Jeffrey Masten - Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time

QUEER PHILOLOGIES

MATERIAL TEXTS

Series Editors

Roger Chartier

Joseph Farrell

Anthony Grafton

Leah Price

Peter Stallybrass

Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeares Time

JEFFREY MASTEN

Copyright 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Masten, Jeffrey, author.

Title: Queer philologies : sex, language, and affect in Shakespeares time / Jeffrey Masten.

Other titles: Material texts.

Description: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2016] | 2016 | Series: Material texts | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015038860 | ISBN 9780812247862 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: English literatureEarly modern, 15001700History and criticism. | Language and sexEnglandHistory16th century. | Language and sexEnglandHistory17th century. | Homosexuality and literatureEnglandHistory16th century. | Homosexuality and literatureEnglandHistory17th century. | English languageEarly modern, 15001700. | Sex in literature. Classification: LCC PR428.H66 M37 2016 | DDC 820.9/003dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015038860

For
Jay Grossman

Phylologie. Loue of much babling.

Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie: Or,
An Interpreter of hard English Words (1623)

Der Zweck der Philologie ist die Historie.
[The purpose of philology is history.]

Friedrich Schlegel, Zur Philologie (1797)

Since the term has so many and such divergent meanings, it is best to abandon it.

Ren Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory
of Literature (1949)

It is thought that philology is finishedand I believe it hasnt yet begun.

Friedrich Nietzsche, We Philologists (1875)

[T]o remain enchanted by the phantom of a political engagement outside and above an engagement with issues of rhetoric, figuration, and fantasy is to ignore the historical conceptualization of homosexuality in a distinctive relation to language.

Lee Edelman, Homographesis (1994)

Q

queue

tail

capital

supervacuous

abuse

philology

skaiography

matrix

cue/count

spell

orthography

habits

perversion

tendencies

mechanical

exercises

his/her

sweet

bung-hole

etymology

persuade

suave

mellifluous

friend

conversation

converse

rare

sporting

intercourse

sexual

jape/sard/swive

enjoy

fuck buddy

boy

man

youth

lamb

cub

codling

bad quarto

letter/ornament/illustration

Ganymede

amorous

enamoured

girl-boy

stripling

instigation

rage/raze

dis-ease

hug

shame

fundament

foundation

prove/probe

fundamentalism

bottom

mongrel

couple

mingle-mangle

gallimaufry

hodge-podge

gentable/genital

tragicomedy

kinship

sodomy

tup/top

monstrous

negar

topt/tapt

lover

friend

wanton

gloss

stranger

bombast/bumbast

bum

Doll

Lombard

buggery

For reasons that are discussed in the Introduction and , quotations from early modern printed and manuscript sources retain their original spellings (including early modern usage of i/j, u/v, and vv, though both long and short s are rendered in modern type).

Except where noted, I have translated a texts blackletter, italic, or other early modern typeface (when used as the default typeface of the text or section of the text) into modern roman type, using italics to indicate the texts emphases. In quotations, second capitals following a larger printed intial capital have also been eliminated silently. In early modern book titles, including in the notes and bibliography, words composed entirely of capitals have generally been rendered as words with initial capitals, and title fonts are made uniformly italic; early modern spelling of titles has been maintained, with some resulting oddities (for example, Scriptvres, Qvip). On meanings conveyed by early modern capitals, see the Introduction and . Given this books emphasis on type and letters, I regret the loss of contextual meaning sometimes incurred by these changes but encourage readers to consult the earlier editions.

Except where noted, all citations of the Oxford English Dictionary refer to the online edition of the OED and reflect the OEDs revisions as of its June 2015 update.

References to Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623) cite through-line numbers (TLN) in The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare, prepared by Charlton Hinman, unless otherwise noted.

Capitals are increased by parsimony, and diminished by prodigality and misconduct.

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

Quin.... and so euery one according to his cue.

A Midsommer Nights Dreame

Introducing queer philology, I should start at the very beginning: with the letter Q. Q is a letter with quite a history, something of a tale to tell, and we might as well begin with Samuel Johnsons erroneous tale, writing in his Dictionary of 1755: Q, Is a consonant borrowed from the Latin or French... the name of this letter is cue, from queue, French, tail; its form being that of an O with a tail.

Q, writes the sixteenth-century French printer and humanist language reformer Geofroy Tory, in the second book of his magisterial treatise on majuscles, Champ Fleury [the Art and Science of the Due and True Proportion of Classical Letters]