Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time (Material Texts) - Hardcover

Masten, Jeffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812247868 ISBN 13: 9780812247862

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016

Synopsis

Received the Elizabeth Dietz Award, for a contribution to Tudor and Stuart Drama, conferred by Rice University and SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

For Jeffrey Masten, the history of sexuality and the history of language are intimately related. In Queer Philologies, he studies particular terms that illuminate the history of sexuality in Shakespeare's time and analyzes the methods we have used to study sex and gender in literary and cultural history. Building on the work of theorists and historians who have, following Foucault, investigated the importance of words like "homosexual," "sodomy," and "tribade" in a variety of cultures and historical periods, Masten argues that just as the history of sexuality requires the history of language, so too does philology, "the love of the word," require the analytical lens provided by the study of sexuality.

Masten unpacks the etymology, circulation, transformation, and constitutive power of key words within the early modern discourse of sex and gender—terms such as "conversation" and "intercourse," "fundament" and "foundation," "friend" and "boy"—that described bodies, pleasures, emotions, sexual acts, even (to the extent possible in this period) sexual identities. Analyzing the continuities as well as differences between Shakespeare's language and our own, he offers up a queer lexicon in which the letter "Q" is perhaps the queerest character of all.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeffrey Masten is Professor of English and of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University and author of Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction
On Q: An Introduction to Queer Philology

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

Q, Without A

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 Johnson's 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." This statement is, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) carefully informs us, wrong: "[An entirely erroneous guess.]" This is to say, Q is known, by the time of the nineteenth-century philology that made possible the OED, to have been derived and named "really" from a letter (koppa) in certain early Phoenician and Greek alphabets. But let us, for the moment, and in the spirit of what I hope to introduce as a queer philology, follow Johnson's cue, or his erroneous guess, back to the period with which this book is most closely concerned, the early modern, and see where this erroneous Q may lead, or (in Latin) intro/duce, us.

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] (1529),

est la seulle entre toutes les autres lettres qui sort hors de ligne par dessoubz, & . . . iay trouue q' [que] le. Q. sort hors de ligne pource quil ne se laisse escripre en diction entiere, sans son compaignon & bon frere. V. & pour monstrer qui le desire tousiours apres soy, Il le va embrasser de sa queue ᵱ [par] dessoubz cōe ie figureray cy apres en son renc. (f. XIIv)

[is the only one among all the other letters that goes outside the line underneath, and . . . I have found that the Q goes outside the line because it/he does not let himself be written in a complete word, without his companion and good brother V, and in order to show who always desires him after himself, he will embrace him/seeks to embrace him with his tail [sa queue] from below, as I will hereafter illustrate in its/his place.]

As Tom Conley has observed in his important reading of Champ Fleury, Tory's plotting of majuscules within the square is part of a larger ensuing humanist project seeking the standardization of the letter. Tory's work "reflect[s] a growing uniformity of patterns of script," and, as Conley shows in his analysis of the book as a cartographic text, Tory's book works not only to map the letters of the alphabet, but also to align, within these plottings, the body of the letter and the body of the body, in what are taken to be their correct proportions. This is to say, this book not only hails, or introduces, its reader into a kind of literacy (the proper proportion of letters) but also introduces his/her body into this map; the reader imagines his/her body as or in a letter. The letter becomes standardized, and the body (here, a male body) either becomes or is already understood as the form of that standardization.

It is worth pointing out, however, that Q is one point at which Tory's humanist project of standardization falters—that Q persists in Champ Fleury as the exceptional letter, the only one among all the other letters, as we have already seen, who goes outside the line (Figure 3; "lettres flevries"). Q is anomalous, too, in never being written by himself in a word; Q is thus an exception to the paradigm shift out of which Tory qua printer writes: if the innovation of movable type capitalizes on the mobility of letters (their willingness to be separated and deployed, printed and redistributed in multiple combinations), Q is, except within abbreviations, never permitted to appear singly, without his companion, V. Q is, in this sense, the letter which is not one: never alone, never functioning only as a letter, always conjoined, always desiring companionship. Johnson's history of Q leads to one even more erroneous, or errant, than the OED has imagined: we are beginning to approach the queerness of Q.

