|
|
 |
|
Sexual
Shakespeare
Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture
Michael Keevak |
|
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. |
|
|
"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
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 |
