Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture. (Reviews).

Michael Keevak, Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture

Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001. 175 pp. $19.95. ISBN: 0-814-32975-6.

Richard Burt, Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture

New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1998. xiii + 318 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-312-21363-8. (Rev. pbk. ed. New York: Saint Martin's Press, 1999. $18.95.)

Echoing Eve Sedgwick's opening argument in Epistemology of the Closet, which he will later quote directly, Michael Keevak contends in Sexual Shakespeare that "the authentic Shakespeare cannot escape being a sexual one" (13). Of course, the problem with an "authentic Shakespeare," as Keevak duly notes, is that the derails of the Shakespeare biography are sparse and often contradict what our culture seems to need in an icon. Critics and biographers, therefore, have been forced to turn to Shakespeare's works, most often the Sonnets, to elaborate on these sketchy biographical detail and to bring the contradictions into line with an image more befitting the Bard. Not surprisingly, far from producing any definitive and non-problematic biography, this critical move has tended to produce "biographical fantasy" (27) -- especially with regard to the Young Man and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets -- and ultimately ends up reflecting contemporary critical debates and anxieties, particularly about sexuality. One of the things that recommends this book is that Keevak constantly reminds us that far from being simply a recent concern, the controversy surrounding Shakespeare's sexuality, and particularly the sexuality depicted in the Sonnets, was well in place by the end of the eighteenth century, with George Stevens refusing to publish an edition of the Sonnets on essentially moral grounds and criticizing Edmond Malone for doing so. In fact, Keevak clearly sees Malone's edition of the Sonnets as a dividing line in the history he recounts.

In chapter one, after enumerating a thorough and thoroughly amusing list of "at least ten" controversies surrounding the Sonnets (26), Keevak considers the late eighteenth-century forgeries of William Henry Ireland in the context of a culture attempting to "recover" an "authentic" Shakespeare and troubled by the "evidence" that the Sonnets produce (27). As Keevak points out, any biographical reading of the Sonnets from the point of view of early modern culture inevitably reveals at least one sodomitical relationship, whether it be a same-sex physical relationship with the Young Man or an adulterous relationship with the Dark Lady. Concentrating on the first of these two in chapter one, Keevak shows Ireland feeding a sanitized Shakespeare to a fact-starved audience which included both Malone and George Chalmers. Malone was quick to acknowledge his initial gullibility and to demonstrate the utter ridiculousness of the Ireland forgeries. Chalmers, by contrast, seems to have used the opportunity to attack Malone, and in the process produced one of the more implausible readings of the Sonnets: that they were all addressed to Elizabeth, a reading that has more in common with Ireland's forgeries than it does with any real scholarship. The effect of Chalmers' reading, as Keevak clearly shows, is to remove all sexual ambiguity from the poems and to desexualize the Shakespeare biography.

Chapter two presents us with the "'pre-queer' Bard" and the competing tradition of Shakespeare as a (hetero)sexual libertine, a tradition which has it origins in the early popular perception of Shakespeare as a writer of "highly eroticized Ovidian verse" (48) such as Venus and Adonis and Lucrece and which included the gossip about William Davenant's parentage. Noteworthy in this chapter is Keevak's discussion of The Passionate Pilgrim and Willobie. His Avisa (50-58). As he makes clear, whether we view these two works today as having any relationship to Shakespeare misses the point; at an earlier time, readers did seem to see a clear relationship, one consistent with the tradition mapped out here. However, "this type of sexualized Shakespeare [was] no more preferable" (43) to late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century audiences than the one outlined in chapter one.

