By Professor James M. Bromley
James Bromley argues that Renaissance texts circulation wisdom a few number of non-standard sexual practices and intimate existence narratives, together with non-monogamy, anal eroticism, masochism and cross-racial lady homoeroticism. Rethinking present assumptions approximately intimacy in Renaissance drama, poetry and prose, the ebook blends historicized and queer techniques to embodiment, narrative and temporality. a major contribution to Renaissance literary reports, queer concept and the historical past of sexuality, the ebook demonstrates the relevance of Renaissance literature to this day. via shut readings of William Shakespeare's 'problem comedies', Christopher Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander', performs by means of Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Middleton's 'The great Valour' and woman Mary Wroth's sonnet series 'Pamphilia to Amphilanthus' and her prose romance 'The Urania', Bromley re-evaluates notions of the centrality of deep, abiding affection in Renaissance tradition and demanding situations our personal funding in a narrowly outlined intimate sphere.
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Extra resources for Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare
Sample text
Instead of taking the modern privileging of long-term monogamy and penetrative sexuality as a fait accompli in the Elizabethan period and assuming that Hero and Leander participates in a debate whose outcome was already decided, I seek to attend to the terms the poem establishes for itself that construct a reader’s experience of the poem’s erotic representations. Moreover, because the poem encourages its readers both to think of erotic texts as scripts and to think differently about their narrative structures, it makes itself available as an intimate script for its readers’ own erotic lives.
With this gift, then, Neptune seeks his own pleasure but does not treat the sexual availability of his would-be lover as his exclusive possession. Possession, penetration, and consummation eventually are linked in Hero and Leander’s encounter, and what differentiates Neptune’s seduction of Leander is its insistence on pleasure without possession, penetration, or even consummation. Neptune pursues the pleasures that the surfaces of Leander’s body can afford him: He clapt his plumpe cheekes, with his tresses playd, And smiling wantonly, his love bewrayd.
Yet it may not be necessary or even historically accurate to look at the blazon as figuring a failed sexual encounter, for the narrator separates male pleasure from the ejaculatory blazoning forth and articulates, in the terminology of writing, a non-teleological narrative of pleasure that can “suffise” both him and the reader. ” By insisting on the pleasure of “underdoing,” the narrator 40 Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare calls into question the hierarchy of consummation and its control over sexual meaning that would cast “to suffise” as a compromise covering over absence or lack.