Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan by Richard Halpern Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester by Paul Hammond (review)

Abstract

1084 Reviews far from dead). Emma Jung (daughter of the great psychologist) and Marie-Louise von Franz offera brief but stimulating account of Merlin in the Grail legend, together with a diagram. Alexandre Micha discusses Robert de Boron, Kate Cooper discusses the Huth Merlin. Surveys of Merlinian preoccupations in Malory, Spenser, and Tennyson are respectively given by D. L. Hoffman, William Blackman, and Catherine Stevenson. Linda Hughes has a striking piece (with illustrations) on Merlin in Victo? rian writing and art. Jean Markale discusses Merlin with the confidence of a French intellectual. In their selection of these pieces (almost all published earlier) the editors rightlystress the work of the last twenty-fiveyears, giving access to research many of us might otherwise never see. By putting together such diverse material they bring home the Merlin legend's astounding variety,and how it crops up in present-day novels and cinema set not just on the sea-girt Celtic Fringe, but even the empty prairies of the USA. The legend is Protean and ever young. So the book deals with creative artists as unlike as Dante, Ariosto, Cervantes, Goethe, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Beardsley, C. S. Lewis, Sartre, T. H. White, and Nikolai Tolstoy (to say nothing ofWait Disney and the scriptwriters of Dr Who). The scope of reference seems limitless: a Baroque ltalian poet (p. 194) sees Merlin as inventor of the telescope and precursor of Galileo; a German (p. 225) describes the Merlin legend's message for the doom-ridden Germany of the early 1980s, with nuclear war thought imminent; a curious element is provided (p. 395) by Mary Zambaco, Burne-Jones's Greek mistress, who modelled Vivien forhis Beguiling ofMerlin and who, when he ended the affair,tried to drown herself in frontof Robert Browning's house. The editors are thorough and painstaking. Few points escape them. As regards Celtic Studies, the following may be noted. The Black Book of Carmarthen (p. 4) is now dated to about 1250, not 1200. Zimmer (p. 268) thought Brut Tysiliowas a chron? icle of the early twelfth century and one of Geoffrey of Monmouth's sources. This is false. It survives in no manuscript earlier than 1500; Brynley Roberts in his Brut y Brenhinedd (Dublin: DIAS, 1971), p. xxx, calls it a 'late compilation' resembling other fifteenth-century chronicles. Hoffman (p. 334) relates Old English drymann 'sorcerer' to dream 'rejoicing'. This cannot stand. Old English dry 'wizard' has long been recognized as a loan from Old Irish drui'dvuid; wizard'. Markale (p. 411) seems unaware that Birnham Wood in Macbeth did not move of its own accord. Afterthis itis no surprise to findhim saying (p. 414) 'Merlin and St Francis are the same character', or linking Merlin's prison of air with Freud's 'discoveries' on intra-uterine memory. Yet Merlin: A Casebook is a major contribution to scholarship. It willbe ^ebookon Merlin studies. Even more than Writing the Future, it prompts enquiry into fictional narratives and archetypes, old and new. University of Navarre, Pamplona Andrew Breeze Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in theSonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan. By Richard Halpern. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. 126 pp. $29.95; ?21. ISBN 0-8122-3661-0. Figuring Sex betweenMen fromShakespeare toRochester. By Paul Hammond. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. xi + 281 pp. ?14.99. ISBN o19 -818693-2. These are two intriguing studies that seek to unveil the teasing rhetoric of sodomy in markedly differentways. 'It is in the detail, rather than in any grand theory', ar? gues Paul Hammond in his richly voiced study of seventeenth-century texts from Shakespeare's Sonnets on, that we can see 'the kinds of associations and disso- MLR, 100.4, 2005 1085 ciations' through which writers 'figured' sex between men (p. 255). In contrast, Richard Halpern's search fora 'coherent tradition', imbrieating the aesthetic with the sodomitic over several centuries, positions the Sonnets on a wilfully uncharted cogni? tive map, 'limited' to 'a few outstanding influences' on the 'theory that less is more' (p. 4). As each in its own way illustrates, both approaches lay themselves open to the kinds of wild jouissance that thinking around sodomy has always tended to...