The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama by Mario DiGangi

CITATION: DiGangi, Mario. The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.
Understanding

• Question: What does queer theory tell us about the subversive effects of early modern dramatic homoeroticism?
• Answer: When understood without the moralizing term "sodomy," homoeroticism can be understood "within other economies of difference... [such as] masculinity, militarism, reproductive sexuality, colonialism, and race" (160).
• Method: DiGangi reads for clues of homoerotic subversion among masculine authority figures in (mostly) non-Shakespearean Ovidian comedies, satires, tragedies, and tragicomedies (those figures being the father, the master, the king, and the general, respectively).
• Assumptions: First, DiGangi responds to the tradition of addressing homoeroticism in terms of "sodomy," a term with implicit claims to moral order. Second, DiGangi reacts to Shakespearean over-represention in this scholarly field. Third, DiGangi ultimately relates representations of homoeroticism to overarching statements about symbolic economies.
• Sententiae: "Before the emergence of male-male sexuality as an identifiable practice or condition of deviation from 'normal' gender identities, object choices, or sexual roles--and the concomitant naming of those deviant people and practices--homoerotic practices were 'normal' aspects of even the most socially conventional relationships." (1-2)
  "... I find it necessary more fully to demonstrate several points: the pervasiveness of nonsodomitical or nonsubversive homoerotic relations in early modern England; the diversity of homoerotic relations as they are represented in a range of literary and nonliterary texts; the implication of homoerotic relations within social, economic, and ideological power structures. To my mind, the studies I have summarized exhibit three tendencies - in different degrees and combinations - which have prevented the above goals from being more fully realized: (1) an emphasis on sodomy, as opposed to a detailed textual analysis of homoeroticism [;] (2) a reliance on psychoanalytic and deconstructive, as opposed to more rigorously materialist, methods [;] (3) a focus on largely familiar texts, especially by Shakespeare, as opposed to less author-centered and more generically diverse consideration of cultural patterns." (9)
  "Similarly, the Renaissance category of sodomy derived its stigmatizing power from threateningly exotic significations: the sodomite was devil, heretic, New World savage, cannibal, Turk, African, papist, Italian--these categories overlap--or a beastly defiler of boys, whores, and goats." (13)
  "No more intrinsically orderly or disorderly than heteroerotic relations, homoerotic relations could sustain one ideology (the master-servant hierarchy) while challenging another (companionate marriage). The point, then, is to identify as precisely as possible the social and ideological contexts in which different kinds of erotic practice accrued meaning." (19)
  "The display of male bodies on the Renaissance stage, if sometimes sensationalistic, is often undeniably sensual. We ignore the homoerotic sensuality of the drama at the cost of misjudging  the centrality of homoeroticism to the ideological and social practices of early modern England." (28)

Overstanding

• Assessment: DiGangi has written a subtle, acute description of early modern homoerotics, indulging neither in revisionism nor psychologism. The method by which DiGangi ultimately hopes to relate homoeroticism with other symbolic economies may unnecessarily reduce his readings.
• Synthesis: The obvious connection is to The Idolatrous Eye: the means by which drama negotiate image and text implicate the audience. For O'Connell, incarnation subjects power to the audience; for DiGangi, performance presents eroticism to the audience.
• Application: DiGangi's interest in symbolic economies may be turned, in an autocritical move, back to the material history of early modern England. Specifically, book history can provide information about  how material systems of difference implicated homoerotics. How did books printed in economies of "masculinity, militarism, reproductive sexuality, colonialism, and race" represent homoeroticism?

(NB: Written with reviews)
Hammond, Paul. "The Homoerotics Of Early Modern Drama (Book Review)." Seventeenth Century 14.2 (1999): 172. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Jan. 2013
Ian MacInnes. "Book Reviews - the Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama." Shakespeare Quarterly. 50.3 (1999): 399. Print.

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser

PRIMARY SOURCE: The Faerie Queene (pub. 1590-6)
Context

• Publication: The Faerie Queene was written in Ireland, first, during the employ of Lord Grey of Wilson, then, in Kilcolman castle in Munster; partially published (three books) in 1590; rewarded with a pension from the Queen of fifty pounds per year; more fully published (six books with the Mutability Cantos) in 1596; ultimately published (seven books) in a 1609 edition (Greenblatt and Abrams 706). EEBO link 1, 2, and 3,
• Scholarship: Scholars read the poem for the complexity of its allegory, for the tension between its prophetic message and political production, for the formal inspiration taken from the Tasso and Ariosto, for the representation of Ireland and imperialism.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, book history, formalism, tapestries, and ekphrasis.

