Shakespeare and Sexuality. .

Catherine M. S. Alexander and Stanley Wells, eds. Shakespeare and Sexuality.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ix + 207 pp. index. $54.95 (cl), $18.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-521-80031-5 (cl), 0-521-80475-2 (pbk).

This book collects ten essays about sexuality in Shakespeare's works. All but two--Ann Thompson's introduction and Celia Daileader's fascinating look at the erotics of popular Shakespeare films--have been published before (almost all in Shakespeare Survey, which Wells edits). Indeed, some of these essays have been so influential (e.g., Margreta de Grazia's "The Scandal of Shakespeare's Sonnets" and Catherine Belsey's "Love in Venice") that they are here printed for a third time.

As Ann Thompson suggests in her introduction, the importance of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality and Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud can be felt throughout the collection of essays, which are invigorated by the feminist, psychoanalytical, new historicist, and queer theories that have been so central to Shakespeare studies over the past two or three decades. William Carroll's essay looks at how both riddles and puns in the plays figure female sexuality as "linguistic transgression" (15) and ties several plays' language about female sexuality to gynecological texts from the period. The first part of Carroll's original title, "The Virgin Not," is for some reason omitted here, which is too bad because it so clearly underscores his central point that language representing the biology of female sexuality in the plays is linked to a particular obsession with the existence--or not--of the hymen (the virgin knot). Mary Bly's essay focuses more narrowly on bawdy puns spo ken by virgins about their own maidenheads, a culturally transgressive practice that she sees Shakespeare pioneering--daringly yet quite successfully--with Juliet but which is later parodied for comic effect in plays by Henry Porter and Thomas Dekker.

Lloyd Davis also notices Juliet's wordplay, observing that her double meanings when speaking with her mother about Romeo simultaneously reveal pleasure and pain. Focusing frequently on Platonic, Ovidian, and Petrarchan tropes of desire and ultimately taking a Lacanian approach, Davis sees Romeo and Juliet as "confirming a conception of desire that speeds nor to its goal but its end" (38). Indeed desire--and especially its relationship to language--is a topic that threads throughout this collection. For Catherine Belsey, the riddle of the caskets in The Merchant of Venice may be about the very nature of desire while the dosing riddle of the ring underscores the multiplicity of Portia's sexual identity, a potentially anxiety-inducing multiplicity arising from sixteenth-century redefinitions of the identity of a wife. And Margreta de Grazia argues that the real scandal of the Sonnets is not the one that so much modern criticism has pored over--those 126 sonnets addressed to a beautiful young man -- but rather t he speaker's "perverse and menacing" sexual desire for a black mistress whose promiscuity threatens to undo the social standing of the "fair boy" (162).

Michael Hattaway charts (without condoning) various psychoanalytical, ideological, and social causes for male sexual anxiety and misogyny in the time period and in the plays, offering this near conclusion: "Men come to hate the very paragons of virtue they have created to save themselves from themselves" (110). Subha Mukherji's long (sometimes repetitive) essay on consummation and law in All's Well likewise turns to history with a close look at court records and the 1600 Treatise of Spousals.

The book closes with two essays focused on performance. John Russell Brown writes on devices in Shakespeare that convey sexual arousal in performance, such as tongue-tied first meetings or clumsy words, evasions, or nonsensical speech. Celia Daileader (Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage [1998]) closes the collection with a nuanced and spirited look at how interpolated scenes of nudity and sex in popular Shakespeare films play to consumers, especially to "increasingly educated, increasingly sexually confident" females (187). It's an essay worth sharing with students, who often fail to analyze Shakespeare films as critically as they do the play texts.

Some of the essays stand out more than others, but the collection is valuable overall. It is somewhat akin to Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen's 1999 collection of essays on Shakespeare and gender, though ultimately less substantial. Alexander and Wells' book will surely prove very useful, especially to faculty and students at institutions where back copies of journals are nor readily available.