Stephen Guy-Bray. Homoerotic Space: the Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature.

Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2002. x + 266 pp. index, bibl. $60. ISBN: 0-8020-3677-5.

Broadly speaking, Stephen Guy-Bray's Homoerotic Space is a study of what Adrienne Rich has called "writing as re-vision": the way writers widely separated by time and culture from their predecessors can make use of those predecessors in their own contexts. Specifically, he argues that "many Renaissance writers used classical models to construct their own homoerotic discourses" (5). His primary interest is not simply to narrate a literary history, but to study how ancient poets are read and revised in the Renaissance: how, for example, Theocritus' "depiction of [homoeroticism] might be used by a reader from a society in which homoeroticism was more or less strictly regulated" (8). Three factors make pastoral a particularly fertile "space" for this concern: the exclusive nature of the languages of classical pastoral, known only to the educated; the presence of homoerotic texts in the pastoral canon; and the nostalgia typical of the mode. These make possible "the creation of what I call homoerotic space: a safe, because carefully demarcated, zone in which homoeroticism can appear" (15).

Though Guy-Bray makes it clear that his primary focus is Renaissance writers, he begins appropriately with the poetry of Theocritus and Virgil. Indeed, Guy-Bray proves himself a capable classicist in the first two chapters, on the eclogues and on the "persistence of elegy" in the Aeneid. In the latter he sees Virgil making a move that will be made more emphatically by later writers: closing off the homoerotic space that pastoral opens up "in the same way that one would seal a tomb" (73).

Guy-Bray continues exploring "The Space of the Tomb" in three Renaissance elegies: Castiglione's "Alcon," Milton's "Epitaphium Damonis," and Surreys "So crewell prison." Similar as these poems are to their classical ancestors, they bear the mark of a culture less accepting of homoeroticism: "we can see the first attempts to find a place for homoerotic relationships in a militantly hetereoerotic society" (86).

Guy-Bray then turns his attention from the specifically elegiac to the broader pastoral tradition, represented by Spenser, Richard Barnfield, and William Browne; and then to the pastoral drama, with Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. He finds this early modern pastoral world markedly more heterosexual than its classical predecessors, one in which "bonds between men" are marginalized or "harnessed for the purpose of celebrating bonds between men and women" (145). Though the safety and size of homoerotic space varies throughout the history Guy-Bray writes, the net effect is one of a finally emphatic "Triumph of Heterosexuality" (211).

Rather than end his story on that note, however, Guy-Bray returns to Theocritus in a brief "Postscript," finding in the twelfth eclogue "a homoerotic space that is happy" (218). This frank statement is indicative of the openness with which Guy-Bray acknowledges the personal and political values that lie behind his interest in the subject of his study, one concerned "not solely [...] with texts" but also with "emancipatory sexual discourse" (9). Some readers will, no doubt, find such comments indicative of an objectionable politicizing of literature, but they give Guy-Brays writing a distinct and lively voice I find appealing.

They do so, more importantly, without diminishing the rigor of Guy-Bray's close readings or his insightful attention to the complex intertextual web of the pastoral mode. These are impressive, the main strengths of the book. The historical argument is less consistently compelling. Guy-Bray is attentive to the problem of anachronism, and is careful to use the terms "homoeroticism" and "homosociality" rather than "homosexuality," but he occasionally plays loosely with the distinction between the two. In "Alcon," for example, the poem is said to create "homoerotic space" by "the pastoral setting" and by "the use of Latin rather than Italian" (89)--as if Latin or pastoral necessarily meant "homoerotic."

To be fair, this is not a consistent flaw; at other times, including elsewhere in the discussion of "Alcon," he takes care to demonstrate specific intertextual cues that mark the poem as homoerotic (93-94). And the weakness it creates at specific moments in the argument is more than compensated for by the strength of the readings and the lucidity of the prose. Homoerotic Space is quite simply a pleasure to read.

MARY R. BOWMAN

University of Wisconsin

Stevens Point