Content

• Form: 
• Spenserian stanza: eight lines iambic pentameter with an alexandrine, rhymed ababbcbcc. 
• Forty-eight stanzas per canto (432 lines per canto [12^2 x 3 = 4^2 x 3^3]), twelve cantos per book (5184 lines per book [72^2], 576 stanzas per book), and twelve announced books. 
• Genre: Epic. Moral allegory.
• Conceit: Six private virtues, six public virtues. Private virtues: Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy (mneumonic: Horses Try Chewing Fake Jello Carrots). Knights: Redcrosse, Guyon, Britomart, Campbell & Triamond, Artegall, and Calidore (mneumonic: Rudolf Gently Bathes Conneticut Army Captains).
• Other notes: 

Knight	Maid	Quest	Enemy	Squire / Ally
Redcrosse, of Holiness	Una (truth)	Free Una's parents from the dragon	Archimago & Duessa (idolatry & false faith)	Arthur (Britain is the ally of Holiness)
Guyon, of Temperance	Medina (moderation)	Destroy Acrasia's Bower of Bliss	Cymochles & Pyrochles (indecision & temper)	Palmer (trustworthy pilgrim)
Britomart, of Chastity	Artegall (like Arthur)	Return Amoretta to Scudamore	Malbecco, Busirane (jealousy, the captor of hearts)	Glauce (elderly woman)
Campbell & Triamond, of Friendship	Canacee & Cambina (healing & concord)	Aid the honor of Canacee & Cambina	Blandamour, Paridell, Duessa, & Ate (jealous friends, false faith & strife)	Each other
Artegall, of Justice	Eirene (peace)	Rescue Eirene from Grantorto	Grantorto (great wrong is the enemy of justice)	Talus (iron justice)
Calidore, of Courtesy	Pastorella (shepherdess courtier)	Slay the Blatant Beast	The Blatant Beast (slander)	Tristram (noble lineage)

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)
Greenblatt, Stephen, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2012. Print.

A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare

PRIMARY SOURCE: Midsummer Night's Dream (perf. 1595-6)
Context

• Publication: Q1 published by Thomas Fisher in 1600. Signatures: A-H4. Q2 published in 1619 and introduces new errors carried through the First Folio. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Fairies are read for representations of the erotic--as arbitrary and fixative, the imagination, and the theater--as a space of dreams. The same-sex pairings can be read as a forceful heterosexual coupling that overcomes same-sex bonds.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, meta-theater.

Content

• Form: Five acts and an epilogue. Iambic pentameter with irregular rhyme. Meta-play: Pyramus and Thisbe.
• Genre: Comedy; performed by the Chamberlain's Men.
• Plot: Theseus is to marry Hippolyta: Hermia is to marry Demetrius or be placed in a nunnery, or die. Lysander and Hermia escape Athens into the forest, to be wed at the home of his aunt. Helena tells Demetrius, to win his approval. Demetrius pursues Hermia, Helena pursues Demetrius. The actors rehearse a play for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. Titania refuses to give Oberon a changeling boy for a page, so Oberon orders Puck to charm her with a charming juice. Oberon also pities Helena, so he orders the same for Demetrius. Puck charms Lysander, instead, who falls for Helena. Thanks to Puck, Titania falls for Bottom, dressed in the head of an ass. Oberon enjoys this, but notices Puck wrongly charmed Lysander. Puck corrects this by also dosing Demetrius. Helena disbelieves both men, and both men abuse Hermia. Oberon orders Puck to lead the men in circles, to the point of exhaustion, when Puck removes the charm from Lysander and Titania. Oberon wins the page from Titania. All on the same day, Hermia will marry Lysander; Helena, Demetrius; Theseus, Hippolyta. Bottom returns from the forest to the wedding just in time to star in Pyramus and Thisbe, which is comically bad.
• Other notes:
• Notable characters: Hermia, who loves Lysander; Lysander, who loves Hermia but is charmed into pursuing Helena; Helena, who loves Demetrius; Demetrius, who loves Hermia but is charmed into pursuing Helena; Oberon, the Fairy King; Titania, the Fairy Queen charmed into loving Bottom; Bottom, a weaver and actor; Puck, Oberon's page; Theseus, duke of Athens.

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)Shakespeare, William, Stephen J. Greenblatt, and Andrew Gurr. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Print.

DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks. Ed. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser. Created 2007. Accessed18 January 2013. <http://deep.sas.upenn.edu>.

