Abstract
On the Queerness of Early English Drama: Sex in the Subjunctive adds to existing studies of queer medieval and early modern literature an authoritative account of the pervasiveness of sexual and gender dissonance in late medieval and early Tudor drama (1300–1570). Despite the reluctance of early English dramatists to represent sexuality as a positive component of human experience, Pugh argues, in their plays a multiplicity of “taboo desires and practices”—including sodomy, bestiality, incest, and abortion—were “adumbrated in unexpected moments,” both textually and performatively (9). Pugh defines queerness broadly as the disruption of “social, ideological, and sexual normativity” that allows “repressed, subversive, ‘sinful,’ or otherwise unexpected gendered and erotic identities to become visible” (11). Although queer eroticism is rarely represented explicitly in early dramatic texts, which aim primarily to convey orthodox theological and moral lessons, it can manifest through double entendres, subtexts, and the interaction of male bodies (which played both male and female roles) during performance.
Given how indirectly and furtively queerness makes its appearance in these plays, Pugh faces the challenge of identifying its textual traces or performative possibilities. To meet this challenge, he formulates a “subjunctive theory of dramatic queerness” that identifies four “clusters” through which sexual desire and transgression might be theatrically manifested: (1) queer scopophilia, (2) queer dialogue, (3) queer characters, and (4) queer performances. Queer scopophilia refers to the pleasure that male audience members might take in looking at handsome actors playing handsome characters, such as Absolom in Thomas Watson's Absolom or even Jesus in a mystery play. As for queer dialogue, Pugh demonstrates how using the Oxford English Dictionary or the Middle English Dictionary (sometimes against their conservative grains), can make available the colloquial, erotic connotations of words such as capon (an emasculated/queer man), pole (penis), or trim (intercourse). (As an early modernist, however, I wish that Pugh had engaged with Jeffrey Masten's similar project in his 2016 book Queer Philologies). Early English drama also contains characters who blur the boundaries between male and female, such as emasculated men (e.g., the hen-pecked Gil of The Shepherds [2]) and masculine women (the aggressive Woman 3 of The Slaughter of the Innocents). Cross-dressers, hermaphrodites, and eunuchs might also be considered queer in gender and/or sexual terms—and to appreciate how difficult it might be to determine whether such figures are non-normative in their gender, sexuality, or both, Pugh usefully reminds us of Chaucer's Pardoner. Finally, as has been implicit in all of the dramatic practices addressed above (i.e., casting, dialogue, and gendered/erotic embodiment), queerness might be conveyed in various ways during performance, including the deliberate cultivation of a “proto-camp sensibility” (43). Queer eroticism might be elicited, for example, by the familiar plot device in which a male actor kisses another male actor playing a female character. Pugh concludes this discussion with a proposition that applies equally well to his overall project: unruly “erotic energies” can inform even those plays “designed to inculcate their audiences into the mysteries of the Christian faith” (48). That seeming paradox imparts an exciting frisson to Pugh's efforts to identify the possibility of queerness even where we (or early authors!) might least expect to find it.
In his readings of theologically oriented plays that presumably did not intend to stir up lascivious thoughts, Pugh demonstrates admirable judiciousness about how queerness might signify. For example, observing that in premodern England male effeminacy was often associated with excessive desire not for other men but for women, Pugh warns that “conclusions about the queerness of a particular scene must be treated with great caution,” especially since erotic connotations might have been dependent upon variable performance choices (35). Likewise, he does not simply assume that the homosocial friendships portrayed in early drama have a queer charge, although in some contexts they might. In the chapter on Mankind, Pugh suggests that the phrase “fresh and gay” might have sexual connotations; nonetheless, he concedes that the application of the phrase to Respublica in Udall's Respublica indicates that a sexual meaning is not always present (114). Pugh thereby models a reading method that applies historical and theoretical insights to rigorously search out queer meaning without insisting that everything can be read queerly.
In the remainder of this review, I would like to provide a brief account of how each chapter of Pugh's book advances his project of excavating the queerness of early English drama. In Chapter Two, Pugh explores the dramatic representation of male friendship and sodomy. Whereas protagonists of morality plays and interludes fall into heteroerotic sin when led astray by male Vice figures, they profit from their homosocial friendships with the male figures of Virtue who accompany their salvific journeys. Some plays, like Nicholas Udall's Royster Doyster and Ulpian Fulwell's Like Will to Like, represent male friendships as “funhouse reflections of marriage” (53); others, like John Foxe's Titus et Gesippus, represent male friendship as the pinnacle of human love. The loving friendship of Damon and Pythias in Edwards’ play of that name is so exceptional, however, that it verges on queerness. Of course, such valorized relationships might also be perverted by Vice characters hoping to lure men into sin. Sometimes those sins take on the cast of “sodomy”: a term that despite encompassing a multitude of prohibited acts could not be completely unlinked from homosexuality. While the male gender both of the majority of characters in early English drama and also of the actors playing all the roles skews Pugh's attentions towards male-male relations, he does take the opportunity to discuss how friendship and sodomy might have signified in the play “with the greatest potential for a lesbian reading”: the Digby Mary Magdalen (66).
