Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film by Madhavi Menon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Really 3.5 stars. A more thorough (and even-handed) review from me is forthcoming on Shaksper.net, so I thought I'd make just a few overall comments and mention the things that really bothered me about this book.



Menon is clearly very intelligent, and her work is very theoretically sophisticated. Her argument about the problems with the way scholars "do history" is significant and timely. BUT... at times her desire to differentiate herself from what she calls "heterohistory" results in her obscuring or even contradicting her argument. Her primary argument is that scholarship that assumes a paradigm of difference distorts/obscures its subject in many ways; how ironic, then, that she is so insistent about how different her work is -- to the extent that she distorts/obscures some potentially interesting ideas. This is, though, only natural when one attempts to do something as ambitious as Menon does in this book.



The other thing that bugged me about the book were the rather pretentious lines Menon sprinkled throughout the work. Sometimes intended to be humorous, other times as poetic statements that encapsulated her ideas, they were usually both annoying and off-topic. A few of the most egregious examples:



1) In her chapter on Venus and Adonis and teleology: 'In such a realm, we would stop having successful sex. Or, perhaps, more unhistorically, we would have sex endlessly.' She'd just written about how the poem is essentially devoid of sex/sexual completion (but not desire), but, OK, whatever.



2) In her chapter on Titus Andronicus and origins (which is, I think, the best chapter, besides the introduction): "Shakespeare does not deprive Ovid of a tongue. Instead, he mingles his juices with that of the Roman to produce a melange of tastes that homohistory finds delectable." This is just pretentious. Probably should have gone the way of that old chestnut (Hemingway's?) about always deleting your favorite sentence from your work.



3) In her chapter on Shakespeare in Love and authenticity: "Shakespeare in Love suggests that the sanitary and historical act of giving face is always stained by the messy and unhistorical scene of giving head." Um, what? This is really, really lame, and the oral sex metaphor has nothing to do with (and never otherwise appears, as far as I noticed) in the chapter.



That said, the introduction was pretty great and will be useful to anyone interested in sexuality/desire, Shakespeare, and historiography.



View all my reviews