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

PRIMARY SOURCE: As You Like It (perf. 1598-1600)
Context

• Publication: Published in 1623 Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies folio by Blount, Edward; Smethwick, John; Jaggard, Isaac; Aspley, William. "This edition exists in three distinct states: the first does not contain Troilus and Cressida; the second contains Troilus and Cressida but without its prologue and with a redundant final page of Romeo and Juliet crossed out by the printer; the third contains Troilus and Cressida with its prologue, which replaces the redundant page of Romeo and Juliet" (DEEP). EEBO link.
  • Aug 4, 1600(?): "as yow like yt: / a booke ... to be staied".
  • Nov 8, 1623: Entered to Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard: "Comedyes. ... As you like it".
  • Jun 19(?), 1627: Transferred from the widow of Isaac Jaggard to Thomas Cotes and Richard Cotes: "her parte in Shackspheere playes."
  • Nov 16, 1630: Transferred from Edward Blount to Robert Allott, by a note of 26 June: "As you like it."
  • Jul 1, 1637: Transferred from the widow of Robert Allott to John Legat (2) and Andrew Crooke (1) (by order of a court): "saluo Iure cuiuscunque ... Shakespeares workes their Part."
• Scholarship: The scholarship addresses the treatment of the pastoral, both critiquing the court and affirming just power; the treatment of the forest as allusive to social injustice, by way of Robin Hood; Petrarchan love; cross-dressing, and the implications for essentialist philosophies. 
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon, the court, the pastoral.

Content

• Form: Five acts and an epilogue. Soliloquies in blank verse.
• Genre: Comedy; performed by the Chamberlain's Men.
• Plot: The Banished Duke lives a pastoral life in the Forest, while his daughter Rosalind stays at court under the protection of Celia, daughter of the usurping brother Frederick. Frederick tries to embarrass Orlando through a wrestling match with his champion, but Orlando wins and impresses Rosalind. Frederick banishes Rosalind, who leaves with Celia and Touchstone the jester. Rosalind takes the identity Ganymede, and Celia, Aliena. Orlando flees from his brother with his servant Adam. Orlando attacks the Banished Duke in desperation, but the Duke instead provides hospitality to Orlando and Adam. Orlando writes poems to Rosalind on trees, but Ganymede discovers them, meets Orlando, and instructs him in how to woo Rosalind. Touchstone shows his wit in response to Orlando's poems, and then woos Audrey. Silvius falls in love with Phebe, who falls in love with Ganymede. Orlando travels to visit Ganymede, but along the way saves sleeping Oliver from a snake and a lioness, ready to strike. Oliver and Orlando are reconciled. Orlando is wounded by the lioness and sends Oliver with a bloody handkerchief to Ganymede. Ganymede feints, and Aliena falls for now-compassionate Oliver. They agree to be married, inspiring Orlando to marry Rosalind. Ganymede promises to produce Rosalind for Orlando. Frederick marches into the forest to capture and kill the Banished Duke and his followers, but is dissuaded by an old hermit. Rosalind exposes herself as Ganymede and engineers four marriages for the same day: Orlando and Rosalind; Oliver and Celia; Silvius and Phebe; Touchstone and Audrey. Frederick takes religious orders and returns the dukedom to the Banished Duke.
• Other notes:
• Notable characters: The Banished Duke, brother of Frederick; Frederick, instigator against Orlando; Orlando, son of Rowland de Boys, brother of Oliver, and lover of Rosalind; Rowland de Boys, ardent supporter of the banished duke; Oliver, oldest son of Rowland but negligent guardian of Orlando; Rosalind, daughter of the Banished Duke, Celia, daughter of Frederick; Touchstone the jester, champion of courtly wit; Silvius;  shepherd; Phebe, shepherdess.
• The forest can be treated as both an idyllic space and the space of poverty and vagrancy. 
• Touchstone can be both aggressive and compassionate. 
• Rosalind produces all of the crucial plot points.
• Touchstone and Rosalind critique the Petrarchan traditions of Orlando's poetry and performance.

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)
Shakespeare, William, Stephen J. Greenblatt, and Andrew Gurr. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Print.

DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks. Ed. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser. Created 2007. Accessed18 January 2013. <http://deep.sas.upenn.edu>.

The tragicall history of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe

PRIMARY SOURCE: Doctor Faustus (perf. 1592-3)
Context

• Publication: A short version that Thomas Bushell published in 1604 combines Marlowe's tragic scenes "with the farcical contributions of a collaborator" (Bevington 249) Signatures: A-F⁴ (-F4); Stationer’s Register: Entered 7 January 1601. EEBO link. A longer version was published by Henslowe in 1616.
• Scholarship: Marlowe is the object of study as a freethinker, and the play is open to orthodox and subversive readings. Faustus is both a damned fool and a profoundly learned thinker: caught at the frustrating imperfections of human knowledge on questions of the gods. A humanist reading finds Faustus genuinely at a loss for will, namely, the will for repentance.
• Why I'm reading it: The canon, the history of science, Johann Fust, book history, illustration.