For it is not only the case that the letter Q is, in Champ Fleury, exceptional, but that Q's exceptionality is a tale tied to his tail, his errant queue. Further, the discourse that articulates Q's difference, Q's anomaly, or his going outside the line from below, is not only discourse that recent scholarship can help us recognize as anal (Q's name as well as his queue/tail homonymically suggest a cul, an "arse, bumme, tayle, nockandroe, fundament" as Cotgrave's 1611 French-English dictionary would translate), but also discourse widely associated with male-male relations during this period. Recent histories of sexuality have demonstrated that in early modern culture there was not (as there is said to be in modernity) a single "homosexuality," but rather multiple homoeroticisms—homoerotic discourses, practices, or structures that are neither self-identical (sodomy is not friendship is not pederasty) nor the same as the modern notion of "homosexuality" qua identity. If it is then, perhaps, somewhat surprising to see, in his mapping of the letter Q, Tory deploying simultaneously two of these discourses (the language of sodomy, usually condemned, and the language of homoerotic male-male friendship, usually promoted), this may again signal the extent of Q's queerness: it (or shall I say "he"?) is exceptional both as the letter with a constant friend and companion and as the letter that couples with another, with his tail from below.

When Tory returns to the letter Q in Champ Fleury's third book, which is devoted to the description and plotting of each of the twenty-three letters in alphabetic order, we learn that Q seems always tending toward jointure; indeed, Q is initially formed by a copula—made, Tory says, of the O "en teste" (tête, literally the cap/ital) and the I lying or couched "en queue" ("faicte de le. O. en teste, & de le I, couche en queue" [f. LIIIv]). Further, Tory's discourse in this extended description of Q retains both his sodomitical and his friend/ly commitments: if V is Q's ordinary companion and faithful friend ("son ordinaire compaignon, & feal amy"), Q here again seeks out and embraces V upward, from below ("querir & embrasse par dessoubz" [f. LIIIv]). We can also notice that Tory's discourse for the immediacy and position of Q and V's relation: they are linked "incontinent & ioignant" (f. LIIIv). This phrasing not only suggests immediate linkage ("as soone as may be," says Cotgrave of "incontinent" as an adverb), but may also bring with it the resonance of Q as incontinent or unchaste, with a physical proximity that is also a joining, a coupling, a touch. (As an adjective, Cotgrave translates ioignant as both "Neere vnto, hard by, . . . almost touching" and as "Ioyning, coupling" [sig. Aaa.iiii].)

The corporeal ligature of the faithful friends is embodied even more sodomitically when Tory maps the two letters in relation to each other, in an illustration that, we can notice, disrupts the otherwise serial, alphabetic order of Tory's third book, by anomalously figuring two letters together:

Pour monstrer ce que iay dit, que Q. tire & embrasse de sa queue le V. Iē [J'en] ay faict cy pres vng deseing au quel peut veoir que le bout de la ditte queue saccorde a la pointe du bout dembas de le V. (f. LIIII)

[To show what I've said, that Q pulls/leads and embraces the V with his tail, I've made nearby a design in which one can see that the end/tip of the said tail accords/agrees with the point of the bottom end/tip of the V.]

The tail accords (itself) with, agrees with, the bottom of its faithful friend and ordinary companion, but again, supplementing the sodomitic, a term like s'accorde in this context may bring with it a range of friendly and even marital resonances: "Accorder vne fille," translates Cotgrave: "To handfast, affiance, betroath himselfe vnto a maiden" (sig. B.iiiiv). The agreement of the tail and the bottom may also alert us here to the confused sodometrics (or positionings) of this configuration, the strangeness (even as it appears to be already sodomitic) of a coupling of tails. Embodying in the letter a trope that is, as several critics have shown, the rhetorical figure of sodomy during the period, Q's tail is literally preposterous, a confusion of before and behind, for it leads while it also follows; simultaneously, this tail, as in English of the period, begins to function not (or not only) as tail but as yard, as penis. Embracing this tail, not unlike other yards, may eventuate in a loss of virtue; quoting Priscian, who speaks of the "vertu" (the virtue or power/value) of letters, Tory accords with, or follows the lead of, the ancient author:

Priscian autheur iadis tresillustre, en son premier Liure ou il parle de la vertu des lr'es [lettres], dict bien q' Q. veult tousiours apres luy V. pour monstrer que le dit V. pert sa vertu & son / son estant escript deuāt vne vocale en vne mesme syllabe. (f. XIIv)

[Priscian, the very illustrious author of old, in his first book, where he speaks of the virtue/power of the letters, indeed says that Q always wants V after himself to show that the said V loses his virtue/power and his sound when written before a vowel within the same syllable.]