Two subsequent chapters demonstrate similar processes. Chapter three treats the authorship controversy and demonstrates the odd way that the implied sodomy of the Sonnets is frequently used to explain why Shakespeare must be someone else only to then be erased or glossed over once a more suitable candidate for the "real" Shakespeare has been suggested. If there is a weak section in this book, it is chapter four, which deals with the issue of the portraits. Keevak contends that baldness, at times associated with syphilis and as depicted in the portraits and the memorial bust, "can symbolize a bawdy bard as well as an old or impotent one" (87); yet he later notes that "[f]ortunately, Shakespeare (lack of) hair has never spawned its own industry of critical commentary" (113). This chapter is concerned with the apparent lack of commentary on the portraits with relation to sexuality, certainly a curious fact. And while the information presented in this chapter does leave one with the impression of a desexualized S hakespeare, it is not as clear here as in the other chapters how we arrived at such a point, since the position seems to always have been a static one.

Keevak ends his book with a rather amusing epilogue, "Shakespeare in Love: An Idiot's Guide," which considers Shakespeare's sexuality as it is depicted in the 2000 movie and Renaissance sexuality as represented in Cliff Notes and other study guides. It will surprise no one that the process of (de)sexualization of the Shakespeare biography that Keevak has mapped out so carefully in earlier chapters continues to this day unabated.

If Keevak shows an historical process that has invested Shakespeare and his biography with so many details that they can't be successfully absorbed into one master narrative (64), Richard Burt in Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares proposes a contemporary process in which "Shakespeare" undergoes an evacuation of meaning. In his introduction, five chapters, and conclusion -- the titles laced with bawdy puns and wordplay -- Burt presents the reader with some of the very worst Shakespeare "replays and citations," ranging from Porky's 2 to episodes of The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island to The Postman, with a rather long foray into pornography that invokes Shakespeare's name (chap. 2). Other sections deal with non-gay, queer "Shakespeares" (chap. 1), American cultural imperialism and the action film (chap. 3), transvestism and sound dubbing (chap. 4), and pedagogy (chap. 5). Much of this material has only a tangential link to Shakespeare or one of the texts, which is Burt's point.

In other forums, Burt's attention to this material has been questioned; yet this criticism sidesteps the real issue, for whether we find this material in some way offensive or simply inane, it does exist and should be accounted for. Burt is seriously attempting to explode a persistent academic fantasy about the use of "Shakespeare" in popular culture. As he states, he is not trying to "reclaim such [Shakespeare] replays and citations by showing that they are actually intelligent (that is, politically subversive, as present cultural criticism typically understands popular culture)"; instead, he will attempt to "think through their production and consumption in the context of a youth culture that paradoxically defines intelligence as dumbing down" (xiii). Burt's language here suggests that his approach will be a cultural-materialist one, with due attention paid to production and reception histories. Instead, we get a psychoanalytic approach, which infers the existence of a "kiddie culture" audience from a close d reading of the works considered instead of actually demonstrating that this audience exists.

The discussion of pornography in chapter two which invokes Shakespeare illustrates another problem with this book. While Burt's proposition of a "castrated male gaze" (86) is interesting, it certainly does not require the invocation of Shakespeare to make the point. In fact, the extended discussion of Shakespeare pornography ultimately concludes with its insignificance: "Critics tend to assume that the pornographic and the uncensored are where the real signified is. A pornographic Shakespeare could, some critics might argue, give us access to what the play is really about. ... Yet what is striking about the Shakespeare porn I have discussed is precisely that there is nothing much to be said about the sex in relation to the Shakespeare play. The uncensored, pornographic sex turns out to be insignificant" (121). Odd indeed -- for a book that purports to be concerned with queer theory--is the omission of any real analysis of the "two gay male porn versions, both spin-offs of Romeo and Juliet" that Burt cites (80 ). If this survey and analysis of Shakespeare pornography is to be complete, it would seem necessary to compare its homosexual to its heterosexual manifestations.

In the end, this book has perhaps done too much with too little -- as the author himself suggests. Burt concludes his introduction by saying, "[W]hether the conjunction of 'high' theory and 'low' culture in this book produces heavy thinking or thinking lite I leave to the readers to decide for themselves, if they feel so inclined. Whatever" (28).