching Line.” 6 For an excellent general discussion of the language of Macbeth, see McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style,  43–​52. 7 Merleau-​Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 101, 127. 8 For an excellent discussion of time in the play that is very different from mine but that also takes the witches as its starting point, see Lewis, “Polychronic Macbeth.” 9 Markidou, “William Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a Spatial Palimpsest,”  53–​4. 10 Varnado, “Queer Nature,” 178. 11 For an interesting discussion of the play’s queer time, see Zoch, “Macduff’s Son and the Queer Temporality of Macbeth.” 12 In her recent book, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld argues that “[t]‌he inappropriate or the indecorous … describe figures of speech … that disrupt the very kosmic hierarchy that they are meant simply to signify by assigning an original set of values to the things of this world” (Indecorous Thinking, 78). Her statement usefully connects the witches’ unorthodox speech and unorthodox values, although I  tend not to think that figures of speech are ever meant to signify simply. 13 Downs-​Gamble, “To th’Crack of Doom,” 158. 14 Varnado, “Queer Nature,” 181.

97  Macbeth

15 Productions of Macbeth, in any medium, do not as a rule represent the witches as bearded women or indeed as anything other than clearly female, if uncanny. The parts would of course originally have been played by actors, but even when actresses came in after the Restoration, the witches were usually played by actors and for comic effect. In the nineteenth century, however, it became customary for actresses to play the witches, a practice that continues. For a fascinating discussion of the change from actors to actresses, see Munro, “Women Reading Witches, 1800–​1850.” 16 It could be argued that in calling themselves “sisters” (they never refer to themselves as witches), they represent themselves as female, but I think that the play as a whole works to undermine our belief in stable meanings. In her valuable discussion of femaleness as one of the play’s major concerns, Janet Adelman considers the witches as entirely female; see “Born of Woman.” A fine recent discussion of the witches, gender, and nature is Lutz, “Strange Intelligence.” 17 I’ll go on to discuss Lady Macbeth and gender, but of course the nature of masculinity is also raised several times with regard to both Macbeth and Macduff. This latter issue is outside the scope of this chapter. 18 In her discussion of Macbeth, Marjorie Garber makes a similar point and connects the performance of gender in the play to the performance of darkness. See Shakespeare After All, 713. 19 Foster, “Macbeth’s War on Time,” 325. 20 It is perhaps for this reason that when the witches reappear in the play they are clearly subservient to Hecate. Apart from the witches’ prophecies to Macbeth, I won’t discuss these appearances in detail (nor will I discuss the question of the authorship of these scenes). For good discussions of these scenes, see Varnado, “Queer Nature,” 190–​3 and Lin, Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance, 126–​30. For a discussion of the scenes and a discussion of authorship, see Daileader, “Weird Brothers.” 21 Sofer, “Spectral Readings,” 335. See also Fox, “ ‘Like a Poor Player’ ” for a discussion of metatheatre in Macbeth. 22 See Oxford English Dictionary, “Palp,” v. 1. 23 A great deal has been written on queer time. I recommend especially Freeman, Time Binds and Love, Feeling Backward. 24 There have been many very good critical analyses of this speech. I  would especially recommend Paster, “Bodies without Borders in

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Lear and Macbeth,” and Townshend, “Unsexing Macbeth, 1623–​1800.” Townshend’s article includes a valuable account of the medical background to her speech. 25 For a discussion of Lady Macbeth’s ultimate silence, see Fox, “ ‘Like a Poor Player,” especially 221. 26 The three prophecies are followed by the apparition of eight kings and the dead Banquo, a show that mixes the past and the future since these kings are the crowned descendants of Banquo foretold by the witches in 1.3. I won’t discuss this apparition other than to say its main purpose is to provoke Macbeth further. 27 The title of thane was itself introduced in Scotland long after the events of the play took place, so the play’s terminology throughout is anachronistic, but neither the historical status of Malcolm’s speech nor its relevance to the politics of Shakespeare’s own times affects my argument.

The Rape of Lucrece

I argued in the last chapter that in beginning Macbeth with the witches and their idiosyncratic verse, Shakespeare gives us something to set against the normal mixture of blank verse and prose that follows in most of the play and thus provides a way to see all the play’s representational strategies as to some extent queer. He does something similar in Lucrece, as he begins the poem with the “Argument,” a relatively short prose synopsis of the story. As a result, from the first line of the poem our attention is focused on the difference of the poem, on the fact that it is in verse, on its length (especially relative to the terseness of the Argument), and on its unusually elaborate rhetoric and metaphors. I  think that we would notice Lucrece’s poetic oddness anyway, but the Argument gives us a context in which the poem seems even odder (or queerer, as I  would say). In his account of Shakespeare’s linguistic play, David Willbern writes that Lucrece is “about the process of writing—​or of imaginatively conceiving a traumatic act and inscribing that conception on the page.”1 In my discussion of the poem, my primary interest will be in its descriptive writing, in how Shakespeare and his characters represent the people, objects, and events they encounter.2 While the Argument gives us the bare facts of the case, including the traumatic act, what follows in the poem itself is to a considerable extent a representation of the process of writing.

99  The Rape of Lucrece

Four

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The Argument turns out to be primarily about the political implications of the story and it begins and ends with Tarquin.3 The story of Lucrece is important to this text, but mainly because her rape is the catalyst for the political change that is the Argument’s main subject. In fact, after the announcement of Lucrece’s suicide the Argument concludes with a long (76 words) sentence focusing on Tarquin and Brutus; Lucrece appears in this sentence only as a corpse: she is an object in the Argument, rather than its subject. Although the poem covers the same narrative, the reader who returns to the Argument after reading the poem itself will be struck by how little of the poem is represented in the prose text. The odd relationship between these texts is certainly significant as an illustration of the fate of women in patriarchal societies and in the narratives that present them, but it should also have an important effect on our own reading practice. Rather than simply seeing the Argument as in some sense defective or incomplete, we should consider other possible relationships between these texts. For instance, the Argument could be like the simple black and white sketch that serves as the basis of a complex and highly colourful painting. We might also consider that the relationship between these texts is the relationship between a work of art and the description of that work of art. In other words, the Argument can be considered as a form of ecphrasis, and ecphrasis will turn out to be an important part of the poem as a whole. We could even reverse the relationship and see the poem as the monstrously excessive description of the brief prose narrative, a relationship that would make the poem even queerer. Strictly speaking, the only ecphrasis in Lucrece is her encounter with the depiction of the story of Troy, but I think that the poem’s frequent descriptive passages should also be considered ecphrases, even if most of

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them are not descriptions of works of art. And in any case, in its blatantly elaborate descriptions—​descriptions that exceed their function and become distracting—​L ucrece is a poem that constantly blurs the line between nature and art. Again and again in the poem Shakespeare presents us with attempts to describe something—​a painting, a face, an action—​and thus focuses our attention on representation, much of which is queer not only in the sense that I have been using throughout this book but also in the sense of being odd. The Argument’s relationship to the poem is distinctly odd, and even queer, but it is also paradigmatic, as Lucrece is a text that is centrally and indeed obsessively concerned with the process of description. One of Shakespeare’s contemporaries who admired the poem but drew attention to what he saw as excessive was William Scott, one of the very first people to write on Shakespeare. In his Model of Poesy (written in 1599 but only rediscovered and printed a few years ago), Scott singles out one line of the poem for criticism:  “ ‘The endless date of never-​ending woe’—​a very idle, stuffed verse in that very well-​penned poem of Lucrece her rape.”4 Scott’s comment is interesting to me partly because in his repetition of “very” and in his use of both “idle” and “stuffed,” he demonstrates what I observed in Salisbury’s speech in King John about the second coronation: the representation of queer representation is itself a queer representation. Interestingly, Scott added the word “stuffed” when he revised his manuscript, prompted, I  think, by the startlingly sexual use of this verb form of this adjective in the poem itself.5 Both Lucrece and King John (and, as we shall see, Venus and Adonis as well) demonstrate Shakespeare’s interest in verbal excess in this early phase of his career. Scott’s comment usefully identifies this excess. His example concerns an adjective that he considers redundant

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(“never-​ending” following “endless” so closely), but we can locate this excess not just in vocabulary, but also in the poem’s descriptive language and its use of figures of speech of all kinds. This “very well-​penned poem” on a tragic subject is also a highly ornamented surface.6 In this context, another Elizabethan view on ornament is pertinent. In his Art of English Poesy, which was first published in 1589, only five years before Lucrece, George Puttenham begins the third book of his treatise by talking about ornamentation. He describes it as the fashioning of our author’s language and style to such purpose as it may delight and allure as well the mind as the ear of the hearers with a certain novelty and strange manner of conveyance, disguising it no little from the ordinary and accustomed.7

In Lucrece as in Macbeth, Shakespeare gives us both the “ordinary and accustomed” and “the novelty and strange manner” early on and thus begins the texts by drawing attention to representation. The contrast is sharper in the poem, however, as in Macbeth the norm is already the highly artificial blank verse of the drama, the witches are to some extent integrated into the play, and the play ends with a prolonged return to the standard dramatic language of the day. In Lucrece, by contrast, the norm is the formal but straightforward prose of the Argument and the division between the prose and the poetry is absolute. I  believe that we should think of the poem as a “strange manner of conveyance,” or what I  would call a queer representation. For this reason, I’ll look chiefly at the representations within the poem and at how the characters deal with them.

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Throughout Lucrece, but especially at the beginning, Shakespeare emphasizes not only description but also how those descriptions are interpreted. For instance, in the second stanza he surmises that Collatinus’ description of his wife as chaste is what first gave Tarquin the idea of raping her: “Haply that name of chaste unhapp’ly set /​This bateless edge on his keen appetite” (8–​9).8 This emphasis on speech is original to Shakespeare, as Nancy Vickers has remarked: “The result … of this rewriting is a heightened insistence on the power of description.”9 And Shakespeare further stresses the power of verbal representation here, as Joel Fineman has noted:  “The word play here is obvious, even, as is typical of “The Rape of Lucrece,” ostentatious.”10 I  think that the word play is there both for its own sake, since Shakespeare is concerned throughout the poem to create a usually dense verbal texture, and to emphasize the power of representation. But what is perhaps most striking is that shortly after these lines Shakespeare says, “Beauty itself doth of itself persuade /​The eyes of men without an orator” (29–​30). These lines could be taken to suggest that Collatinus’ description only hastened a rape that would have happened anyway as soon as Tarquin saw Lucrece. As well, in hinting that an orator is unnecessary, Shakespeare gestures towards the possibility that a poet—​another kind of person who uses formally ordered speech—​may not be necessary either. We might also take these lines as pointing to the difference between poetry, which tells, and drama, which shows, a difference of which Shakespeare is keenly, if implicitly, aware in both his narrative poems. To a certain extent, I think that what Shakespeare is doing in this early part of the poem is attempting to deal with his own complicity in making this story public once again. We

could relate this to his use in the same stanza of the word “publisher”:       why is Collatine the publisher Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown From thievish ears?

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(33–​5)

At this time, both the verb “to publish” and the noun “publisher” could refer simply to making public by any means and more specifically to producing a book; Shakespeare uses both senses here in this, his second publication.11 Shakespeare publishes Lucrece’s story and at the end of the poem she does too, but the final use of the word in the poem comes when the men who have witnessed her suicide decide “To show her bleeding body thorough Rome, /​And so to publish Tarquin’s foul offence” (1851–​2).12 At the end of the poem, Lucrece has become something to be used—​by the Romans to overthrow the king and by Shakespeare to further his poetic career. My point is not that Shakespeare is like the Romans and even less that he is like Tarquin, but I take this as a sign that he wants us to think about the cost of representation. The metaphorical equivalence between bodies and texts is emphasized in the remarkable lines in which Shakespeare describes Lucrece’s inability to understand Tarquin’s bad intentions by looking at him: But she that never coped with stranger eyes, Could pick no meaning from their parling looks, Nor read the subtle shining secrecies Writ in the glossy margins of such books. (99–​102)

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Tarquin’s eyes are compared to books and these books speak to Lucrece—​they are “parling”—​but this speech is incomprehensible to her. The conspicuous mixed metaphor here, in which Shakespeare appears to anticipate the audiobook, is underlined by the oxymoron of secrecies that are simultaneously subtle and shining. These contradictory figures of speech, crammed together in only four lines as they are, provide a good example of queer representation. But what is at stake here is not only representation but also the failure to understand representation, as we learn when Shakespeare concludes the stanza by writing “Nor could she moralize his wanton sight /​More than his eyes were opened to the light” (104–​05). The light here is literal light rather than the metaphorical light of understanding, which Lucrece lacks In contrast to Tarquin and to the poem itself; for Lucrece at this point things only represent themselves and metaphor is not something she can apprehend. As Danielle Clarke has pointed out, this emphasis is peculiar to Shakespeare’s version of the story:  “One innovation of Shakespeare’s is to focus on the dynamics of the relationship between Lucrece and Tarquin, looking at self and other, and the scopic economy of the gaze that constructs Lucrece as a ‘virtuous monument.’ ”13 It would be no exaggeration to say that this scopic economy predominates in much of the poem, with the result that description becomes the poem’s characteristic mode. An especially good example is provided by Tarquin’s passage in the middle of the night through the dark house to Lucrece’s bed. When he gets out of his own bed he needs a light so “His falchion on a flint he softly smiteth, /​That from the cold stone sparks of fire do fly” (176–​7). Jeffrey Paxton Hehmeyer has suggested that we should see this passage as an impresa and Tarquin himself certainly sees

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it as an image that requires an interpretive caption: “As from this cold flint I enforced this fire, /​So Lucrece must I force to my desire” (181–​2).14 While Lucrece, as we saw, was unable to interpret Tarquin’s eyes, he proves adept at interpreting what he sees. He also proves himself adept at verbal manipulation, as we see when he uses the word “enforced” to describe striking a spark from flint—​a usage that could almost be called catachrestic—​in order to speak in the next line of forcing Lucrece. The difference between Tarquin and Lucrece is most importantly the difference between vice and virtue, but that difference is presented in this part of the poem as the difference between sophistication and inexperience with regard to visual and verbal representations. Tarquin’s interpretation here is of course wrong. As he moves through the house to Lucrece’s chamber, there are two more examples of his mistakes in interpretation. First we are told that The wind wars with his torch to make him stay, And blows the smoke of it into his face, Extinguishing his conduct in this case. (311–​13)

and then that when he picks up Lucrece’s glove the needle in it             his finger pricks, As who should say, ‘This glove to wanton tricks Is not inured.’ (319–​21)

It is surely plain to Shakespeare and to us that these should be taken as signs that he should abandon the attempt to rape

Yea, though I die, the scandal will survive And be an eyesore in my golden coat. Some loathsome dash the herald will contrive To cipher me how fondly I did dote. (204–​07)

Tarquin is worried about his future representation in a coat of arms. To write of heraldry in ancient Rome is of course anachronistic, but the anachronism is useful to Shakespeare because it allows him to focus attention on visual rather than verbal representation. In effect, Tarquin anticipates a kind of ecphrasis in which his shield will be interpreted as pointing to his crime. Still, he ultimately rejects the power of visual representation when he says “Who fears a sentence or an old man’s saw, /​Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe”

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Lucrece (and our sense of this is underlined because the image of the needle piercing the finger is clearly an image of rape), but they have no effect on Tarquin:  “But all these poor forbiddings could not stay him. /​He in the worst sense consters their denial” (323–​ 4).15 In Lucrece and Tarquin, Shakespeare illustrates different bad readings of representation: the former takes everything at face value while the latter interprets them to support a decision he has already taken. Before Tarquin decides to leave his chamber, he has a series of soliloquies in which he weighs the cost of what he plans—​ the cost to himself, that is, not the cost to Lucrece. He also considers the cost to his reputation after his death. Here, he anticipates Lucrece’s own more elaborate consideration of what future generations will say of her, which I shall discuss below. His concern in this passage is partly expressed as a question of representation:

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(244–​5).16 As we shall see, however, he only rejects this power insofar as it applies to himself. The final spur that gets Tarquin, after all his vacillations, to go to Lucrece’s chamber comes from his own imagination:  “Within his thought her heavenly image sits, /​And in the selfsame seat sits Collatine” (288–​9). The presence of Collatinus in the representation Tarquin has made for himself is already odd and the alliteration, unusually heavy for Shakespeare and emphasized by the repetition of “sits,” might help to prepare us for the rest of this stanza, which is perhaps the most difficult in what is never a particularly easy poem: That eye which looks on her confounds his wits, That eye which him beholds, as more divine, Unto a view so false will not incline, But with a pure appeal seeks to the heart—​ Which, once corrupted, takes the worser part. (290–​4)

These lines are an especially good example of the “scopic economy” Clarke mentions, but here the gazing is imaginary. Crucially, however, it is not quite mutual: “That eye which him beholds” actually refuses to behold him and instead makes an appeal to his heart. As well, it is not even clear whether the eye in question belongs to the imagined Lucrece or the imagined Collatinus. In other words, this stanza presents us with a very difficult representation of a representation. I think it is one of the queerest representations in a poem full of queer representations. The result of the appeal to the heart is doomed. In fact, Tarquin’s representation of this appeal is what ultimately makes him go to Lucrece’s chamber:

And therein heartens up his servile powers Who, flattered by their leader’s jocund show, Stuff up his lust as minutes fill up hours.

