“Notes” in “The Shapes of Fancy”
Notes
Introduction
John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Andrew Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 1:95–96, quoted in Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 61.
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding, Arden Early Modern Drama edition, ed. Suzanne Gossett (London: Methuen Drama, 2009), 1.2.140.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Foreword: T Times,” in Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), xii.
On the reanimation of “queer” as a reclaimed slur with the potential to affect and animate things and events in the world, setting matter in motion in new ways, see Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), chapter 2, “Queer Animation,” 57–88.
See Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); the essays in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993); and, foundationally, Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press), 1982.
On homosocial relations within the structures of patriarchy, see Julie Crawford, “The Place of the Cousin in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2018): 101–27, and “All’s Well That Ends Well: Or Is Marriage Always Already Heterosexual?,” in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 39–47. On erotic power dynamics, see Melissa Sanchez, Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop 29 (1990): 1–19.
James M. Bromley, Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992). The foundational work navigating this tension between “normal” and “deviant” early modern sexualities is Bray, Homosexuality.
Carla Freccero, “Queer Times,” in “After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory,” ed. Janet Halley and Andrew Parker, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 485.
David Halperin, How to do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), and One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990); Goldberg, Sodometries; and Bray, Homosexuality.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, introduction to Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 10.
Adam Philips, Unforbidden Pleasures (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
This claim is indebted to the work of Shoshana Felman and Peter Brooks in developing a formally attuned psychoanalytic criticism. See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Shoshana Felman, ed., Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). However, their archive skews toward the Victorian-to-modern period and toward the novel. Among the smaller number of early modern works using psychoanalytic terms to analyze language and form, to which this book is indebted, are: Madhavi Menon, Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Graham L. Hammill, Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992).
Peter Brooks, “Narrative Desire,” Style 18, no. 3 (1984): 312–27.
I explore this question in depth in a previous essay. See Christine Varnado, “‘Invisible Sex!’: What Looks Like the Act in Early Modern Drama?,” in Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England, ed. James M. Bromley and Will Stockton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 25–52.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); on models of embodiment in Deleuze, Guattari, and Spinoza, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, and Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Lauren Berlant, “Starved” and Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” in Halley and Parker, “After Sex?,” 433–44 and 459–68; and Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).
Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). See also Lesel Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); the essays in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
A variety of other approaches now being pursued at the nexus of affect studies and early modern literature are represented in Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi, eds., Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, Form (New York: Palgrave, 2017).
In addition to Bray, Homosexuality; Goldberg, Sodometries; and Smith, Homosexual Desire, see also Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Valerie Traub, “Friendship’s Loss: Alan Bray’s Making of History,” in Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 37–56, 154.
On the contrary, this book is deeply indebted to the wealth of recent queer early modern scholarship on the social significance (or insignificance) of erotic acts, particularly Will Fisher, “The Erotics of Chin-Chucking in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Bromley and Stockton, Sex before Sex, 141–69; Bromley, Intimacy; Mario DiGangi, Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); and Daniel Juan Gil, Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Introduction: Axiomatic,” in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 48.
Chen, Animacies, 2. The posthuman or ontological turn is represented in premodern literary studies by the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Eileen Joy, Stephen Mentz, Vin Nardizzi, and Julian Yates, among others. See the essays in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s edited collection Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (Washington, D.C.: Oliphaunt Books, 2012).
Chen, Animacies; Karen Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19, no. 2 (2011): 121–58; and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
Much of the extant work on early modern material culture investigates the historical meanings of objects as they bear on subjects and practices in the period, often with a focus on contemporary religious, economic, and social suspicions about the efficacies of made things. Will Fisher details material objects’ construction of sexuality and gender in Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See also Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
One important ancestor text is the anonymous 1990 pamphlet, published by Queer Nation and handed out on the street at the New York City Pride March, “Queers Read This (I Hate Straights).” The pamphlet’s legacy was recently explored in Ramzi Fawaz and Shanté Paradigm Smalls, eds., “Queers Read This! LGBTQ Literature Now,” special issue, GLQ 24, no. 2–3 (2018).
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 10.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 25.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 11.
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), 62.
Nelson, Argonauts, 62.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 24.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 22.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 22.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 23.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 24.
See Christopher Pye, The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, eds., Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Maus, Inwardness and Theater.
A major origin point of this anxiety is Stephen Greenblatt’s “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 210–24.
The question of what, if anything, is outside of “sex” is probed deeply in Halley and Parker’s introduction to “After Sex?,” 421–32. This point is particularly well made in the assertion by Joseph Litvak, “Glad to Be Unhappy,” 526, that queer theory “lodges the ‘nonsexual’ firmly within the ‘sexual.’”
Elizabeth Freeman, “Still After,” in Halley and Parker, “After Sex?,” 499.
This received narrative can be traced to Freud’s particularly enduring explication of Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955).
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 179.
Nelson, Argonauts, 62. See also Philips, Unforbidden Pleasures; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” in Halley and Parker, “After Sex?,” 625–44.
Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein,” 629.
Meira Likierman, Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context (London: Continuum, 2002), 55, quoted in Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein,” 628.
Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein,” 629.
Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein,” 629.
Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 12, no. 5 (1997): 1061.
Dimock, “Theory of Resonance,” 1060–61.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 23.
See Varnado, “Invisible Sex!,” 29.
One of my most influential methodological touchstones in attempting such a fantasmatic, queer historiography is Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).
Citations from The Antipodes are from the Globe Quartos edition, ed. David Scott Kastan and Richard Proudfoot (London: Nick Hern Books, 2000), hereafter cited by act, scene, and line number in the text.
Dimock, “Theory of Resonance,” 1060–65.
See the MLA “Forum: Conference Debates” panel featuring Robert Caserio, Tim Dean, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz and entitled “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 819–28. See also Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); and Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), and “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (1987): 197–222.
Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012); Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), and “Starved”; and Love, Feeling Backward.
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 1.
Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 11–12.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 156.
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 166-167.
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 10.
Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 37; see also Barthes, S/Z, 20.
Barthes, S/Z, 16.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 2–3.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 27–28.
Heidi Brayman traces the uneven and incomplete representation of reading as a supposedly solitary activity, which was nevertheless still communal in practice, in Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003); and Adam Fox, Oral and Literature Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, 1.1.1. All Shakespeare citations are by act, scene, and line number from The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Gordon McMullan, and Suzanne Gossett (New York: Norton, 2015), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 1998), 442–53.
Iser, Act of Reading, 169-70.
Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” in Felman, Literature and Psychoanalysis, 126.
The inherent collectivity of early modern theatrical process is emphasized in some important recent work on theater history, notably the essays collected in Henry Turner, ed., Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Holger Schott Syme, Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare’s England: A Culture of Mediation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Metheuen, 1980), 93.
Elam, Semiotics, 94.
Elam, Semiotics, 95.
Greenblatt elaborates on his methodological debt to Geertz in “The Touch of the Real,” in “The Fate of ‘Culture’: Geertz and Beyond,” special issue, Representations 59 (1997): 14–29.
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero coined the influential axis of oscillation between identification and alterity in “Introduction: Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History,” in Premodern Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996), particularly xv–xx. This tension is further elaborated in Jonathan Goldberg’s and Madhavi Menon’s methodological intervention in “Queering History,” PMLA 120, no. 5 (2005): 1608–17.
In recent contributions, scholars have taken a wide range of theoretical positions on this question: radical anti-identitarian universalism (Madhavi Menon, Lee Edelman); a recuperation of historicism and how to do history (Valerie Traub); new theorizations of knowledge production (Valerie Traub, Jeffrey Masten, Carla Freccero, Heather Love); a turn from straightforwardly sexual subjects to ecological and biological matters (Carolyn Dinshaw, Stephen Guy-Bray, Vin Nardizzi); and several new investigations of sexuality (Melissa Sanchez, James Bromley, Will Stockton, Will Fisher), which take as their objects of analysis various aspects of embodiment, pleasure, gender, and relationality. For an excellent summary and analysis of the theoretical claims and conflicts shaping this debate, see Ari Friedlander, “Desiring History and Historicizing Desire,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 16, no. 2 (2016): 1–20.
This is the formulation Bruno Latour uses to describe the inextricable identity of these two processes of knowledge production in We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5.
The turn toward studies of temporality in queer theory is subjected to a thoughtful exchange among Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, Annemarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, and Nguyen Tan Hoang, in “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” in “Queer Temporalities,” ed. Elizabeth Freeman, special issue, GLQ 13, no. 2–3 (2007): 177–95.
This idea is suggested in Fradenburg and Freccero, “Introduction: Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History,” xx. See also Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern; and Dinshaw, Getting Medieval.
See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 29.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 18.
Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Love, Feeling Backward.
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 69.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 46–47.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 72–75.
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
Jonathan Goldberg, “After Thoughts,” in Halley and Parker, “After Sex?,” 503. This idea is picked up in other criticism, including Goldberg and Menon, “Queering History,” in which they call for recovering same-sex eroticisms of the past to illuminate “the non-self-identical nonpresent” rather than reifying present or past identities (1609). See also Freccero, “Queer Times,” 486–89, and Queer/Early/Modern, 69–72.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 45.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 52, breaks down the myriad ways in which homoerotic feelings, language, and acts of the past are adjudicated “completely meaningless” under a heteronormative reading practice: either because it was everywhere, because there was no language for it, because it was so forbidden, or because there were no prohibitions against it.
Dimock, “Theory of Resonance,” 1061.
Dimock, “Theory of Resonance,” 1061.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 3.
See Varnado, “Invisible Sex!,” 47.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 8.
The still-definitive work on the structure and referents of the play’s satire is itself an artifact from the intervening “thick modernity” of the twentieth century: Joe Lee Davis, “Richard Brome’s Neglected Contribution to Comic Theory,” Studies in Philology 40, no. 4 (1943): 520–28.
See Musa Gurnis, Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 22.
Valerie Rohy, “Ahistorical,” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 1 (2006): 71.
