GLR January-February 2023

S OME of the most memorable ad vice in all of English literature comes in Hamlet, when Polonius tells his son Laertes: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” But anyone hearing that advice knows—and Shake speare’s playgoers probably knew—that it takes time to figure out who you truly are, if ever you do. As Leonard Barkan reveals in his lyrical, literary autobiography, figur ing out how to be true to himself happened by performing, read ing, and teaching Shakespeare’s work. In the first few pages, Barkan tells us that this book is about his “lifelong love affair” with Shakespeare. But another way to think about this book is that it conveys how Shake speare taught Barkan how to love. King Lear and Macbeth , for example, helped him to understand his father’s displays of indignant anger and his mother’s exuberant teaching of Yid dish as performances intended to make an impression on him as a child. His own early experience of acting in the role of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream helped him make sense of his own “loveless” twenties, when he was both an iso lated gay man and a cast member moved by the lovers’ happy endings in the story. The Winter’s Tale helps him discover how he could form such an intimate friendship with a straight male John S. Garrison is professor of English at Grinnell College in Grin nell, Iowa. 34 intellectual—so that the “secret vices” of many young men would not be given a chance to blossom. The appearance of Defects and Poisons prompted gay men in France and elsewhere to write to “Dr. Laupts.” Many told him that they were not ashamed of themselves and in fact ad vocated for changes in society, not personal “cures.” Mean while, the Italian kept hoping to find a character in one of Zola’s subsequent novels based on himself. As the years went on, he resigned himself to the fact that he should not expect Zola to do “what Balzac himself didn’t dare do.” The story might have ended there but for the Italian’s stu pendous chance discovery of Saint-Paul’s book in a shop win dow one day in 1896. He wrote to “Dr. Laupts,” thanking him for the discretion the doctor had shown in his use of the letters and offering more stories about the “treacherous affliction that torments me.” He provided detailed accounts of his sex life since those original letters, and speculated on the causes of his sexual orientation. By the end of this long “sequel”—it runs to 38 printed pages—the Italian came to accept who he was: “a strange being, neither man nor woman, or, rather, both man and woman at the same time.” Fourteen years later, when Saint-Paul brought out a sec ond edition of the book, his thinking about homosexuality had changed to the extent that he now accepted that there were “born homosexuals,” though he was quick to say that homo

sexuality was “a rarity” in France. A third edition was pub lished in 1930. In it, Saint-Paul acknowledged that the think ing on same-sex love had changed a lot since the 1910 edition, and he was now more cautious about unequivocal statements and interpretations regarding the still new field of homosexual studies. Might the Italian’s tale, only now fully revealed after its ear lier expurgated versions, be considered “the foundational auto biography of gender fluidity”? Psychiatrist Vernon Rosario poses this question in his excellent foreword to The Italian In vert. Whatever the case, Rosario says we can still “unequivo cally admire” the Italian for coping with the hostility he encountered and, in the end, for enthusiastically embracing his sexual uniqueness. The Italian Invert is an important addition to the field of queer studies. The Italian’s story—full of despair, confusion, narcissism, sexual yearning, snobbery, and ultimate self-accep tance—is as compelling as it is candid. Moreover, as editor Michael Rosenfeld points out, Zola’s collaboration with Saint Paul was an extraordinary example of “goodwill and courage,” even though both men struggled to understand the complete re ality of homosexuality. The ménage à trois of Zola, Saint-Paul, and the Italian, as strange as it was, has left us with a document that provides both the casual reader and the scholar with fasci nating material.

Shakespeare Made Me Okay with It

friend, and how that prepared him for true love. The love triangles in the Sonnets bring him to fathom why he fell in love with both members of a couple in one of his first adult crushes. And, in the present, Barkan and his partner’s love of RuPaul’s Drag Race is explored through themes it shares with Richard II. Both dramas reveal how the “real” and the “royal” are based in performance.

J OHN S. G ARRISON

READING SHAKESPEARE READING ME by Leonard Barkan Fordham University Press 256 pages, $29.99

Reading Shakespeare Reading Me offers a meditation on not only what’s queer in Shakespeare but also how queer peo ple translate a wide range of what they find in books into their own lives. Barkan remarks: “The world literature of love and desire, with some notable exceptions, is heavily heterosexual, Shakespeare included.” Nevertheless, he finds many places in the plays and poems where queer people can see themselves— boy actors playing women, cross-dressing heroines, profound love shared between same-sex friends—but he also finds a wide range of places that might not look explicitly queer but ended up being deeply resonant for him. In this way, many sur prising examples from Shakespeare’s work (some of which may be familiar to readers, others not) hold a mirror up to Barkan in which he can make sense of his identity—as Jewish and gay—at different stages of life. The fact that we can see the plays performed live adds another dimension to how we might find ourselves reflected in a character. Intriguingly, the author locates the “gayest moment in

The G & LR