The confusing representation has now become a “jocund show” and its effect is represented by the coarse phrase “Stuff up his lust,” a phrase whose directness is emphasized by the fact that it is a dispondee.17 Alison A.  Chapman notes that “Shakespeare associates Tarquin’s progress toward Lucrece’s bedroom with the inexorable and impersonal advance of the hands of a clock.”18 In part, this can be seen as exculpatory insofar as it presents what happens as inevitable and natural like the progress of time, rather than as the result of a bad man’s deliberate bad actions. Thus, these lines are a representation of the male cycle of tumescence and detumescence and also of Tarquin’s desire to act on his lust despite knowing that he will be committing a crime; both these things are represented as inevitable. They are certainly part of the images of clocks and their hands that Chapman notes, but with the crucial difference that by eliminating the clock itself—​as a clock is an abstract human representation of the passage of time and therefore artificial—​the image seeks to naturalize Tarquin’s plans. My discussion of Tarquin’s deliberations in his chamber and of his progress through the villa to Lucrece’s chamber has dealt with a relatively small portion of this part of the poem, but certainly enough to show how elaborate and excessive the rhetoric is. In part, of course, as Shakespeare is telling a story whose basic outline is so well known (and which is retold in the prose argument at the beginning of the poem), he has to do something to compensate for the lack

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(295–​7)

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of suspense. Or rather, in place of the narrative suspense that readers experience when reading a story that is unknown to them, Shakespeare gives us a representational suspense:  we read on in order to find out what metaphors and figures he will use to achieve the requisite copia for his poem. We could even say that one of the main things the poem has represented is Shakespeare’s composition of the poem, which would then make the representation a meta-​representation. That is, perhaps the poem is not primarily about Lucrece or Tarquin or the birth of the Roman republic but rather about representation, about how a narrative that is relatively simple—​as it is not only in the prose argument but also in Livy and Ovid, the Latin sources of the story—​can become a full-​length narrative poem. Rather than it being the case that representation assists a narrative to become more vivid and memorable, here narrative exists primarily to enable representation. The poem’s lavish deployment of aesthetic strategies is at its height in the passage in which Shakespeare describes Lucrece in bed, and since we are in effect seeing her through Tarquin’s eyes we might well feel somewhat complicit in this picture that is produced for our reading pleasure. The elaborate description and stretches over several stanzas; I’ll only comment on the one that gives us our first look at the sleeping Lucrece: Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under, Coz’ning the pillow of a lawful kiss, Who therefore angry seems to part in sunder, Swelling on either side to want his bliss. (386–​9)

The representation is clearly excessive and I would argue that it is only different from the earlier descriptions of Tarquin’s

Between whose hills her head entombèd is, Where like a virtuous monument she lies To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes. (390–​2)

The pillow has changed from being a frustrated lover to being hills that are also a tomb. To me, the picture also suggests that Lucrece is a text and that the pillow is the binding of that text. In any case, I think while the first four lines of the stanza represent the rape, the last three represent the poem’s conclusion. In these lines the dead Lucrece has become the exemplar of virtue that she is in the many texts and paintings that depict her—​and Shakespeare’s poem is clearly no exception. But a discordant note is sounded by the statement that Lucrece as monument will be “admired of lewd unhallowed eyes.” The line points to the paradox inherent in retelling the story: this story about a virtuous woman is inescapably also a story about where illicit gazing at a beautiful woman may

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deliberations in degree, rather than in kind. The conceit of a pillow seeking to give Lucrece a kiss can be seen as a partial representation of the rape. In the anger of the pillow and in its phallic swelling Shakespeare presents a view of rape that is sadly still common, one in which male lust denied inescapably becomes male sexual violence. And the fact that the kiss is described as “lawful” could be seen to put Lucrece in the wrong, especially given that until quite recently it was held that a man could not be legally charged with raping his own wife. The rest of the stanza, in which Shakespeare changes the focus of his description from the pillow to Lucrece herself, also repays attention:

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lead and it is impossible to prevent immoral readers from finding rape sexually exciting. The power of representation means that Shakespeare’s desire to make a virtuous monument might also result in his making an incitement to sexual violence. What is more, it is entirely possible that the “lewd unhallowed eyes” are our own. Once Lucrece wakes up, we might expect that the rape will follow immediately, but in fact Shakespeare introduces a further delay, as Tarquin begins with words rather than deeds: ‘Lucrece,’ quoth he, ‘this night I must enjoy thee. If thou deny, then force must work my way, For in thy bed I purpose to destroy thee.’ (512–​14)

The feminine rhyme of “enjoy thee” and “destroy thee” is very effective:  in its linking of “enjoy” and “destroy,” the rhyme arguably demonstrates the falsity of Tarquin’s initial statement so that he is undone by the poetic representation itself. Shakespeare gets in a second feminine rhyme in the rest of the stanza: That done, some worthless slave of thine I’ll slay, To kill thine honour with thy life’s decay; And in thy dead arms do I mean to place him, Swearing I slew him, seeing thee embrace him. (515–​18)

Tarquin’s plan here is to create a false representation that will make her appear guilty and him appear innocent. It is typical of this poem that even here at the point of the rape that is the central fact in the text the emphasis is on representation.

Tarquin continues to talk about representation in the next stanza, saying that after her death her husband and children will be scorned: And thou, the author of their obloquy, Shalt have thy trespass cited up in rhymes, And sung by children in succeeding times.

These lines parallel those I  discussed above (204–​07), in which Tarquin imagines his coat of arms defaced by a mark symbolizing infamy. That the disgraceful memory is conveyed through words here rather than through images seems to me to suggest a further parallel, one between the hypothetical rhymes sung by hypothetical children and Shakespeare’s own rhymes. That is, we can see Shakespeare as tacitly acknowledging his complicity. Although his own representation of the story is clearly sympathetic to Lucrece and although he clearly condemns Tarquin, Shakespeare is still the one who has come up with the rhymes that transmit the story of her “trespass.” The use of “cited” here is significant as well:  Shakespeare means simply to tell or narrate, but I think he also intends to suggest the sense of “to cite” that means to imply or indicate a legal precedent.19 Reading the verb in this way simultaneously increases the threat in Tarquin’s speech and the extent to which Shakespeare is complicit. After this stanza we learn that Tarquin is in fact offering Lucrece a choice. What he has described up to this point is what will happen if she refuses him:  “But if thou yield, I rest thy secret friend. /​The fault unknown is as a thought unacted” (526–​7). The first point I want to make is that in both alternatives the important thing for Tarquin is that he

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(523–​5)

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will be able to represent himself as innocent: this is the real representation in his eyes and the others are merely means to an end. The second—​and related—​point I  want to make is how odd his formulation here is, or rather how odd it becomes in the second half of line 527. Instead of saying something like “an unknown fault is the same as a fault that hasn’t been committed,” which is what we would expect, he emphasises a thought that isn’t acted upon. The thought in question can only be his own, so his choice of words here serves to underscore how he is really only concerned for how he will be represented. What really happens to Lucrece—​what is really about to happen to Lucrece in the poem and what we know to have happened to her—​cannot be represented: her choice is to be represented either as a woman who has disgraced herself by having sex with one of her slaves or as the virtuous Roman matron that she is, and as we see, Lucrece feels that being raped is something that should disqualify her from being a virtuous Roman matron. Interestingly, the fact that what happens to Lucrece cannot be represented is echoed in the poem itself, as Shakespeare never describes the rape, ultimately resorting instead to periphrasis: “But she hath lost a dearer thing than life, /​And he hath won what he would lose again” (687–​8). Representation itself fails at the moment of the rape. The act that creates the story that exists in so many forms is something that Shakespeare cannot or will not represent. We can see this failure of representation as the poetic equivalent of what Jonathan Walker has recently discussed in his book on the importance of the offstage realm to Renaissance drama: “My argument is that … premodern theorists bestow the stage with representational power only by producing offstage spaces that can contain and neutralize essential but problematic material

For they their guilt with weeping will unfold, And grave (like water that doth eat in steel) Upon my cheeks, what helpless shame I feel. (754–​6)

Lucrece’s arresting image is also a description of the process of etching, and I would argue that it suggests not only that her cheeks will illustrate what she sees as her shame, but also that we should consider this etching as a book illustration. Her own face would thus become a visual representation of a textual account of her rape—​for instance, an account like the poem by Shakespeare that we are reading.

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in the drama.”20 That is, in refusing to represent the rape that is the action that provides the basis for the story in the first place—​it is certainly both essential and problematic—​ Shakespeare creates a literally obscene place outside the poem that authorizes the representational power he exerts so lavishly and queerly. Denied the representation of the rape itself, readers must instead focus their attention on Shakespeare’s noticeably excessive representation of other things. When Tarquin leaves, we see the change in Lucrece primarily in her own focus on representation. Whereas before she had accepted things at (literally) face value, she now considers the difference between appearance and reality.21 As Lynn Enterline notes in her superb discussion of the poem, “the ravished Lucrece is retrospectively aware of the dangerous errancies of language that once eluded her.”22 In fact, she begins her anguished reflections after Tarquin has left by considering herself as part of a book. Wishing for an eternal night that will hide her, she comments that her eyes are unused to deceit and will declare her shame to all who see her:

Lucrece also focuses on her own representation when she considers how the story of what has happened will continue to be told. Her consideration can be seen as an expansion of line 523–​5, which I discussed above, in which Tarquin threatens her with posthumous infamy. First, Lucrece imagines that her face will tell her story: Yea, the illiterate (that know not how 116 Shakespeare and Queer Representation

To cipher what is writ in learnèd books) Will quote my loathsome trespass in my looks. (810–​12)

Interestingly, she begins by thinking beyond verbal representation, or more precisely by thinking about verbal and visual representation together. While apparently her story will be found in books, her face—​presumably as an etching accompanying the text—​will still convey her story to people who cannot read. Their knowledge of the rape will then become verbal (they will “quote” it) and will thus be transmitted orally as well. This is another version of the publication that has already been mentioned and that will be mentioned again at the ending of the poem. Lucrece foresees only too accurately the endless dissemination of her story and the proliferation of versions of it. In fact, Lucrece envisions (and dreads) three kinds of verbal representation of her story with three very different audiences. Here are the first two: The nurse to still her child will tell my story, And fright her crying babe with Tarquin’s name. The orator to deck his oratory Will couple my reproach to Tarquin’s shame.23 (813–​16)

Feast-​finding minstrels tuning my defame Will tie the hearers to attend each line, How Tarquin wrongèd me, I Collatine. (817–​19)

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In her first example, Lucrece imagines that her story will be one of the first things children will hear; her rape by Tarquin will be something that they will know from their earliest childhood. In the second, she imagines that Tarquin will be shamed. To some extent, this also suggests that she will be vindicated, but she makes it clear that the price of that is the public revelation of her rape. The reference to oration should lead us to consider that Shakespeare’s poem might qualify as a specimen of this kind of oratory. The Argument has already made it clear that the price of Tarquin’s overthrow is the publication of Lucrece’s rape, and the poem’s conclusion ends on precisely this point. In this example of her imagining her future representation, then, Lucrece represents the poem by Shakespeare which we are reading. One thing that should be clear from Lucrece’s representation of the poem in which she is a character might be that she does not think highly of these putative rhetorical tellings of her story. The use of the verb “to deck” is rather contemptuous, implying that her story is only a minor part of the case against Tarquin—​ a mere ornament. As well, the contemptuous implications of the verb are underlined by the polyptoton of “orator” and “oratory” and by the very close rhyme of “Tarquin’s name” and “Tarquin’s shame” and further underlined by the fact that the other rhymes in this quatrain are also feminine rhymes. As Lucrece speaks slightingly of oratory, she emphasizes her feelings by a pronounced use of poetic devices: she speaks in an oratorical manner. Her contempt is further emphasized by the lines that conclude the stanza:

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While oratory is at least potentially serious, here her story has become merely something to amuse people while they eat. The memorable phrase “tuning my defame” is, I think, a particularly savage indictment of precisely what Shakespeare has done in writing this poem. The conspicuous chiasmus in the last line of this stanza once again focuses our attention on representation: there is a sense that for Lucrece representations of her story can only be excessive or, as I would say, queer. I have already suggested that we could consider ecphrasis one of the basic modes of the poem. The only section that is technically an ecphrasis comes in the long section in which Lucrece contemplates a painting of Troy. As many critics have noted, this scene is based on the famous scene in the Aeneid in which Aeneas looks at the depictions of Troy when he comes to Carthage.24 I want to begin my discussion of Shakespeare’s ecphrasis by looking at Virgil’s: constitit et lacrimans “quis iam locus” inquit, “Achate, quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? en Priamus! sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. solue metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.” sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani.25

(Weeping, he stopped and said “What place, Achates, what part of the earth is not full of our exploits? Behold Priam. Here are the rewards of praise, tears for deeds, and mortal affairs touch the mind. Dispel your fear:  this renown will bring you some peace.” He said this and fed his soul with the empty picture.)26 The most obvious change is in gender. Marion A. Wells speaks of “Shakespeare’s ostentatious replacement of a male viewer

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of images … with a female one,” to which I would add that he also replaced the benevolent female character Dido with the rapist Tarquin.27 Perhaps ecphrasis is something else that can be gendered and perhaps we can see Lucrece’s use of a male kind of poetry as itself queer. A further change is that while Aeneas addresses his remarks to his friend Achates—​and not just any friend, as Achates is the classical exemplar of a good friend—​Lucrece addresses her comments only to herself:  she is the only woman in the poem. But I  think that the most important difference between Virgil and Shakespeare’s versions is the effect of the ecphrasis. Virgil’s comment after Aeneas’ speech appears to present the visual art as pointless. The picture is empty and Aeneas’ feeding on it is clearly in vain. On the other hand, the poem confirms Aeneas’ belief that the renown of the story of Troy will be a benefit. Both the visual representation of Troy and, especially, Aeneas’ verbal representation of it in Books 2 and 3 lead Dido to give Aeneas the material support that enables the Trojan exiles to go Italy and, eventually, to build the Roman empire. In contrast, the ecphrasis in Lucrece has no result. In her discussion of the poem, Catherine Belsey argues that “[p]‌ictures cannot restore the dead; representation does not deliver presence.”28 This is Lucrece’s conclusion as well. After scratching the picture of the traitorous Sinon with her fingernails, she “smilingly with this gives o’er: /​‘Fool, fool; quoth she, ‘his wounds will not be sore’ ” (1567–​8). After this, we move into the final phase of the poem, one in which the only thing represented is Lucrece herself. When her husband, her father, and other Roman noblemen come to her house, Lucrece gives a long speech in which she tells exactly what has happened to her, representing, in effect, the poem we have been reading.29 Or rather she represents

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almost all—​just as Shakespeare did not and perhaps could not represent the rape itself, so Lucrece is unable to name Tarquin. Instead, she stabs herself and dies. Enterline comments that “Lucrece explicitly uses her body as a text” and this is certainly true, but what happens after her death is that her body becomes a text that other people use.30 As Coppélia Kahn notes, Lucrece’s speech has the effect of inscribing her firmly within masculine discourse: “Being raped does grant Lucrece a voice—​the voice of the victim. But the terms of her victimage do not constitute a vantage point distinct from the patriarchal ideology that generated Tarquin’s act.”31 Indeed, we could say both that Lucrece learns that a woman’s ability to speak publicly is only granted by extreme distress and that she learns that for a woman to speak is also to die. Lucrece’s speech is replaced by her dead body and by the blood that flows from her wound. This blood is itself the subject of a notably excessive representation, as if to make the point that women should be something that is represented rather than something that does its own representing.32 The figure presiding over the final stanzas of the poem is the nobleman Lucius Junius Brutus, who intervenes in the rather undignified argument between Lucrece’s husband and her father over who is the more unfortunate.33 Significantly, Shakespeare introduces Brutus in a way that continues the focus on representation. Up to this point, it appears that Brutus was chiefly known For sportive words and utt’ring foolish things. But now he throws that shallow habit by, Wherein deep policy did him disguise, And armed his long-​hid wits advisedly. (1813–​16)