Though he would not use the term “queer,” Ira Clark’s reading of The Antipodes in Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992) has informed my analysis of the disunified, shifting, and unresolved political and dramatic structure of the play.
Valerie Traub, “The Joys of Martha Joyless: Queer Pedagogy and the (Early Modern) Production of Sexual Knowledge,” in Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 103–24.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 8.
See Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003).
Traub, “Joys of Martha Joyless,” 109.
As I explain in more detail in chapter 1, Mary Frith (or Moll) and Bellario (or Euphrasia) are more accurately described as genderqueer or on the transmasculine spectrum than as cross-dressed women; their masculine yet androgynous gender performance does not line up with their ostensibly female sex, and unlike the female heroines who temporarily disguise themselves as boys in Twelfth Night or As You Like It, their genital anatomy is actually unknown or confused in the play, even from the audience’s perspective.
Bersani, in “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” elaborates on the solipsistic nature of both subjectivity and sexuality in his queer and deconstructive reading of psychoanalytic theories of sexual development, specifically in his deprivileging of the partner relation and his reclamation of primal, antirelational narcissism.
Dimock, “Theory of Resonance,” 1060–61.
I am thinking here of Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?,” PMLA 10 (1995): 343–49; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” in Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 1–20.
A related intervention, dedicated to complicating the usually assumed opposition between queer and normativity by renewing the historical specificity and nuance of normalization, is undertaken in Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson, eds., “Queer Theory without Antinormativity,” special issue, differences 26, no. 1 (2015).
See André Gide, Oscar Wilde, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: William Kimber, 1951), on his encounter with the “marvellous youth” he calls “Mohammed” in Algiers, for only one example (280–85, quoted in Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 5–6).
Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 157–58.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 91–97 (on Billy Budd), and 242–46 (on McCarthyism and the outing of homophobes).
Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).
See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1991); and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
1. Getting Used, and Liking It
As befits an argument about the work of Beaumont and Fletcher, I am indebted to a collaborator, Abigail Joseph, who in 2006 pointed out Bellario’s function as a technology for the communication of affect.
“There was a wonderfull consimility of phansey between [Francis Beaumont] and Mr. John Fletcher, which caused the dearnesse of friendship between them. . . . They lived together on the Banke side, not far from the Play-house, both batchelors; lay together—from Sir John Hales, etc.; had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same cloathes and cloake, &c., betweene them.” Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1:95–96, in Masten, Textual Intercourse, 61. On identification, friendship, and homoeroticism in Beaumont and Fletcher’s collaboration (and in early modern literary collaboration as a whole), see Masten, Textual Intercourse, esp. chaps. 1 and 2. See also Masten, “My Two Dads: Collaboration and the Reproduction of Beaumont and Fletcher,” in Goldberg, Queering the Renaissance, 280–309; and Masten, “Beaumont and/or Fletcher: Collaboration and the Interpretation of Renaissance Drama,” ELH 59 (1992): 337–56.
Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1:96, in Masten, Textual Intercourse, 61.
There are a few exceptions; three affectively motivated readings of the play, which nonetheless examine feeling in the service of their respective historical arguments, are: Jeffrey Masten, “Editing Boys: The Performance of Genders in Print,” in From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 113–34; Denise Whalen, “Anxiously Emergent Lesbian Erotics,” in Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 83–85—although I disagree with Whalen’s conclusion that the “frail waif” or “retiring virgin” is the operative homoerotic type for Bellario; and Jo E. Miller, “‘And All This Passion for a Boy?’ Cross-dressing and the Sexual Economy of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster,” in English Literary Renaissance 27, no. 1 (1997): 129–50—although I disagree with Miller’s readings of Arethusa and Bellario as devoid of erotic desires.
Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster, 1.2.108–9. All citations from Philaster are hereafter cited by act, scene, and line number in the text.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 4.5.170–71. All subsequent citations from Shakespeare are from Greenblatt et al., Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., and are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
More on the homoerotic affect and desire of weeping shepherd boys—specifically the delectable shepherd boys of Richard Barnfield—can be found in Kenneth Borris and George Klawitter, eds., The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard Barnfield (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2001), especially the contributions of Raymond-Jean Frontain, “‘An Affectionate Shepheard Sicke for Love’: Barnfield’s Homoerotic Appropriation of the Song of Solomon,” 99–116; Julie W. Yen, “‘If It Be Sinne to Love a Sweet-Fac’d Boy’: Rereading Homoerotic Desire in Barnfield’s Ganymede Poems,” 130–48; and Mario DiGangi, “‘My Plentie Makes Me Poore’: Linguistic and Erotic Failure in ‘The Affectionate Shepheard,’” 149–73.
“Of the nature of an instrument (material or subservient); serving as an instrument or means; contributing to the accomplishment of a purpose or result.” Oxford English Dictionary Online (hereafter OED Online), http://oed.com/, s.v. “instrumental, a. and n.,” A. adj., 1.a.
“Serving well for the purpose; serviceable, useful; effective, efficient.” OED Online, “instrumental, a. and n.,” A. adj., 1.c.
The sense of the word in meaning 1.a., “a means to an end,” takes on a connotation of more causal force when construed with to or in, or rarely of or for, followed by the noun form of a verb. Whereas the purely adjectival form means “secondary,” this adverbial usage posits an instrumental agent as an essential catalyst for action. These connotations of specificity and indispensability are also present in the “Old Physiological” meaning, “Having a special vital function; that is a bodily organ; organic.” OED Online, “instrumental, a. and n.,” A. adj., 1.b. and 4.
Masten, “Editing Boys,” 126.
Mario DiGangi describes a “homoerotics of mastery” within the power structure of service (and within comic plots of mastery and humiliation), arguing that discourses of service are used to signify “disorderly” homoerotic practices that cannot be represented onstage; these sodomitical dynamics, which can be manipulated by masters or servants, both inhere within and threaten the master/servant power differential. See DiGangi, Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, 64–66.
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject—A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), #23, 59.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 28.
Sontag, “Notes on Camp” #11, 56.
Eugene M. Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1952), 9–10.
Sontag, “Notes on Camp” #10, 56.
In comparing Bellario to Hylas and Adonis, Megra cites two ancient and pervasive queer myths of the androgynously, omnisexually alluring young man.
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
The instability of this three-way relational dynamic is dependent on, though not synonymous with, the literal indeterminacy of the play’s signifiers around the term “boy” that Masten describes in “Editing Boys.”
These hyperbolic exchanges of love, pain, self-abnegation, and deferred violence constitute a tragicomic camp version of the early modern trial discovery scene, wherein the court attempts to extract invisible, interior truth from the accused by means of interrogation and threatened violence. See Elizabeth Hanson, Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Philaster dramatizes many of the same anxieties that Maus documents in Inwardness and Theater—worries about the potential for deception created by the phenomenon of interiority—transposed into the melodramatic register of tragicomedy.
My comparison of Epicoene’s social satire to Philaster’s tragicomic celebration of desire for the androgyne makes some of the same observations as Phyllis Rackin’s reading of Epicoene in contrast to the fantastical world of Lyly’s Gallathea in her canonical essay “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,” PMLA 102, no. 1 (1987): 29–41.
Stephen Orgel also unpacks the subversive erotic punch of the transvestite figure, particularly in his observation that it owes its allure to the convention of gender disguises being regarded as convincing enough to fool a sexual partner, in Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), particularly chap. 2, “The Performance of Desire.” Masten, “Editing Boys,” 123, alludes to Philaster’s homosexual brinksmanship in declining to show Bellario/Euphrasia first in women’s clothing and pushing the gender reveal to the very end.
Citations from The Roaring Girl are from Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, New Mermaids edition, ed. Elizabeth Cook (London: A&C Black, 1997), 1.1.97–100, and are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.
See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Transvestism and the ‘Body Beneath’: Speculating on the Boy Actor,” in Renaissance Clothing; Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests (New York: Routledge, 1997); Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994); Stephen Orgel, “Nobody’s Perfect, or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 1 (1989): 7–29; and Stephen Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66–93. My argument is particularly indebted to these canonical works’ attention to the surprising cathexes that can erupt between desiring subjects and their objects, both people and material things; and to their illumination of how fully cross-dressing comedy depends on audiences’ libidinal investments in gender illusion.
Fisher, Materializing Gender.
On Moll’s masculine embodiment as an early modern example of queer gender on the transmasculine spectrum, see Simone Chess’s reading of The Roaring Girl in her “Introduction: Passing Relations,” in Male-to-Female Crossdressing in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2016), esp. 16–19.
See Masten, “Editing Boys,” on the textual undecidedness of Bellario/Euphrasia’s sex at the level of speech prefixes.
Sawyer K. Kemp, “‘In That Dimension Grossly Clad’: Transgender Rhetoric and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Studies 47 (2019): 120–26.
Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 230.
Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 436n106.
Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity, Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018), 53.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 45.
Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 32. More recently, however, Traub, in “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,” PMLA 128, no. 1 (2013): 35, argues for more diachronic methods of historical knowledge production using “a queer historicism dedicated to showing how categories, however mythic, phantasmatic, and incoherent, came to be.”
See the forthcoming essays in Early Modern Trans Studies, ed. Simone Chess, Colby Gordon, and Will Fisher, special issue, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 4 (2019).
The definitive treatment of the historical evidence for Moll Frith’s performance is P. A. Mulholland’s “The Date of The Roaring Girl,” Review of English Studies 109 (1977): 18–31. Two other sources that provide helpful context on Mary Frith as an historical figure are: Natasha Korda, “The Case of Moll Frith: Women’s Work and the All-Male Stage,” in Women Players in England, 1500–1600: Beyond the All-Male Stage (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005), 71–88; and Bryan Reynolds and Janna Segal, “The Reckoning of Moll Cutpurse: A Transversal Enterprise,” in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 62–97.
Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 12.
Hic Mulier. Or, The Man-Woman: Being a Medicine to cure the Coltish Disease of the Staggers in the Masculine-Feminines of our Times (London, 1620).