In the remainder of the book, Pugh devotes each chapter to a detailed reading of a single play or related set of plays. Although his efforts, as I have suggested, are largely devoted to unearthing possible queer meanings in theologically and morally oriented texts, in a chapter on the York Corpus Christi plays Pugh addresses how biblical typology attributed different gendered and sexed identities to Jewish and Christian bodies. Nonetheless, he argues, typology doesn't quite succeed in demonstrating that purified “Christian” genders and sexualities have superseded transgressive “Jewish” genders and sexualities, in part because of Jesus’ own identity as a Jew. I sometimes found myself more skeptical of Pugh's readings in this chapter than in others. For instance, to support the claim that the York plays “stress the otherness of Jewish genders,” Pugh argues that Noah is “effeminized” through dialogue that describes the sojourn of his ark as a nine-month gestation (79). This maternal representation of Noah is countered by the masculine “martial and knightly” romance imagery surrounding Jesus in the cycle's later pageants (80). Although the argument that Jesus takes on qualities of chivalric virility is compelling, I am not convinced that maternal imagery is sufficient to taint Noah with “effeminacy,” or that such an attribution would be readily legible to an audience as a sign of the “gendered otherness” of Jews generally (81).
In Chapter Four, Pugh argues that the morality Mankind depicts the journey to salvation as “unabashedly filthy” (excremental) and “exuberantly queer” (95). Pugh defines medieval allegory as “inherently queer” because its surface narration often “camoflag[es] an erotically charged and potentially perverse subtext” (96). Here the general challenge of reading queerness against the orthodox theological grain of early English drama is ameliorated by the structure of allegory itself, which suggests that salvation must be achieved through “inverted” and “perverted” means (97). Mankind, that is, openly deploys scatological, homoerotic, and carnivalesque humor to portray the condition of corrupt humanity in need of salvation. Faced with the choice between Jesus’ perfect body and the imperfect mortal body, however, audience members might “disidentify” to some degree with the orthodox ideology of the play, finding themselves unable completely to repudiate the pleasures (including homoeroticism) marked as sinful by Christian teaching.
If Mankind comprises a kind of queer allegory, John Bale's pro-Reformation interludes, Pugh argues, enact a “queer historiography.” Bale's historiography is queer in the sense that his promotion of a chaste, theologically reformed England becomes implicated in his condemnation of clerical chastity as a kind of sodomy. “Sodomitical traces” of a demonized Catholic past thus haunt Bale's redeemed English present (125). One way that Bale associates the Catholic Church with sodomy is through the character Sodomismus in Thre Lawes of Nature, Moses, and Christ, who boasts of the pederastic tastes of even the Pope. As we saw in the earlier chapter about male friendship, however, sodomy was a broadly defined sin that signified the general debauchery of human will. For Bale, then, sodomy could encompass not only pederasty but also adultery, promiscuity, masturbation, bestiality, and idolatry. Yet because Bale's interludes, like many of the dramatic texts in Pugh's study, feature few female characters, sodomy comes to seem particularly descriptive of transgressive male same-sex relations. With the wonderfully paradoxical phrase “sodomitical chastity,” Bale excoriates the sexual hypocrisy of lecherous if unmarried Catholic prelates (and nuns) even as he thereby undercuts the purity of Englande, a chaste widow and mother, in King Johan. King Johan's chaste asexuality similarly falls under the shadow of “sodomitical chastity.” As always, Pugh is alert to the ways in which performance might add a queer(er) dimension to the text; here, he observes the delicious irony that the performer who played Englande also doubles in the part of lecherous Clergye.
In his final chapter (preceding a brief conclusion that situates Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi within the “queer legacy” of early English drama), Pugh turns from the English Reformation to the Scottish Reformation as presented through David Lyndsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Pugh identifies this carnivalesque text as proto-camp for its foregrounding of the dissonance between the male bodies of actors and the exuberant female bodies they perform, a dynamic that fosters in audiences a “hermaphroditic gaze” in which male and female gender distinctions refuse to congeal (146). Like Bale, Lyndsay attributes sexual incontinence to the Catholic Church; unlike Bale, he fills his play with “an extraordinarily large number of female characters,” some of whom “straddle the borders between masculine and feminine” (157). I appreciated Pugh's use of contemporary theories of camp to explain how Lyndsay seems to search for an innovative dramatic form with which to explore sexual vices and inversions of traditional gender roles. Camp provides an apt vocabulary for describing not just the dramatic style of Lyndsay's Satyre but also its production of “epistemological crises” for spectators who might not be able to apprehend the allegory of social reform beneath the performance's sexually raucous surface. That tension between the orthodox ideological message and the unruly performative energies of early English drama drives Pugh's interpretations throughout this excellent study and serves as a powerful motive and model for future work.