DiGangi analyses the relation between homoeroticism and social power in a range of literary and historical texts from the 1580s to the 1620s, drawing on insights from materialist, queer and feminist theory to show the centrality of homoerotic practices.

This book explores representations of love and desire between female characters in nearly seventy plays written between 1580 and 1660. The work argues that playwrights of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England recognized and constructed richly diverse tropes of female homoerotic desire. Writers place female characters in erotic situations with other female characters in playful scenarios of mistaken identity, in anxious moments of amorous intrigue, in predatory situations and in enthusiastic, utopian representations of romantic love. These plays indicate an awareness of female homoeroticism in early modern England and belie statements that literary evidence of homosexuality was concerned primarily with men.

Textual Intercourse proposes that the language and practice of writing plays in early modern England was inextricably linked to languages and practices of eroticism, sexuality and reproduction. Jeffrey Masten reads a range of early modern materials - burial records, contemporary biographical anecdotes and theatrical records, essays, conduct books and poems; the printed apparatus of published plays, and the plays themselves - to illustrate the ways in which writing for the theatre shifted from a model of homoerotic collaboration toward one of singular authorship on a patriarchal-absolutist model. Plays and collections of plays by Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Fletcher, Beaumont and Fletcher, Margaret Cavendish, and others, are considered. Textual Intercourse illustrate the ways in which methods attuned to sexuality and gender can illuminate more traditional questions of authorship, attribution, textual editing and intellectual property.

Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans looks at the early modern theater through the lens of obscure and obscene puns--especially "queer" puns, those that carry homoerotic resonances and speak to homoerotic desires. In particular, it resurrects the operations of a small boys' company known as the first Whitefriars, which performed for about nine months in 1607-8. As a group, the plays performed by this company exhibit an unusually dense array of bawdy puns, whose eroticism is extremely interesting, given that the focus of eros is the male body. The laughter recoverable from Whitefriars plays harnesses the pun's inherent doubleness to homoerotic pleasure; in these plays, 'the bawdy hand of the dial' is always 'on the pricke of noone'. Mary Bly's analysis depends on the nature of punning itself, and the inflections of language and the creativity that marked Whitefriars punsters, with special emphasis on the effect of puns on an audience. What happens to audience members who sit shoulder to shoulder and laugh at homoerotic quibbles? What is the effect of catching a queer pun's double meaning in a group rather than while alone? How can we characterize those auditors, within the convoluted, if fascinating, theories of erotic identity offered by queer theorists?

The numerous and multifaceted ways in which masculinities emerge and are expressed within cultures prompt a broad ranging examination and reconsideration of what it means to be a man. Within the study of masculinity, the early modern period stands between the Renaissance, when conceptions of manhood were primarily dominated by chivalric and humanistic traditions, and the latter half of the 18th century, which marked the beginnings of modern conceptions of masculine identity. But rather than a transitional period, the early modern era was a key moment in the evolutionary dynamics of masculine representation. Political forces, such as the Puritan revolution, the Restoration, and the shift in power from the courtier class to the growing middle class forced a reconsideration of the masculine ideal in light of the experiences of the masses. At the same time, the emergence of print culture provided a means of transmitting the new masculine ideal, and literature of the period reflected the changing notions of masculinity. The chapters in this volume explore the various strategies used by early modern writers to represent masculinity. Together, the expert contributors offer a broad perspective on the social and political dynamics of early modern masculine identity. Included are chapters on such writers as Thomas Carew, Andrew Marvell, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson. Though incorporating a variety of critical approaches, the contributors all explore the inherent anxiety associated with masculinity and its representation. The chapters demonstrate how significant literary texts of the period provided not only idealized images of early modern manhood but also contesting ones. By focusing on the literary, historical, and social dynamics which construct cultural perceptions of masculinity, this volume ultimately illustrates the literary representation of manhood in the early modern period to be a dynamic and evolving process which often challenged Western notions of what it means to be a man.

The "rogue," a term that described criminals, prostitutes, vagrants, beggars, and the unemployed, dominated the pages of early modern popular crime literature. Rogue Sexuality resituates the rogue by focusing on how their menace—and their seductive appeal—emerged not only from their social marginality, but also from their supposedly excessive sexuality and prodigious sexual reproduction. Through discussions of both familiar and little-studied early modern works by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Robert Greene, Thomas Harman, and the inventor of modern demography John Graunt, this volume posits the sexualized rogue as the avatar of a new category of "socio-sexual identity" and traces a surprising social transposition, in which socio-political elites are portrayed as appropriating the rogue's sexual vitality and performative charisma to navigate moments of crisis. By tracking the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a normative discursive register, this book challenges the distinctions that literary critics and historians tend to draw between orderly and disorderly sexuality. With its focus on reproduction, rogue sexuality also provides a new framework for what Michel Foucault called "biopolitics," the state's focus on exercising power over life. In legal, administrative, and scientific documents, this book shows that early modern writers grappled with popular pamphlets' rendering of the alleged threat of rogue reproduction. Rogue Sexuality thus offers a new approach to the political history of early modern England as a population—as a people whose aggregate sexual life and reproduction were a key part of its political imagination.

In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. First published in 1992, this book details the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. Valerie Traub argues that desire and anxiety together constitute the erotic in Shakespearean drama – circulating throughout the dramatic texts, traversing ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ sites, eliciting and expressing heterosexual and homoerotic fantasies, embodiments, and fears. This is the first book to present a non-normalizing account of the unconscious and the institutional prerogatives that comprise the erotics of Shakespearean drama. Employing feminist, psychoanalytic, and new historical methods, and using each to interrogate the other, the book synthesises the psychic and the social, the individual and the institutional.

In this volume, the author argues that blood was, crucially, a means by which dramatists negotiated shifting contours of domesticity in 16th and 17th century England. Early modern English drama vividly addressed contemporary debates over an expanding idea of "the domestic," which encompassed the domus as well as sex, parenthood, household order, the relationship between home and state, and the connections between family honor and national identity. The author contends that the domestic ideology expressed by theatrical depictions of marriage and household order is one built on the simultaneous familiarity and violence inherent to blood. The theatrical relation between blood and home is far more intricate than the idealized language of the familial bloodline; the home was itself a bloody place, with domestic bloodstains signifying a range of experiences including religious worship, sex, murder, birth, healing, and holy justice. Focusing on four bleeding figures—the Bleeding Bride, Bleeding Husband, Bleeding Child, and Bleeding Patient—the author argues that the household blood of the early modern stage not only expressed the violence and conflict occasioned by domestic ideology, but also established the home as a site that alternately reified and challenged patriarchal authority.

This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age. Provides an expansive and inter-disciplinary approach to Renaissance plays and the world they played to. Offers a colourful and comprehensive overview of the material conditions of England's most important dramatic period. Gives readers facts and data along with up-to-date interpretation of the plays. Looks at the drama in terms of its cultural agency, its collaborative nature, and its ideological complexity.

This volume analyzes early modern cultural representations of children and childhood through the literature and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Contributors include leading international scholars of the English Renaissance whose essays consider asexuals and sodomites, roaring girls and schoolboys, precocious princes and raucous tomboys, boy actors and female apprentices, while discussing a broad array of topics, from animal studies to performance theory, from queer time to queer fat, from teaching strategies to casting choices, and from metamorphic sex changes to rape and cannibalism. The collection interrogates the cultural and historical contingencies of childhood in an effort to expose, theorize, historicize, and explicate the spectacular queerness of early modern dramatic depictions of children.