See Jean Howard, “Sex and Social Conflict: The Roaring Girl,” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 132–47; Stephen Orgel, “The Subtexts of The Roaring Girl,” in Zimmerman, Erotic Politics, 12–26; Marjorie Garber, “The Logic of the Transvestite: The Roaring Girl,” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 221–34; and Mary Beth Rose, “Women in Men’s Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl,” English Literary Renaissance 14 (1984): 367–91.
James M. Bromley, “‘Quilted with Mighty Words to Lean Purpose’: Clothing and Queer Style in The Roaring Girl,” Renaissance Drama 43, no. 2 (2015): 143–72.
Colby W. Gordon, “A Woman’s Prick: Trans Technogenesis in Sonnet 20,” in Shakespeare and Sex, ed. Jennifer Drouin (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, forthcoming).
The endemic violence visited on twentieth-century butch women by straight men, specifically police, is proof of the challenge female masculinity poses to a patriarchal order that regards its expression as a usurpation of natural maleness. See Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues, Twentieth Anniversary Author Edition (2014), https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/; and Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Another critic using a queer reading of The Roaring Girl to analyze what the transvestite does—in this case, what the transvestite body does to the interplay of knowledge and ignorance—is Ryan Singh Paul, “The Power of Ignorance and The Roaring Girl,” English Literary Renaissance 43 (2013): 514–40.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 80.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 79.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 79.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 80–81. This must hold particularly true under “the literal patriarchism that makes coming out to parents the best emotional analogy to Esther’s self-disclosure to her husband” (King Ahasuerus in the Book of Esther, the story on which Sedgwick builds her case for the distinctive dynamics that set gay coming out apart from other kinds of disclosure) (82).
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 81.
For a comprehensive account of the gay resonances attached to women’s tailors, and a useful argument for the validity of tracing gay sexual stereotypes in the Renaissance, see Simon Shepherd, “What’s So Funny about Ladies’ Tailors? A Survey of Some Male (Homo)sexual Types in the Renaissance,” Textual Practice 6, no. 1 (1992): 17–30. Shepherd does, however, mistake one crucial fact about The Roaring Girl: judging by the clothing Moll’s tailor makes for her and for Mary, he is not a ladies’ tailor but a men’s tailor (21). The same kind of ribald, homoerotic insinuation is operative around men’s tailors in other early modern plays as well—cf. Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humor (1599). I am also indebted to Aaron Santesso’s helpful précis of sexual discourse around tailors extending back to the early modern period in “William Hogarth and the Tradition of Sexual Scissors,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 39, no. 3 (1999): 499–521.
Bromley, “Quilted with Mighty Words,” 158–60.
This is Maggie Nelson’s phrasing of the scope of Sedgwick’s intervention in the proliferation of erotic desire; Argonauts, 62.
“An opening or slit in a garment which enables the wearer to put it on or which gives access to a pocket; spec. (now hist.) an opening in a woman’s skirt or underskirt, esp. as offering a man the opportunity for sexual activity; (hence, in extended use) the vagina.” OED Online, s.v. “placket, n.,” I. 2.
Though the exact origins of these words are unknown, it is not unlikely that “pimp” derives from the Middle French word pimper, “to adorn, attire (a person, oneself) (1578).” OED Online, s.v. “pimp, n.,” Etym.
See Varnado, “Invisible Sex!,” 38–42.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 81.
A cyborg, or cybernetic organism, is a hybrid of natural and artificial components. See Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81.
Thomas Nashe’s 1592 poem, “The Choise of Valentines,” exemplifies these associations: a dildo takes the place of a man’s fatigued, dysfunctional penis to satisfy his female lover’s voracious, receptive desire. Traub discusses how the dildo in Nashe’s poem (and the poem itself, which embodies the “choice” and substitution of the artificial tool) functions anxiously, and literally, in the manner of the Freudian fetish, unintentionally confirming the substitutability of the penis. Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 98. But I suggest we consider Moll as a dildo in a less paranoid light—as a materialization of a “lost object of desire” (196) which never was: the ideal, universally functional imaginary phallus, which can be found on a body of any sex.
Two readings of the play that treat the mask and dress as signs of political containment are: Valerie Forman, “Marked Angels: Counterfeits, Commodities, and The Roaring Girl,” Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 4, part 2 (2001): 1531–60; and Jane Batson, “Rehabilitating Moll’s Subversion,” in SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 37, no. 2 (1997): 317–35.
Michel de Montaigne, The Journal of Montaigne’s Travels in Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany (1903), in The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, ed. Terry Castle (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 80.
“Avec son contentement, à ce qu’on dit.” Michel de Montaigne, Journal de voyage en italie (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 1118 (my translation).
“Et fut pendue pour des inventions illicites à suppléer au defaut de son sexe.” Montaigne, Journal de voyage, 1118 (my translation).
“Elle avoit esté condamnée à estre pendue: ce qu’elle disoit aymer mieux souffrir que de se remettre en estat de fille.” Montaigne, Journal de voyage, 1118 (my translation).
Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” 66–67, 79–80. See also Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, “The Hermaphrodite and the Orders of Nature: Sexual Ambiguity in Early Modern France,” in Fradenburg and Freccero, Premodern Sexualities, 117–36.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 8.
Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 193–94; see also Traub, “The (In)significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England,” in Zimmerman, Erotic Politics, 150–67.
Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 193.
Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” 67. I am indebted for this critique, and for the call to move beyond the literal, legalistic interpretation, to Richard L. Regosin’s treatment of this story in Montaigne’s Unruly Brood: Textual Engendering and the Challenge to Paternal Authority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 191–93.
Masten, “Editing Boys,” 121; also Nicholas Radel, “Fletcherian Tragicomedy, Cross-dressing, and the Constriction of Homoerotic Desire in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Drama 26 (1995): 53–82.
Masten, “Editing Boys,” 122, acknowledges the possibility of female–female eros in the play’s resolution.
Masten, “Editing Boys,” 122–27, details the differences in character labeling and gender dynamics among the printed editions of the play.
2. Everything That Moves
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, 1.1.1–8. All subsequent citations from Shakespeare are from Greenblatt et al., Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., and are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
René Girard, “O, What a Deal of Scorn Looks Beautiful: Self-Love in Twelfth Night,” and “’Tis Not So Sweet Now as It Was Before: Orsino and Olivia in Twelfth Night,” in A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 106–11, 112–20.
See Crawford, “All’s Well That Ends Well”; Julie Crawford, “The Homoerotics of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Comedies,” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume 3: The Comedies, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 137–58; Dympna Callaghan, “‘And All Is Semblative a Woman’s Part’: Body Politics and Twelfth Night,” in Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2000), 26–48; Laurie Shannon, “Nature’s Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness,” Modern Philology 98, no. 2 (2000): 183–210; and Jean Howard, “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1988): 418–40.
See Joseph Pequigney, “The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice,” English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 201–21; Lisa Jardine, “Twins and Travesties: Gender, Dependency, and Sexual Availability in Twelfth Night,” in Zimmerman, Erotic Politics, 27–38; Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and Janet Adelman, “Male Bonding in Shakespeare’s Comedies,” in Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic”: Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppelia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 73–103.
Bruce R. Smith thinks through some related implications of Orsino’s “fancy” in his contribution, “‘His Fancy’s Queen’: Sensing Sexual Strangeness in Twelfth Night,” in Twelfth Night: New Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (London: Routledge, 2011), 65–80. We agree about the queer play of fancy as a converse to nature; I go a step further to posit fancy as an engine of queer generation, connected to an historical genealogy of degraded desires.
“A mental apprehension of an object of perception; the faculty by which this is performed.” OED Online, “fantasy, phantasy, n.,” 1.a.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n. 4.a., first quoted 1581, OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n. 8.b., first quoted 1559, OED Online.
“Fancy, v.,” 8., first quoted 1545, OED Online.
The word’s appeal to poets attempting to write the unrequited, nonreproductive desire of Petrarchan love in English is not surprising; it was commonly used to refer to the imaginative flights of the lover in poetry both about and in the style of Petrarch in English for the next two centuries—including Mary Darby Robinson’s “Petrarch to Laura” (1791) and Hartley Coleridge’s sonnets (1833). For example, George Frederick Nott’s nineteenth-century translation of Petrarch’s Sonnet 69, “To Laura in Life,” has “Yet haply fancy my fond sense betray’d,” for “Non so se vero, o falso mi parea” (literally, “I don’t know whether [it is] true or false, it appeared to me”). See The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch, Now First Completely Translated into English Verse by Various Hands, ed. Thomas Campbell (London: George Bell and Sons, 1879).
Sanchez, Erotic Subjects, 3–10, 239–44.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n. 4.a., first quoted 1581, OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n. 2., first quoted 1609, OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n. 3., first quoted 1597, OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n. 5.a., first quoted 1665, OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n. 5.b., first quoted 1577, OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n. 4.a., first quoted 1581, OED Online.
The “mother’s fancy,” detailed by Montaigne (among others), was a popular explanation for how a woman’s erotic fantasy about another man—an image in her mind’s eye—could impress her unborn child with the appearance of someone other than its “natural” or legitimate father. Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essais famously reads: “So it is, that by experience wee see women to transferre divers markes of their fantasies, unto children they beare in their wombes: witnes she that brought forth a blacke-a-more.” Michel de Montaigne, “20. On the Force of Imagination,” in Essays: Book 1, trans. John Florio, Renascence Editions E-text, http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/montaigne/1xx.htm. This belief is thoroughly historicized by Marie-Hélène Huet in “Part 1: The Mother’s Fancy,” in Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 11–123.
Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 69. The queerness of the category of “virgin” is also documented by Theodora A. Jankowski, Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); and Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern English Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Alicia Andrzejewski, “‘For Her Sake’: Queer Pregnancy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Studies 47 (2019): 105-11.
