Shakespeare and Homosexuality
Goran Stanivukovic
Goran Stanivukovic
Department of English
Saint Mary's University
Halifax
Nova Scotia B3H 3C3
Canada
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Forum Mod Lang Stud (2010) 46 (2): 138-151.
DOI:
Published:
10 March 2010
Abstract
This article is concerned with the intellectual and cultural constructions of homosexuality in nineteenth-century scientific writing about sexuality as a precursor to criticism about homosexuality in Shakespeare's works. It argues that queer early modern criticism of Shakespeare has illuminated the valences of homoerotic desire in plays and poems, and has paid tribute to theories that influenced it in the second half of the twentieth century, but it has remained unreflective on the discursive and critical heritage of the nineteenth century. Thus the article explores the influence of nineteenth-century German sex science on the development of the psychology of sexuality and psychoanalysis in England in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Queer theory has in common with nineteenth-century sex science and theories of homosexuality a focus on character and its interiority. The article examines the development of the critical ideas about homosexuality in Shakespeare, especially in the sonnets, as well as major figures who discussed homosexuality in their writing. Among Shakespeare critics discussed are Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Jones, Edward Dowden, Walter Thomson and G. Wilson Knight.
Shakespeare criticism, nineteenth-century sex science, queer theory
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Articles
“Homosexuality in the plays [of Shakespeare] has only been found in the last few years, and doesn't cause much worry,” wrote Simon Shepherd in a 1988 essay summarising the state of criticism on Shakespeare and homosexuality published in the first half of the twentieth century.1 Shepherd wrote at the beginning of cultural materialist criticism that was then set to change the ways scholars wrote about Shakespeare and homosexuality. He argued that homosexuality should be treated as a product of social and economic forces within the cultural sphere, not a reflection of the idea of homosexuality which society created. Although Shepherd was writing about the twentieth century, in the literary history of Shakespeare criticism at the turn-of-the-century – indeed in the short history of queer criticism – homosexuality in Shakespeare had been a topic before the cultural materialist turn in literary criticism. For example, Oscar Wilde's homoerotic reading of Shakespeare's sonnets, in The Portrait of Mr. W. H., has continued to inspire criticism on homosexuality in Shakespeare's works ever since it was first published in 1889. What does it mean, then, two decades after Shepherd's essay to write on the same subject under much the same title?
This article is less about how critical assessments of homosexuality in Shakespeare since Shepherd's piece have changed, and more about the “unfinished business in cultural materialism” which takes into account intellectual and cultural constructions of homosexuality in nineteenth-century scientific discourse as the intellectual precursor to the literary views of it in Shakespeare.2 “A goal of cultural materialism,” writes Alan Sinfield, “is to restore literary writing to the immediate social and political engagement that has previously and elsewhere been taken for granted, for instance, in the early modern theatre.”3 Yet, this form of social and political engagement represents only one side of finishing the business of cultural materialism. Changes in the scientific paradigms and the language used to present them are also forms of material change within a culture and are thus part of the larger project of cultural materialism. I have in mind the traffic of knowledge concerning sex psychology between Germany and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a flow of ideas which transcended both “idealist” and “literary” writing; this flow of ideas represents part of the intellectual history of queer early modern criticism. Historical articulations of homosexuality “as a dynamic mode based on the sum of one's erotic practice”, and not a “fixed identity”, within a variety of historical discourses have created a varied and rich formulation of homosexuality in Shakespeare's works.4 They have also provided critics with models of how to do the history of homosexuality.5 In these approaches homosexuality is not merely an unchanged historical category, recognised as such at any moment in history. There is no doubt that the new history of homosexuality has stimulated a lively and continuing polemics about the presentation of homoerotic desire in Shakespeare's work. Yet, the achievements of even the best contemporary criticism of homosexuality in Shakespeare come at a cost. Queer early modern criticism of Shakespeare has illuminated the valences of homoerotic desire in plays and poems, and has paid tribute to theories that influenced it in the second half of the twentieth century, but it has remained less reflective on the intellectual and critical heritage of the nineteenth century.