Content

• Form: Prologue (by Chorus), five Acts, and an Epilogue. Soliloquies in blank verse.
• Genre: Tragedy; performed by the Admiral's Men.
• Plot: Faustus dismisses the three fields of knowledge and instead summons two scholars to teach him the dark arts. He summons a demon, and despite warnings from a Good Angel and divine intercession, sells his soul to Lucifer to have the service of Mephistopheles for 24 years.
• Other notes:
• Notable characters: Faustus, who begins with a desire to do everything, but who gives up both on power and on his salvation; Wagner, who serves Faustus; Mephistopheles, who serves as intercessor between Faustus and Lucifer; the Clowns Rafe and Robin, who try to steal Faustus' power, but are tortured by Mephistopheles; the Seven Deadly Sins.
• Faustus dismisses the liberal arts as obsolete (medicine), mercenary (law), and fatalist (theology).

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)

Bevington, David M, Lars Engle, Katharine E. Maus, and Eric Rasmussen. English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Print.

Upon Appleton House by Andrew Marvell

PRIMARY SOURCE: Upon Appleton House (comp. 1651)
Context

• Publication: Miscellaneous Poems, 1681, "by his former housekeeper as support for her unsuccessful claim to be his widow and heir" (Rumrich 531) EEBO entry.
• Scholarship: Compared to "Horation Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" for political commentary on Fairfax, who refused to invade Scotland and was replaced by Cromwell.
• Why I'm reading it: Dubrow uses the country house poem to apply New Formalism to the Renaissance.

Content

• Form: Iambic tetrameter; couplets; eight-line stanzas; 97 stanzas. (Based around 8-8-8 organization.)
• Genre: Country house poem or topographical poem.
• Conceit: "The framework is a guided tour: a description of the house itself (lines 1-80), modulating into moralized history--the story of the nunnery and the attempted seduction of the Fairfax ancestor, the "blooming Virgin Thwaites"--and into false and corrupted religion (81-280). The grounds are described: the gardens (281-368), laid out in military style; the meadows (369-480), where the order of the seasons prevails; the woods (481-624), image of the retired life; the river (625-648). Finally, at evening, returning to the mode of elaborate compliment, the poet describes Mary Fairfax, the epitome of the natural scene, the microcosm of the place, and the hope for a new and better order (649-776)." (Rumrich 559)
• Other notes: 
• The play places a high value on embodied reason.
• Transcendental imagery.
• Unclear image: "I was but an invented tree" (ln. 565)
• Mneumonic from the apple trees on Rahn Rd., down Rahn, then over to John Hole on Whipp.

(NB: Written with anthology notes.)

Rumrich, John P, and Gregory Chaplin. Seventeenth-century British Poetry, 1603-1660: Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Print.

Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance by David Norbrook

CITATION: Norbrook, David. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. Print.
Understanding

• Question: Can poetry animated by an "organic society" (see FR Leavis, esp.) transcend politics?
• Answer: Critics must politicize aesthetics, and by determining the "specific ideological allegiances" of poets the critic can reconstruct authorial intention. 
• Method: New Historicism. The chapters move mostly chronologically through More, early Milton,  Sidney, Spenser, Greville, Jonson, and Milton. Norbrook's methods re-integrate these poets into their radical, prophetic tradition, and the canon--because New Critics favored private and apolitical metaphysics. Norbrook finds The Shepherdes Calender and Lycidas to have paid homage to earlier prophetic poetry.
• Assumptions: The introduction responds to both new critical and radical traditions, asking chiasmically, whether to aestheticize politics or politicize aesthetics. The chapter arrangement bases the prophetic tradition of English poetry in the Edwardian period--Mary's reign is seen to have produced a "paucity" of poetry. These poets are interpreted in terms of class consciousness, especially under patronage. Shakespeare, lastly, is viewed separate from the tradition.
• Sententiae: 

