Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture

Michael Keevak

ISBN 10: 0814329756 / ISBN 13: 9780814329757

Published by Wayne State Univ Pr, 2001

About this Item

New copy.

Seller Inventory # 2037762

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Sexual Shakespeare: Forgery, Authorship, Portraiture
• Publisher: Wayne State Univ Pr
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814329756
• ISBN 13: 9780814329757
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 0.062 pounds
• Seller catalogs:
  • Books

About this title

Synopsis

Shakespeare's sexuality has always been an ambiguous concept, despite the pleasant fictions of Shakespeare in Love. Now Michael Keevak examines such sources as anecdotes, imitations, forgeries, spurious works, and portraits to show that this ambiguity has a long and twisted history. Sexual Shakespeare is the first book to argue that Shakespeare's sexuality has always presented a problem to readers, who thus have a tendency to desexualize him. Because so little reliable information is available about Shakespeare, Keevak suggests that the very idea of his sexuality, much like his personal reputation, should remain as open and unfixed as possible―that Shakespeare and his contemporaries are not easily reducible to a sexuality of any kind. His book offers a new way of understanding our desire to uncover "the absent sodomite" in the early modern period and makes a unique contribution to both queer theory and Renaissance studies.

About the Author

Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University and author of The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar's Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax.