Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics.

Publication: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Publication Date: 01-JUL-93

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press

This book makes a major contribution to the rapidly growing field of gay history. Smith characterizes his purpose as an attempt "to define the |imaginative vocabulary' that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers possessed for talking about homosexual desire" (p. 19); it is a purpose he has admirably accomplished. By focusing his analysis on the language of sexual desire rather than on the determination of identity based on the gender of the object(s) of desire, Smith for the most part dodges the potentially false opposition that currently haunts lesbian and gay studies about whether homosexuality is a social construct or a biological essence. Acknowledging that "in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sexuality was not, as it is for us, the starting place for anyone's self-definition" (pp. 10-11), Smith nonetheless makes a compelling case for the Renaissance as the period in which one can witness the emergence of what he calls "homosexual subjectivity."

Smith's discussion...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.