Something Rich and Strange: Shakespeare and Queer Theory

What was sexuality before sexuality? Shakespeare’s corpus portrayed gender and desire in a period in which categories like “homosexual” and “heterosexual” had not yet been invented. And yet, Shakespearean plays and poems dwell insistently on scenarios we would now classify as queer—and not only this. Shakespeare’s representations of desire proceed by way of language and forms thick with playful, passionate, transgressive impulses of wanting and relating against the grain. Nor are these impulses strictly about sexuality or gender—they intersect with questions of difference, broadly writ: race, class, and disability among them. From the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets to Viola’s courtship of Olivia in Twelfth Night to the homosociality of young prince Hal and his crew, in what ways does Shakespeare’s work offer a rich aesthetics of sexuality that continues to reverberate in the contemporary moment?

Concentrating on the Sonnets, with brief excursions into drama (Twelfth Night, the Henriad, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra) and queer reception of Shakespeare (Oscar Wilde, Derek Jarman), this course will introduce students to major questions in the study of Shakespeare and the history of sexuality. As we read, we will ask questions including the following: What were early modern conceptions of difference and how do they inform our own discourses of difference? How did gender and sexuality work in the early modern period and how did literary form take up the problem of representing non-normative desire? What is Shakespeare’s aesthetics of sexuality? In what sense are early modern texts queer? What does it mean to “queer” a Shakespearean text? How do you read a sonnet? What are the uses of form in the development of a queer theory? What uses has queer theory found for Shakespeare? What are Shakespeare’s politics of form? How do sexuality and gender intertwine with race, class, and disability in early modern poetry and drama? What does it mean to read sexuality before sexuality or race before race? What, after sexuality, does Shakespeare have to tell us about gender, pleasure, and desire? Supplementary texts are likely to include selections from some of the the following authors: Patricia Akhimie, Stephen Booth, Heather Dubrow, Michel Foucault, Stephen Guy-Bray, Jonathan Goldberg, Margreta de Grazia, Jeffrey Masten, Madhavi Menon, Joseph Peguigney, Melissa Sanchez, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Bruce Smith, and Valerie Traub.