So Long, And Thanks For All the Analysis

S E X U A L I T Y

As the ostentatious marquee suggests, I chose to follow sexuality through the works of William Shakespeare. In my exact words, "my main question for this Critical Concepts blog is to examine and track how Shakespeare allows his characters to discuss their sexuality, how sex appears and is used in both his comedic and tragic (and historical) plays, and compare the pre-Victorian, Early Modern era's "possession [and] expression" of sexuality with our own "modern" conceptions" (from my first blog post). For my final blog post, I will examine my posts leading up to this point to see how I attempted (and hopefully succeeded in) accomplishing this goal. 

First, let me remind you what we are talking about: the OED definition I cited in my first post defined "sexuality" as 

1. Biol. The quality of being sexual or possessing sex. Opposed to asexuality.  

2. Sexual nature, instinct, or feelings; the possession or expression of these.

Well, alright. These definitions were certainly straight forward, but I chose instead to assemble a definition of "sexuality" elsewhere, namely in The History of Sexuality by French philosopher Michel Foucault. I read this text over the course of the semester as a worked with "sexuality" in Shakespeare's plays, and my conception of "sexuality" shifted irrevocably toward the posits in THoS. In his influential work, Foucault stressed the idea that "sexuality" as a unified concept did not exist before the early nineteenth century. Foucault traces the use of sex and sexuality back through the ostensibly repressive Victorian era to discover that, in its earliest usages, "to express" sexuality was not indicated that one "possessed" anything at all (beside, perhaps, a hefty libido); it was not until the later modern decades that sexuality became this "thing" that is intrinsically "possessed."

As I went into battle against the early work of Shakespeare, new definitions and conceptions in hand, one of the first problems I had to first combat was the inevitable anachronism that will emerge when looking for "sexuality" in the 1500-1600s, where it did not exist then as it does for us now. I attempted to mitigate this problem in one of two ways:

a) Whenever possible, I would try to relate the work of Shakespeare back to a modern adaptation or, if there was no pertinent adaptation, to a similar scene or exchange of dialogue to highlight the anachronism rather than attempting to obscure it. One example of this technique is in my second post, "Shakespeare and Film Noir," where I used a scene from The Taming of the Shrew and from Double Indemnity, the archetypal 1950s film noir, to talk about concupiscent exchanges between characters, and the differences found between Shakespeare's characters' sexes and the more "modern" sexualities of the twentieth century. As it turns out, the libidinous exchanges were more alike than different; one could even argue that the Shakespeare dialogue was more explicitly sexual.

b) Another technique I used was to toss out comparison completely and to read the work of Shakespeare solely through a modern, critical eye. Any questions that would arise from this anachronistic reading would be then examined to find out exact why the question arose in first place. Two examples of this (and, I would argue, two of my stronger posts) are my third post, "A Queer Reading of Romeo and Juliet," and my fourth, "Venus as a Boy." These two posts were important not just in the way they deepened my understanding of sexuality, queerness, and the performance of gender, but also for how they deepened my understanding of how Shakespeare might have used, talked about, and written sexuality for his characters. The connection I argued between the tragic story of Romeo and Juliet became important for its modern resonance and potential application, while Venus and Adonis became a gold mine for sexual reference and suggestion straight from the pen of the Bard. These two posts can also be viewed together to provide a holistic image of what sexuality could have meant to Shakespeare, and what his deployment of sexuality can mean to us.

To break down this last posit for the ending note: "a holistic image of what sexuality could have meant to Shakespeare"—Shakespeare would not have seen sexuality in the same ways that we see it now; telling the Bard that you are straight, gay, bisexual would have literally no meaning to him whatsoever. How, then, did Shakespeare construct his characters? Around what central locus? His characters were simply allowed to use sex without the daunting task to possess it, and perhaps this allowed for sex to appear in myriad, eclectic ways.

Finally, "what his deployment of sexuality can mean to us"—in my reading of Romeo and Juliet, I connected the story of the two youths, with their love forbidden by societal regulations and their resulting suicides, to the recent suicides of LGBT youth who, like the two lovers, find themselves hopelessly unable to "fit in." Obviously, Shakespeare had no intent of writing a tragedy to show (and maybe critique) the terrible, even deadly, burden of societal stigmas and expectations. He had no idea of what his plays could come to mean, and so perhaps it is up to us to figure it out for him.