GLR September-October 2022

It is a mark of how bleak this book is that the most opti mistic note comes on the last page, when he writes: “One must be grateful for what one has.” I would argue that it is precisely the refusal to accept this position that has fueled most progres sive movements, including what we now call the LGBT one. There were moments in reading The Kingdom of Sand that I wanted to give Andrew Holleran a good shake and tell him to leave northern Florida for somewhere less haunted by the melancholy of his past.

if a young reader assumed that their sexuality condemned them to the isolation that Holleran depicts. The frontispiece of the book quotes Saint Benedict as telling us to “Keep death daily before your eyes,” an admonition that Holleran seems to have followed. Benedict lived to the age of 67, a remarkable age for the sixth century, but his death was seemingly far less lonely than the one Holleran foresees. The Kingdom of Sand is haunted by images of old people dying alone, undiscovered for several days.

Ere Shakespeare

T HEATER is an art form that most of us would not associate with the Middle Ages. The early me dieval Catholic Church con demned theatrical productions and prohibited the faithful from attending them. Various councils of the Church for bade clergy from viewing performances of mimes and stage plays. As a result, drama virtually disappeared from the historical

lowing the emergence of Queer Theory in the academy in the 1980s and ’90s, literary scholars began to investigate “the ways in which plays written and performed through out the Renaissance revel in queer tensions and torsions of identity, desire, and per formance,” and especially in Shakespeare’s plays, with their abundance of gender re versals, cross-dressing, and homosocial de sire bordering on the homoerotic and even

N ILS C LAUSSON

ON THE QUEERNESS OF EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA Sex in the Subjunctive by Tison Pugh Univ. of Toronto Press. 256 pages, $65.

record from the 5th to the 8th century, returning in the early 9th century in the Easter liturgical form of the Quem quaeritis , in which an angel appears before the tomb of Christ and asks the Three Marys, “Whom do you seek?” The women answer “Jesus,” and the angel proclaims that He has risen and the women rejoice and praise God. Since monks played all the roles in these proto-dramas, including the Three Marys, Pugh argues that these liturgical rituals, by incorporating cross-gen der performance and costuming, “shifted the course of the Catholic liturgy and of Western theater, and its inherent queer ness could not be eluded.” From this observation, Pugh pro ceeds to read the major texts of medieval drama in ways that open them up to queer interpretations. On the Queerness of Early English Drama is divided into two parts. The first, “Queer Theories and Themes of Early Eng lish Drama,” provides the theoretical underpinning of Pugh’s analyses of the plays discussed in the second part, “Queer Read ings of Early English Drama.” The book aims to uncover and in terpret both male and female homosexual desire as portrayed in the major forms of medieval theater: liturgical drama, morality plays, secular interludes, and the mystery plays from the York Corpus Christi cycle. The subtitle, “Sex in the Subjunctive,” refers to Pugh’s methodology, which involves the use of gram mar, specifically the subjunctive mood, which denotes behav iors that are desired or wished for but not acted upon. In the two theoretical chapters that explain the methodology governing his close readings of specific texts, Pugh identifies “four clusters of potential queerness”: dialogue, characters, performance, and scopophilia (literally the love of looking, usually at human ob jects of desire). This book fills in a gap in the history of English drama. Fol Nils Clausson is emeritus professor of English at the University of Regina (Canada). September–October 2022

homosexual. The main value of Pugh’s study is that it attempts to apply queer scholarship to the Middle Ages. Pugh’s careful readings of medieval and early Tudor drama reveal them to ex hibit “taboo desires and practices” that include bestiality, sodomy, incest, and abortion. Pugh defines queerness as much more than deviant sexual desires and practices. It encompasses the disruption of “social, ideological, and sexual normativity, which includes anything that allows repressed, subversive, ‘sin ful,’ or otherwise unexpected gendered and erotic identities to become visible.” This definition allows Pugh to address the fact that the plays he examines rarely deal explicitly with “queer” subject matter, as Renaissance plays, especially Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s, often do. Pugh’s argument is bolstered by his readings of specific plays. His analysis of the morality play Mankind reveals the extent to which both the text and the performance of it by a cast of male actors bring out its sexual meanings. The play is a moral allegory which tells the story of Mankind, a representa tive of the human race, as he is tempted into sin by various al legorical vice figures (all male), followed by his repentance and ultimate salvation. Viewed from this orthodox moral per spective, the action of the play appears designed to inculcate or thodox Christian morality. Yet the action, much of which involves five male vice figures attempting to seduce Mankind into sin, together with its pervasive scatological imagery, af fords abundant opportunities for homosexual innuendo. In one scene, for example, one of the vice characters, New-Gyse (gyse = fashion), plans to dress Mankind in the latest style of jacket. The jacket is repeatedly shortened to the point that the actor playing Mankind must reveal more and more of his legs, thereby approaching higher and higher to his private parts. Pugh points to a 1463 law that prohibited a man from wearing a jacket or coat that does not “cover his privy members and buttocks.” In performance, this scene could be staged to hu

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