Shakespeare Survey 46: Shakespeare and Sexuality.

Following an introductory statement on "Shakespeare and Sexuality" by Ann Thompson, nearly a dozen essays address this broad topic from angles too varied to suggest anything resembling a critical orthodoxy. Some overlap exists, however, and the following is meant to highlight this even as it encapsulates the more striking of the pieces.

Juliet Dusinberre begins by wondering about the fantasies of women in Renaissance playhouses. She provides a partial answer by reading As You Like It as a play rewritten from within, by an Elizabeth-like Rosalind, to suit women's desires. A fascinating strand of her argument explores the relation of Sir John Harrington to the play, and to Elizabeth. Because we have forgotten how to do source study - and have lost our belief in the "old" historicism - it is not surprising to find Dusinberre unwilling to press some of her discoveries further. A similar concern with sources marks John Astington's essay; he sees Matthew 19:11-12 as a deep source for Malvolio's "greatness" lines. Astington rounds out the religious politics of Malvolio's shaming, which, in ascribing impotence to Malvolio, lies "entirely within the English festival tradition" (34). In another essay it is the Venus and Mars story - especially, their capture by Vulcan's net - which is seen as a source of Othello by Catherine Bates, whose main argument is that weaving is the central trope of and for narrative in that play.

One of the more provocative essays here is Margareta De Grazia's "The Scandal of Shakespeare's Sonnets," in which she demonstrates that the narrative we have of John Benson deliberately "straightening" the Sonnets in his 1640 edition - replacing the male pronouns with female pronouns - is a fiction. De Grazia proposes that this fiction has come in the service of disguising class and race issues in these poems. While this is never really proven, De Grazia's essay promises to be an important statement on the Sonnets.

Where Joel Fineman saw the Sonnets as the font of modern subjectivity, Lawrence Danson sees the late plays as crucial: "the peculiar consciousness of self and other that we see in the jealous husbands of Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale registers a turn . . . toward an interiorized correlative which yields the repertoire of the modern psychological subject" (79). This self-discovery, "the opening out of themselves to us, depends on another, more troubling 'discovery' these male characters think they make about the threateningly foreign country of women" (79). Initially the romances seem different to Russ McDonald, who argues that "what we witness in the final phase of his career is the feminization of Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic style" (91). If we accept the brunt of McDonald's argument, however - the complex evidence for which it is difficult to convey in this space - it might not only not conflict with, but actually provide a formal rationale for the isolation of the paranoid males whose psychology Danson explores.

William C. Carroll's essay explores the "k/not" of the maidenhead in Renaissance literature, and provides dozens of interesting references to the hymen from poetry to medical discourse but doesn't finally advance an argument about his topic. Though treating various topics, a loosely structured piece by Michael Hattaway is more pointed. Among his claims is that in the early modern era "chivalry, residual chivalry, affected male sexuality disastrously" by making the relations between the sexes an extension of war (133).

The most enjoyable essay is that of Michael Dobson, who demonstrates an invidious relation between Shakespeare's embodiment his imagined physicality and dramatic bawdy and the project of English nationalism. Shakespeare lent Britain his potency; by doing so he became, in Dobson's unforgettable phrase, "Britain's national W***y" (144, here expurgated).

DOUGLAS BRUSTER University of Texas, San Antonio