In Shakespeare and Modernism, Cary DiPietro documents the influence that Freud's writing on sexuality and his views on Shakespeare had on the intellectual culture of English modernism.6 As DiPietro argues, “[t]he currency of psychoanalysis in Anglo-Irish culture was greatly accelerated by the 1913 translations of The Interpretation of Dreams”, in which Freud applies his theory of the Oedipus complex to Hamlet.7 The story of Freud's influence on the history of modernist criticism of Shakespeare remains unfinished. But I want to leave the Freudian readings of homosexuality in Shakespeare and Freud's impact on twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism aside, not only because the significance of that topic requires separate attention, but also because Freudian theory of homosexuality is only one aspect of the theories of homosexuality in Shakespeare in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism. What concerns me here is how the German psychology of sex contributed to the cultural consciousness of homosexuality in turn-of-the-century Britain. Because of Freud's prominence in the history of homosexuality, the story of other Continental scientists who wrote influentially about homosexuality has been either ignored or reduced to a footnote in queer early modern criticism.
Those early scientific ideas about homosexuality are also important because they help us complete the picture which traces the development of the historicist method in the study of Shakespearean homosexualities. Queer theory has tended to consider itself a new, late twentieth-century theoretical paradigm which came out of theoretical models and social conditions related to the shifts in the ideological and political status of women and homosexuals. Yet, what queer theory holds in common with the theories with which I am here concerned is a focus on character and its interiority. While those nineteenth-century theories reflect the period's interest in character criticism, current queer theory tilts its arguments at interiority and interrogates its ambiguities against the historical and political background of the early modern period.
In an article surveying the key critical approaches to early modern sexualities, Bruce R. Smith states that “Studies of premodern sexuality can be traced to two diverse origins: feminism and Foucault.”8 This kind of framing cuts current historical research off from the early history of sexuality in the twentieth century, influenced by feminism and Foucault. For a critical paradigm grounded in social construction and dependent on historicism, queer theory's silence about its other cultural predecessors within the history of British culture is both surprising and self-serving, implying the historical singularity of queer theory. Debates about homosexuality in nineteenth-century socio-legal and scientific discourses both established the foundations and created the conditions for disagreement with subsequent theories of homosexuality. As a critical and ideological paradigm that celebrates the experience of non-normative desire, and which affirms homosexuality as a force that challenges sexual normativity in culture and society and that vehemently rejects the earlier notion of homosexuality as pathology, Anglo-American queer theory has positioned itself theoretically and ideologically against its thematic heritage – nineteenth-century science. It has done so largely because of the force of Foucault's theory about different varieties of policing and controlling sexuality, and punishing homosexual behaviour in the nineteenth century.9 It may, then, be a challenge to queer theory to argue that the socio-legal policing and scientific pathologising of homosexuality ought to be considered part of the history of queer theory (however uncomfortable it may be) because at certain points in that history, especially in Britain, there existed parallel discourses which sharply contrasted the language of policing, control and repression. I am thus suggesting a new archaeology, pace Foucault, of the language(s) of homosexuality in the nineteenth century; one that unearths the intersection of the pathologising and liberal discourses of homosexuality. In light of Foucault's statements that the “[a]rchaeology [of discourse and knowledge] is much more willing than the history of ideas to speak of discontinuities, ruptures, gaps, entirely new forms of positivity,” a reconsideration of the historical language of homosexuality in search of discontinuities helps us to discover new ruptures within the discourse of control.10 Ideas from Continental scientific sexology represent the earliest cultural origins of the intellectual framing of the criticism of homosexuality in Shakespeare. Continental sexology is not treated here as a direct influence on Shakespeare criticism. Rather, it is considered a theoretical foundation of an emerging intellectual culture within which further ideas about homosexuality and criticism on Shakespeare took place.