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Once Brutus reveals his true character, he begins the process that will establish him as the founder of the Roman republic. And for my purposes, he also shifts the mode of the poem. As Heather Dubrow points out, he “rejects lyric stasis in favour of narrative movement.”34 Lyric stasis is rather an overstatement, but certainly up to this point, the poem has kept narrative to a minimum and has focused instead on representations of various kinds. Once Brutus takes control, the decision is quickly made to parade Lucrece’s corpse through Rome and to overthrow Tarquin in favour of a republic. It is at this point that the poem ends, but we could also say that it is at this point that the poem returns to its beginning as a brief prose narrative. While the poem as a whole focuses on representation in ways that are often excessive and while narrative movement is kept to a minimum, the shift at the end of the poem should be seen as a shift from queer representation to straight representation. The issue that interests me at this point is what all this says about representation in general. One possible answer can be found in looking more closely at one of the stanzas from Lucrece’s encounter with the depiction of Troy. I refer to the picture of Achilles. Before I  discuss this, however, I  want to look at how Shakespeare introduces his description, because I think it is intriguing in the extreme: “For much imaginary work was there; /​Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind” (1422–​3). The first line sums up the painting as a whole. In noting the artist’s “imaginary work,” Shakespeare makes a play on words:  the work is imaginary in the sense that it is imaginative, but it is also imaginary in the sense that it doesn’t exist, since the depiction of Troy only exists as a verbal construct. In the second line, it is tempting to say that his use of “compact” calls attention to his own poem’s dilation, especially in comparison to the

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Argument at its beginning. Shakespeare develops the resonance of “Imaginary” in the second line when he brings together “conceit” and “deceitful” and implies that the more convincing a work of art is, the more it is a lie. This play on words is emphasized when Shakespeare calls the work “so kind” (natural). We are left with the paradox that a work of art may be both deceitful and kindly, or to put it another way, we are reminded that representation is artificial. The poem as a whole tends to emphasize the artificiality of representation, while the picture within the poem disguises it.35 In his description of the depiction of Achilles, Shakespeare talks about one way in which representation can work, and as we see, the viewer has a large part in this:           for Achilles’ image stood his spear Gripped in an armèd hand; himself behind Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind: A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head Stood for the whole to be imaginèd. (1424–​8)

There is no full-​body representation of Achilles. Instead, we are given a collection of fragments—​first, the spear and then parts of the body. There is no question here of verisimilitude, as there is no real Achilles for the viewers (or, for that matter, the painter) to use as a guide. The viewers use metonymy, in the case of the spear, and synecdoche, in the case of the body parts, in order to construct a suitably heroic figure. In his book on Shakespeare and the visual, Richard Meek says of Lucrece—​as a whole, but we can see it as a synecdoche for this passage in particular—​that “It insists on the limitations of art, yet simultaneously champions the power of the imagination

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to piece out those imperfections.”36 Much depends on the viewers as well as on the writer. Representation is both labour and deceit, and the viewer or reader is both a colleague and an accomplice. My interest in this passage is not solely in what it tells us about how Shakespeare imagines the viewer’s role in representation works, however. I also think that it gives us some insight into his process in writing Lucrece. That is, I have singled out this passage because I  think it is a useful metaphor—​more specifically, a synecdoche—​ for Shakespeare’s representational strategy in Lucrece. Just as she sees a weapon and a few scattered body parts and constructs a man who is in fact the principal character in the story depicted by the painter, so we might imagine Shakespeare seeing the shadowy figure of Lucrece as she appears in the Argument and then constructing the principal character of his poem: making a protagonist in poetry out of someone who appears in prose as merely a catalyst. Here, I return to the possibility I expressed earlier, that we could see the poem as an ecphrasis of the Argument—​an excessive, out of control, queer ecphrasis of the orderly prose account. From this perspective, then, Lucrece would be parallel to Shakespeare himself. She is parallel not only in constructing a whole out of parts but also in that she takes this figure obscured by the representation itself and recognizes it as a depiction of one of the most famous literary characters ever. Shakespeare does something similar in transforming Lucrece from her important but supporting role in the Argument to making her the heroine of the story. Indeed, such are the excesses of the poem’s representations that we might think that behind the image of Lucrece constructing a unified human figure is Horace’s famous image of a disorderly text in the Ars Poetica:

          isti tabulae fore librum persimilem, cuius, velut aegri somnia, vanae fingentur species; ut nec pes, nec caput uni

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reddatur formae.37

(The book will be just like a picture, in which the ideas are all vain and false, like the dreams of a sick man, so that neither the foot nor the head can be attributed to one form.) For Horace—​and the Ars Poetica has been an enormously influential poem—​good art consists to a considerable extent on order and verisimilitude. Shakespeare’s Lucrece is obviously not as disordered as the painting and book that Horace imagines, but in its persistent and excessive focus on representation, in its queerness, it is closer to this disorder than to the orderly prose of the Argument. NOTES 1 Willbern, Poetic Will, 95. 2 For a fascinating discussion of Shakespeare and Lucrece as parallel authors, see Greenstadt, “ ‘Read It in me.’ ” For a discussion of the relationship between the Argument and the poem, see Maus, “Taking Tropes Seriously,” 74 et seq. 3 I will not spend much time on the political content of the story. I think the best analysis of the politics of the poem is Sanchez, Erotic Subjects, especially 91–​105. See also Woodbridge, “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic,” especially 27–​33; Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, especially 136–​ 53; Metzger, “Epistemic Injustice and The Rape of Lucrece”; and Kaegi, “Passionate Uprisings in Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” An excellent account of both politics and gender is MacDonald, “Speech, Silence, and History in The Rape of Lucrece.” 4 Scott, Model of Poesy, 53. 5 See ibid., lxxvi, for Alexander’s comment on the addition. I discuss the use of “stuff” in the poem (297) below. 6 An excellent recent discussion of ornament in Renaissance poetry is Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking. Her valuable discussion focuses on

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“ornament not as the sign of the aesthetic but as the source of a particular kind of thinking” (6), while mine focuses on the aesthetic. 7 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, 221. 8 Sonya Brockman has argued that beginning with Tarquin “aligns not only the poet, but his audience as well, with the mind of a rapist.” See “Trauma and Abandoned Testimony in Titus Andronicus and Rape of Lucrece,” 362. I’ll discuss Shakespeare’s and our complicity below. 9 Vickers, “ ‘The blazon of sweet beauty’s best,’ ” 99. 10 Fineman, “Shakespeare’s Will,” 32. 11 The best discussion of the role of publication in the poem is in Wall, The Imprint of Gender, 214–​20. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives the first use of “publisher” in the sense of someone who works in the book trade as 1579; see “publisher” n. 2.a and 2.b. 12 A very good analysis of both publishing and dramatic representation in the poem is Scott, “ ‘To Show … and so to Publish,” especially 377–​8. 13 Clarke, “Love, Beauty, and Sexuality,” 188. 14 Hehmeyer, “Heralding the Commonplace,” 145. 15 Fineman points out the extent to which these obstacles figure the act of rape, see “Shakespeare’s Will,” 40–​1. 16 For a good discussion of the role of sententiae in the poem, see Peterson, “Shakespeare and Sententiae.” 17 The phrase could admittedly be scanned as two iambs or perhaps even as a choriamb, but I really think only a dispondee works in this context. 18 Chapman, “Lucrece’s Time,” 171. See 171–​3 for her full discussion of Tarquin’s approach to Lucrece’s chamber. 19 See “cite,” v., especially 2, in the OED. 20 Walker, Site Unscene, 27. 21 Her transformation here always reminds me of Abigail’s similar change from credulity in doubt in The Jew of Malta:  “But now experience, purchased with griefe, /​Has made me see the difference of things” (3.3.61–​2). 22 Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare, 158. For her discussion as a whole, see 158–​97. Enterline focuses on the classical allusions in Lucrece’s speeches; another good discussion of these allusions is Mann, “ ‘Reck’ning with Shakespeare’s Orpheus in The Rape of Lucrece.” 23 I am certainly no expert on childrearing, but it seems odd to tell a rape story in order to calm a crying child. Presumably the point is to frighten the child into silence.

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4 See, for instance, Johnson, “Appropriating Troy,” 197–​200. 2 25 Aeneid, 1.459–​64. 26 Part of the history of these great lines is the repeated failure, in many languages and at many times, to translate them effectively. Here I enrol myself in this tradition, keeping in mind John Dryden’s comment on his own translation of another famous passage of the poem: “For my part, I  am lost in the admiration of it:  I contemn the World, when I  think on it, and my self when I  translate it” (“Dedication of the Aeneis,” 335). 27 “To Find a Face Where All Distress Is Stell’d,” 98. Wells’s analysis of ecphrasis is excellent throughout. See also Preston, “Ekphrasis,” especially  124–​6. 28 Belsey, “Invocation of the Visual Image,” 179. 29 For a brilliant analysis of the legal background for her last speech, see Weaver, “ ‘O Teach Me How to Make Mine Own Excuse.’ ” 30 Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body, 153. 31 Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 38. 32 For a discussion of the blood and of the use of blood as legal evidence, see Weaver, “ ‘O Teach Me How to Make Mine Own Excuse,” 445–​9. 33 This passage seems to me to be a second allusion to The Jew of Malta. Here I am thinking of Act 3, Scene 2, in which Fernese and Katherine both vow to kill themselves out of grief for their dead sons and end up fighting over the ownership of the weapons which will they plan to stab themselves. 34 Dubrow, “Mourning Becomes Electric,” 24. 35 Disguising art (both in terms of how it is made and of what it does) has historically been much commoner than revealing it. A particularly good recent discussion of this disguise is D’Angelo, Sprezzatura. 36 Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare, 81. See also Dundas, Pencils Rhetorique, 71. 37 Ars Poetica,  6–​9.

The sonnets

In the last chapter I  wrote about how Shakespeare keeps narrative to a minimum in Lucrece until the ending. In this chapter, I  look at his sonnet sequence, a genre in which narrative is traditionally kept to a minimum. Insofar as there is a narrative in Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is not the predictable story of the speaker’s romantic misfortunes, here portioned out in micro doses over the course of 154 sonnets, but rather the story of how poems come to be written. As I see it, the sonnets chiefly represent themselves: there is a sense in which many of the poems in the sequence are forms of metarepresentation. To some extent, I  would say that this is true of all sonnet sequences, and certainly of the English ones. What is particular to Shakespeare’s sequence, however, is the noticeable change in direction as the appeals to the young man to have children disappear from the poems and later as the poems to the young man are replaced, for the most part, by poems to the woman. One way to think about all this is to consider Sara Ahmed’s recent statement that “We learn about form when a change in function does not require a change in form.”1 The malleability of Shakespeare’s sonnets—​their ability to deal with a number of topics—​gives us one way to think and learn about the possibilities of the sonnet form and thus to direct our attention to it rather than to the subject matter. In Shakespeare’s sequence we are constantly invited to

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Five

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consider the representative possibilities of his poems; my discussion will focus on a few sonnets in which the questions of representation are especially prominent.2 Admittedly, my view of narrative in the sonnets is a partial one. There are some events throughout the sequence and certainly much scholarship has been produced about these events and also, notoriously, about the real-​life originals of the young man, the dark lady, and the rival poet. This approach was the dominant one in writing about the sonnets until the twentieth century and it continues to this day. Like Milton writing in Paradise Lost about traditional epic poems, I would say “Mee of these /​Nor skill’d nor studious” and I shall not engage with that scholarship here.3 I wrote in the introduction that I would not be overly concerned with the existing critical work on Shakespeare in any case because it is so vast and I am especially happy to continue that practice in my discussion of the sonnets. Among all of Shakespeare’s texts, perhaps none has given rise to a greater body of scholarship that could be used to illustrate misplaced ingenuity. My own discussion of the sonnets will be focused on how they represent various things, including themselves, and on how they direct our attention to their own strategies of representation in what is for me a noticeably queer way. If incontrovertible proof of the identities of the people in the sonnets and of the relations of these people to Shakespeare himself were discovered tomorrow, it would not affect my discussion in the slightest.4 In this chapter, I’ll discuss a relatively small number of the sonnets and I’ll begin with the very first one. This early group of sonnets has often been called the reproduction or procreation sonnets, as they are mainly, although not exclusively, exhortations to a young man to marry and have children—​ with noticeably more emphasis on the having children part

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than on the marrying part.5 Of course, this is to some extent an accurate description, but I  want to make the point that from the beginning of the sequence Shakespeare sets up a tension between reproduction and textual production as modes of representation; I would call the former straight and the latter queer. Even in the opening lines of the very first sonnet, an alternative reading of the call to procreation can be discerned: “From fairest creatures we desire increase, /​That thereby beauty’s rose might never die” (1–​2). Shakespeare’s use of “increase,” which is already noticeable as its similarity to “creatures” sets up a (false) polyptoton, stands out to me as it is not specific. The word has a range of meanings, not all of which refer to either human or animal reproduction, so it is not immediately apparent what kind of increase is desired.6 The next line doesn’t really clear up the ambiguity. What is to be preserved in life is apparently not a bloodline or a family name, but rather “beauty’s rose,” an expression that could refer to a number of things, including, as we shall see, a work of art. As Richard Halpern points out, this sonnet suggests that “[r]‌eproduction is, in the first instance, an aesthetic duty.”7 In imagining a future in which the man is dead and “His tender heir might bear his memory” (4), the sonnet gestures towards the idea of reproduction, but even here it is not entirely clear what this memory will commemorate. As the sonnet progresses it seems that what is at stake is, once again, not a bloodline or a family name but instead the man’s beauty.8 As Shakespeare writes, the man is “now the world’s chief ornament” (9) and it is his ornamental excellence that must be preserved. Shakespeare emphasizes the power of the man’s beauty by devoting the sonnet’s second quatrain to an allusion, implicit but unmistakable, to Narcissus. First, he tells the man that he is “contracted to thine own bright

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eyes” (5), using the past participle here both in the sense of “restricted, lessened in scope” and in the sense of “engaged to be married.” Like Narcissus, the man is focused only on his own beauty. The allusion to Narcissus is clearest when Shakespeare translates Ovid’s famous phrase “inopem me copia fecit” (abundance makes me poor)—​said by Narcissus just as he realizes that the beautiful man he sees in the water is himself—​as “Making a famine where abundance lies” (7).9 For Narcissus, this realization comes too late to save his life. The hope Shakespeare holds out is that the man will be able to save himself in time. In the third quatrain, Shakespeare turns, as he will so often throughout the sequence, to seasonal imagery to describe the young man’s potential: Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament And only herald to the gaudy spring Within thine own bud buriest thy content. (9–​11)

He plays here on the two meanings of “content,” suggesting both that the young man’s happiness will come from doing what Shakespeare says and that the young man contains things that need to be expressed. In these lines, the young man is most obviously like the bud of a flower, something that is ornamental but is chiefly important because it signals even greater beauty to come. We might assume the potential here to indicate children, but it could just as well indicate aesthetic pleasures. What is more, if we think that “content” could suggest “table of contents,” these aesthetic pleasures would then be textual in nature—​like a sonnet, for example. The possibility that Shakespeare does mean reproduction is

by making reproduction a matter of poetry, rather than of sex, Shakespeare takes the place of two members of the young man’s future family: those who will reproduce the young man and the wife who will be responsible for that reproduction.10

We could even say that it is not really accurate to say that the sonnets shift their focus from procreation to love: they have perhaps all along chiefly sought to persuade the young man to become a poetic subject.

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not ruled out, but it is only one possibility and does not even dominate in this initial sonnet. What is often seen as a pivot to artistic representation towards the end of this sub-​sequence has been part of the poems from the beginning. The aesthetic focus of Shakespeare’s appeals to the young man can be found throughout the procreation sonnets, as we can see in the third sonnet:  “But if thou live remembered not to be, /​Die single, and thine image dies with thee” (13–​ 14). In this sonnet, Shakespeare proposes two happy endings for the young man. In both, what is at stake is, once again, the man’s image, which is to say his most aesthetic aspect. In one scenario, this image will be preserved through memory; in the other, through reproduction, although even here “Die single” is somewhat ambiguous:  does that refer to dying without a wife and therefore without children or to dying without leaving behind a proper copy—​in words, in ink, in flesh—​of his beauty? As well, in these sonnets Shakespeare is much more than merely a man presenting arguments. As he increasingly represents himself as the agent by which the man’s beauty will be preserved, he becomes a more and more important figure. Robert Matz has pointed out that

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Poetry is not the only way of preserving the young man’s beauty that is mentioned in the sonnets. In sonnet 8 the focus is on music. Shakespeare uses the sadness that the young man apparently feels when he hears music in his attempts to persuade him to reproduce. He suggests that musical concords “but sweetly chide thee, who confounds /​In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear” (7–​8). Up to this point the poem follows the usual course of the procreation sonnets, but the development of the image is noticeably odd: Mark how one string, sweet husband to another, Strikes each in each by mutual ordering; Resembling sire and child and happy mother. (9–​11)

The ideal situation that this music represents is a very queer affair:  the strings are all men married to each other and still including fathers, mothers, and children. This is one of the queerest representations in the sonnets, as both the family that the young man is being enjoined to form and the beautiful art that occasions the sonnet are compared to a same-​sex marriage, and, what is more, to what appears to be a group marriage11. In place of what we would now call the nuclear family, we have what we could call a polyamorous queer collective. In this couplet, the alternative to the young man’s single and childless state is not a turn away from queerness but rather a turn towards a different kind of queerness. Perhaps wisely, Shakespeare seems to abandon the musical metaphor after sonnet 8. In its place, he focuses on metaphors of writing and of visual art, frequently joined in imagery by the pencil that can be used for both. In sonnet 11, for example, after 12 lines of relatively straightforward exhortations to the

When I consider everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment, That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows. (1–​3)

All the world’s a stage and Shakespeare is the playwright. The shows in question are obviously plays, but they are also, in the pejorative sense, merely appearances. Shakespeare focuses our attention on his own representations and suggests that they are only representations. We can see this as his tacit admission

133  The sonnets

young man to reproduce, Shakespeare turns in the couplet to a significant metaphor:  nature “carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby /​Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die” (13–​14). While in context the “copy” is clearly a child, this child will be the result of artistic production rather than human reproduction. Aaron Kunin has argued that “the couplet, in identifying the young man with print, provides a glimpse for the first time in the entire sequence … of poetry as an alternative technology of preservation.”12 This is perhaps somewhat of an overstatement:  as the printing Shakespeare references here means making an impression in wax, poetry is only metaphorically present in this metaphor as a possible text to which the seal is affixed. Nevertheless, Kunin is correct in identifying this couplet as a crucial development in the sonnets. While the aesthetic qualities of the young man have been identified since the first sonnet as the thing which needs to be preserved, it is here for the first time that this preservation is presented as textual. After this point, Shakespeare speaks more and more of his poetry as one of the ways in which the man’s beauty will survive, but he continues to do so in metaphors rather than directly. Sonnet 15, for instance, makes a reference to theatre:

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that while the young man’s beauty, however transitory it may be, is genuine, his own poetry can only represent it: it fails to give us the real thing, which might in any case not really exist at all. In one of the more provocative statements about these poems, Clark Hulse intriguingly wrote that the sonnets “are counterfeit presentments of his art of counterfeiting.”13 I think this statement works as a characterization of the sonnets as a whole, but perhaps especially of these lines. After this stress on the artificiality of representation, the sonnet moves into the natural world: “When I perceive that men as plants increase” (5) Shakespeare writes, and goes on to develop this comparison in a predictably depressing way. What is not predictable, however, is that the sonnet does not turn to suggesting reproduction. Instead, continuing with the comparison of men to plants, Shakespeare ends the poem with a reference to his own art through a suitably botanical metaphor: “And all in war with Time for love of you, /​As he takes from you, I engraft you new” (13–​14). Here, Shakespeare’s art does not merely preserve the young man’s beauty: it even makes it new again. As Nardizzi points out in his study of this sonnet, engrafting was an established metaphor for writing by the time that Shakespeare wrote these lines: the gardener’s knife is a metaphor for the writer’s pen.14 The knife is also a metaphor for the penis in reproduction, as it is used to make an incision in which foreign matter is placed, and arguably for Shakespeare’s penis as well. But while I would never want to talk someone out of seeing Shakespeare’s pen as a phallus, we could also see it as the pin that attaches the young man to the page like a butterfly to a card. Instead of the gardener-​ assisted reproduction of grafting, we have a purely textual production in which rather than having children the young man has become an aesthetic object on display.

The aestheticization of the young man at the expense of the procreation that seems to be the theme of this first group of sonnets began earlier, however, in the remarkable fifth sonnet, to which I now turn. This poem opens with a quatrain that expresses the already familiar idea that time will ruin the man’s beauty: Those hours that with gentle work did frame The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell Will play the tyrant to the very same, And that unfair which fairly doth excel.

But although the sentiment is not new, this way of expressing it is. Here, time is not only the force that will destroy the man’s looks but also the force that created them in the first place. What is more, this creation is presented as a kind of labour—​“gentle work”—​that is also artistic:  while “frame” could simply mean “to build or construct,” it also had artistic associations. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives the first use of the verb in the sense of “to enclose in a frame” as 1705, but in Shakespeare’s time the word could also mean “literary composition” and “artistic frame.”15 Nature is thus a kind of art, rather than the opposite of art. The imagery of the first four sonnets has also presented the young man’s beauty as natural: he is one creature among many and subject to the same changes. Here, however, his beauty is also presented as a kind of art. From this point of view, then, when Shakespeare turns the man’s beauty into sonnets he is making explicit what was already an aspect of the beauty in any case: he is artistically representing what is already, at least to some extent, an artistic representation. I would argue

135  The sonnets

(1–​4)

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that the focus on art in this quatrain is emphasized by the vocabulary. By this I mean not only the polysemy of “frame” that I  discussed in the previous paragraph, but also the use of “gaze” and “unfair.” The OED gives this use of “gaze” (something that people gaze at) as its first definition, but this meaning is now obsolete and was never the more common one, which suggests that even then readers would have had to pause in order to make the line make sense, just as readers now do.16 “Unfair” as a verb meaning “to make someone or something cease to be beautiful” is Shakespeare’s own creation: this line is the only citation in the OED.17 Shakespeare wants us to think that the man’s loss of beauty is an injustice, but he also wants us to have to stop in order to figure out that “unfair” is a verb in order to be able to parse the sentence as a whole. In this first quatrain, Shakespeare forces us to work at apprehending his meaning in order to focus our attention on (both his and nature’s) representation itself. The hours that Shakespeare mentions lead to what Shakespeare calls “hideous winter” (6): The second sonnet also presented age as winter when Shakespeare imagined a time “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow /​And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field” (1–​2), and the metaphor is certainly common enough. But while in that sonnet the emphasis is on what the metaphorical winter will do to the young man’s face, in the fifth sonnet Shakespeare appears to be distracted by what winter itself looks like: “Sap check’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone, /​Beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness everywhere” (7–​8). One way to describe what happens in these lines is to say that we have an excess of representation: while a description of the man’s current beauty or future decrepitude is clearly part of the plan, this focus on winter is excessive, especially in comparison with the bare statement of “forty

137  The sonnets

winters” in the earlier sonnet. I see this excess as queer and I want to look at this description of winter in greater detail. With its use of “sap” and “lusty” to suggest sexual impotence is fairly straightforward, and we could see it as a return to the appeals to the man to have children: have children now, because you won’t be able to have sex in the future. It is the second of these lines that gives me pause: “Beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness everywhere.” Prosodically, the line consists of an initial choriamb (a trochee followed by an iamb) and then four regular iambs. This pattern is of course an entirely usual metrical variation in English poetry, but I  would argue that in isolating—​marking—​a section of the poem for further scrutiny, the choriamb recalls the frame of the sonnet’s beginning (and anticipates Sontag’s quotation marks in her essay on camp that I discussed in my introduction). I also think that the hiatus, something that is quite rare in the poetry of the time—​“beauTY O’ERsnow’d”—​further stresses the phrase, especially when the poem is read aloud. In other words, a statement that ostensibly says that beauty has been obliterated is marked by its prosody. I  think that Shakespeare’s use of winter imagery here queers his use of winter imagery in his second sonnet or perhaps I should say that I see this as a queer representation of the beginning of that sonnet. The snow may have covered the beauty of nature, may even have covered the “v” in “oversnowed” and the main verb in line 12 of this sonnet—​yet another moment, like the use of “gaze” and “unfair” earlier, at which readers typically pause, forced to puzzle out exactly what is being said on the most literal level—​but Shakespeare’s phrasing suggests that it still has an aesthetic force. This point is made even more sharply, if differently, in the rest of the line: “and bareness everywhere.” The restored

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regularity of the iambic procession here cannot disguise the extreme oddity of the statement. Bareness denotes a lack of objects, but a bareness that is everywhere seems more like plenitude. The bareness Shakespeare describes here is thus not blankness but rather a different kind of fullness, one that our conventional system of evaluating landscapes has neglected. Perhaps this line could lead us to a different kind of aesthetics. What if the most beautiful sight in nature is not the flowers and leaves of the summer garden but rather the even, white covering of snow over—​or o’er—​everything? This inversion of a standard aesthetic judgement is typical of camp, a mode of queer representation that often celebrates things usually considered low or trivial or insignificant or even ugly. This line, then, can be considered queer in more than one way, but perhaps the most important queerness of the line is its excess: Shakespeare doesn’t need to make winter seem beautiful. In fact, to do so undermines the main point he seeks to make not just in this sonnet but in this entire section of the sequence. In its incongruity with what has been and will continue to be the main thrust of Shakespeare’s argument, this line enacts a kind of queer resistance to the reproductive imperative that has dominated the sonnets to this point. The idea that winter might itself be beautiful is merely a hint, however, and Shakespeare returns to the problem of this part of his sequence, which is how to preserve the young man’s beauty. This beauty is metaphorically the beauty of summer and by a synecdoche, summer’s beauty is itself represented by the rose. Perhaps surprisingly, Shakespeare says that the solution to the obliterating effects of winter is to make perfume rather than to make babies, as has been the case up to this point in the sequence. I think that Shakespeare’s choice here should be seen as a decisive turning point in the sequence,

139  The sonnets

although the sonnets that follow this one retreat from this position. The idea that making perfume from roses is a way to preserve summer’s beauty is not in itself odd, but I think that Shakespeare’s presentation of it is: he refers to the perfume as “summer’s distillation” (9). From one point of view, this is unsurprising: the attar of roses is presented as a substance that represents the summer bloom of roses. On the other hand, given the stress on the agency of the hours with which the poem begins, the phrase can also be taken to suggest that summer itself has distilled the roses into attar, a process that actually takes a great deal of human time and work. Once again, nature is presented as art, as—​in fact—​an artificer. What’s also odd is the conclusion of the quatrain. While it seems fair to say that without the attar the beauty of roses would no longer be apparent, it is obviously incorrect to say that “no remembrance [of] what it was” (12) will be left. Here, Shakespeare suggests that memory only exists in art—​ not in our mental pictures and not in children. His point here thus goes against both what he has been saying in the sonnets up to this point (and what he will continue to say in the sonnets that follow this one) and our own common sense. And the couplet that concludes the poem is in some ways even odder: “But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet, /​ Lose but their show; their substance still lives sweet.” Really, where to begin? First of all, once flowers are distilled, they have ceased to be flowers. Making attar of roses requires only the petals, not the whole flower and certainly not the plant as a whole. In the final line, Shakespeare distinguishes between “show” and “substance.” This distinction is not unusual in itself, but it is noticeably strange here. The “show” means the look of the rose, of course, but to choose the smell as the substance is strange, and I think it is significant that Shakespeare

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chooses the one aspect of a rose that cannot be presented on stage—​this is thus a strictly poetic representation. I want to look now at line ten of the sonnet—​perhaps Shakespeare’s loveliest line—​which is Shakespeare’s description of the perfume itself:  “A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass.” It is perhaps unavoidable now to see this liquid as semen in a test tube destined for in vitro fertilization, an anachronistic reading made even more plausible by the next sonnet’s use of “vial” to refer both to the glass vessel in which attar of roses is stored and the womb that will bear the young man’s child—​for it must be admitted that after what I  see as the glorious queerness of this sonnet Shakespeare returns to reproduction. But for Shakespeare, of course, this liquid prisoner is the substance of roses, their sweet fragrance—​not something that will endure long or that will carry on the young man’s beauty.That is, the only way to preserve the young man is through aesthetics rather than through children—​or even, if it comes to that, through more roses. The cost of this strategy is apparent: rather than being a plant, the rose is now a prisoner, imprisoned within a vessel. But these walls of glass should not only be seen as a perfume bottle but also as the sign of the aesthetic, as, to make a second anachronistic reference, the glass that encloses a picture. We can see the glass vessel as a kind of frame that sets off an object and puts it in the realm of art. Shakespeare’s solution in this sonnet has not met with universal approval. For instance, Halpern wrote that “In the translation from a child, to semen in a womb, to perfume in a bottle, something has been lost, and that something is life.”18 I would counter that life—​the young man’s life—​will be lost anyway, and that has precisely been the subject of the sonnets to this point. Furthermore, I think Shakespeare is aware of the

cost of destroying roses to make perfume—​and, by extension, destroying the young man to make poetry. A contemporary analogue to this sonnet is the remarkable conclusion to a poem by Vahni Capildeo: how to pull space apart, extract concentrique essence of rose this was not the work of one night

The work itself is arduous and is not itself the subject of representation and it involves the destruction of the thing itself, but what’s important is what is produced:  the new thing that is a work of art. Both the perfume and the poem for which it is a metaphor are queer representation, and that is a kind of representation that is not easily achieved. Sonnet 5 appears to signal an end to the procreation sonnets, to replace human reproduction with artistic production. In the next sonnet, however, Shakespeare returns to exhortations to have children and continues (on and off) in this vein for several more sonnets. I want now to look at the last of the procreation sonnets, beginning with sonnet 16. Both in this sonnet and sonnet 17 Shakespeare expresses insecurity about the power of his own poetic representations. In the former, he tells the young man that having children is a “means more blessèd than my barren rhymes” (4)  to preserve his memory. A few lines later, he speaks of the women who would bear the man “living flowers, /​Much liker than your painted counterfeit” (7–​8). Shakespeare refers to these hypothetical children as “lines of life” (9), playing on both

141  The sonnets

this was not work meant for your sight.19

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“bloodline” and “poetic line.” In the next line, he links “time’s pencil” and his “pupil pen” (10). As was the case at the beginning of sonnet 5, something natural is presented as a kind of artist: both time (Time) and Shakespeare work with a pencil. At the end of the poem, Shakespeare returns to this image, telling the young man that he “must live, drawn by your own sweet skill” (14). Now the implement is neither the real pencil of the poet nor the metaphorical pencil of Time but the penis that impregnates. In his discussion of this poem, Julian Yates writes that the poem “stages a modeling of human reproduction from the vantage point provided by poetic or machinic replication.”20 The human reproduction with which the poem ends is shown to be merely one of the ways in which the young man’s image can live on and does not appear to surpass the poet’s literal pencil. In sonnet 17, Shakespeare’s anxieties appear somewhat greater. At the beginning, Shakespeare expresses doubt about his poetry’s ability to survive:  “Who will believe my verse in time to come /​If it were filled with your most high deserts” (1–​2). He describes his poems as “papers, yellowed with their age” (9)  and therefore little regarded. The solution is found in the poem’s couplet: “But were some child of yours alive that time, /​You should live twice: in it, and in my rhyme” (13–​14). Daniel Juan Gil has argued that “To say that Shakespeare’s poetry will only work to immortalize the Young Man if the Young Man reproduces himself sexually is to say that Shakespeare’s poetry will not work to immortalize the Young Man.”21 This is a good point, but as this is the last of the procreation sonnets, Shakespeare appears to have decided not to worry about it. In any case, I think that the most important word in the couplet is “twice”:  he puts equal stress on the young man’s having children and on his being a poetic subject.