Sigmund Freud, “2. Infantile Sexuality,” trans. James Strachey, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 57.
Sigmund Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–74), 15: 209.
Shannon, “Nature’s Bias,” 208.
Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1:95–96, in Masten, Textual Intercourse, 61.
Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), trans. James Strachey, in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 546.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Fortieth Anniversary Edition (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 168.
Jami Ake, “Glimpsing a Lesbian Poetics in Twelfth Night,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 43, no. 2 (2003): 375–94; Jankowski, Pure Resistance; and Traub, Desire and Anxiety.
Olivia’s degree of awareness and the intensity of her homoerotic investment could be a directorial or acting choice in production.
Shannon, “Nature’s Bias,” 209–10, reviews the applicability of a language of “swerving.”
The tailor was hanged for using “inventions illicites,” “illicit inventions to supply the defect of her sex,” in 1580 in Vitry-le-François: “Elle fut pendue pour des inventions illicites à suppléer au defaut de son sexe,” Montaigne, Journal de voyage, 1118 (my translation).
Stallybrass, “Transvestism and the ‘Body Beneath,’” 207–19.
Ben Brantley, “How Mark Rylance Became Olivia Onstage,” New York Times, August 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/.
This is true in the central cross-dressed/homoerotic bonds as well; cf. all Viola’s exchanges with Olivia.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n. 5.c., first quoted c. 1652, OED Online.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 23.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” C.1.c., OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” B., adj. 5.; and “fancy man, n.,” 1., OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” C.2., “fancy-woman, n.,” first quoted 1819, OED Online.
“Fancy man, n.,” 3., first quoted 1811, OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” C.2., “fancy Dan, n.,” first quoted 1943, OED Online.
Freccero, “Queer Times,” 485.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n. 6., 7., 8., OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” B. adj., 1.a., first quoted 1753, OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” B. adj., 1.a. and 2.a, OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n., 11., first quoted 1712, OED Online.
The music video of Rufus Wainwright’s song “Rules and Regulations” from Release the Stars (Geffen Records, 2007) cites the gay heritage of boxing, which still adheres to the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, originally written by John Douglas, ninth marquess of Queensberry—Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas’s father and Oscar Wilde’s libel adversary. RufusWainwrightVEVO, “Rufus Wainwright—Rules and Regulations,” YouTube, November 22, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n., 13., and B. adj., 1.c., OED Online.
See Jonathan Goldberg’s essay grappling with the illusion of history’s teleological decidedness in the scene of colonial violence, “The History That Will Be,” in Fradenburg and Freccero, Premodern Sexualities, 1–21.
Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927), in Standard Edition, 21:147–58.
Fisher, Materializing Gender; Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean Howard and Scott Shershow (New York: Routledge, 2001); Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing; Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London: Norton, 1996); and Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995).
Elena Levy-Navarro makes use of an analytic connected to queer theory in her brilliant “fat studies” reading of the play, “Weigh Me as a Friend: Jonson’s Multiple Constructions of the Fat Body,” in The Culture of Obesity in Early and Late Modernity: Body Image in Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Skelton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 147–92. In theorizing the need for a “fat history,” which, much like queer history, recovers the subjugated bodies and pleasures of a different time and critiques the assumptions of a progressivist, modernizing telos for the category of “fat,” Levy-Navarro treats the fat bodies of Ursula the pig-woman and Bartholomew Cokes as sites of bodily resistance and revolt against the “civilizing” bourgeois norms of aesthetics, embodiment, consumption, and behavior that are operative at the Fair.
All citations from Jonson’s works, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, are from Ben Jonson, The Alchemist and Other Plays, Oxford English Drama series, ed. Gordon Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1.5.129.
Like the desire to be made erotically instrumental that is the focus of chapter 1, this acute, all-consuming longing frequently has at its beginnings some kind of device or ruse, such as Philaster’s question, “How shall we devise/To hold intelligence?” Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster, 1.2.108–9. The constitutive element of artifice in both structures of erotic investment is key to what makes them queer: what started out as performative or artificed desire often gradually becomes—and is revealed to have already been—real attraction.
See Gowing, Common Bodies, for more on the complicated interplay of bodily surveillance, power, truth production, and social fiction involved in pregnancy detection.
The processes I am describing in early modern drama are the product of mental artifice in a way that Deleuze and Guattari’s thoroughly materialist account of desire is not; but Deleuze and Guattari also conceive of materially produced and materially productive desire as a queerly, asexually generative, self-replicating force. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
Jonson’s satire of “Puritan” Protestant behavior here plays on the interpenetration of some social control sects’ habits of religious discipline and the popular discourse about them, which stereotyped their prohibitions against pleasure and appetite. See Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, “Introduction: The Puritan Ethos, 1560–1700,” and Patrick Collinson, “Elizabethan and Jacobean Puritanism as Forms of Popular Religious Culture,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996).
Thomas Adams, A Commentary, or Exposition vpon the Diuine Second Epistle Generall, Written by the Blessed Apostle St. Peter (London, 1633), 424.
My notion of the imaginative fancy is rooted in the early modern period’s nonhumoral, Neoplatonist model of how erotic affects enter into the body/mind. The model Ficino articulates in De Amore is based on Ibn Sina (Avicenna)’s idea of materialized “mental faculties”: images drawn from matter that travel into the “ventricles” of the brain. This alternate genealogy is treated in Dawson’s Lovesickness and Gender, 21–26. See also Sibylle Baumbach, Literature and Fascination (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Litvak, “Glad to Be Unhappy,” 523–31.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 151–52, quoted in Litvak, “Glad to Be Unhappy,” 525.
For more on the interplay between Puritans’ Hebraism and anti-Semitism, including an analysis of Bartholomew Fair, see Nicholas McDowell, “The Stigmatizing of Puritans as Jews in Jacobean England: Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, and the Book of Sports Controversy,” Renaissance Studies 19, no. 3 (2005): 348–63.
Compare to a satirical faux opinion piece by “Bruce Heffernan,” “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?,” Onion, October 28, 1998, https://www.theonion.com/.
Jonathan Gil Harris asks similar questions about the historical phenomenology of smell and the audience’s experience of the stink of gunpowder on the Shakespearean stage, with reference to the stink mentioned in Bartholomew Fair, in “The Smell of Macbeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2007): 465–86.
See Levy-Navarro, “Weigh Me as a Friend”; Kathleen Rowe, “Pig Ladies, Big Ladies, and Ladies with Big Mouths: Feminism and the Carnivalesque,” in The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 25–49; and Gail Kern Paster, “Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy,” Renaissance Drama 18 (1987): 43–65. Grace Tiffany, in contrast, characterizes Ursula’s body as queerly, monstrously desexed and powerfully “mannish” in a Falstaffian mode, in Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1995), esp. 105–69.
This predilection or fetish receives one of its only cultural studies treatments in the chapter on “Macrophiles: Giantess Fans” in Katharine Gates, Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex (New York: Juno Books, 1999). See also Valerie Billing’s groundbreaking work on the erotics of size, “The Queer Language of Size in Love’s Labour’s Lost,” in Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017), 107–22.
The gingerbread people are made in the image of Saint Bartholomew for the Fair; hence, they are also wafers endowed with some human attributes, recalling the Catholic Eucharist. Jonson, The Alchemist and Other Plays, 510n68.
All of the toys in hobbyhorse-maker Leatherhead’s stall are in some sense ceremonial objects, if children’s play is considered to be ceremonial. Early evangelical Protestants generally did not, as a rule, formally make or buy toys for children. See Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), esp. 186–89, on Puritans’ opposition to childhood play as potentially corrupting.
Busy also makes witch-producing insinuations about Ursula the pig-woman’s “having the marks upon her of the three enemies of man . . . the devil.” Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 3.6.32–34.
See George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho, ed. R. W. Van Fossen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 1.2.
“Fancy man, n.,” 3., first quoted 1811, OED Online.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” C.2., “fancy Dan, n.,” first quoted 1943, OED Online.
Though outbreaks of plague often did disrupt the Bartholomew Fair, this line is also haunted from the future by the specter of the AIDS epidemic, which showed what it looks like when a pestilence depopulates an entire culture of artistic production.
Jonson, The Alchemist and Other Plays, 514n336.
On the puppet-ghost-flashing as an encapsulation of a related problem at the heart of early modern culture—the problem of interpretation, of how to read texts and objects—see Nicole Sheriko, “Ben Jonson’s Puppet Theater and Modeling Interpretive Practice,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 59, no. 2 (2019): 281–304.
Laura Levine sees the puppet’s absence of a sex as emblematic of the radical gender artifice at the heart of the theater that is the focus of antitheatrical hysteria. See Levine, “The ‘Nothing’ under the Puppet’s Costume: Jonson’s Suppression of Marlowe in Bartholomew Fair,” in Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 89–107.
“Fancy, n. and adj.,” A. n. 4.a., first quoted 1581, OED Online.
Callaghan, “And All Is Semblative,” 37, calls this phrase “genitally undecipherable” in respect of the multiple words associated with female genitalia juxtaposed in this triply proprietary grouping—presumably, Orsino has a “fancy,” and Viola will be “queen” of it?
Shannon, “Nature’s Bias,” 208, calls the pair of couples at the resolution “an expanded group of siblings based on the axis of the twins.”
3. It Takes One to Know One
Some of the most widely circulated examples of English witch hunt pamphlets include: The most strange and admirable discoverie of the three witches of Warboys arraigned, convicted, and executed at the last assises at Huntington (London, 1593); The araignement & burning of Margaret Ferne-seede for the murther of her late husband Anthony Ferne-seede (London, 1608); Thomas Potts, The wonderfull discoverie of witches in the countie of Lancaster, With the arraignement and triall of nineteene notorious witches (London, 1613), the trial that is the source for Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s 1634 tragicomedy The Late Lancashire Witches; The Wonderful discovery of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Philippa Flower, daughters of Joan Flower neere BeverCastle: executed at Lincolne, March 11th 1618 (London, 1619); and the trial pamphlet that is the source for The Witch of Edmonton (1622), Henry Goodcole’s The wonderfull discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a witch late of Edmonton, her conviction and condemnation and death. Together with the relation of the Divels accesse to her, and their conference together (London, 1621).
Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Women, Men, and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 11.
I am thinking here of D. A. Miller’s work on the queer meanings of Jane Austen and Alfred Hitchcock; see Miller’s Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), and “Anal Rope,” Representations 32 (1990): 114–33; as well as Sedgwick’s literary treatments of the AIDS quilt, Supreme Court decisions, and culture war rhetorics in Tendencies and Epistemology.
Newes from Scotland, declaring the damnable life and death of Doctor Fian a notable sorcerer, who was burned at Edenbrough in Ianuary last. 1591. Which doctor was regester to the diuell that sundry times preached at North Barrick Kirke, to a number of notorious witches. With the true examination of the saide doctor and witches, as they vttered them in the presence of the Scottish king. Discouering how they pretended to bewitch and drowne his Maiestie in the sea comming from Denmarke, with such other wonderfull matters as the like hath not been heard of at any time. Published according to the Scottish coppie (London, [1592?]), BOD 8o Douce F 210, Aivv, hereafter cited parenthetically in text by signature and leaf number.
See Gowing, Common Bodies, as well as Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Frances Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Gowing, Common Bodies, 73.
One of the important connections to be made between the history of witchcraft and the histories of medicine and state violence toward poor people is this recurring narrative strand: the criminalization of women for providing health care on a lay, community basis. See Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1973).
Document 20, “The Trial of Agnes Sampson, 27 January 1591,” items 1–12, 19, in Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches, ed. Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000). All subsequent citations from early modern legal documents are from this book, identified by document number, name, and item number. Sampson’s accusation concentrates on her long-standing practice of midwifery and folk medicine for clients from a wide range of social stations. Presented with ill clients who came to her to ask if they would live or not, she correctly told, many times, how long it would be before they were well again, and whether they would die of their current illnesses.
Newes from Scotland’s emphasis on James’s personal involvement in the trials reflects authorship by someone close to James, a collaborator in fashioning his public persona. Though the pamphlet was speculatively attributed to James himself in ninteenth-century scholarship, modern research suggests that James Carmichael, the minister of Haddington who was in charge of some of the trials, may have written the original source text for the pamphlet. Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, 8. See Robert Pitcairn, Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, Compiled from the Original Records and Manuscripts, with Historical Illustrations (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1833); and George Lincoln Burr’s edition of Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, “The Witch Persecutions,” vol. 3, no. 4 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania History Department, 1897).
The idea that the witch’s silence was attributable to demonic assistance, potentially through charms hidden on her body, dates from the Malleus Maleficarum (1487) by Heinrich Kramer, though the devil’s mark is a later belief that postdates medieval witchcraft theory. See Dyan Elliott, “The Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality,” in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller, Alastair J. Minnis, and Eammon Duffy (Suffolk, U.K.: York Medieval Press, 1997), 173n142. See also S. W. McDonald, “The Devil’s Mark and the Witch-Prickers of Scotland,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 90, no. 9 (1997): 507–11.
The most strange and admirable discouerie of the three witches of Warboys arraigned, conuicted, and executed at the last assises at Huntington, for the bewitching of the fiue daughters of Robert Throckmorton esquire, and diuers other persons, with sundrie diuellish and grieuous torments: and also for the witching to death of the Lady Crumwell, the like hath not been heard of in this age (London, 1593), O3v–O4r.
Deborah Willis, “Magic and Witchcraft,” in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 138–39.
Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing, 120–33, reads the mark discovered on Sampson as the central sign that belies the antirepresentational belief system of Protestant antitheatrical discourse. The investment in finding it, she says, reveals a deeply repressed paranoid anxiety that material signs can indeed have transformative efficacies, which she connects explicitly to the antitheatrical anxiety that sexual difference, gender, and desire could be altered by material accessories.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1.
Influential work on the systemic conditions of gender, communal psychology, and the witch hunt includes: Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), and Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994); Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (New York: Routledge, 1996); Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (London: Norton, 1987).
Influential studies of the epistemology of “discovery” and the “discovery scene,” arguing for its constitutive significance to early modern ideas of interiority, truth, and subjectivity, have been presented by Christopher Pye, “Froth in the Mirror: Demonism, Sexuality, and the Early Modern Subject,” in Vanishing, 38–49; and Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 44–46.
Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 37, 102–4.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1. I appreciate Kristeva’s figurative description of the state of being beset by abjection as a “twisted braid of affects” rather than a clean-cut or unitary mechanism.
Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, 209. See also Charlotte-Rose Millar, Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2017); and Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 204–8.
Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “NO COLLUSION—RIGGED WITCH HUNT!,” Twitter, August 23, 2018, 1:10 a.m.
Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!,” Twitter, July 31, 2018, 7:59 a.m.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 1–37.
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965), trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), 33–34, quoted in Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 4–5.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 6.
Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 56.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 6.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 9.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 6.
Dinshaw, in Getting Medieval, 55–99, also uses this phrase to illustrate the paranoid and projective desires animating the complex of shifting, reflexive accusations around Lollardy, murder, simony, sodomy, and leprosy in late medieval England.
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 34.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 8.
Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1935), in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 262.
“Since the dread of internalized objects is by no means extinguished with their projection, the ego marshals against the persecutors inside the body the same forces as it employs against those in the outside world. These anxiety-contents and defence-mechanisms form the basis of paranoia.” Klein, “Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 262.
Klein, “Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 262.
Klein, “Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” 263.
Melanie Klein, “Personification in the Play of Children” (1929), in Love, Guilt, and Reparation, 203n1.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 8.
“Entanglement” is a technical term in quantum mechanics for particles that are ontologically related such that, regardless of their distance from one another over space or through time, they can instantly coordinate their properties with one another. The information that entangled particles disperse and share through their mysterious communication network is by its nature secret and invisible as long as it’s held among entangled particles. Once observed, the particles are no longer in a state of entanglement. Rivka Galchen, “Dream Machine: The Mind-Expanding World of Quantum Computing,” New Yorker, May 2, 2011, 34–43.
See Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), particularly chap. 12, “The Magical Power of Signs.”
Suspicion around domestic material objects is famously on display as a queer-constructing and queer-persecuting force in the trials of Oscar Wilde, where the fabrics of drapes, the stains on bedsheets, the lines of furniture, and the dishes ordered on restaurant bills are marshaled as evidence of Wilde’s “gross indecency” with other men. See The Trials of Oscar Wilde, ed. H. Montgomery Hyde (London: The Stationery Office, 2001); and Abigail Joseph, Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2019).
Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, document 23, “The Trial of Euphame MacCalzean, 9–15 June 1591,” items 25 and 26.
The image of witches sailing in sieves on the sea (like uncanny seafarers, which some of the accused are by occupation) to attend demonic business is thought to originate in Newes from Scotland, because it does not appear in Jean Bodin, Reginald Scot, or any earlier sources on witchcraft. It is the putative source for the witches’ declaration that they will sail in sieves to do harm to the sailor’s wife in Macbeth. For a detailed analysis of Newes from Scotland’s afterlives as source material for Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s Jacobean drama, see Edward H. Thompson, “Macbeth, King James, and the Witches,” paper presented at “Lancashire Witches: Law, Literature and 17th Century Women,” December 1993, University of Lancaster. http://faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Phil%20281b/Philosophy%20of%20Magic/Arcana/Witchcraft%20and%20Grimoires/macbeth.htm.
Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, 20.
Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, 21.
Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, 303.
This is where accused women become truly fungible in Newes from Scotland, their identities shifting from criminal suspects individually subjected to examination and torture into a conglomerate of interchangeable witches acting in concert. The pamphlet attributes this confession to “Agnis Tompson,” but the cat christening comes from the record of Sampson’s trial. Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, document 20, “The Trial of Agnes Sampson, 27 January 1591,” item 40.
The trial records (including the indictment where sieve sailing originates) mention throwing a dog overboard and conjuring cats: “Ye and they took the sea, Robert Grierson being your admiral and masterman, passed over the sea in riddles to a ship where ye entered with the devil your master therein, where after ye had eaten and drunken, ye cast over a black dog that skipped under the ship, and thereby ye hewing the devil your master therein, who drowned the ship by tumbling, whereby the queen was put back by storm. (26) Item, indicted for consulting with the said Annie Sampson, Robert Grierson and divers other witches for the treasonable staying of the queen’s homecoming by storm and wind, and raising of storm to that effect, or else to have drowned her Majesty and her company by conjuring of cats and casting of them in the sea at Leith and the back of Robert Grierson’s house. To stay the queen’s homecoming.” Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, document 23, “The Trial of Euphame MacCalzean, 9–15 June 1591,” items 25 and 26. The elder witch, Agnis or Agnes (“Annie”) Sampson, also confesses to baptizing a cat in the chimney hearth of a house. Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, document 20, “The Trial of Agnes Sampson, 27 January 1591,” item 40.
It is possible that the cat may have been christened James, Anne, or some other reference to the royal targets of the storm. Or it may have been given a diabolical moniker out of folk tradition, like Tom (the name by which the devil dog in The Witch of Edmonton introduces himself)—or somehow christened, in a fully perverted version of the sacrament, with no name at all.
Their possible provenance is hinted at in the trial dittay of Agnes Sampson (who is after all a longtime healer and midwife) when she is accused of “taking off the pain and sickness” of women in childbirth (including Euphame MacCalzean, the other witch accused of cat conjuring) by “putting of moulds or powder, made of men’s joints and members in Newton kirk, under Euphame MacCalzean’s bed ten days before her birth.” Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, document 20, items 42–43.
Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Theory of Intellectual Inhibition” (1931), in Love, Guilt, and Reparation, 238.
Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York: Viking, 1996), 40–49.
Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, 215, read the North Berwick gathering as a sort of populist political carnival or rally, “an astonishingly democratic meeting presided over by a devil who can be criticised [. . .] We may even see this moment as an image of political argument and challenge [. . .] The devil berated in North Berwick kirk for late delivery of an image is not the super-subtle and supremely powerful enemy of God of the demonologists. He is, at least in part, the devil of popular belief, ballads and stories, of many proverbs and popular woodcuts, who has close, chatty relationships with clowns in early modern drama.”
Briggs, Witches and Neighbors, 25. Briggs also explains the early modern identification of the devil with a sadistic father figure in Continental witch beliefs, and the respective Catholic and Protestant psychologies around the devil’s role in the seduction of witches (385).
The lore of the witches’ Sabbath frequently includes music and dancing; this is presumably some form of a popular folk song, but its antiphonal leader-and-chorus structure and the repetitive, linked dance it implies give it additional associations with archaic communal ritual life such as morris dancing and the maypole.
The pamphlet narrative identifies at an emotional level with the king here, indicating the author’s possible presence with James in the courtroom to witness his “delight,” and/or an investment in aligning the voice of the pamphlet as closely as possible with James’s emotive political persona, in order to imprint the king’s personal pleasure on this particular construction of witchcraft for circulation in both Scotland and England.
James imagines the realm to be secretly teeming with witches who are constantly fashioning technologies through which to harm him. In the chains of simulacra James imagines, people (such as himself) are roasted via their wax images, using representation and likeness to create a material conduit from the devil, through the witch, to the victim: “To some witches the Devil teaches how to make Pictures of waxe or clay. That by the rosting thereof, the persones that they beare the name of, may be continuallie melted or dryed awaie by continuall sicknesse.” James VI, Daemonologie, in forme of a Dialogue (Edinburgh: Robert Waldgrave, 1597; fascimile ed., Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969), 44.
The Jew’s harp also underlines the historical and thematic links between the Continental idea of the witches’ Sabbath (popularly called a synagogue) and long-standing communal paranoia around the ritual practices of heretics and Jews, including cannibalism, blood libel, and sexual orgies. See Martine Ostorero, “The Concept of the Witches’ Sabbath in the Alpine Region (1430–1440): Text and Context,” in Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, ed. Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 20–23.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 10.
See Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003), 100–140. English agent Thomas Fowler reported before the wedding that Anne bore the king a great deal of “affection which his Majestie is apt in no way to requite.” Quoted in Ethel Carleton Williams, Anne of Denmark (London: Longman, 1970), 14–15.
Goodcole, Wonderfull discoverie.
William Prynne, for example, alleges that at an Elizabethan performance of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), the actors and audience were amazed at “the visible apparition of the Devill on the stage.” Prynne, Histrio-mastix, the players scourge, or actors tragedie . . . (London, 1633). E. K. Chambers locates performances of Doctor Faustus as a common site for such urban legends, which formed a “curious mythos” registering audiences’ anxieties and appetites around witchcraft onstage. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 3:423–24.
The first and only printed edition of the play dates from thirty-seven years into its popularity: William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton: A known true Story. Composed into A Tragi-Comedy By divers well-esteemed Poets, William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, &c. Acted by the Princes Servants, often at the Cock-Pit in Drury-Lane, once at Court with singular Applause. Never printed till now (London, 1658).
Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, introduction to The Witch of Edmonton, by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, Revels Student edition, ed. Corbin and Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 6.
Anthony Dawson and Viviana Comensoli have offered structural and historicist accounts in which the bigamy plot highlights the pressures on women and the threat of social marginality. See Dawson, “Witchcraft/Bigamy: Cultural Conflict in The Witch of Edmonton,” in Renaissance Drama 20 (1989): 77–99; and Comensoli, “Witchcraft and Domestic Tragedy in The Witch of Edmonton,” in The Politics of Gender in Early Europe, ed. Jean R. Brink, Allison P. Coudert, and Maryanne C. Horowitz (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1989), 43–59. David Atkinson’s position is that the plots enact complementary dramas of antisocial hubris and moral reckoning. Atkinson, “The Two Plots of The Witch of Edmonton,” Notes and Queries 31, no. 2 (1984): 229–30. Other scholars have pointed to both plots’ concern with the efficacy and truth status of language and oaths. Todd Butler reads the legal problem of bigamy alongside Goodcole’s affirmations of the truth of witchcraft in the pamphlet in “Swearing Justice in Henry Goodcole and The Witch of Edmonton,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 50, no. 1 (2010): 127–45; Elyssa Y. Cheng reads Elizabeth Sawyer and Susan as victims of an overarching social pathology resulting from private/patriarchal land ownership in “Marginalizing Women: Forced Marriage, Witchcraft Accusations, and the Social Machinery of Private Landownership in The Witch of Edmonton,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36, no. 1 (2010): 119–34; and Cindy L. Vitto reads the twinned performative rituals of marriage and witch initiation in a destabilized Reformation context in “Mismatched Words and Deeds: Rituals in The Witch of Edmonton,” in Ceremony and Text in the Renaissance, ed. Douglas F. Rutledge (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 167–79.
Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, Witch of Edmonton, 1.1.44. All subsequent citations in the text are from the Revels Student edition and are cited parenthetically in text by act, scene, and line number.
The portentous mood of secrecy, stigma, and fear around Winnifride’s bridal pregnancy in The Witch of Edmonton may reflect a changing disciplinary norm in which church courts attempted to crack down on premarital fornication and bridal pregnancy (which was extremely common) after about 1600, in an effort to insist that only church marriage made sexual relations licit. This push for official condemnation (which was especially intense in areas of economic scarcity) contends against a preexisting and coexisting social norm in which premarital sex and bridal pregnancy were relatively widespread and accepted as long as marriage took place before the birth; see Martin Ingraham, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 219–37.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 17.
See Millar, Witchcraft.
Millar, Witchcraft, 101–7.
“Ingle” has connotations of service that are interesting in that they bear out the witch/familiar dynamic—which is itself a reversal of the larger cosmic order enacted by the familiar’s seducing the witch into the devil’s service. In this relation, Dog appears to take the submissive sexual role, although he obviously wields control over Cuddy; see DiGangi, Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, 64–67.
“Spit in thy mouth” refers to a gesture of affection that was believed to please dogs. Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, Witch of Edmonton, 107n286. It is also an explicit sexual metaphor, along with “given him a bone to gnaw twenty times,” both of which allude to oral sex between the Dog and Cuddy Banks.
The term for this particular gendered form of manipulation originates with the film Gaslight (dir. George Cukor, 1944), based on the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton, Gas Light. As in The Witch of Edmonton, a husband convinces his wife she is going mad in order to conceal his past criminal acts—by dimming the lights and denying to her that they are dimming.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 19.
Cuddy Banks’s scenes with Dog (thought to be chiefly Rowley’s work) are the only place where any details of the play’s demonology are presented. See Corbin and Douglas Sedge, introduction to Rowley, Dekker, and Ford, Witch of Edmonton, 6.
The ontological status of the “Spirit of Susan” is as ambiguous as the Dog’s placement of the murder weapon; if not a ghost, it could be construed as the uncanny materialization of Frank’s guilty imagination, or as a demonic apparition in Susan’s shape, sent out by the Dog to torment him.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 17.
Sedgwick, Epistemology, 81.
A February 8, 2011, production directed by Jesse Berger for the Red Bull Theater in New York City included a silent, stylized tableau of Elizabeth Sawyer burning alive alongside Winnifride’s recitation of her epilogue, with the two women lit by twin spotlights on an otherwise pitch-black stage, providing a convicting reminder of the cost at which Winnifride’s redemption is bought.
4. Lost Worlds, Lost Selves
Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 197. All subsequent citations of Léry’s text are from Janet Whatley’s authoritative translation, based on the 1580 edition. I also refer to the first printed edition, Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil autrement dite Amerique/le tout recueilli sur les lieux par Jean de Léry (Geneva, 1578), as well as a modern French edition also based on the 1580 text, Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, 2nd ed., ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris: Librarie Générale Française, 1994).
Janet Whatley, introduction to Léry, History of a Voyage, xxi.
Paul Hulton, “Introduction to the Dover Edition” of Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia: The Complete 1590 Theodor De Bry Edition, ed. Paul Hulton (Frankfurt: J. Wechel for T. De Bry, 1590; fascimile ed., New York: Dover, 1972), vii–ix.
For more on the history of generic cross-currents between colonial travel narratives and romance, see Donald Kimball Smith, The Cartographic Imagination: Re-writing the World in Marlowe, Spenser, Raleigh, and Marvell (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008); Karen Newman, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially chap. 6, “Armchair Travel”; and Joan Pong Linton, The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
See Shankar Raman, “Back to the Future: Forging History in Luís de Camões’s” in Travel Knowledges: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh (London: Palgrave, 2001), 134; Thomas Scanlan, Colonial Writing and the New World, 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3–4; and Jacques Lezra, Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 40–41.
Hulton, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” xiv.
The 1590 folio edition of Harriot’s report with White’s “True Pictures” was the inaugural volume of De Bry’s America series. Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage was enormously successful as well, enjoying reprintings in 1580, 1585, 1594, 1599–1600, and 1611 after the initial publication in 1578. Translated into Latin and German, it becomes part of De Bry’s third volume of the America series in 1592. Léry’s text is also anthologized in English, as “Extracts out of the Historie of John Lerius a Frenchman, Who Lived in Brasill with Mons. Villagagnon, Ann. 1557, and 58,” in the 1625 edition of Samuel Purchas’s compendium of travel writing, Hakluytus posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (first published in 1613). See Janet Whatley, “Editions and Reception of Léry,” in Léry, History of a Voyage, 220–21, as well as the book’s bibliography, 258–59.
On the entrance of Henri II, see Michael Wintroub, A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and Knowledge in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006). On the uses of blackness in the Jacobean court, see Hall, Things of Darkness, 127–40.
