Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England ed. by James M. Bromley and Will Stockton (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England ed. by James M. Bromley and Will Stockton Emily Johnson Roberts Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England, ed. James M. Bromley and Will Stockton (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2013) vii + 329 pp. Building on important scholarship that theorizes and historicizes sex and sexuality, this collection of essays, which began with a series of conversations [End Page 326] among scholars and the prompt “What is sex?” challenges modern assumptions about sex (the act) in the early modern period prior to the development of the modern definition of the term as penile-vaginal intercourse. Several of the essays in this volume explore and historicize sexual acts that today are little known or have been obscured by dominant cultural narratives, while others offer queer readings of early modern texts. According to the editors, Sex before Sex is a compilation of queer, historicist, and queer-historicist essays, which is just one of the reasons that it is an exciting and significant contribution to existing scholarship. The introduction, co-authored by Will Stockton and James Bromley, opens with a brief discussion of Act 2 Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Hermia and Lysander are discussing their sleeping arrangements for the night. Stockton and Bromley recognize the sexual tension of this scene, but they also aptly note that scenes such as these should raise questions about what preciselyis sexual (or what sex could be) in these contexts. Reminding readers that there is no transhistorical definition of sex, the authors explain that Sex before Sex is an attempt to destabilize scenes like this one by “pressuring the definition of sex” and challenging modern presumptions about sex (2). In the first chapter, “‘Invisible Sex!’: What Looks like the Act in Early Modern Drama?,” Christine Varnado connects the “LOLCats” Internet phenomenon (in which photos of cats in anthropomorphic positions are posted with captions identifying their imagined activities) with the implied offstage action that suggests sex in early modern drama. In doing so she demonstrates the imaginative and interpretive activity that must take place for one to “see” sex in early modern drama. In making this connection, Varnado hopes to recover the similarities between modern and early modern subjects which critical emphasis on historical alterity has deemphasized (25). In addition to asserting that erotic reading requires subjective identification with an objective phenomenon, Varnado offers analyses of sexually-charged scenes from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, and Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, arguing that scenes from the latter two texts demonstrate the ambiguity of offstage sexual acts in the former, particularly in the morning after scene in Romeo and Juliet, which scholars typically read as a scene of “straight” offstage sex. Chapter 2, “Death and Theory: Or, the Problem of Counterfactual Sex,” by Kathryn Schwarz, is the most theoretically demanding essay in the collection. Schwarz explores the connection between sex and death by focusing on corporeal virginity, the social reputation for virtue, and the dead bodies on which virtuous reputations are built. Using the myth of Lucretia as a starting point, Schwarz explores with insight the complex paradox that privileges a dead body over a living subject. Among the essays that reexamine erotic desire in early modern texts are Melissa Jones’s “Spectacular Impotence: Or, Things that Hardly Ever Happen in the Critical History of Pornography,” in chapter 3, and Nicholas F. Radel’s “‘Unmanly Passions’: Sodomitical Self-Fashioning in John Ford’s The Lover’s [End Page 327] Melancholy and Perkin Warbeck,” in chapter 4. Jones explores the erotics of impotency in Thomas Nashe’s “Choise of Valentines” (1592) and John Mars-ton’s Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598), arguing that narrowly categorizing pornographic narratives as “subversive” or “hegemonic” limits the affective and erotic possibilities of the texts (89). Jones emphasizes the overlooked desires of early modern female readers, for whom the failed erections of pornographic narratives might serve as objects of desire. In a similar reading of male-male desire in the two plays of his essay’s title, Radel argues that the ability of men...