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By this stage in the procreation sonnets, sexual reproduction is still important, but it seems that textual production—​the frequently queer representation of the young man—​is just as important. And we could even argue that the couplet depicts sexual reproduction as also unable to immortalize the young man’s image by itself. The pairing of children and poetry at the end of sonnet 17 allows us to see that the sexual reproduction that Shakespeare has been encouraging has really been a means of representation: the descendants the young man could have serve the purpose of representing his beauty, and in this way they are ultimately just different forms of representations than poems or paintings or perfume. And while the couplet puts reproduction and textual production together, sonnet 18 subsumes reproduction altogether. Significantly, it does so by focusing on representation itself. Beginning with the question “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (1), the sonnet spends the next seven lines listing the ways in which a summer’s day, however beautiful it may be, cannot adequately represent the young man’s beauty. While summer days pass and while summer itself passes, the young man’s beauty will survive death itself:  “Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, /​When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st” (11–​ 12). In sonnet 17, the poetry would only work in combination with the children, but here the poetry (eternal lines) is sufficient by itself. It is not only the case that Shakespeare’s poetic lines are eternal, however:  they preserve the young man’s beauty and they even enable him to continue to grow without fading, in defiance of time and in contradiction to the sad depiction of the ravages of time in sonnet 15. What is more, this sonnet shows both the defeat of time and the defeat of nature, as in rejecting a summer day as a way to

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represent the young man’s beauty Shakespeare places this beauty above nature altogether. Shakespeare shows his confidence in the power of his poetry in this sonnet’s couplet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, /​So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” He is saying that his poems will last as long as the human race itself, of course, but he is also saying more than that. In her fascinating discussion of the sonnets and immortality, Lina Perkins Wilder writes of these lines that “their focus is not on the physical medium of print or manuscript but on the poem’s liveliness. This liveliness appears to be both an effect of reading and a quality intrinsic to the verse.”22 Thus, in sonnet 18 Shakespeare moves from the rejection of nature’s representational suitability to a presentation of his own poetry as itself a kind of nature, a living thing in the world. If, as I said, representation becomes queer when it focuses attention on itself or when it ceases to depict something, then we can see this couplet as the pinnacle of queer representation. It might have seemed to us throughout the procreation sonnets that the poems were metaphorically children and that Shakespeare was employing the familiar reproductive metaphor for textual production, but here we find that textual production has apparently rendered having actual children unnecessary. The poems themselves live and preserve the beauty of the young man. Shakespeare’s representation of his own poetry arguably reaches its height in the grand and defiant declaration at the end of sonnet 19:  “Yet do thy worst, old time; despite thy wrong, /​My love shall in my verse ever live young” (13–​ 14). What interests me here is how Shakespeare’s phrasing calls attention to itself through its violation of the metrical norm:  “My love shall in my verse live ever young” would

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be a regular line of iambic pentameter. The unusual trochaic substitution in the fourth foot disrupts the even flow of the poetry and places considerable stress on the adverb of time “ever.” If Shakespeare had written the metrically regular line I  constructed above, “ever” would emphasize the eternal youth of “My love” (and of course this formulation could mean either the man himself or Shakespeare’s love for him). As Shakespeare wrote it, however, the adverb stresses the life itself, which is to say that he is really emphasizing the power of his poetry. I don’t mean that the poem is not a tribute to the young man, but rather that is not only that. It is also a tribute to Shakespeare’s own poetry. By this point, he is representing his own artistic achievement as much as he is representing the man’s beauty. Fineman remarks that the poems to the young man “amount to the representation of praise rather than to its presentation,” and I  think this is truest of this couplet.23 Building on the couplet of sonnet 18, the couplet of this sonnet can be seen to make explicit the dominance of representation over presentation. I’m going to end my analysis of the sonnets here. At the beginning of this chapter I wrote that my discussion would be partial and would only deal with a few of the sonnets and I have certainly kept my word. There are well over a hundred sonnets after sonnet 19—​so many, in fact, that Shakespeare comes to seem like a prisoner pent in walls of verse. These later sonnets represent many things: two (or more) unhappy love affairs, weariness, guilt, jealousy, disgust, but also the joy of love. But what interests me most about the sonnets with regard to the topic of representation is how the procreation sonnets ultimately make representation itself their subject—​indeed, we might do better to call sonnets 1–​19 the representation sonnets. These opening sonnets are particularly

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queer in their ostensible focus on sexual reproduction, that most heterosexual of topics; this focus turns out to be a focus on themselves, on representation itself. We often narrativize these sonnets by saying that in order to persuade the young man to have children Shakespeare praises his beauty so much that he falls in love with him himself. This is a plausible and appealing narrative in many ways, but I would say rather that Shakespeare uses these early sonnets to set up sonnets themselves as his subject. In other words, we should read them as an extended treatment of the power of representation. It is finally the act of representation itself that matters in these sonnets and it is in this fact that we can locate their queerness. NOTES 1 Ahmed, What’s the Use?, 34. 2 The best account of the self-​consciousness of the sonnets is probably Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, 1–​48, especially 1–​6. 3 Paradise Lost, IX.41–​2. 4 In any case, we don’t know that Shakespeare intended to publish all these sonnets and it seems that the order is not necessarily his. As well, most of the sonnets are addressed to an ungendered person and thus the traditional distinction between “young man” and “dark lady” sonnets doesn’t apply as these sonnets could be addressed to either or indeed to a person or persons unknown. For discussions of these points see, among others, Dubrow, “ ‘Incertainties Now Crown Themselves Assur’d’ ”; de Grazia, “Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”; and Nelles, “Sexing Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” 5 Two first-​rate discussions of the procreation sonnets are Sullivan, Jr., “Voicing the Young Man” and Sanchez, Queer Faith,  131–​6. 6 For an excellent discussion of the importance of the word “increase” to the sonnets, see Nardizzi, “Shakespeare’s Penknife,” 90–​2. 7 Halpern, Shakespeare’s Perfume, 19. 8 On Shakespeare’s curious avoidance of any appeals to the idea of a noble name or lineage, see Pequigney, Such Is My Love, 12. For a stimulating discussion of memorials in early modern England that discuses

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Shakespeare’s sonnets, see Schwyzer, “ ‘A Tomb Once Stood in this Room.’ ” 9 Ovid, Metamorphoses, III.466. Arthur Golding’s translation of the poem, published just after Shakespeare’s birth and tremendously influential, renders the Latin as “my plenty makes me poor” (3.587). 10 Matz, “The Scandals of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” 480. 11 For Fineman’s discussion of this image, see Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, 257. 12 Kunin, “Shakespeare’s Preservation Fantasy,” 100. 13 Hulse, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Art of the Face,” 7. 14 Nardizzi, “Shakespeare’s Penknife,” 83–​4. 15 See OED, “frame,” v. 10.a, for the sense of framing a picture. The sense of “frame” as a synonym for literary composition is “frame,” n. 3.c; the OED notes this usage as both obsolete and rare. For frame in the sense of a structure placed around a work of art, see “frame,” n. 8; the OED cites sonnet 24 in this entry. 16 See OED, “gaze,” n. 1. 17 See OED, “unfair,” v. 18 Halpern, Shakespeare’s Perfume, 14. See 13–​15 for his discussion of this sonnet as a whole. 19 “Dans le jardin de ma mère,” 17–​22. 20 Yates, “More Life,” 341. 21 Gil, Before Intimacy, 131. 22 Wilder, “Reserved Character,” 478–​9. 23 Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, 153.

Venus and Adonis

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Six In this last chapter, we finally come to my discussion of Shakespeare’s first published text and so the queer figure of hysteron proteron is firmly established in the structure of my book as a whole. Of course, as he had already written a few plays, Venus and Adonis was not his first work, although it is the earliest I discuss in this book. But it is in this poem that Shakespeare would first have had to deal with the difference between a play, even one in verse, and a poem that has no visual element. In this connection, one of the changes Shakespeare makes to the story as Ovid tells it in Book X of the Metamorphoses is especially significant.1 In Ovid, Adonis doesn’t resist Venus’ advances and so his death can be seen as a tragic ending to a love affair. In Shakespeare, Adonis never gives in to Venus despite her numerous attempts at seduction. The poem is thus fixed in the process of seduction. In Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, a poem that influenced Shakespeare and that includes both seduction scenes and sex, we learn that Hero wears a dress that includes a representation of Where Venus in her naked glory strove, To please the carelesse and disdainfull eies, Of proud Adonis that before her lies.2

It is as if when Shakespeare came to write Venus and Adonis, he took as his model this depiction of one moment of the story

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rather than Ovid’s narrative, which would make his poem a kind of ecphrasis. The absence of a sex scene in Venus and Adonis has often been felt to cause a problem. In one of the most influential accounts of the poem, for example, Catherine Belsey wrote that “[t]‌he poem … prompts in the reader a desire for action that it fails to gratify.”3 I’ll return to the question of the reader’s desire, but first I want briefly to consider the question of why there can be no sex scene—​that is, why it is that Adonis himself apparently feels no desire. Many commentators have wondered what he desires, since he shows no interest in the most beautiful woman who has ever lived. One would naturally wish for Adonis to be sexually interested in other men, but the poem does not encourage this reading. Adonis mentions that he has (male) friends, but the references are generic. Another possibility could be that he is consumed with desire for himself, but although Venus mentions Narcissus, there is really no evidence for this reading either.4 More promisingly, Richard Rambuss has argued that “Adonis’ desire … flows in only one direction: toward the boar.”5 I would be more inclined to say that he desires the hunt rather than the quarry specifically, although it is certainly true that Shakespeare sexualizes the boar.6 Ultimately, however, I  think that Venus and Adonis is a poem about one-​sided desire and that not only does Adonis not desire Venus, he doesn’t really desire anyone or anything in her place.7 I want now to return to Belsey’s statement that the reader’s desire for action is frustrated. One response is to point out that even if Venus and Adonis did have sex, neither would have had sex with the reader, so there is a sense in which frustration is built into the experience of reading a sexy poem—​ unless, of course, reading a sexy poem is itself satisfying or if the lack of satisfaction is itself the point. Both of these reasons

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might apply. Madhavi Menon has persuasively argued that this lack of satisfaction is deliberate and that the frustrated teleology of the poem insofar as we assume it is supposed to deliver a sexual experience to us is not a problem in Venus and Adonis. Menon argues that for many critics “the idea of failure is bound up with the idea of sexual failure”; in other words, Venus’ failure to get the sex she wants is conflated with what is then seen as the failure of the poem or of Shakespeare himself.8 Menon points out that Shakespeare chose to write a poem that fails to achieve a telos, both by presenting Venus’ attempts at seduction as unsuccessful and by making the flower that Adonis becomes at the end impermanent. It would be thus be more accurate to say that the poem succeeds in avoiding teleology than that it fails to achieve it. Shakespeare’s aim in Venus and Adonis was perhaps to write a poem that forces the reader to consider other pleasures than those provided by what we classify as closure. One of these pleasures in seeing how Shakespeare compensates for the lack of a visual element in a poetic text. As Richard Meek astutely points out, Venus and Adonis is “a sophisticated elaboration of the visuality of literary language in its own right.”9 This chapter will focus partly on this question, on how Shakespeare gestures towards the visual throughout the poem, seeking to find and exploit the visual potential within verse. To a certain extent, we could also say that his insistence on the visual, chiefly through similes, is one of the ways in which he frustrates narrative progress: visual presentation is more important to him than narrative advancement. As well, I want to consider the implications of Goran V. Stanivukovic’s comment that “the real subject of Venus and Adonis is desire in rhetoric, not the rhetoric of desire.”10 In this reading, our desire to see desire presented in poetic rhetoric

Even as the sun with purple-​coloured face Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-​cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase. Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn. Sick-​thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-​faced suitor ‘gins to woo him. (1–​6)

The salient feature here is the use of poetic figures and language. As Lucy Gent remarks, in this poem “rhetorical figures obtrude by their sheer wealth and by the skill with which they are handled.”13 In fact, there are so many poetic devices in these opening lines—​ unusual compound adjectives, metaphor, and simile are perhaps the most obvious—​that they effectively substitute for the narrative information we might expect to be the focus here and provide a pleasure that

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is the most important desire in the poem, rather than Venus’ desire for Adonis or his desire for some unknowable object. As Stanivukovic goes on to say, the poem “shows that the true nature of sexual pleasure is ‘the pleasure of the text.’ ”11 As well, William Weaver has argued that the poem “is a singular illustration of how much discourse could function as prologue and sequel to an (absent) act.”12 What unites these two critics is the idea that what could be perceived as a problem—​the absence of a sex scene—​results in a display of poetic power that is a wholly adequate—​and perhaps even superior—​substitute. In what follows, I  will look, among other things, at the various substitutes for sexual action Shakespeare contrives for us in the course of the poem. For now, I  want to look at a particular kind of substitute and to begin with the first stanza:

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depends on ornament and excess, which is to say a queer pleasure. Both metaphor and simile operate through substitution. I  think simile is especially predominant in Venus and Adonis because it is useful for Shakespeare to use this form of metaphor, in which the substitution is explicitly signalled.14 While a simple or straight metaphor baldly equates A and B, insisting on their sameness, a simile, with its use of “like” or “as” could lead us to consider both the process of substitution and the difference between the two things compared. In Venus and Adonis at least—​I am not making a categorical statement about similes in general—​the simile contributes to queer representation in two ways: as similes are so frequent in this poem they become obtrusive and effectively draw attention to the work it does, and as the things coupled by the simile are frequently odd the resulting discrepancy is also noticeable. I would add that the couple formed by the simile, which refuses the unity that the simple metaphor seeks to establish, functions as another substitute for the couple that the poem’s two characters will never form. The simile in the last line of the first stanza is especially marked: Shakespeare tells us that Venus woos Adonis “like a bold-​faced suitor.” This simile seems to be a simple statement of fact, rather than a poetic metaphor, as Shakespeare’s Venus is undeniably bold-​faced. Is the point perhaps that as a woman and as an immortal being she cannot technically be a suitor, as that typically implies both maleness and lower status? I think we are meant to ask the question rather than get an answer to it: the first simile in Venus and Adonis refuses to contribute to our smooth progression through the poem. The simile is further marked because “bold-​faced” recalls both “purple-​coloured face” in the first line and “rose-​cheeked”

‘Thrice fairer than myself,’ thus she began, ‘The field’s chief flower, sweet above compare, Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man, More white and red than doves or roses are.’ (7–​10)

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in the third line. As well, both these compound adjectives are odd in themselves, as men are not usually described as “rose-​ cheeked” and as purple seems a bizarre word to describe the sun. Like the simile, Shakespeare’s compound adjectives often bring two things together that might not work well together or that might seem strange in relation to the noun they modify and thus call attention to the work of representation they perform. But this is not the only work they do. As Gary Kuchar points out in his first-​rate discussion of how Venus and Adonis toys with narrative, “The sense of movement achieved in the opening … occurs through a series of implied similes that are contiguously linked”; he goes on to say that the “sequences of images and the intertexts they evoke work in combination to develop the ceaseless detour and postponement of sexual and narrative resolution.”15 The similes and the other rhetorical and poetic devices that proliferate wildly throughout the poem are a substitute for the sexual and narrative resolution that Kuchar mentions. Another way to put this is to say that instead of the heterosexual narrative that the presence of a female name and a male name in the title might lead us to expect, Shakespeare gives us queer representation through the sheer excess of his poem. In the first stanza this excess is delivered by the narrator, but in the second stanza, Venus begins the first of what will be many speeches throughout the poem, all of them excessive in one or more ways:

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Venus’ praise of Adonis is obviously hyperbolic—​although it is admittedly unclear how hyperbolic it is, as Adonis was famed for his beauty—​and she exceeds this verbal excess by declaring him to be “sweet above compare” at the same time she compares him to herself, to men, to nymphs, and to doves and roses. Her opening speech is of course typical of her speech and behaviour throughout the poem. She is as excessive in beauty, desire, and strength as she is in speech. Much criticism of the poem has seen Venus as physically monstrous, but Valerie Billing has recently argued for a positive valuation of her physical excess: “Venus’ largeness inspires non-​normative desires and queer erotics in the poem.”16 To put this another way, while Venus works hard to bring about a heterosexual coupling, her verbal representation and the ways in which Shakespeare represents her gesture to other erotic possibilities. These possibilities can perhaps most clearly be seen in her famous representation of herself. As one of her strategies to seduce Adonis, Venus describes herself in some detail. Blazons of beautiful women are certainly very common in Renaissance poetry: this is a form of representation that seems completely normal in context. But it is distinctly not normal for a woman to give a blazon of herself, and I  think the oddness of the resulting auto-​blazon, as we could call it, is emphasized both because we and Adonis and everyone else already know that Venus is beautiful and because she has already spoken of her beauty (133–​ 56). Thus, the auto-​ blazon is established as queer representation from the outset. After putting her arms around Adonis, Venus says to him:           since I have hemmed thee here Within the circuit of this ivory pale, I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer. (229–​31)

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Even before the blazon proper begins, the overdetermined nature of its language is clear. For instance, “pale” can be both the noun that means enclosure and which is modified by the adjective “ivory” that refers to her white skin and an adjective that intensifies the noun “ivory.” As well, there is the familiar pun on “deer” and “dear,” and behind it the implicit pun on “Venus” and “venery.” Most importantly, if Adonis is a deer enclosed by a pale, are we to understand this pale as something that protects him from the world outside or as something that prevents him from escaping from human hunters? Both meanings are available. As Venus develops the metaphor of herself as a landscape, she quickly becomes increasingly sexually explicit:  “Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry, /​Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie” (233–​4). While blazons typically begin with the hair and progress down the woman’s body, although without reaching the genitals, here Venus goes from her lips down to her genitals with celerity. The only hair mentioned is her pubic hair—​“Sweet bottom grass” (236)—​and the blazon ends at her vagina: “brakes obscure and rough” (237).17 Most blazons aim to arouse the desire to look; her blazon is more considered with the desire to touch. Despite the fact that the blazon is an invitation to sex between a man and a woman, I think we can say that Venus queers the blazon by using the form to describe herself, by the sexually explicit imagery, and ultimately by the question of what sexual activity is being proposed—​it is certainly not penile insertion into the vagina. Billing points out that “By excluding penetration, Venus instead invites a range of sexual practices.”18 In her focus on oral sex—​an activity that could have been considered a form of sodomy at the time of the poem’s composition—​Venus could be said to have queered heterosexuality within the poem. Venus and Adonis has much

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in common with other seduction scenes in Renaissance literature, but it appears that what she hopes to gain by her attempts at seduction is something that would not usually be considered the main event. One sign of Venus’ excessive language is obviously its sheer abundance. She makes numerous long speeches throughout the poem, whereas Adonis is for the most part noticeably terse. Her speech about hunting, stretching from line 613 to line 715 (approximately 8.6% of the poem), is excessive both because of its length and because of its wealth of detail. Venus begins by describing how fearsome the boar is. She then says that her own thoughts present The picture of an angry chafing boar, Under whose sharp fangs on his back doth lie An image like thyself, all stained with gore. (662–​4)

Venus’ attributes this image to a personified jealousy. Her meaning is that this personification is jealous of the joys of love, but if we follow Rambuss in recognizing that her depiction of the boar emphasizes its penetrative potential, then she could also be described as being jealous of the boar as of a rival in love.19 Here, Venus could be said to set up an understanding of the boar’s eventual killing of Adonis as sexual. Whatever any particular reader may think about this view, perhaps the important thing is that Venus’ rhetoric is also excessive because it sexualizes almost everything it deals with. In her efforts to prevent Adonis from hunting the dangerous boar, Venus suggests less powerful prey and she names the hare, the fox, and the roe. It is the hare that really engages her sympathies and leads her to an extended and vivid imagining

Unlike myself thou hear’st me moralize, Applying this to that, and so to so, For love can comment upon every woe. (712–​14)

Here, Venus depicts herself as a skilled orator, one who can speak on any occasion and any subject. Up to this point in the

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of the experiences of the hunted hare (679–​708), one that only ends because Adonis renews his efforts to break free. Venus naturally disapproves of his wish to be gone—​“Nay, do not struggle, for thou shalt not rise” (710)—​but is unable to remember where she was before this interruption:  “Where did I leave?” (715), she asks, and Adonis answers “No matter where … Leave me, and then the story aptly ends” (715–​16). In his play on the two sense of the verb “to leave” and in the fact that this exchange leads to his longest speech in the poem (42 lines), Adonis appears for the first time, if only to a limited extent, as a skilful user of language. The speech itself is quite well done, but of course it is also his last speech. It seems to me as if Shakespeare wants us to think that Venus has in some way influenced Adonis:  he has learned from her, although he has refused to be her lover. We could say that she taught him rhetoric and his profit on it is that he knows how to say no. In any case, this is one of a number of moments in Venus and Adonis in which Venus appears as much a pedagogue as a seducer.20 However unsuccessful Venus’ rhetoric is in seducing Adonis, both he and we derive some benefit from it, which enables a queer reading in which language can be appreciated for its own sake independent of whether it persuades. What is most striking to me in all this, however, is the passage in which Venus comments on her own rhetoric:

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poem, Venus has demonstrated how lavish her speech is; here she shows its basis in rhetorical technique. Indeed, in her use of “this to that” and “so to so”—​placeholders for the actual subject of a speech—​Venus presents language as a form that can be used for any content. Perhaps oddly, I am reminded of Robert Creeley’s comment in later life that “content is never more than an extension of form and form is never more than an extension of content.”21 While as a young man Creeley famously said that form is only an extension of content, he eventually revised his formulation to indicate that form and content are interdependent. Venus sounds unlike herself because content—​in this instance, a moral content very different from her usual speech—​comes from form, from its representation in language rather than from an essential core. Unlikely as it may sound, Venus is gesturing towards the position that all representation might conceivably be queer. I wrote above that Venus appears as a kind of pedagogue here, but I  think that her most importance appearance as a pedagogue clearly comes in the scene involving Adonis’ horse and I  want to look at this remarkable scene now.22 When Adonis attempts to flee Venus and remount his horse after having been plucked from the saddle by Venus in line 30, a second horse appears: But lo, from forth a copse that neighbours by A breeding jennet—​lusty, young and proud—​ Adonis’ trampling courses doth espy, And forth she rushes, shorts and neighs aloud. The strong-​necked steed, being tied unto a tree, Breaketh his rein, and to her straight goes he. (259–​64)

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The scene depicted here could be described as woodcut-​ ready: it seems like an emblem or like the perfect illustration of one of the many accounts of human passions as being like a horse that needs to be bridled and restrained. Venus herself is quick to take it as an exemplum and she seizes the chance to propose to Adonis that he takes the horse as a model. She begins by saying “Thy palfrey, as he should, /​Welcomes the warm approach of sweet desire” (385–​6). She presents the breaking of the rein that the horse was “Servilely mastered with” (392) as “Throwing the base thong from his bending crest, /​Enfranchising his mouth, his back, his breast” (395–​ 6). In Venus’ representation, the horse performs a heroic act that leads to true liberty; the implication is clearly that Adonis would be similarly liberated in giving in to Venus’ sexual demands. Thus, she tendentiously depicts Adonis’ refusal to have sex with her as a kind of timidity. In the next stanza, however, she makes a different argument, saying that someone who sees “his true-​love in her naked bed” (397) will not be content with merely looking: “when his glutton eye so full hath fed, /​His other agents aim at like delight” (399–​400). Venus concludes her moralizing on the horse with specifically pedagogic language: “O, learn to love! The lesson is but plain, /​And once made perfect, never lost again” (407–​08). I have gone over this remarkable speech in some detail because of its striking conflation of pedagogy and pederasty. Shakespeare’s contemporary readers would certainly have noticed how closely Venus’ explication of the horse’s behaviour parallels the primers that would have been used in their own education. Another way to put this is to say that Venus’ speech could have been seen as a queer representation of the schoolbooks that were used in Elizabethan England.

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There are a number of problems with Venus’ speech, however ingenious it may seem at first. For one thing, she ignores the fact that the horse is Adonis’ horse to use: it is an animal domesticated to human service rather than a wild animal. Her elision of this fact that she cannot afford to acknowledge is especially noticeable as only slightly earlier in the poem she used the arguments of use and nature to seduce Adonis (163–​ 74). More importantly, the episode of the horses that we have just read presents a somewhat different picture. Shakespeare tells us that the stallion performs for the mare—​“Sometimes he trots, as if he told the steps” (277)—​and that this performance is done: As who should say, “Lo, thus my strength is tried, And this I do to captivate the eye Of the fair breeder that is standing by.” (280–​2)

While the horse’s display is not uncommon mating behaviour among animals, I think it is significant that Shakespeare uses the verb “told”—​that is, counted. His representation of the stallion thus suggests rational computation: a deliberate display, rather than an excess of animal lust. This suggestion is developed when he explains the stallion’s behaviour by imagining that he is speaking in order to explain what he’s doing and when the stallion refers to the mare as a “breeder.” The stallion’s imagined commentary on his actions anticipates Venus’ moralizing of it and the description of the mare as a breeder further undermines any attempt to see the episode of the horses as unmediated nature. We see a further elaboration of all this in Shakespeare’s description of the horses just before they gallop off. Significantly, however, Shakespeare does not use the word

Look when a painter would surpass the life In limning out a well-​proportioned steed, His art with nature’s workmanship at strife, As if the dead the living should exceed: So did this horse excel a common one In shape, in courage, colour, pace, and bone. (289–​94)

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“gallop” but instead writes that “they hie them” (323) to the woods, using the same reflexive verb he used to describe Adonis’ attempts to go hunting at the beginning of the poem: “Rose-​cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase” (3). This parallel between Adonis and the horses arguably works against Venus’ insistence that Adonis learn from them: perhaps he is already like them. At any rate, the horses seem very much like humans, as we see most clearly in Shakespeare’s description of the mare’s response to the stallion’s display: “Being proud as females are, to see him woo her, /​She puts on outward strangeness, seems unkind” (309–​10). The stallion’s response is to act “like a melancholy malcontent” (313) at which the mare “perceiving that he was enraged, /​Grew kinder, and his fury was assuaged” (317–​18). In their conforming to the gendered behaviour expected of Elizabethan men and women, the horses emphasize Venus’ violation of these norms in her aggressive attempts to seduce Adonis. As well, the striking artificiality of the horses’ behaviour means that when Venus uses the stallion in her attempt to seduce Adonis, her rhetoric will not ring true. In other words, the horses provide a queer representation of human sexual behaviour and underline the queerness of Venus’ own representations. Between the two descriptions of the horses that I have just discussed there occurs a curious passage in which Shakespeare compares the horse to a painting of a horse:

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The opposition between art and nature is familiar from much Renaissance literature, but what makes this passage odd is that the opposition in these lines does not so much involve art contrasted to nature but rather one form of nature—​Adonis’ beautiful horse—​contrasted to another—​the average horse. In effect, Shakespeare says that an artist would accidentally have depicted Adonis’ horse merely by trying to perfect the imperfections of a natural horse. What we have understood to be the hyperboles of the poem (most of which occur in Venus’ descriptions of Adonis’ beauty) are not hyperbolic but rather simple statements of fact: what we might have taken as queer representations is actually simple accuracy. The stanza makes a strong opposition between art and nature by referring to the former as “the dead”: art is inanimate matter. Yet this opposition is complicated by the next stanza, which gives us a blazon. This highly poetic device should remind us that Adonis’ horse, the fictional horse of a fictional character, is firmly in the category of art. Our awareness that within Venus and Adonis both art and nature can only really be art is a form of queer representation insofar as it draws attention to the fact of representation itself. The poetic device of the blazon is emphasized by being (so far as I know) the only equine blazon extant and by following so closely after Venus’ equally if differently odd auto-​blazon. The difference between the blazons is instructive. After enumerating various features of the horse, the stanza ends in a significant couplet: “Look what a horse should have he did not lack, /​ Save a proud rider on so proud a back” (299–​300). Instructed by our reading of Venus’ blazon, we would naturally expect that the stanza would end with a description of (or at least a reference to) the stallion’s penis, but what we get instead is a reminder that the stallion is a use animal, like the slightly

earlier reference to the mare as a “breeder”: rather than the stallion riding the mare, in the metaphorical and sexual sense of that word, it is Adonis who should ride the stallion, in the literal and not at all (I assume) sexual sense of that word. Shakespeare returns to the sexual implications of riding almost exactly 300 lines later. Venus has her arms around Adonis’ neck when he says he intends to hunt the boar. Frightened by this news she faints and he falls on top of her: Now is she in the very lists of love, Her champion mounted for the hot encounter. All is imaginary she doth prove. He will not manage her, although he mount her.

The feminine rhyme of “encounter /​mount her” is perhaps the best in the poem, approaching the brilliance of Marlowe’s feminine rhymes in Hero and Leander. What is more, the encounter is doubly metaphorical: Shakespeare refers both to the encounter between hostile parties, a metaphor already set up by the reference to “lists,” and to a sexual encounter. And the encounter will be metaphorically hot whether we see it as a combat or as a sex act. But here again there is a tension between the metaphorical and the literal. Although Adonis is on top of Venus and they are thus in an enduringly popular position for sexual intercourse, there will be no sex, which is to say that the metaphor will remain merely a metaphor. The tension is increased by Shakespeare’s use of the verb “prove,” that is, experience. Venus experiences something that does not happen, which is to say that “prove” is itself used metaphorically. What makes this particular representation even queerer is the comparison in the next stanza:  “Even so poor birds

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(595–​8)

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deceived with painted grapes /​Do surfeit by the eye, and pine the maw” (601–​02). I  have said that metaphors work by substitution and that in Venus and Adonis they can be seen as substitutes for the sex scene that Shakespeare never writes; these lines are a good example, as art is presented as physically satisfying (if not in the way Venus wants). Furthermore, the comparison is also an allusion to the famous story from Pliny’s Natural History about the contest between the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius.23 In these lines, Shakespeare covers Zeuxis’ painting, a depiction of grapes so lifelike that birds tried to eat them. Intriguingly, however, he leaves out the rest of the story. Thinking he would win, Zeuxis tried to pull back the curtain covering Parrhasius’ painting and found that the painting was of a curtain, at which he conceded defeat. The second part of this story is relevant to Venus and Adonis in more than one way. For one thing, it can be seen as a literalization of the famous adage “ars est celare artem” (art should hide art), a saying that presents the ideal artwork as one that is not obviously artistic. Parrhasius exceeds this by making the hiding of art an artwork in its own right and Shakespeare exceeds Parrhasius by effectively hiding his painting of the hiding of art. In its (paradoxical) highlighting of the desire to conceal art by leading the reader to expect an allusion that never appears, Shakespeare highlights his own art and thus this lack of representation is a queer representation. I have argued that Shakespeare’s frequent and frequently confusing figures of speech should be seen as substitutes for the sexual activity that will never take place, but perhaps the most pervasive substitutes are the numerous instances to bodily fluid throughout the poem. By my count, there are 15 references to bodily fluids in the 1194 lines of Venus and Adonis. These references are usually to sweat or tears, although Venus

refers to vaginal lubrication in her auto-​blazon, and they are usually Venus’ fluids. In some ways, Venus is the stereotypical “leaky woman” of Renaissance literature; her fluids always exceeding the limits of her body just as her speech exceeds the limits of poetic and womanly decorum.24 Indeed, Pauline Kiernan has argued that we should see these two kinds of excess as linked: Emotion finds its expression not only in the purely physical “raining” of her tears and the sweat that seems perpetually to be issuing from her pores with hot desire, but also in her repeatedly impotent linguistic attempts to persuade the beloved to respond to her tumescent flesh, her torrential

I would be remiss not to point out that Kiernan’s brilliant diction is itself a kind of queer representation, one that perfectly represents Venus’ inability to restrain herself. The bodily fluid that significantly never appears in the poem is obviously Adonis’ semen. Like Parrhasius’ painting, only notionally present behind its painted curtain, this is something Shakespeare cannot represent in his poem, although its absence arguably produces the numerous other exudations throughout Venus and Adonis. In fact, it is Adonis, rather than Venus, whose bodily fluids are first mentioned, although hers predominate from that point on. After her first speech to him, entreating him to love her, she seizes           his sweating palm The precedent of pith and livelihood, And trembling in her passion, calls it balm. (25–​8)

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tears and wearisome tropes.25

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Thinking of his sweat as a precedent of the semen he will produce when they have sex, as if it were Cowper’s fluid, Venus loses control: “Being so enraged, desire doth lend her force /​Courageously to pluck him from his horse” (29–​30). Her action is a kind of sexual assault, and at this point it might seem that the inevitable outcome will be that she rapes him, but instead, after tying up his horse she begins to talk and to weep, and this talking and weeping (and sweating) will in effect take up almost all of the rest of the poem. Bodily fluids are represented so frequently in Venus and Adonis in lieu of—​ but also to remind us of—​the one bodily fluid that escapes representation altogether. Adonis’ bodily fluids both begin and end the poem, although in both cases it is Venus who has the agency. But before I talk about these fluids, I want to look at how Shakespeare returns to the theme of sight. As I have shown, the poem frequently focuses our attention on the process of representation; at the end of the poem, Shakespeare focuses on how Venus perceives what is represented to her. First we get her response to the sight of Adonis’ mangled corpse: Which seen, her eyes, as murdered with the view, Like stars ashamed of day themselves withdrew. Or as the snail, whose tender horns being hit Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain. (1031–​4)

Shakespeare uses two similes, each of which conveys the idea of a retreat into darkness. The relatively rare double simile is highlighted both by the vast difference in scale between stars and snails and by the fact that it is introduced by “Which

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seen,” a curiously Latinate construction that makes most sense as an ablative absolute. So when Venus shuns representations, Shakespeare focuses even greater attention on his own representations. The stanza that follow are even odder, as they develop the metaphor of the eyes withdrawing—​ I say “metaphor” as I do not believe we are intended to believe that Venus actually has fully retractable eyes. Shakespeare personifies Venus’ interior: her eyes “resign their office and their light /​To the disposing of her troubled brain” (1039–​40); her brain tells the eyes to remain dark and stop representing anything: “never wound the heart with looks again” (1042); the heart somehow overhears this and “gives a deadly groan” (1044) that makes everything in the body shake with the result “[t]‌hat from their dark beds once more leap her eyes” (1050) and thus she is forced to see Adonis’ corpse again. This passage is probably the most excessive, and most queerly excessive, representation in the poem. It is also a kind of narrative highlight. To a certain extent, more happens in these three stanzas than in the rest of the poem. Or, at least, more happens in the cause and effect way that is our most basic model for narrative. But like the largely event-​free poem in which this is an episode (arguably the kind of mythological digression that is typical of the epyllion as a genre), this narrative has no real result: at the end, as Venus’ eyes open again, she is exactly in the same position as she was at its beginning. For that matter, so are we. We should perhaps take this episode of how a queer representation can also queer narrative progression itself. Venus’ problems with seeing continue even after her eyes are open, however. Instead of refusing to look at Adonis’ wounds she decides to stare at them

        so steadfastly That her sight, dazzling, makes the wound seem three, And then she reprehends her mangling eye, That makes more gashes where no breach should be.