Virginia Mason Vaughan addresses the stage as a site for representing racial difference in “Enter Three Turks and a Moor: Signifying the ‘Other’ in Early Modern English Drama,” in Speaking Pictures: The Visual/Verbal Nexus of Dramatic Performance (Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), 119–40. Nabil Matar refines the historical connections between early modern Britain’s “triangular” relationships with Muslims from the Levant and North Africa and Native Americans in Virginia in Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 89; Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 81.
Major examples include Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
An explication of the “straight” reading of colonial desire can be found in Greenblatt’s treatment of the writings of Columbus and Cortés in chap. 3, “Marvelous Possessions,” and chap. 5, “The Go-Between,” of Marvelous Possessions. On racialized colonial desire, see Hall, Things of Darkness, 25–43.
See Hall, Things of Darkness, especially chap. 1, “A World of Difference: Travel Narratives and the Inscription of Culture”; Louis Montrose, “The Work of Gender and Sexuality in the Elizabethan Discourse of Discovery,” in Discourses of Sexuality from Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Donna C. Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 138–94; and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Other scholars of psychoanalysis have traced how Freud’s revisions of his ideas on narcissism and sexual inversion “subordinate[d] both to the teleology of procreative heterosexuality,” so that “inversion becomes not a separate dynamic of cathexis with its own authority, but a misplaying of the singularly authorized heterosexual cathexis.” Gregory W. Bredbeck, “Narcissus in the Wilde: Textual Cathexis and the Historical Origins of Queer Camp,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New York: Routledge, 1994), 62–63. See also 59–64 on Freud’s subtle heteronormativizing of his account of sexual maturation.
Fradenburg and Freccero, “Introduction: Caxton, Foucault, and the Pleasures of History,” xix.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 16–17.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 17–19.
See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, xiv; also chap. 7, “The Black Man and Recognition.”
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 100. Bhabha is analyzing nineteenth-century colonial administrative processes of civil address and legal inscription, but the cycle of craven investment in the other’s gaze that he describes can be seen long before the advent of those regimes.
Bhabha, Location of Culture, 63.
Bhabha, Location of Culture, 61.
This also serves to make explicit the limitations of this study to a focus on European desires. There is important work being done that seeks to recover the perspectives of American people looking at the European invaders. See Beatríz Pastor, “Silence and Writing: The History of the Conquest,” trans. Jason Wood, in 1492/1992: Re/discovering Colonial Writing, ed. René Jara and Nicolas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Pastor takes up the project of “rewriting” the history of the conquest, which requires “retracing the lost steps, listening to other voices that could have related the history of a discovery rooted in dreams and lies” (147).
“The form [of the event’s] appearing—the morphology of the culture or of the moment—‘precedes’ the event, which comes to form always and already in the shape of a sign, an event that ‘means something.’” Lezra, Unspeakable Subjects, 40–41.
Of the critics who have written on same-sex, gay, or queer erotics in the colonial sphere, only Freccero, in the last chapter of Queer/Early/Modern, a methodological intervention titled “Queer Spectrality,” has articulated a similar valence of melancholic desire in colonial writing. Freccero advocates for a queer historiography of being haunted by the past, which she distinguishes from melancholia’s “entombment”—although her model of queer, transtemporal historical affect resonates with the past- and future-oriented melancholias I am describing.
See Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2011; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); and Peter Sigal, Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
The coexistence of forms of queer identification and desire with violent exploitation in colonial sexuality has been clarified for me by Rifkin’s work, particularly When Did Indians Become Straight?, and by Canadian First Nations (Cree) artist Kent Monkman’s Old Masters–style paintings, which render fantasy histories of graphic colonial homoeroticism and violence (https://www.kentmonkman.com/). See Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?, 26–30, for an incisive critique of the ways in which queer theory has been implicated in settler colonial imperatives through binary and white-normative conceptions of kinship, family, individuality, citizenship, and the nation-state.
Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in Standard Edition, 14:243–58.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 249, categorizes identification as the surrogation of the desire for difference, “a substitute for the erotic cathexis.” But some attachments—or some subjects, it seems—were always suspiciously narcissistic in their object-choices: when “the object-choice has been effected on a narcissistic basis,” the melancholic’s object-love has some essential susceptibility to “regress into narcissism” at the first “obstacle.” However, this regression is also a return, back to “a preliminary stage of object-choice . . . the first way—and one that is expressed in an ambivalent fashion—in which the ego picks out an object.” Freud, “On Narcissism,” 554, defines narcissism as the “original” erotic condition, which is sustained and intensified in “perverts and homosexuals” and at “the maturing of the female sexual organs,” and which only normal, Oedipal, heterosexual men completely banish.
Other critics have used the idea of melancholia to discuss the aftermath of colonial violence, notably Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); and Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
“Nostalgia, n.,” 1. and 2.a., OED Online.
Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure and In a Queer Time and Place; Love, Feeling Backward.
Michael Warner treats the history of often reductive associations in psychoanalytic thought between homosexuality and narcissistic overidentification in “Homo-Narcissism; or, Heterosexuality,” in Engendering Men, ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990), 190–206. Earl Jackson Jr. offers a critique in Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995) of psychoanalytic theory’s construction of a gay subject. However, Jackson also seeks to rehabilitate one nuance of Freud’s notion of narcissism: “a range of identificatory operations . . . a potentially compelling descriptive model of the dynamic interchanges constituting psychosocial subject formation (and the economic fluctuations of external or internal libidinal investments).” Jackson, Strategies of Deviance, 21–26.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 247.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955), trans. John Russell (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 85.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 41; “ils la vouloyent mascher et avaler toute crue,” Histoire d’un voyage (1994), 177.
Sara Castro-Klarén, “Parallaxes: Cannibalism and Self-Embodiment; or, The Calvinist Reading of Tupi A-Theology,” in Thinking the Limits of the Body, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 101–28. See also the canonical work of Frank Lestringant, particularly Le huguenot et le sauvage: L’Amerique et la controverse coloniale, en France, au temps des Guerres de Religion (1555–1589) (Paris: Aux Amateurs des Livres, 1990) and “Calvinistes et cannibales: Les écrits protestants sur le Brésil français (1555–1560),” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 126 (1980): 19–26.
Whatley, “Editions and Reception of Léry,” 221; Carla Freccero, “Heteroerotic Homoeroticism: Jean de Léry and the ‘New World’ Man,” in The Rhetoric of the Other: Lesbian and Gay Strategies of Resistance in French and Francophone Contexts, ed. Martine Antle and Dominique Fisher (New Orleans, La.: University of the South Press, 2002), 101–14.
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals” (c. 1580), in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), book 1, chap. 13, 150–52.
Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 69–104; “Heteroerotic Homoeroticism”; and “Cannibalism, Homophobia, Women: Montaigne’s ‘Des cannibales’ and ‘De l’amitié,’” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (New York: Routledge, 1994), 73–84.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 198.
“Ausquels . . . j’ay cogneu plus de rondeur qu’en plusieurs de par-deça, lesquels à leur condamnation, portent titre de Chrestiens.” Léry, Histoire d’un voyage (1994), 508.
The iconic trope of queer desire I cite here, “I am the Love that dare not speak its name,” is the last line of a poem, “Two Loves,” by Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas, the perpetually absconding object of Oscar Wilde’s melancholic desire, which appeared in the sole issue of the sexually transgressive and queer-affiliated Oxford undergraduate literary journal The Chameleon 1, no. 1 (1894): 28. Quoted in Sedgwick, Epistemology, 74.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 67.
Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 95.
“Je les voye tousjours devant mes yeux, j’en auray à jamais l’idée et l’image en mon entendement.” Léry, Histoire d’un voyage (1994), 233–34.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 249–50.
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 196.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 67; “je confesse qu’il est malaisé de les bien representer, ni par escrit, ni mesme par peinture,” Histoire d’un voyage (1994), 234.
This particular register of histrionic disavowal of the possibility of description coupled with florid description has been explicated as a specifically camp sensibility by Abigail Joseph. See Joseph, “‘Excesses of Every Kind’: Dress and Drag around 1870,” in Crossings in Text and Textile, ed. Katherine Joslin and Daneen Wardrop (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2015), 13.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245.
“One feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either.” Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245.
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245.
Léry, “Préface,” History of a Voyage, xlv.
Léry, “Préface,” xlvi.
Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 87, characterizes these events of religiously motivated torture and mass murder as modern or protomodern traumas that do shattering, haunting violence to the narratives of French nationhood.
Freud characterizes repetition-compulsion as an unconsciously self-destructive neurotic response to a trauma, especially a trauma like the ministers’ sojourn in Brazil, in which the subject is passive and powerless. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), in Standard Edition, 18:1–64.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 199.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 200.
Léry, “Préface,” xlv.
Freccero, “Cannibalism, Homophobia, Women,” 78.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 121.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 142.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 141.
I am intrigued by Léry’s belated insertion into his narrative of a parallel between his memory of the ceremony and a witches’ Sabbath. Léry even adds a passage from Jean Bodin’s witch-crazed treatise, De la démonomanie des sorciers (1578), to the 1585 edition of Histoire d’un voyage, concluding that Bodin best describes what he witnessed twenty years before. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 15–19, is perceptive when he describes how thoroughly literal and material—not metaphorical—negative affects are for Jean de Léry; he experiences suffering, pain, and torment as part of the same erotic mechanism as wonder and pleasure.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 141–42.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 144.
Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 99; Bersani, Homos, 101.
Goldberg, “History That Will Be,” 16.
Goldberg, “History That Will Be,” 15.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 9. Citations to this text are hereafter cited in the footnotes according to the text’s 1590 folio page numbering.
Edelman, No Future, 1–32.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 11.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 25.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 27.
Léry, History of a Voyage, 64.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 27.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 24.
Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” 6.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 27.
Goldberg, “History That Will Be,” 18, reads Harriot as attempting to “dazzle” the natives with writing and to endow writing with magic-making power by including it on this list.
