Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture by Michael Keevak (review)

Abstract

170 Reviews and by the end of the reign of Elizabeth he had overcome his humble origins to be 'worshipped' by 'stage-struck students and gallants' (p. 137). By the early years of the reign of James I the King's Men were the top company and Shakespeare 'unchallenged ' as their leading writer. The rise of Shakespeare to this dominant position is reinforced by a running contrast with Ben Jonson, who is somewhat demonized by comparison, as unable to win popularity and increasingly envious of superior talent. Jonson's 'almost obsessive contempt for the unlettered majority' (p. 178) enhances Shakespeare's image as loved by audiences. Katherine Duncan-Jones raises many intriguing questions in the course of her book, which offers an interesting and challenging narrative. Her double vision of Shakespeare is plausible, and might help to explain a curious lack of response to Shakespeare's death: 'It is striking that there was no immediate rush of elegies or epitaphs from his friends, colleagues or admirers' (p. 278). The book tells a good story,is engagingly written, and certainly provides the reader with food for thought. University of California, Los Angeles R. A. Foakes Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture. By Michael Keevak. Detroit , MI: Wayne State University Press. 2001. 175 pp. $39.95 (pbk $19.95). ISBN 0-814-32953-5 (pbk 0-814-32975-6). Michael Keevak sorts through often obscure and sometimes hilarious Shakespeareana to show how attempts to create an authentic Bard either oversex him, making him a bold and lusty lover (whether hetero-, bi-, or homo-sexual), or unsex him, rendering him an ageless, bodiless sprite. The result: 'Shakespeare in a tank top or an angel's robes' (p. 85). To make this worthwhile point Keevak winnowed through biographies, lies, and rumours, and hacked his way through wastes ofcontroversy. His choice of topics is intriguing and appealing, with chapters dealing with the way the 'queer' sonnets figured in the battle between Edmond Malone and George Chalmers over the amazingly inept forgeries of William Henry Ireland; the 'pre-queer' Bard as William Davenant's lost-and-found father; authorial sexuality as a shuttlecockin antiStratfordian campaigns (the strongest chapter by far); the gendering of Shakespeare through his portraits, especially in daft and earnest efforts to encode his baldness; and a recent example of de-queered Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Love. Unfortunately , Keevak is given to predictable conclusions, such as 'all portraits of the artist are equally grounded in the realms of fantasized forgery,whether the result is an edition, a painting, or an absent Life, and any of these will at some point have to confront the fact that, in the end, we really don't seem to know anything at all' (p. 21). While Keevak's work is often suggestive, its utility is compromised by his factually dense yet over-chatty style?at one point he thanks friends for helping him web-surf (p. 71)?and his obsessive posing of questions. Early modern definitions of, and attititudes towards, 'sodomy' play a major part in Kleevak's arguments about the suppression or exaggeration of Shakespeare's sex? uality. While legally the term could apply to a far greater range of sexual acts (both same-sex and heterosexual) than today, Keevak applies the word with too broad a brush in assessing Shakespeare's sexual fame in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . Few ifany early moderns would judge heterosexual adultery, or a man's desire fora dark-haired woman, or the fatheringof a bastard, as defacto 'sodomy', as Keevak maintains (pp. 17, 59). While he refersto 'contemporary queer studies debates' (p. 36) in support, his note simply lists works by Bray, Goldberg, Orgel, DiGangi, Smith, and others, without distinguishing among them, or describing any 'debates' over this key concept (p. 136 n. 51). Keevak includes a valuable section on female readership MLRy 98.1,2003 171 of Venus and Adonis, but for the most part allusions to the role of female hetero- and homoerotic desire in the process of sexualizing Shakespeare remain underdeveloped. The importance of Keevak's findings to Shakespeare studies in general is limited by his almost total neglect of the plays in favour of the poetry, and by...