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(1063–​6)

From not seeing any Adonis at all she now sees more than one. In this passage, Shakespeare takes the popular Renaissance view of extromission, according to which sight is an active sense like touching rather than a passive one like hearing, and exaggerates it to the point that the hypothetical “eyebeams” that extend from the eyes to whatever is seen become cutting weapons. Shakespeare explains what Venus sees by saying that “oft the eye mistakes, the brain being troubled” (1068), but I think that the idea that the eye can mangle a human body remains in the poem and is important to it. In describing Venus’ blurred vision so carefully and then in explaining it, Shakespeare once again draws attention to the process of representation, and he does so precisely at the point at which we might expect representation to be simplest: the mere relaying of images to the brain. Venus’ vision is thus linked to all the distracting similes and the generally excessive rhetoric of the poem as an example of how representation can interpose itself between what is seen and how we understand it. In what remains of the poem, Venus gives two speeches. The first is a celebration of Adonis’ beauty and ends with a discussion of the boar’s killing of him; the second is a depressing vision of the future of love, essentially one that predicts all lovers will be as unhappy as she is. Between these speeches there is a further passage that focuses on Venus’ sight. It begins when Venus “stains her face with his congealèd blood”

(1122), yet another example of her taking his bodily fluids as substitutes for his semen. Then she lifts his eyelids: Where lo, two lamps, burnt out, in darkness lies. Two glasses where herself herself beheld A thousand times, and now no more reflect.

Once again we have two metaphors in a row, but the most important pair here is “herself.” It seems that one of Adonis’ important functions—​and perhaps the most important—​was to serve as a mirror for Venus. Shakespeare follows the lines I’ve just quoted by saying “Their virtue lost wherein they late excelled, /​And every beauty robbed of his effect” (1131–​2), and by this point it is not clear whether the beauties referred to are Adonis’ own eyes or the reflections of Venus’ beauty that they provided. It turns out that he was primarily a representation of her and now she can no longer be seen, a point Shakespeare underlines when he ends the poem by writing that Venus returns to Paphos “to immure herself and not be seen” (1194). Having lost the means to represent herself, she withdraws from representation altogether. But before this happens, Adonis himself vanishes. When Venus ends her second speech, Shakespeare writes: “By this, the boy that by her side lay killed /​Was melted like a vapour from her sight” (1165–​6). The transition seems noticeably casual and it is impossible to be sure how it works in such narrative as this final scene has. “By this” could mean either “at this time” or even “because of this.” I think that Shakespeare is imitating Marlowe’s use of the transition in Hero and Leander: “By this, sad Hero, with love unacquainted, /​Viewing Leanders face, fell downe and fainted.”26 Marlowe’s lines are

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(1128–​30)

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obviously comic, but the abruptness and the consequent focus on the act of representing what could be either a transition or a cause and effect connection are similar. Shakespeare wants to draw the reader’s attention to how he represents the shift from describing how Venus mourns Adonis to describing Adonis’ corpse. Or, rather, to describing the absence of his corpse, which is presented in a way that returns, yet again, to the question of how and what Venus sees: Adonis is said to have disappeared “from her sight” rather than, for example, from the ground or from the mortal world. Venus is repeatedly unable to see his corpse and Shakespeare is unable to represent it and, I  would argue, wants us to notice that he cannot or will not represent it. As was the case in Lucrece, not representing is an important part of representing. As in the Metamorphoses, this version of the story of Adonis ends with a flower. Shakespeare makes a number of changes, however, so I  want to begin my discussion by looking at Ovid’s account. In his poem, Venus herself changes the corpse into a flower: sic fata cruorem, nectare odorato sparsit, qui tactus ab illo intumuit sic, ut fuluo perlucida caeno surgere bulla solet; nec plena longior hora facta mora est, cum flos de sanguine concolor ortus.27

(Thus saying, she sprinkled sweet-​ smelling nectar on the blood, which swelled up on contact just as bubbles rise in yellow mud; and in no longer than an hour a flower of the colour of blood rose up.) In Ovid, Venus uses her power to create the flower that Adonis becomes, mixing his human blood with the drink of the gods.

Ovid concludes his story (and the tenth book of his poem) by saying that the flower lasts only a short time because the fragile petals are too easily “excutiunt idem, qui praestant nomina, uenti” (stripped off by the wind, which gives it its name).28 Turning to Shakespeare, we see how important his changes are. Perhaps because Ovid’s version features the union of human and divine fluids, Shakespeare omits the nectar. The flower does not arise because of Venus’ agency, but sponte sua. In fact, it is not actually clear that it is in any way Adonis, although Venus certainly thinks so: And in his blood that on the ground lay spilled, A purple flower sprung up, chequered with white, Resembling well his pale cheeks, and the blood (1167–​70)

One obvious difference is that the flower Shakespeare describes is not an anemone, something that marks a clear visual difference between the two poems. And while the flower is certainly supernatural and while it certainly resembles Adonis, that is not the same as Ovid’s precise description of how the flower is made. Instead of stressing the power of Venus, Shakespeare stresses the visual aspect of the scene. In other words, we can take the flower in Shakespeare’s poem as at once a representation of the dead Adonis and a representation of the poem’s focus on the visual, on how things look. In her discussion, Belsey points out that “the identity of the windflower is deferred.”29 I would add that it is deferred until some point after the poem ends:  like the sex act itself, the name of the flower—​if it even has one—​is something Shakespeare does not represent.

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Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood.

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The anemone that Adonis becomes in the Metamorphoses is, as Ovid notes, a fragile flower. Nevertheless, it is a flower that has continued to thrive over the millennia. In contrast, the flower in Venus and Adonis appears to have no successors as Venus kills it instantly: “She crops the stalk, and in the breach appears /​Green-​dropping sap, which she compares to tears” (1175–​6). Venus’ comparison here is yet another distracting simile, as the sap is clearly more like blood than like tears. More importantly, the sap is the last bodily fluid in the poem, the last imperfect substitute for Adonis’ semen. Venus places the torn flower in her bosom as an ornament: “it is as good /​ To wither in my breast as in his blood” (1181–​2). In the next stanza, she metaphorically describes the flower as a child: “Lo, in this hollow cradle take thy rest; /​My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night” (1186–​7). In these lines Venus represents this flower, the first and last of its kind, as the child Adonis never fathered. When Venus withdraws to her palace, taking the flower that represents Adonis’ corpse with her, we see that Venus and Adonis is a poem teeming with frequently odd and always noticeable representations but we are left with nothing behind those representations. The poem is ultimately like the flower:  an ornament and a thing that represents something that is not there. NOTES 1 Many critics writing on the poem have talked about Shakespeare’s revisions of Ovid. Perhaps the best is Sansonetti, “Out-​Oviding Ovid in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.” See also Mortimer, “The Ending of Venus and Adonis.” 2 Hero and Leander, 1.12–​14. 3 Belsey, “Love as Trompe-​l’oeil,” 258. 4 Eric Langley argues that it is ultimately Venus who is the narcissist in the poem. See “ ‘And Died to Kiss his Shadow.’ ” See also the discussion by Garrison, “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” 171.

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5 Rambuss, “What It Feels Like for a Boy,” 252. Marcela Kostihová has argued that the poem actually seeks to differentiate the frequently conflated categories of homosexuality and bestiality, see “Discerning (Dis)taste.” An excellent discussion of the relationship between sexuality and the natural world in the poem is Callaghan, “(Un)natural Loving.” For a good discussion of the erotics of the boar’s killing of Adonis, see Smith, “A ‘Consummation Devoutly to be Wished.’ ” 6 For the argument that we should see the hunt as a homosocial alternative to sexual desire, see Shohet, “Shakespeare’s Eager Adonis.” 7 Simone Chess has recently argued that we should see Adonis as asexual, which seems the most plausible explanation of all. See “Asexuality, Queer Chastity, and Adolescence in Early Modern Literature,” especially  31–​2. 8 Menon, “Spurning Teleology in Venus and Adonis,” 499. 9 Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare, 31. For his excellent discussion of the poem, see 29–​54. 10 Stanivukovic, “Troping Desire in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” 290. 11 Ibid., 299. 12 Weaver, Untutored Lines, 79. 13 Gent, “ ‘Venus and Adonis,’ ” 722. 14 By Gent’s count there are about 77 similes in the 1194 lines of the poems as opposed to only 53 in the much longer Rape of Lucrece (1955 lines); see ibid., 723. 15 Kuchar, “Narrative and the Forms of Desire in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” 4, 6. 16 Billing, “Queer Erotics of Size in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” 132. For another useful corrective to the misogyny of much of the criticism of the poem, see Levy-​Navarro, “Resisting Fatphobia in the Critical Tradition of Venus and Adonis.” 17 For an analysis of this passage focusing on the invitation to cunnilingus, see Fisher, “ ‘Stray[ing] Lower Where the Pleasant Fountains Lie.’ ” 18 Billing, “Queer Erotics of Size in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, 134. 19 See Rambuss, “What It Feels Like for a Boy,” 248. 20 The best discussion of this is Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 62–​94. See also Stapleton, “Venus as Praeceptor.” 21 Creeley, “Robert Creeley in Conversation with Leonard Schwartz.”

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22 See Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 63–​4. Two other good discussions are Fleck, “ ‘Arte with her contending, doth aspire T’excell the natural,’ ” 99–​100, and Jacobson, Barbarous Antiquity, 120–​6. For my own earlier discussion of this passage, see “Nondramatic Style,” 304–​05. 23 For the original, see Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, 65–​6. A good discussion of Shakespeare’s handling of this story is Fleck, “ ‘Arte with her contending, doth aspire T’excell the naturall,’ ” 110–​11. 24 Perhaps the single best analysis of the Renaissance discourse of the leaky women is Paster, “Leaky Vessels.” 25 Kiernan, “Venus and Adonis and Ovidian Indecorous Wit,” 86. 26 Hero and Leander, II.1–​2. This is an important transition in Marlowe’s poem, as it begins the poem’s second sestiad. The division into sestiads was not Marlowe’s, but it is still an important shift in the poem from the narration of Cupid and the Fates to the return to the main narrative of the poem. 27 Ovid, Metamorphoses, X.731–​5. 28 Ibid., X.739. The flower is the anemone, which comes from the Greek word for wind. 29 Belsey, “Love as Trompe-​l’oeil,” 261.

Coda

I want to end this book as I  began it:  by looking at both Shakespeare and more recent poetry (and some recent criticism). One of the American poet Lyn Hejinian’s points in the introduction to her collection of essays provides a useful starting point: Poetry, to use William James’s phrase, “is in the transition as much as in the terms connected.” This is not to say that poetry is about transition but that “aboutness” (in poetry, but, I would argue, also in life) is transitional, transitory; “aboutness” into question.1

Hejinian’s statement can be taken in a number of ways. For one, it suggests that the representation that drama (especially) and poetry (to a somewhat lesser extent) are expected to provide is perhaps not really the point after all. In repeatedly, insistently, and in a number of ways focusing attention on the means by which representation occurs, the texts by Shakespeare that I  have discussed in this book might make us think about aboutness. To what extent, for instance, could we say that a particular text is largely about how images are conveyed to the reader? Or to put it another way, to what extent might a text be about its own strategies of aboutness

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indeed, poetry (and perhaps life) call traditional notions of

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rather than, for example, the legend of Venus and Adonis or the history of King John? I have focused throughout this book on those passages in which some of Shakespeare’s texts make the most obvious transition—​from the representation to the thing represented, whether that exists in our minds when we read a poem or in the performance when we see a play—​ something to be resisted. Queerly resisted, I would say. In her perceptive and provocative book on the often unsettling use of figures of speech in Renaissance poetry, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld remarks of a noticeably elaborate poem by Sir Philip Sidney that “[t]‌he pleasure of this poem belongs to its maker rather than to his audience and this pleasure serves to alienate the maker from rather than reinforce the logic of his immediate community.”2 For Rosenfeld, this is at least potentially a problem. My argument throughout this book, on the other hand, has generally been that this kind of alienation is a good and productive thing. After all, the logic of our immediate community is utilitarian, homophobic, hedonophobic, and teleological (mutatis mutandis, the same was true of the logic of Shakespeare’s immediate community); it is our duty to resist this logic at all times. What is more, I think it is important to stress that the audience, just as much as the poet, may take pleasure in elaborate and often self-​ consciously poetic language, language that utterly exceeds any utilitarian purpose. Language, that is, that represents something important like poetry rather than something trivial like subject matter. The thing represented aesthetically is typically intended to be real or at least adjacent to the real, and certainly Shakespeare has often been praised for his realism. What interests me is an insistence on the aesthetic realm, and in this connection I was struck by the comments made by the queer Latino poet Gabriel

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Ojeda-​Sague in a conversation with his publisher that is printed at the end of his 2018 book Jazzercise Is a Language. Speaking of how he became a poet, Ojeda-​Sague says that when he was about 19 years old he realized that he “was interested in aesthetics and the untrueness of aesthetics.”3 Aesthetics is a broad category that can include all sorts of things, varying of course from one art form to another, but what matters most to me here is his use of the word “untrueness.” We would normally use the word “falsity,” perhaps, but I  think “untrueness” is the right choice both because it contains the word “true” and because in its awkwardness and rarity it focuses our attention on the word itself as much as on what it represents. As I see it, Ojeda-​Sague’s point is not that aesthetics is in any sense a lie but rather that it is something that operates outside of the normal world in which truth and falsity form one of our most important binary oppositions: untrueness names a condition in which something—​for my purposes, of course, a work of verbal art—​is simultaneously real and not real, a fiction that has not lost sight of the truth. A thing that is aesthetic—​a literary text, for example—​is artificial but it is still a real thing. Ojeda-​Sague reminds us of this by writing and structuring his poems according to complex and arbitrary rules, so that we are always aware of the poem as a shaped object on the page.4 In the case of Shakespeare, we could think, for instance, both of the mass and weight of the New Oxford Shakespeare from which I  have quoted throughout this book and also of the hours spent at the theatre watching the plays I discuss here or the hours spent reading these texts, to list only some of the ways in which these untrue texts are real in the real world. When I  wrote that what matters most here is that aesthetics is not true, I  meant that it matters to Ojeda-​Sague, to me, and even, I think, to Shakespeare, at least sometimes.