Goldberg, “History That Will Be,” 15.
Bhabha, Location of Culture, 100.
Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” 3.
Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” 3.
Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” 3.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 27.
This fantasy appears periodically in the voyage-history genre, including George Best’s 1570s accounts of Martin Frobisher’s voyages to Baffin Island. It appears as a claim that Native Americans communicate—in words or by gestures—a self-consciousness of their relative cognitive simplicity compared to the invaders, as well as an inability to grasp the abstract principles that animate European technology and scientific thought. See Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 114–16.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 29.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 29.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 29.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 29.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 29.
Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in Shakespearean Negotiations, 35–36.
Goldberg, “History That Will Be,” 15.
Goldberg, “History That Will Be,” 16.
Goldberg, “History That Will Be,” 16.
Goldberg, “History That Will Be,” 16.
Goldberg, “History That Will Be,” 15.
Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univeristy Press, 2007), 4–5.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion,” Glyph 8 (1981): 50, quoted in Goldberg, “History That Will Be,” 16.
Edelman, No Future; Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”; Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955).
Theodor De Bry, “To the gentle Reader”; “The True Pictures and Fashions of the People in that Parte of America Now Called Virginia . . . ,” in Harriot, Briefe and True Report, [41].
“True Pictures,” [36].
The definitive modern edition of John White’s Roanoke watercolors is The American Drawings of John White, ed. Paul Hulton and David Beers Quinn, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964).
Hulton, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” xi.
John White, “A weroan or great Lorde of Virginia. III”; “True Pictures,” A. Further citations from “True Pictures” will be cited in notes under John White’s name and the “True Pictures” page signature.
White, “True Pictures,” A5.
White, “True Pictures,” A6.
See Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), for an intervention into how native peoples have been situated in time—both by primitivist relegation to the past and by the liberal settler state’s erasure of indigenous temporalities via inclusion in the modern present.
White, “True Pictures,” A6.
White, “True Pictures,” D2.
White, “True Pictures,” E.
Sedgwick, “Foreword: T Times,” xii.
See Sam Smiles, “John White and British Antiquity: Savage Origins in the Context of Tudor Historiography,” in European Visions: American Voices, ed. Kim Sloan (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 2009), 106–12.
The Roanoke story has inspired hundreds of books of varying degrees of historicity and imaginative speculation. I have relied on the work of David Beers Quinn, whose numerous publications on English colonialism include Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1606 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); see also James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke (New York: Basic Books, 2010); and Lee Miller, Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony (New York: Arcade, 2000).
John White to Richard Hakluyt, letter, February 4, 1593, in The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–90: Documents to Illustrate the English Voyages to North America under the Patent Granted to Walter Raleigh in 1584, ed. David Beers Quinn (New York: Dover Publications, 1991), 2:714.
White to Hakluyt, letter, 2:715.
White to Hakluyt, letter, 2:715.
The multiple narratives about the lost settlers are contextualized within the political history of the indigenous nations in the area in Michael Leroy Oberg’s masterful historical study, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand: Roanoke’s Forgotten Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
John Smith, A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia, 1608, in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 1580–1631, ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 48, 54.
This map, known as the Carta Zúñiga because it was leaked to Spain by an ambassador, is reproduced in William P. Cumming’s The Southeast in Early Maps, 3rd ed., revised and enlarged by Louis De Vorsey Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), map 21.
“Instructions Orders and Constitutions to Sir Thomas Gates Knight Governor of Virginia,” May 1609, printed in The Records of the Virginia Company of London, ed. Susan M. Kingsbury (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1906–35), 3:17.
This comment appears in editions of Purchas, Hakluytus posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, beginning in 1624–25, both as a marginal footnote to Smith’s account and in an editorial tract Purchas appends to the reports he includes from the Virginia colonies. See Hakluytus posthumus (London, 1625), vol. 4, book 9 (“English Plantations, Discoveries, Acts, and Occurents, in Virginia and Summer Ilands, Since the Yeere 1606. Till 1624”), chap. 4 (“The proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia”), 1728; and chap. 20 (“Virginia’s Verger”), 1813.
William Strachey, The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia (London: Hakluyt Society, 1849), 85–86, 101.
Strachey, Historie of Travaile, 26.
Oberg, Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, 127–39, reads the Jamestown colonists’ search for Roanoke survivors in the context of the contested political terrain of the Powhatan empire. Effectively, the Englishmen went where their native hosts, guides, protectors, and enslavers wanted them to go, and were told what served the native leaders’ purposes.
George Percy, A Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia, printed in A Library of American Literature from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time: Early Colonial Literature, 1607–1675, ed. Edmund Clarence Stedman and Ellen Mackay Hutchinson (New York: Webster, 1889), 1:33.
Oberg, Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, 130–31, recounts the Christian racial uplift fantasies around the Hatteras people’s supposed European descent recorded by colonial surveyor John Lawson in the early eighteenth century. On the isolation of the North Carolina Tuscarora from the rest of the Tuscarora nation, traces of the Roanoke settlers in Tuscarora oral history and phenotypes, and the role of light eyes in Tuscarora conflicts with white settlers, see Arwin D. Smallwood, Bertie County: An Eastern North Carolina History (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2002), 28–29, 44–45.
See Malinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
This genetic-nostalgia imperative is exemplified by such popular genealogy efforts as the Lost Colony DNA Project (http://www.lost-colony.com/DNAproj.html), organized by the Lost Colony Center for Science and Research, a lay historical and genealogical society in North Carolina. The racial fetishism around DNA, particularly as it is used to reconstruct the histories of indigenous people in the Americas, is unpacked by Kim TallBear, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Strachey, Historie of Travaile, 26.
Michael Harkin, “Performing Paradox: Narrativity and the Lost Colony of Roanoke,” in Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous–European Contact, ed. John Sutton Lutz (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), 104.
For a thorough history of the Roanoke narrative’s romanticization in and as literature confirming the providential rightness of white Manifest Destiny in America, see Robert D. Arner, “The Romance of Roanoke: Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony in American Literature,” Southern Literary Journal 10, no. 2 (1978): 5–45.
Harkin, “Performing Paradox,” 110–15
“Sad Fate of the White Doe. Deadly Work of the Silver Bullet. The Captain Becomes Reminiscent on a Trip which Seems to Have Neither Start Nor Finish,” New York Times, April 22, 1888.
Sallie Southall Cotten, The White Doe, or The Fate of Virginia Dare—An Indian Legend (Philadelphia, Pa.: Lippincott, 1901).
Arner, “Romance of Roanoke,” 26.
Entries about the Roanoke colony are included in many encyclopedias of the paranormal and unexplained, including Time-Life Books’s Mysteries of the Unknown series. It is listed in compendia of ghost-haunted places on the earth and is featured in several television documentaries investigating famous unsolved mysteries.
Michael Wallis makes this point about the sensationalistic and moralizing media narratives surrounding the Donner party, which characterized the survivors’ cannibalism as an outbreak of exceptional, diabolical, inhuman monstrosity in order to downplay the challenge their ordeal posed to the entire westward expansion project. Wallis, The Best Land under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny (New York: Norton, 2017).
The American Protestant origin myth that draws mystical biblical time into the settler colonial present even more explicitly is the founding myth of Mormonism: the story of Joseph Smith being given the golden tablets containing the Book of Mormon by the angel Moroni, which takes place in Palmyra, New York, in the early nineteenth century, and which can in some ways be considered a sequel and a companion tale to the story of the lost colony.
American Horror Story: Roanoke, season 6, created by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, 2016; Michael Scott, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel (series, 2007–12); Neil Gaiman, Marvel 1602 (2003); Storm of the Century, created by Stephen King, 1999; Harlan Ellison, “Croatoan” (1975); Philip José Farmer, Dare (1965).
Harkin, “Performing Paradox,” 103–17.
Harkin, “Performing Paradox,” 115.
Oberg, Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand, 136. Rifkin theorizes indigenous adoption as a land-based, political practice, in opposition to white settler sexuality’s imposition of the heterosexual nuclear family. Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?, 31, 50–52.
Harkin, “Performing Paradox,” 103–4.
Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 132–34.
See Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
Quinn, Set Fair for Roanoke, 153.
See Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 26–27.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (https://www.splcenter.org/) lists VDARE as a white nationalist extremist group.
Ben Davis, “The New White Nationalism’s Sloppy Use of Art History, Decoded,” Artnet News, March 7, 2017, https://news.artnet.com/.
“American Renaissance,” Southern Poverty Law Center, https://www.splcenter.org/.
Documentation of VDARE’s presence at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference is provided by journalist Osita Nwanevu in “The True Face of Trump Conservativism Can Be Seen in CPAC’s Swag Center,” Slate, February 25, 2017, https://slate.com/.
In Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” 245, the subject may know “whom he has lost, but not what he has lost in him.”
Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 126.
Cheng, Melancholy of Race; Bhabha, Location of Culture; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012); and Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 6.
Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender-Refused Identification,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 5, no. 2 (1995), 172.
Butler, “Melancholy Gender,” 171.
In Butler, “Melancholy Gender,” 169, the analogy is actually: “If one is a girl to the extent that one does not want a girl, then wanting a girl will bring being a girl into question; within this matrix, homosexual desire thus panics gender.”
Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 196.
Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 196.
Conclusion
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 6.
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008).
In addition to Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” see the section titled “Thought as Privilege” in “Queer and Now,” 18–20.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 20.
“Data Snapshot: Contingent Faculty in U.S. Higher Ed,” AAUP: American Association of University Professors, October 11, 2018, https://www.aaup.org/.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 4–5.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 18.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 35.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 16–17.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 8.
Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 5–10.
Most recently Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 22.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 22.
Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading,” 25.
Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 2.
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Felski, Uses of Literature, 10–11.
Dimock, “Theory of Resonance,” 1064.
Dimock, “Theory of Resonance,” 1064.
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