Sexual Shakespeare

Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture

By Michael Keevak

Paper - 9780814329757 (Out-Of-Print)


Published 2001
Size: 6 x 9, Pages: 224

Subjects: Language and Literature: Renaissance


Description

Shakespeare's sexuality has always been an ambiguous concept, despite the pleasant fictions of Shakespeare in Love. Now Michael Keevak examines such sources as anecdotes, imitations, forgeries, spurious works, and portraits to show that this ambiguity has a long and twisted history. Sexual Shakespeare is the first book to argue that Shakespeare's sexuality has always presented a problem to readers, who thus have a tendency to desexualize him. Because so little reliable information is available about Shakespeare, Keevak suggests that the very idea of his sexuality, much like his personal reputation, should remain as open and unfixed as possible—that Shakespeare and his contemporaries are not easily reducible to a sexuality of any kind. His book offers a new way of understanding our desire to uncover "the absent sodomite" in the early modern period and makes a unique contribution to both queer theory and Renaissance studies.

Published by Wayne State University Press

Author(s)

Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University and author of The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar's Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax

Other Books by Michael Keevak: The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax,

Reviews

"This is a book that addresses itself adroitly to both an academic and quasi-popular readership.  It's good to know that English language literary scholarship in Taiwan's premier university is being carried out with such a combination of meticulousness, discrimination, and elan."

— Taipei Times


 "Sexual Shakespeare by Michael Keevak is an excellent and challenging work that shows how conceptions of Shakespeare's character have always been determined by notions of sexuality."

— Time Life Supplement


"Michael Keevak's Sexual Shakespeare is a stellar contribution to the history of Shakespeare's reputation and afterlives....Keevak demonstrates with grace and wit how our culture's need to sexualize Shakespeare has produced such queer effects that we have just as consistently needed to desexualize him."

— Richard Burt, University of Massachusetts