Before queer theory: fin-de-siècle Vienna and London
First named in the second half of the nineteenth century, homosexuality is a concept associated with the scientific enlightenment of modernity; it is one way of understanding what being in the body meant both to modern people and to society and how the period saw the body in relation to sexual object choice. Modernity and homosexuality continue to be linked. The word “homosexual” was first used by the German-Hungarian KárolyMáriaKertebeny in a letter he wrote to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1868. The letter was later published anonymously in 1869 in Leipzig as two pamphlets arguing for the reform of Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal code “penalizing sexual relations between men”, on the grounds that private consensual sexual acts should not be subject to criminal penalty.11 The emergence of homosexuality as a category of scientific description in fin-de-siècle Central Europe occurred as part of the proliferation of different discourses about homosexuality which oscillated between pathology and liberalism.
Sexual science, which in Austro-Hungary and Germany emerged from forensic science and psychiatry, was concerned “with defining and identifying forms of behaviour and diseases considered deviant and criminal”.12 The overlapping of psychiatric and legal fields gave rise to a combined pathologisation and criminalisation of homosexuality which continued to frame discourses of homosexuality throughout the nineteenth and part of the twentieth century. This view culminated in Richard von Kraft-Ebing's treatise PsychopathiaSexualis (1889), intended primarily as a medico-forensic compendium for doctors and lawyers on matters of sexual aberration, since at the time of publication homosexuality in Germany was still punished by imprisonment. Kraft-Ebing, professor of psychiatry and diseases of the nervous system at the Royal University of Vienna and a leading doctor in scientific sexual pathology, saw homosexuality as the most peculiar form of the sexual impulse, to his mind a form of neurotic disturbance and perversion leading to the degeneration of character. Yet this particular aberration, Kraft-Ebing acknowledged, was of such great social and legal significance (because it occurred frequently among children and their parents) that it ought to be of interest to both medical and legal experts.13 Kraft-Ebing's treatise was the first of many to emerge in Vienna's medical circles describing sexual inverts (individuals who turn to their own sex for sexual gratification) and “autoerotics”. This term “autoerotic” was first used by J. Konrad Sadger, an Austrian doctor for nervous diseases and a psychoanalyst, in his 1913 article “Die psychoanalyseeinesAutoerotikers” (Psychoanalysis of an Autoerotic).14 In Britain, the term “autoerotic” was less common than “sexual invert”, even if both terms referred to sexual object choice of the same gender. Following (but also augmenting) the tradition of Kraft-Ebing, Sadger assembled numerous cases of sexual aberration in children and their parents, as his focus was on familial homosexuality. Both Kraft-Ebing's and Sadger's theories of sexual pathologies reflect the fear over, and the danger of, the nudging force of sexuality that was characteristic of fin-de-siècle intellectual culture and its bourgeois life.15 It is worth emphasising, however, that shortly after Kraft-Ebing, and just before Sadger, there appeared a challenge to scientific Vienna's promotion of the pathologisation of homosexuality.
In 1903, the twenty-three-year-old Otto Weininger published his account of gender and desire, Geschlecht und Charakter, which became one of the most popular books on gender and sex in the first half of the twentieth century.16The first English translation was done from the German original published in 1906. This book provokes by its pronounced misogyny and impresses by its perceptive approach to the structure and unconscious organisation of male friendship and homosexuality. It is enough to recall a short paragraph from this work to illustrate its challenge to the dominant position on homosexual aberration:
It is utterly reprehensible and, moreover, entirely incompatible with the principles of the penal code, which punishes crime but not sin, to forbid homosexuals to pursue their way of sexual intercourse while allowing heterosexuals to pursue theirs, if both do so equally without creating a “public nuisance.”17
The power and clarity of Weininger's views on homosexuality are independent of Kertebeny's position and clearly oppose the prevailing scientific discourse of the pathologisation of homosexuality. Nonetheless, the abruptness of Weininger's discourse in this narrative reminds us how the medical establishment of Vienna ignored his views.
