Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama

by Valerie Traub

Details the relation between gender and sexuality in the early modern period, through close readings of Shakespeare's plays. From the perspective of recent gay and lesbian theory, Traub explores the psychic and social, individual and institutional.

Genres: Academic, Literary Criticism, Feminism

182 pages, Hardcover

First published July 21, 1992

Reviews

[Candy Wood]

Valerie Traub’s 1992 study combines feminist, psychoanalytic, and new-historicist methods to explore issues of sex and gender in Shakespeare’s plays. Striving to avoid the essentialist assumptions that she finds in other critics such as Stephen Greenblatt, Jean Howard, and Lisa Jardine, Traub suggests that the texts of the plays provide evidence of both the patriarchal system that suppressed female agency and homoerotic desire and the possibilities of challenging that system. While she focuses on early modern meanings of sexuality, she proposes that our own time needs more openness to the kind of “negotiation and resistance” involving sexual categories that she sees in the plays. The analysis of specific plays in Part 1 is more satisfying than Part 2’s theoretical emphasis, where only a brief comparison of As You Like It and Twelfth Night provides application of the theories.