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COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
Hort. A will make the man mad to make the woman of him.
Kate. Yong budding Virgin, faire, and fresh, & sweet, Whether away, or whether is thy aboade? Happy the Parents of so faire a childe; Happier the man whom fauourable stars A lots thee for his louely bedfellow. Petr. Why how now Kate, I hope thou art not mad, This is a man old, wrickled, faded withered, And not a Maiden as thou saist he is. (The Taming of the Shrew 4.5.35-44; 2333-41) (1)
As part of his program of subordination, Petruchio assigns the exhausted Katherine yet another ridiculous task. He commands her to address the aged Vincentio as if he were a beautiful young woman fit for ecstatic poetical praise. She complies immediately, instantaneously constructing the feminine with the bland, cliche terms of address that sonneteers reserve for their subjects: "faire," "sweet," "lovely." Having skewed his bride's gender coordinates, Petruchio realigns them to their rightful places. Men are not women and should not be addressed in this fashion. To make a man into a woman will make him mad, as Hortensio, better than a chorus, declares. The passage suggests that male and female represented separate and discrete entities to Shakespeare's audience and to the boys and men playing women's roles. So Hic Mulier explains with some heat to Haec Vir (her epithet for him, "my dear Feminine-Masculine," no compliment): "even by the Laws of Nature, by the rules of Religion, and the Customs of all civil Nations, it is necessary that there be a distinct and special difference between Man and Woman." (2)
Yet as Catherine Belsey and countless others have noted over the last two decades, Shakespeare "disrupts" this sexual difference in his plays with an almost peevish insistence, again and again. (3) As these critics often remind us, his playhouse audience enjoyed comedies in which boys played girls who pretend to be boys because they secretly love other boys and want, quite desperately in some cases, to be loved as girls: Viola (Twelfth Night), Rosalind (As You Like It), Imogen (Cymbeline), and, to a lesser extent, Portia (The Merchant of Venice). This viewership may have been troubled by such spectacles and might have regarded the proceedings as a form of child abuse. Or, since such concepts have recently been judged anachronistic for analyzing same-sex relations in Shakespeare's time, one could also argue that this audience may not have read the dynamic as homoerotic or pedophilic, suspended its disbelief and accepted the boys as girls. Criticism on the topic will probably never exhaust itself. It will certainly never reach a consensus. (4)
The scrum of competing genders and sexualities in the playhouse has naturally spilled over into discussions of Shake-speares Sonnets (1609). I cite the above passage from The Taming of the Shrew as a key for reading parts of his controversial lyric sequence, since it shares some of the play's dynamics, albeit in reversed form. In the Sonnets, a poet creates an older speaker, "Will," who repeats blandishments to a younger male person, the Man Right Fair (so described in Sonnet 144). (5) In Shrew, Petruchio is in effect a puppeteer who compels a younger female speaker, Katherine, to woo an older man. Her compulsory speech-act of linguistic seduction humiliates Vincentio because she "transgenders" him by misdescribing him as female. That Petruchio compels Katherine to exhibit this poetical behavior as part of his program of mind-control and spirit breaking suggests that such encomiastic exercises contain an element of masochism for the person who praises. That he so violently hypercorrects his bride after her compliance with his fatuous demand suggests just how wrongheaded such overt gender-bending might have seemed to early modern people. Perhaps these same people, on reading the Sonnets, reached similar conclusions when encountering the Man Right Fair. They may have thought that Shakespeare's Will humiliates his addressee with his same-sex blandishments, and that his slavish praise contains an element of masochism. They might also have noticed that Will's language encourages us to construe his male addressee as feminine, since it is identical to that of his predecessors and contemporaries addressed to avowedly female subjects. Perhaps all of this seemed as preposterous to Shakespeare's audience as Katherine's feminizing of Vincentio. It could accept boy actors playing girls, but it could not accept poets addressing boys as if they were girls.
If Shakespeare knew that his readers might balk at sonnets in which one man speaks romantically to another, why would he risk alienating them? Although his severe twisting of convention may well serve as a breakout exposition of man-on-man passion (a kind of manifesto, as some imply), it constitutes generic lampoon, as well. Commentators have long recognized this tendency in Sonnets 127-54, those concerned with the Woman Colored Ill, especially 130 ("My Mistres eyes are nothing like the Sunne"). Like her, Shakespeare's Man Right Fair is a parody of a sonnet lady, even of what I call "sonnetladydom" in its entirety. I offer this as a possible explanation for the bizarre and insistent voice in this most controversial and critically fraught Shakespeare text. It may be madness to make a man into a woman, but it is also quite amusing.
