Desire and anxiety: circulations of sexuality in Shakespearean drama

Abstract

In both feminist theory and Shakespearean criticism, questions of sexuality have consistently been conflated with questions of gender. This book refuses this all too common approach by detailing instead the intersections and contradictions between sexuality and gender in the early modern period. It 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. Taking heterosexuality and homoeroticism equally seriously, this is the first book to present a non-normalizing account of the unconscious and institutional prerogatives that comprise the erotics of Shakespearean drama. Employing feminist, psychoanalytic, and new historical methods, using each to interrogate the other, the book implements a long overdue synthesis of the psychic and the social, the individual and the institutional. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature.