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Popular Culture Review
Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory
in Shakespearean Literature and Film
Madhavi Menon
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
Unhistorical. Unhistoricism. Homohistory. Compulsory Heterotemporality.
Identitarian Sexuality. Sodomotical Desire. Hetero-time. Queer Sameness.
Methodological Resistance. Homoness. These are some of the intriguing terms
readers will encounter in the pages of Madhavi Menon’s outstanding new study,
Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film.
With this cogently argued and, indeed, elegant work, Menon has made an
invaluable contribution to the discipline from a queer theoretical perspective that
continues to allow for significant strides in contemporary understanding of the
operation of sexuality and desire during the English early modem period and the
present.
For decades historicist literary critics have fetishized the notion that
Shakespeare’s time is so ontologically and epistemologically dissimilar to our
own that no continuities or resonances can possibly or ever exist between the
two periods. This fetishization, at least as regards sexuality and its correlate,
desire, stands in good part on the groundbreaking work of Michel Foucault and
Alan Bray. In the first volume of his The History o f Sexuality, Foucault details
how the homosexual became a species in the late 19th century when the term
homosexual was coined by German researchers and later popularize d by Freud.
Bray, in Homosexuality in Renaissance England, discusses the use of the term
sodomy as a synonym for what today would be referred to as homosexuality
since the word homosexual and its derivatives did not exist in the early modem
period. Given this set of conventionally accepted historical circumstances, all
that Shakespeare and his fellow citizens could have known and understood was
sodomitical desire rather than the identitarian sexuality of the “I am a
homosexual,” “I am a lesbian,” variety we are so familiar with now. Whether by
default or deliberate purpose, historicist critics have held their peers accountable
for complete fidelity to this supposedly indisputable “fact” of history. Of course,
the historicist fear is that by not maintaining a sufficient distance between the
early modem period and the 21st century, we will, inadvertently or otherwise,
project our present concerns onto the past in a way that somehow contaminates
the past and reduces it from something knowable and authentic to mere illogical
anachronism.
Menon opens her introductory chapter to Unhistorical Shakespeare by
noting that the insistence on “difference as the template for relating past and
present produces a compulsory heterotemporality in which chronology
determines identity,” resulting in the “famous distinction between identitarian
sexuality and sodomitical desire” of the 21st and 16th centuries, respectively (1).