Following Q, the V loses his vertu—his power, which is also his "valour, prowess, manhood," as Cotgrave translates. Normally himself une vocale (a vowel), V loses as well his voice or sound ("son / son," as Tory is careful to write, aware of the homograph that joins voice and self-possession), his vocality. A subordinate sexual positioning, as elsewhere in this culture, eventuates in a loss of power understood as manhood understood as voice. This is to say, there are powerful implications to where and how one is led, or intro/duced.

In moving toward an introduction to philology, the love of the logos, I have instead introduced you to the love of the letter, love among the letters. But, lest you think I am overemphasizing the sexiness or corporeality of letters—lest, that is, you think I am leading you erroneously to read a metaphorical discourse of the letter as having to do with actual bodies—it is important to recall the insistence of the bodily in Tory's orthography. Champ Fleury is subtitled "the Art and Science of the due and true Proportion of classical Letters, . . . proportioned according to the Human Body and Face." As Conley has shown in detail, Tory maps the human body, and what he calls the "body" of the letters, onto a ten-by-ten grid; the graphing of letters produces an elaborate conjunction of rhetorical terms, the disciplines of classical education, and the body. In the graphing of the letter O and a recognizably Vitruvian man (f. XVIIIv), for example (Figure 5), the diagonals cross, forming a chi, at the center of the letter and the man, and it then comes as no surprise, in Tory's explanation of a figure he calls "lhomme letre" (Figure 6), that the letter X should correspond with "Dialectica" and the navel (ff. XXIIv-XXIII). This "lettered ," "learned," or "literal man" brings the twenty-three letters of the "Roman" alphabet into relation with, presents them as a parallel realization of, the "most noble members and places of the human body" ("le nōbre des. XXIII. lettres Attiques accorde, comme iay dit, aux membres & lieux pl[us] nobles du corps humain"), and with the nine muses, seven liberal arts, four cardinal virtues, and three graces, reproducing some familiar early modern hierarchies of the body: upper and lower, right and left (dextre et senestre), and so forth (ff. XXIIv-XXIII). The letter A, for example, accords with Iusticia and the right hand. The placement of Q makes corporeal and witty sense within these correspondent systems: as Conley notices, Q here makes use of "a common pun and rebus on cul" (81). Q marks "the place for discharging the belly" ("Le lieu pour decharger le ventre") with a pun also on wind (vent) and is wittily therefore associated with Euterpe, the muse of music (f. XXIIv).

But we should also notice Q's persistent anomaly, his queerness, within these schema: like the penis, Q figures one of two body parts of the literal man that here lacks a name: "the place for . . . ," rather than the straightforward nouns naming the other parts; a function, rather than an identity; a "does" as much as an "is." He is furthermore the only letter attached to the unseen backside of the lettered man, the only letter whose location cannot be seen on the map of the body. Tory writes:

Les lettres ainsi logees que voyes cy dessus, ne sōt pas logees en leur ordre Abecedaire quon tient communement, mais tout a mon essient les ay mises & appliquees selon ma petite Philosophie. (f. XXIII)

[The letters thus lodged as seen above are not placed in their alphabetical order, to which one commonly adheres, but altogether intentionally/consciously I have placed and associated them/set them out according to my little Philosophie.]

But even out of the common order, outside the logic of the alphabet, "as seen above," Q cannot be seen above, is not visibly logé in this logic.

Lest you think I can draw such conclusions only by engaging in the jouissance of a French text, let me assure you that Q resists assimilation to the rule as well in English, the language at the center of this study. Q, explains Richard Huloet in his 1552 Abcedarivm Anglicolatinvm, "[i]s a mute, whych also taken as Litera super uacue, dothe desyre no letter to hym but V." Supervacue is a term rarely found in English contexts, but Wyclif translates it as both "over-void" and "over-vain." (The threat of such a letter may not be obvious to us, but, especially to a group of spelling reformers who, as we will see in Chapter 1, want to rationalize English into a one-letter/one-sound system, the threat of the mute and supervacuous letter is significant.) John Higgins, revising Huloet twenty years later, again refers to Q as a "mute" and "vnneadfull." In John Baret's Alvearie Or Triple Dictionary (1574), this discourse is expanded:

Q Hath long bene superfluously vsed in writing english woordes, whereas the Grekes neuer knew it, neither could the English saxons euer abide the abuse thereof, but alwaies vsed K when such occasion serued. As for Q in latin woordes, I meddle nothing with it here, leauing that language to be refourmed by better learned men. Yet Quintilian lib. 12. cap. 10. saith it is but a needelesse and voide letter: and Priscian also affirmeth that both K, Q , and...

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0812247868
• ISBN 13: 9780812247862
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368