I It is impossible to read this fulsome panegyrick, addressed to a male object, without an equal measure of disgust and indignation. (George Steevens, 1780) Some part of this indignation might perhaps have been abated if it had been considered that such addresses to men, however indelicate, were customary in our authour's time, and neither imported criminality, nor were esteemed indecorous. (Edmund Malone, 1790) (6)
Commentators do not often suggest satire as a reason for Shakespeare to construct a sonnet sequence in which one man composes fulsome panegyrics to another. Perhaps such a theory might seem trifling or ephemeral as a means of explaining such an important matter as our ever-living poet making addresses to men, some of these utterances so canonical that they constitute blueprints for lyric poetry in the English language. (7) Commentators from the eighteenth century to our own time have proffered a number of other explanations that ignore, avoid, or contextualize the underlying issue, homoeroticism. Katherine Duncan-Jones argues that the association of Oscar Wilde with an affinity for the Sonnets (i.e., his "The Portrait of Master W. H.") and his conviction for gross indecency in 1895 ensured that twentieth-century scholars would keep Shakespeare, sonnets, and homoeroticism as far from one another as possible. Sir Sidney Lee (1898) appears to have reemphasized the exculpatory "Platonic male friendship in the Renaissance" thesis first propounded by Richard Simpson (1868) for precisely this purpose, a theory that Wilde, ironically, had used to closet himself before his exposure. (8) The foregoing editorial conversation between Steevens and Malone concerning Sonnet 20 ("A Womans face with natures owne hand painted") may be said to be the first explicit statement of the controversy. Against this last real denizen of the old school, the first truly modern editor of Shakespeare positions himself, appearing to triumph over caprice and idiosyncrasy by sheer reason. Yet Malone also demonstrates great unease concerning the same issue that so vexes Steevens, who at least squarely faces the homoeroticism that his successor evades. (9) Even further back in time, we have what has become the most notorious response to the problem, John Benson's reconfiguration of the sequence, Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent. (1640), as well as his brief preface that implicitly justifies his editorial intervention. He adds titles to individual poems, violates the order of the sequence, combines some sonnets into twenty-eight-line canzone, and changes some masculine pronouns to feminine:
the lines of themselves will afford you a more authentick approbation than my assurance any way can ... in your perusall you shall finde them Seren, cleere and eligantly plaine, such gentle straines as shall recreate and not perplexe your braine, no intricate or cloudy stuffe to puzzell intellect, but perfect eloquence. (10)
Benson's practice was by no means unusual for a seventeenth-century editor; to describe this activity as damage or desecration as Hyder Rollins does is anachronistic. (11) After all, Alessandro Vellutello's restructuring of Petrarch's Rime sparse anticipated Benson's editorial activity by over a century, and Michelangelo's great-nephew substituted feminine for masculine pronouns when he edited the artist's sonetti to Tommaso de' Cavalieri for the edition of 1623, almost two decades before the publication of the 1640 Poems. (12)
Parody is an elusive and subjective category, even in a genre as conducive to it as the Renaissance sonnet sequence. I resuscitate Benson to suggest how Shakespeare's contemporaries may have reacted to this curious response to sonnetladydom, one that appears to have perplexed many brains and puzzled several intellects from the beginning. A man described as a woman might have seemed quite strange to seventeenth-century readers. (13) Bruce Smith analyzes Shakespeare's choice of male object in Sonnets 1-126 and asserts: "Change the gender of the listener [i.e., addressee] from female to male, and all of the delicate alliances of feeling, ideology, and power are called into question." (14) Perhaps Benson attempted to avoid questioning delicate alliances in his pronoun exchange, intending to restore that familiar, feminine, heterosexual, Petrarchan subject, the expected thing, as Coleridge's famous comment implies: "the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman." (15) Besides, in feminizing his Man Right Fair, Shakespeare's Will had come so close to creating one, as he implies: "And for a woman wert thou first created" (20.9). A few substitutions of "she" for "he" might help clarify the matter. However, Benson fails to complete the pronoun transformation, which seems inconsistent to moderns obsessed with editorial consistency. Perhaps he reasoned that readers might not notice an occasional "he" or "him." Early eighteenth-century editors certainly operated under this assumption. Bernard Lintott's reissue of the 1609 text (1711), the work of an anonymous editor, says of the Sonnets that Shakespeare intended "all of them in Praise of his Mistress." The Charles Gildon-Edmund Curll supplement to Rowe's edition of the works (1714) that reprints Benson makes the same claim, as does the George Sewell addition to the Pope edition (1726). (16) It might also be noted that many Sonnets simply do not clarify the gender of the addressee and would not require grammatical transposition, which suggests that the editor assumed his readership would construe the subject as feminine. It would have been difficult indeed to expunge all 190 uses of "he," "him," and "his" in Shakespeare's text. (17) As it is, Benson only excises a handful, none in the troublesome Sonnet 20, which he features prominently in the beginning...
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