"To attempt to politicise the sphere of the aesthetic is to risk the accusation of reductionism... And a rigid antithesis between political and aesthetic spheres is itself reductive... From religious rituals to conventional sexual roles, such systems postulate particular power relations as part of the natural order... Our conventional notion of the 'political' itself involves certain assumptions about those institutions which are open to question and those which are not..." (6-7)
"Literary historians have sometimes regarded the ideals of humanism as inimical to those of the Reformation, and regarded radical Protestantism as hostile to literary culture. but it was the application of humanist methods of the exegesis to the Bible that provided the rationale for the Protestant critique of ecclesiastical tradition, for a decisive and unprecedented break with the past." (8)
"In questioning abstract systemisation, the humanists emphasized the need to set texts in their historical context; and their historical scholarship made them increasingly aware of the discrepancies between medieval and classical conceptions of human nature." (23)
"More's communism is a way of criticising the aristocratic belief that work is degrading." (28)
"Spenser... draws attention to the difficulties, and the political implications, of interpretation...  No new collection of English poems before 'The Shepheardes Calender' had provided such an array of aids to interpretation: a preface, general and particular arguments, woodcuts, and lengthy glosses." (73)
"Interpretations which tie the 'moral' eclogues down to personal allusions or to a defence fo a pure Church of England against Roman corruption fail to do justice to the work's prophetic character." (76)
"Spenser's stanza overgoes by one line the eight-line stanza favoured by Ariosto and Tasso. The self-enfolding dispersion of the rhymes reinforces the effect of self-conscious analysis rather than unreflective narrative movement, while the final alexandrine permits a further reflection before moving to the next stanza." (112)
"Spenser may have been drawing on Neoplatonic theory in which the highest kind of unity is not just a prosaic mean between extremes but a more dynamic and paradoxical kind of coincidence of opposites." (114)
"On Elizabeth's progresses this process [of poetic prophesy remaking the world] of transformation could be made actual: landscape artists would prepare the way for the queen's advent by smoothing out blemishes, adorning statues, even digging whole lakes. The transformed landscape symbolised the civility which good rule produced." (147)
"The masque form dramatised this dependence of the nobility on the monarch: all the participants had to act out a formal pattern that centered on the ruler." (180)
"But Jonson aimed to naturalise the artifice of his poetry, to give an impression of directness and colloquial energy. The verbal texture of a poem, he said, should be 'like a Table, upon which you may runne your finger without rubs, and your nayle cannot find a joynt; not horrid, rough, wrinckled, gaping, or chapt'." (186)
"The Spenserian poets tended to adopt a style which drew attention to its own artifice and thus highlighted the inability of language fully to embody transcendent truths: where Jonson's verse gives the impression that ideals can be organically embodied in existing institutions and linguistic formulations, Spenserian verse constantly confesses its inadequacy." (200)

"Rubens was a diplomat as well as an artist and used his influence with Charles and Buckingham and their advisers to try to dispose the English government better towards Spain. Buckingham's artistic tastes made him ideologically suspect... His enemies were particularly  prone to associate him with illusion because he loved spectacular masques, which lacked the lasting value of Rubens's canvases but had an immediate  if short-lived appeal. He had first brought himself to the king's favour by his skill in dancing in a masque." (224)

"[Milton] believed that an element of disorder and dissension was essential to the maintenance of liberty, that to try to achieve complete, static harmony  was to invite stagnation. When he used aesthetic analogies in his political works he modified their traditional associations. If building the reformed church was carving a statue, it was necessary to acknowledge that this task was bound to produce an element of waste matter, the sects that could not be harmonised with the main church: here Milton's emphasis was on the process, the 'struggl of contrarieties', not on the finished project." (239)

"Milton adopted a Protestantised version of the Renaissance theory that music and poetry had once been indissolubly allied, that the music of the ancients had unusual emotional power because each note was precisely adjusted in pitch and quantity to a corresponding syllable... Champions of the new 'monodic' music saw themselves as overcoming this aural 'idolatry'  and restoring the just relations between sound and sense." (244)

"Puritans had long valued music as more spiritual, less immediately sensual than the visual arts, and they especially valued the ability to harmonise sound with sense." (260)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Norbrook veers at times away from his own warning against reductionism, politically by  describing Rubens mostly as a diplomat, or formally by granting Spenser's alexandrine a universal capacity for reflection.
• Synthesis: Norbrook argues that Buckingham was controversial for selling off lower titles (223), a claim sympathetic to DiGangi. And, of course, Norbrook's new historicism is compatible with King's Tudor Royal iconography, albeit with a through-line following the prophetic tradition rather than courtly power.
• Application: Norbrook's treatment of music is infrequent, but still useful for a formalist overview of the period. 

(NB: written with reviews.)
King, John N. "Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance." Huntington Library Quarterly. 49.3 (1986): 277-280. Print.
Rudnytsky, Peter L. "Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance." Renaissance Quarterly. 40.1 (1987): 153-155. Print.