Abstract

“Look how he looks!”: Queerness and Visual Pleasure in the Early Modern Theater

By

Mark Scott

Doctor of Philosophy in English

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Jeffrey Knapp, Chair

“Look how he looks!”: Queerness and Visual Pleasure in the Early Modern Theater calls for a radical reassessment of visibility and visual pleasure in early modern theaters. Despite the recent flourishing of audience studies, accounts of theatergoing continue to rely (implicitly or explicitly) on a model of spectatorship derived from film and mass media theories: the singular gaze that surveys a framed and bounded visual field. This restrictive conception of spectatorship has obscured the multiplicity and instability of gazes that crisscross the playhouse during any given performance. Unlike the anonymous isolation experienced in a darkened cinema or a proscenium arch theater, shared-lighting amphitheaters with their thrust stages exposed spectators as well as actors to view. The visual hierarchy of the stage over the auditorium was destabilized by a competition for looks not only among actors vying for the attention of spectators, but also among spectators seeking the attention of other spectators, and even among spectators trying to catch the actors’ eyes: any supposed distinction between subject and object of the gaze was constantly shifting. Playwrights like Chrisopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare exploited the ways that such visual flux manifested ambiguities inherent in contemporary linguistic and scientific approaches to sight. In early modern English, words like “look,” “gaze,” and “eye” functioned as both verb and noun and troubled distinctions between active and passive, agent and patient. Early modern science generated similar confusions, offering two competing theories of vision: intromission (images penetrate the eye) and extromission (eyebeams penetrate the surrounding environment). This epistemological uncertainty fueled a preoccupation, amongst playwrights and antitheatricalists alike, with the dynamics of visibility. The questions went far beyond how an actor appeared to the audience. Playgoers too were urged to ask themselves, “How do I look?” “How does my being seen affect others, and myself?” “Should I be seen?” “Where should I look?” “Why is seeing and being seen so pleasurable?” These questions in turn helped shape how playwrights conceived of identity and selfhood. From Doctor Faustus to Richard II and Hamlet, the great “individuals” of the Elizabethan stage are overwhelmed by their awareness of being watched (“too much in the sun”) while they are also desperately competing with others for attention. The spectatorial self-consciousness of the period’s plays could only have been created with the eyes of early modern theatergoers in mind. In erasing binaries like looker and looked-at, penetrator and penetrated, male and female, and thus destabilizing traditionally gendered hierarchies of visual control and domination, playhouse gazing was a fundamentally queer pleasure – like playgoing itself. Studies of queerness in early modern drama often remain fixated on the stage and on the homoerotic spectacles enacted between boy players and adult actors. Yet the stage was by no means the playhouse’s only (or even primary) source of visual eroticism, which was instead dispersed throughout the theater in the dense webs of looks in which actors’ and spectators’ eyes were enmeshed during performances. Plays like Jonson’s Poetaster and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida explore how theaters functioned as cruising grounds for those looking for sodomitical sex (including, though not limited to, men seeking sex with men). I argue that theater became a site – and a sight – of sodomy because it facilitated a queer multiplicity of gazes and visual exchanges impossible in other early modern spaces. My project thereby contributes to the history of urban queer cruising, too often thought of exclusively in terms of the post-19th century male flaneur.

This dissertation argues that an acknowledgment of disparity was central to the conception of early modern friendship and that the period’s emphasis on such disparity authorized the creation of larger social groups and networks. Classical theory’s emphasis on likeness and parity in friendship offered a crucial model and rhetoric for conceiving ideal social relations. Renaissance writers, however, highlighted the inescapability of difference in an emerging set of social, political, and economic possibilities. Rather than read this difference as a loss of friendly idealism, they articulated the ways in which such difference might sustain existing likeness-based bonds as well as engender a larger number of social relations. A disparity between friends, Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed, would generate an expansive cultivation—rather than a mere reflection—of virtue; the promise of such virtuous expansion in turn encouraged friends to seek a greater number and range of social connections. The celebration of such pluralist configurations in Renaissance literature challenges the conception of social life as a search for exclusive union with a single individual and allows us to recognize the ways in which disparate qualities and experiences actually facilitated the creation of social connections over the course of the early modern period.

Long scorned for their strange inconsistencies and implausibilities, Shakespeare’s romance plays have enjoyed a robust critical reconsideration in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But in the course of reclaiming Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest as significant works of art, this revisionary critical tradition has effaced the very qualities that make these plays so important to our understanding of Shakespeare’s career and to the development of English Renaissance drama: their belatedness and their overt strangeness. While Shakespeare’s earlier plays take pains to integrate and subsume their narrative romance sources into dramatic form, his late romance plays take exactly the opposite approach: they foreground, even exacerbate, the tension between romance and drama. Verisimilitude is a challenge endemic to theater as an embodied medium, but Shakespeare’s romance plays brazenly alert their audiences to the incredible. When a corpse is miraculously revived in Pericles, a bystander muses, “Is not this strange?” When Time comes onstage to skip the plot of The Winter’s Tale ahead by sixteen years, he defensively admits that the audience might view this gap as a “crime” against the dramatic unities. After hearing that three Britons defeated the entire Roman army in Cymbeline, a lord says, “This was strange chance.” After a string of improbable events in The Tempest, Alonso complains that “they strengthen / From strange to stranger.”

“From strange to stranger”: The Problem of Romance on the Shakespearean Stage offers a novel perspective on these issues by showing how Shakespeare’s romance plays conscientiously revive a dramatic genre that had fallen into disuse and disrepute as an abjuration of the highly coherent and unified dramaturgy that superseded it. Because of its otherworldliness and endlessness, romance was derided by opponents and defenders of imaginative literature as indecorous, incredible, and idle. When combined with drama, which was considered exceptionally suasive and therefore dangerous, romance seemed to its critics to present more than technical problems; it presented ethical problems as well. Although overwhelmingly popular in the early decades of the English playhouses, romance had largely disappeared from the stage by the 1590s as English drama became more sophisticated, unified, and realistic.

Looking at moments in Shakespeare’s romance plays that draw our attention to their generic belatedness and formal strangenesses, this dissertation demonstrates that Shakespeare revives romance as a dramatic genre in order to pose ethical questions about community and representation through apparently technical questions of genre and decorum. I show how Pericles argues for the cultivation of virtue through promiscuous mingling; how The Winter’s Tale pathologizes absolute autonomy—which Sir Philip Sidney famously claims in The Defence of Poesy for the poet and the poet alone—as destructively tyrannical; and how Cymbeline seeks multiplicity and plurality as an alternative to hegemonic unity to fashion the new British empire in relation to Rome. Finally, I explain why The Tempest ostentatiously employs dramatic strategies for unifying a play, only to conclude with Prospero’s gesture of release. Rejecting sophistication, mastery, and hegemonic unity, Shakespeare embraces romance’s expansiveness of time, place, and action, and opens up drama to become more ethically and aesthetically capacious in its representational possibilities.