Shakespeare and Gender

Valerie Traub claims that ‘the meanings of homoerotic desire during the early modern period seem to have been remarkably unfixed, with contradictory meanings existing across a complex and fractured field of signification’ (‘Desire and the Differences it Makes’ in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare). Choose ONE play on the module and discuss the ‘meanings’ of homoerotic desire.

“Not only did legal, moral, religious and literary discourses understand and evaluate homoeroticism differently, but within each discourse there existed contradictory positions.” Here, in her essay Desire and the Difference it Makes, Valerie Traub observes that homoerotic desire had a variety of “meanings” in the Early Modern Period. She, however, refers to the “act” of sexual intercourse between two men as being the form of homoerotic desire categorised as ‘sodomy’. By focusing on playwrights such as William Shakespeare, who recognised this ambiguity and chose to explore it in particular works such as his Othello, we can see how the idea was represented at the time. However, it appears that not only the ‘meanings’ of ‘homoeroticism’ were unfixed, but that the words ‘love’ and ‘friendship’ were also ambiguous and period-bound. The word ‘love’, for instance, had four distinct meanings in classical Greek and so it is not surprising that we have difficulty in engaging with the past.

By examining the context of these terms, what can be seen is that homoerotic activity has been visible throughout literature and the visual arts since antiquity. However, from our perspective we need to be cautious in making assumptions about what the ‘meanings’ were actually inferring at the time. For example, an understanding of the wo...

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...osexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’ in History Workshop Journal, 29 (1) http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/1/1 (accessed 24/03/11).

DiGangi, Mario, ‘Introduction’ in The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1997)

Honigmann, E.A.J. ‘Secret Motives in Othello’ in Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies (New York: Barnes & Noble Books: 1976)

Montaigne, Michel de, ‘Of Friendship’ in The Essays of Michael de Montaigne trans. M.A. Screech (Virginia: Penguin Books: 2005)

Smith, Bruce R. ‘Combatants and Comrades’ in Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press: 1991)

Traub, Valerie, ‘Desire and the Difference it Makes’ in The matter of difference: materialist feminist criticism of Shakespeare ed. by Valerie Wayne (New York; London: Harvester Wheatsheaf: 1991)