One way to think about this is to consider an aphorism by Georg Simmel: The usual notion is as follows: here is the natural world, there the transcendent, we belong to one of the two. But now, we belong to a third one beyond words, of which both the natural and the transcendent are reflections,

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projections, forgeries, and interpretations.5

Although I  don’t believe in the transcendent and although I hate even to imagine some sort of existence without words, I like Simmel’s sense that even the natural world is composed of, as he puts it, forgeries. I  take Simmel to mean (among other things) that the things we know or think we know about both the natural and the transcendent worlds are really just representations of one sort or another:  artificial but still real, as I said above. What has interested me in the texts by Shakespeare that I  have discussed in this book are the moments at which it seems to me that he has chosen to focus on the “reflections, projections, forgeries, and interpretations” rather than on giving the impression that these things accurately represent the world in which his stories take place or the world in which we live. As I have said, this focus on the process of representation can be seen in many places in Shakespeare’s works; I  have chosen here to look at what strikes me as particularly noteworthy examples of this focus. Ojeda-​Sague says that he sees “poetry as a simulation of language, experience, and aesthetics. It is the word ‘simulation’ that is key for me because it marks that a poem is not true, and that gap is what I try to exploit the most.”6 In this book, I have looked at a number of texts in which I felt that

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one of the most important things Shakespeare was doing was exploiting this very gap. I recognize that the claim will seem counterintuitive:  Shakespeare, perhaps more than any other English author and certainly more than any other English author of his era, is usually considered an artist of verisimilitude. His characters are often thought to be true to life and the consensus is often that, to quote his most famous character, he aims “to hold, as ʼtwere, the mirror up to nature.”7 I will say the obvious by pointing out that the parenthetical “as ʼtwere” could be a tacit acknowledgement of the untrueness of what will be represented, of the extent to which whatever has been said may well be (merely) a turn of phrase. As well, in reversing the image reflected in it, a mirror inescapably testifies to the fact that what we see is mediated by the means of representation. In other words, this famous statement that is often taken to mean that art should be realistic actually calls attention to representation as a mediating force. What is more, I have assumed in this book that the mirror—​the means of representation—​may be queer. However verisimilar many of the characters and emotions represented in the texts I  have discussed here may be and regardless of whether same-​sex bonds are presented, Shakespeare’s representational strategies are often, to return to the passage from Sedgwick’s Tendencies that I  quoted in the introduction, excessive and oblique. In other words, they are queer. Throughout this book, I  have avoided defining exactly what queer representation is; I want to conclude it by continuing this avoidance, an avoidance that is—​to me, at least—​ unmistakably queer. In order to do this, I turn to the words of the art historian David Getsy in his writing about queer abstraction. This is a category that is admittedly hard even to imagine: if an artwork does not depict anything, how can it

depict queerness? At the beginning of his remarkable essay, Getsy says, “Queer abstraction,” like all categories, will fail us in the end even though it has served to make things possible and imaginable. You will be frustrated and fruitless if you go searching for a singular definition of “queer abstraction”—​ let alone anything resembling a style, an iconography, 180  Shakespeare and Queer Representation

or a movement. Nevertheless, it has been used as a good-​enough shorthand for the many ways in which both artists and viewers have invested abstraction with queer perspectives and priorities.8

I want to single out the double alliteration of “frustrated and fruitless,” especially since one possible synonym of “fruitless” is “devoid of queer content.” Perhaps most valuable is the point that even if a term cannot be precisely defined, it can still “make things possible and imaginable.” This undefined term can allow us to think in different ways. Also very valuable is the focus at the end of the passage I’ve quoted on how whatever “queer perspectives and priorities” we might see in a work of art might have been put there either by the creator or by the spectator (or reader) rather than existing in the work because of what we would recognize as queer content. This is to say that in the absence of any knowledge about what Shakespeare thought, queer representation is something that we ourselves find in his work—​or fail to find in his work. Many people, probably most people, will find queerness in the love of the male poet for the man in the sonnets, for example, or in the passionate attachments between Antonio and Sebastian in Twelfth Night. For my purposes in this book, queer representation has been a good-​enough shorthand and

One of the most moving aspects of queer theory might be the irrepressible resources of relatability it mobilizes, the resilient creativity with which queer readers find ways of relating to the objects of a culture that has often shown little interest in their survival.10

I hope that in this book I  have demonstrated my own resilient creativity in finding what I see as signs of queerness in Shakespeare. Shakespeare is so endlessly and tirelessly

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it has been valuable to me in this project because it has made a certain way of considering and discussing these texts by Shakespeare both possible and imaginable. I  have also been mindful of what Corey McEleney wrote at the end of his excellent book on Renaissance literature and the idea of use. He calls for a blurring of the line between criticism and literature and urges us to entertain “the possibility that the pleasure of criticism, not unlike the pleasure of literature, may exceed or even thwart whatever goals of utility it aims to reach and secure” and to embrace “the charge of self-​indulgence too often levied against queer writers.”9 Shakespeare is a queer writer, at least sometimes; I  am always a queer writer. The queer representations that this book discusses come from my own idiosyncratic sense of what queerness is and I recognize that others will see queerness in Shakespeare elsewhere or perhaps nowhere. I could summarize my point here by saying that my intention is not to establish a queer Shakespearean canon but instead to adumbrate some of the ways in which Renaissance texts can be read queerly. In his recent article on Frank O’Hara, Brian Glavey makes a point about how queer readers operate even in relation to texts that are not obviously queer:

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promoted in English literary studies—​ and, of course, in Renaissance studies in particular—​that it would be a shame not to find queer ways of relating to his texts. As for the pleasure of criticism or literature or indeed both, I  assure you that writing this book has been pleasurable for me and I hope that reading it has been pleasurable for you. My aim in this book has never been to provide either a definition or a definitive treatment of my subject. Instead, I look forward to reading what other critics queerly imagine about Shakespeare and about representation. NOTES 1 Hejinian, Language of Inquiry, 2. 2 Rosenfeld, Indecorous Thinking, 52. The poem in question here is the famous glove poem from the Old Arcadia. 3 Ojeda-​Sague, Jazzercise Is a Language, 112. 4 For Ojeda-​Sague’s account of his compositional practice, see ibid., 114. 5 Simmel, “Journal Aphorisms” 1, The View of Life, 160. 6 Ojeda-​Sague, Jazzercise Is a Language, 112. 7 Hamlet, 9.17–​18. 8 Getsy, “Ten Queer Theses on Abstraction,” 65. 9 McEleney, Futile Pleasures, 168–​9. 10 Glavey, “Having a Coke with You Is Even More Fun Than Ideology Critique,” 999.

Adelman, Janet. “ ‘Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth.” In Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce:  Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber. 133–​42. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Ahmed, Sara. What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Amin, Kadji, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez. “Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social.” ASAP/​Journal 2 (2017): 227–​39. Aquilina, Mario. “The Event of Style in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Oxford Literary Review 37 (2015): 119–​39. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. —​—​—​. Camera Lucida:  Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. Beckwith, Sarah. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012. Belsey, Catherine. “Love as Trompe-​l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis.” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 257–​76. —​—​—​. “Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond.” Shakespeare Quarterly 63 (2012): 175–​98. Berry, Amanda. “Cymbeline:  Desire Vomit Emptiness:  Cymbeline’s Marriage Time.” In Shakesqueer:  A Queer Companion to the Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon. 89–​96. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Billing, Valerie. “The Queer Erotics of Size in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.” Shakespeare Studies 45 (2017): 131–​6. Bloom, Gina. “Words Made of Breath:  Gender and Vocal Agency in King John.” Shakespeare Studies 33 (2005): 125–​55.

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Index

aboutness 175–​176 Aeneid 118–​119 aesthetics 176–​178 Ahmed, Sara 7, 127 “Allegory” 4–​7 Amin, Kadji 3 Ars Poetica 123–​124 ASAP/​Journal 4

194 Index

Barthes, Roland 11–​12, 17, 18 Belsey, Catherine 119, 149, 171 Berry, Amanda 23, 28 Billing, Valerie 154, 155 Brooke, Nicholas 70 camp 9–​10, 21n16, 137, 138 Capildeo, Vahni  141 Chapman, Alison A. 109 Clarke, Danielle 105 Creeley, Robert 158 Cymbeline 16–​17, 23–​45; clothes and jewellery, representation through 29–​31, 32, 38; dirge 72, 75; discrepancy between two modes of dramatic representation 28, 36–​37; embodiment and representation 29–​32, 38–​40, 41; families in 27; final scene 23–​24, 41, 42, 43; Giacomo’s visit to Innogen’s chamber 32–​36; heteronormativity and queerness in 24, 40, 43; homoeroticism

24; homosociality 24; identification of lost sons 39–​40; identity, issue of 26–​32; Innogen’s misrecognition of Cloten’s corpse 31–​32; Jupiter’s text 41–​42; marriage of Innogen and Posthumus 24–​25, 27–​29; masque 41, 42–​43; narrative excess 23–​24, 42, 43; Posthumus’ soliloquy before battle 38–​39; queer representation 36, 37–​38, 40–​42; queer time 28; queerness of 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 43; representation and potential unreliability 25–​26, 32–​36, 37–​39 Downs-​Gamble, Margaret 77 Dubrow, Heather 121 Eagleton, Terry  71 Edelman, Lee 26 Enterline, Lynn 115, 120 Fineman, Joel 103, 145 Foster, Donald W. 82 Gent, Lucy 151 Getsy, David 179–​180 Gil, Daniel Juan 142 Glavey, Brian 181

Halpern, Richard 129, 140 Hejinian, Lyn 1, 2, 175 Hero and Leander 148, 163, 169–​170 Hofmann, Richie 4–​7 Horace 123–​124 Hulse, Clark 134

Kuchar, Gary 153 Kunin, Aaron 133

Kahn, Coppélia 120 Kiernan, Pauline 165 King John 46–​69; antimetabole 55, 58, 67; battle 57–​59; Chatillon’s message from King of France 47–​48; connection to Magna Carta and The Troublesome Reign of King John 46; Constance and outward form and inner feelings 53–​54; death of Arthur 64–​65; dying from poison 54; embodiment and representation 48–​49, 52, 54; false representation 65–​66, 68; “form” 52–​54; marriage of Blanche and Philip’s son 59–​60; parallelism 54–​57; physical representation as metaphorical texts 48–​52, 54, 63; plot for Hubert to murder Arthur 61–​64; queer representation 19–​20, 54, 55, 56–​57, 58, 59, 63, 67–​68; queerness of theatrical representation 65–​66; as a “scribbled form” 53, 54, 67; second coronation 60–​61; sexual play on words 59; texts, emphasis on 16, 46–​47, 48, 54, 63, 66, 67; treaty between Dauphin and English nobles 66–​67; warrant to visit Arthur 63, 64; will of Sir Robert Faulconbridge 48, 49, 50, 52, 53 King Lear 19, 37 King, Ros 23, 24

Macbeth 16, 70–​98; Banquo’s and Macbeth’s response to witches’ disappearance 82–​83; Banquo’s descriptions of witches 79–​80; dagger speech 83–​86; gender representation 80–​81, 89–​90, 93; Lady Macbeth 87–​89; letter describing Macbeth’s meeting with witches 86–​87; Macbeth’s first line 76–​77; Malcolm’s final speech 94–​96; ‘palpable,’ use of word 85–​86; queer representation 71, 74, 79, 80, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94; queer time 74, 87, 92; queer, witches as 79, 80; real and false representations 84–​86, 92; rhyming couplet at end of first scene 72–​73; rhyming couplet at end of second scene 76; rhyming couplet at start of first scene 73–​74; second scene 75–​76; sense that witches are not entirely in play 78, 79, 90–​91; straight representation of queer representation 77; time and space for witches 73–​74; witches as part of, or apart from, nature 78–​79; witches’ first scene 71–​75; witches greet Macbeth 81; witches’ power over language of human characters 75–​77, 91; witches’ prophecies 90–​93; witches reveal future to Banquo and Macbeth 81–​82

195  Index

“The Landscape” 7–​9 Lin, Erika T.  49 Lopez, Jeremy 37 Love, Heather 28

Markidou, Vassiliki  73 Marlowe, Christopher 148, 169–​170 Matz, Robert 131 McEleney, Corey 181 Meek, Richard 122–​123, 150 Menon, Madhavi 2–​3, 150 Metamorphoses 148, 163, 170–​171, 172 Musser, Amber Jamilla 4 Narcissus 129–​130 Natural History 164 non-​queer representation  18–​19

196 Index

Ojeda-​Sague, Gabriel 177, 178 order of Shakespeare’s works 17 Ovid 148, 163, 170–​171, 172 Parrhasius 164 Pérez, Roy 4 plays as distinct from poems 17–​18 Pliny 164 poems as distinct from plays 17–​18 Ponge, Francis: “The Landscape” 7–​9; “Unfinished Ode to Mud” 9–​11 “Public Library, 1998” 11–​14 Puttenham, George 102 queer abstraction 179–​180 queer representation 2, 19–​20, 179–​182; “Allegory” 4–​7; Cymbeline queerness and 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 36, 37–​38, 40–​42, 43; King John 19–​20, 54, 55, 56–​57, 58, 59, 63, 65–​66, 67–​68; “The Landscape” 7–​9; at level of form 3–​4; Macbeth 71, 74, 77, 79, 80, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94; Menon and 2–​3; “Public Library, 1998” 11–​14; The Rape of Lucrece 99, 101, 102, 105, 108, 118, 121–​124; the sonnets

128, 129, 132, 137, 138, 141, 144, 146; “Unfinished Ode to Mud” 9–​11; Venus and Adonis 152, 153, 154, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163–​164, 167 Rambuss, Richard 149, 156 The Rape of Lucrece 15–​16, 99–​126; the Argument 99–​101; Brutus 120–​121; costs of representation 103–​104; as a disorderly text 123–​124; ecphrases 100–​101, 107, 118–​119, 123; elaborate descriptions 100–​102, 103, 105, 109–​111; Lucrece contemplating a painting of Troy based on scene in Aeneid 118–​119; Lucrece in bed, description of 110–​112; Lucrece’s body as a text 120; Lucrece’s focus on her own representation after the rape 115–​118; Lucrece’s inability to understand Tarquin’s intentions 104–​105; Lucrece’s suicide 119–​120; ornamentation 102; painting of Achilles 121–​123; paradox in retelling of 111–​112; power of representation 103, 107, 112, 115; progress of time 109; ‘publisher,’ use of word 104; queer representation 99, 101, 102, 105, 108, 118; queer representation shift to straight representation 121–​124; the rape, failure of representation 114–​115; relationship between poem and the Argument 100–​101, 102; Shakespeare’s complicity in making story public again 103–​104, 113; Tarquin offers Lucrece a choice 112–​114; Tarquin’s concern with his future representation

Schwarz, Kathryn 52 Scott, Richard 11–​14 Scott, William 101 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 19 Sidney, Sir Philip 176 Simmel, Georg 178 Simpson-​Younger, Nancy  26 Sofer, Andrew 84–​85 the sonnets 127–​147; “beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness everywhere” 136, 137–​138; camp 137, 138; ‘frame,’ use of word 135; ‘graze,’ use of word 136; “a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass” 140; musical metaphors 132; pencil imagery 132–​133, 134, 137, 142; queer representation 128, 129, 132, 137, 138, 141, 144, 146; Sonnet 1 129–​131; Sonnet 2 136; Sonnet 3 131; Sonnet 5 135–​141; Sonnet 8 132; Sonnet 11 132–​133; Sonnet 15 133–​134; Sonnet 16 141–​142; Sonnet 17 142–​143; Sonnet 18 143–​144; Sonnet 19 144–​145; summer’s roses 138–​140; tension between reproduction and textual production 128, 129, 133, 134, 142, 143, 145–​146; ‘unfair,’ use of word 136; winter imagery 136–​138 Sontag, Susan 9–​10 Stanivukovic, Goran V. 150–​151

The Tempest 43 Trollope, Anthony 18–​19 “Unfinished Ode to Mud” 9–​11 “untrueness” 177, 178 Varnado, Christine 74, 78 Venus and Adonis 15, 148–​174; absence of a sex scene 149–​151; Adonis as a representation of Venus 169; Adonis’ last speech 157; allusion to story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius 164; art and nature 162; bodily fluids 164–​166, 169, 172; “encounter/​mount her” 163; flower 170–​172; horses 158–​163; hunting speech of Venus 156–​157; metaphor and simile 150, 151–​153, 166–​167, 169, 172; poetic figures and language of first stanza 151–​153; queer representation 152, 153, 154, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163–​164, 167; queering of heterosexuality 155–​156; reader’s desire for action 149–​150; sight, theme of 166–​169, 170; simile and metaphor 150, 151–​153, 166–​167, 169, 172; substitutes for sexual activity 151, 163–​164, 164–​166, 169, 172; vanishing of Adonis’ corpse 169–​170; Venus as a pedagogue 157, 158–​159; Venus’ auto-​ blazon 154–​155; Venus’ depiction of herself as a skilled orator 157–​158; Venus’ praise for Adonis’ beauty 153–​154; Venus’ response to Adonis’ corpse 166, 167–​168 Vickers, Nancy 103 Virgil 118–​119

197  Index

107; Tarquin’s deliberations in his chamber 107–​109; Tarquin’s passage through the house 105–​107; viewer’s role in representation 122–​123; word play 103 Rosenfeld, Colleen Ruth 96n12, 124–​125n6, 176

198 Index

Walker, Jonathan 114–​115 Wall-​Randell, Sarah  42 Weaver, William 151 Wells, Marion A. 118–​119 White, Hayden 20n4 Wilder, Lina Perkins 144 Willbern, David 99

Wilson, Richard 54 The Winter’s Tale 50, 52 Yates, Julian 142 Zeuxis 164