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SHAKESQUEER: A QUEER COMPANION TO THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE. Edited by Madhavi Menon. Series Q. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011; pp. 512.
Was William Shakespeare a queer theorist? Madhavi Menon argues as much in her introduction to this compilation of essays by forty-eight prominent queer scholars working in and beyond the early modern period. While the status quo in academia "ensures that a queered Shakespeare is never a queer Shakespeare" (1), Menon considers how the Bard's own queerness might predate the word, the identity, and the academy around it. The essays in this book consider how the already-present queerness in Shakespeare's texts may inform, or "Shake," queer theory and thus establish a dialogue between it and early modern scholarship.
Enabled by Carla Freccero's Queer/Early/Modern (2005) and Jonathan Goldberg and Menon's own "Queering History" (2005), as well as by the Bard's own use of anachronism, Menon creates a framework that allows for a pliable relationship with periodicity. She argues that queerness "does not abide by the laws of a chronology [and insists] on redrawing, if not collapsing, the temporal divide between sixteenth century . . . and the twentieth" (2-3). Thus, we can accept that Shakespeare considered concepts and identities that would not emerge until centuries after his death. Additionally, many essays appear to deliberately flaunt their ahistoricism: for example, Bethany Schneider's contribution reads Julius Caesar through the lens of the Lincoln assassination; meanwhile, Katherine Bond Stockton claims that "The Winter's Tale...