In another memorable passage, Weininger argues for the sexual basis of male friendship:
Nor is there such a thing as a friendship between men that completely lacks an element of sexuality, although, far from representing the essence of friendship, the very thought of sex is embarrassing to friends and opposed to the idea of friendship. That this is correct is sufficiently proved by the mere fact that there can be no friendship between men if their external appearance has not aroused any sympathy at all between them and they will therefore never come closer to each other. A great deal of “popularity”, protection, and nepotism among men derives from such relationships, which are often unconsciously sexual in nature.
The unconscious processes suggested here contrast with the scientific discourse of pathologised homosexuality, as well as reveal something crucial about the organisation of Vienna's patriarchal establishment. Yet these quotations suggest that Weininger's book, which mixes psychoanalysis with social analysis, was a breath of fresh air amid the negative tone of prevalent psychiatric arguments concerning homosexuality. The refreshing modernity of his view is expressed in the rejection of the dominant discourse of homosexuality as either criminal or pathological and in the theorisation of the homosexual impulse as the basis of male friendship. But Weininger's work reminds us of the parallel and conflicting ideas concerning homosexuality and the progress in thinking that it marked.
In 1914, one year after Sadger published his treatise about the autoerotic, the Hungarian psychoanalyst SándorFerenczi introduced what later became a famous essay in the history of homosexuality: “On the Nosology of Male Homosexuality (Homoeroticism)”. Augmenting Sadger's observation about autoerotics and Freud's theory of homosexuality, Ferenczi was the first to refine a conception of homosexuality along the lines of identity – and not character pathology. Ernest Jones, who read Sadger and who was once analysed by Ferenczi, keenly endorsed Ferenczi's theory and promoted its author in England. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, we witness the tension between the tendency in the 1880s to pathologise homosexuality – it is most notably the subject of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (first edition, 1890; revised with emendations in 1891) – and the propensity to present a more liberal view of homosexuality, evident in some early twentieth-century novels, such as E. M. Foster's Maurice (1914), D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920) and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928).
Critics have documented the hostility toward psychoanalysis in Britain, especially before Ernest Jones's successful institution of it.18There is an assumption that compared to Continental psychiatric writing homosexuality was very little written about in Britain before Havelock Ellis. Yet, as Ivan Crozier has recently demonstrated in an essay assessing “the missing story” of British psychiatric writing on sexuality, British sexology was at once dependent on the Continental theories as it developed its own arguments. While German sexologists were publishing, British writers produced a significant body of work on homosexuality. Although British writing about homosexuality was “less theoretically sophisticated and less sexually explicit than Continental sexology”, it was precisely the former characteristic that extended its appeal to a larger circle of British intellectuals.19 Assumptions about the perverse nature of homosexuality made in the British writing about it were less rigid, and British discourses of homosexuality were less a subject of theology and more a “legitimate scientific object” interested in describing both object choices and gender inversion.20
While British writing on homosexuality was by the 1890s influenced by theory from the Continent including Kraft-Ebing's work, “it is not sustainable,” as Crozier points out, “that these home-grown works were largely the product of either conversations with homosexuals [as in the Continental psychiatric writing], or the challenge of outmoded sexual stereotypes by feminists.”21 In other words, despite the traffic between Britain and the Continent of scientific ideas about sex, writing by free-thinkers also contributed to the development of cultural discourses in society. Certain books did a lot to liberalise views on homosexuality, even if the impact of that liberalisation was not immediately apparent – for example, the 1915 expanded edition of Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Inversion, in which Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds “depathologize homosexuality” and thus rescue it from “the medical profession which took over social control by converting sin into sickness”.22 Edward Carpenter's pamphlet Homogenic Love, printed privately in 1893, as well as his book The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (1908), also promoted an unorthodox view of homosexuality from a popular point of view. If looked at from our perspective in time, some of the views expressed in these works appear as an emerging, although not yet coherent, system of ideas which contrasted homosexuality (or sexual inversion, as the late Victorians would call it) to the normative category of heterosexuality.23 “A utopian philosopher” who wished to enhance human self-knowledge about sexuality, Ellis was also crucial in raising awareness of German sexology theory in Britain and “graft[ing] it onto the already strong tradition of writing about sex in his home country”.24