Shakespeare's queer 'Sonnets' and the forgeries of William Henry Ireland - William Shakespeare

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by Michael Keevak

One may wonder why we should even bother with Chalmers's theories after two hundred years. Do they reside merely in "the by-ways of eighteenth-century letters,"(39) or is it possible to argue that these big books are more than just an effect of an antique milieu in which bardolatrous forgeries were so readily accepted? Although the Ireland case has received its share of analysis, far too little attention has been paid to Chalmers's involvement in the controversy, and to the manner in which his books have much to teach us about larger critical questions--and about the effects of sodomy in particular.

In this sense we must orient our understanding of Chalmers's response to contemporary queer studies debates, which not accidentally have as one of their main points of focus the early modern period. One reason for this is that in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the term "sodomy" could be used to refer not only to sexual acts between men or between women, but also to any non-normative form of sexual behavior (extramarital intercourse, non-vaginal sex, masturbation, bestiality, rape, and so on), and many contemporary queer theorists have adopted a similar designation for "queer' in order to make it more inclusive, or less exclusionary, than a term like "gay and lesbian studies."(40) In this sense the Sonnets are unquestionably queer or sodomitical poems, either in terms of their (supposed) relationship with the young man or the dark lady, but clearly it is much more urgent for Chalmers to free Shakespeare from the possibility of same-sex desire than from an adulterous affair. Just as the forged letter from Elizabeth may simply have given Chalmers an opportunity to relieve Shakespeare from the graver charge of "platonism," the whole theory about a female addressee is a belated rescue operation whose "solution" stems from a cultural anxiety about sodomy just as much as from the letter itself. Even in the first Apology the forgeries had already moved into the background. But Chalmers also looks "backward" in the way in which he endeavors to define a normatively sexual Shakespeare which will counteract an anxiety about sodomy already being felt. As Stallybrass writes, "[t]he justification of Shakespeare is always subsequent to the charge of deviation--just as the concept of the `heterosexual' is a belated response to the prior concept of the `homosexual.'"(41) This is one reason why the Ireland affair is such a valuable and instructive piece of evidence for queer studies. But let us also recall that Chalmers's reading is also the first predominantly autobiographical one of Shakespeare's poems, and we should pause to ask why the initial foray into this sort of criticism should have taken this particular form rather than any other. Is it important, in other words, that the first autobiographical reading should have the avoidance of sodomy at its center?