Queer Philologies

Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time

Jeffrey Masten

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780812293173
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

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.

CHAPTER 1

Spelling Shakespeare: Early Modern “Orthography” and the Secret Lives of Shakespeare’s Compositors

[I]t is even more important that we should discover, if we can, through the identification of compositors on the basis of their spellings, what kind of minds may have affected the readings of substantive editions of Shakespeare’s plays, since this question is fundamental to the editing of any text.

—Alice Walker, Textual Problems of the First Folio¹

A password is more than just a flaky kind of fingerprint. We still want passwords to be romantic, not just utilitarian. We reveal ourselves in our passwords. . . . Choosing xerxes or donjuan is a grown-up equivalent of wearing Power Ranger underwear.

—James Gleick, in the New York Times Magazine²

Putting aside my title for a moment, I will begin instead with a more modern secret life. When a twentieth-century American student—let’s call him Student A—was in about the sixth grade, a teacher corrected his repeated spelling of the word occasion in a composition. Student A was in the habit of spelling this word o-c-c-a-i-s-i-o-n, because he knew that a correct spelling of this word would need to register (as his spelling did) a long “a” vowel in the second syllable. O-c-c-a-i-s-i-o-n. Student A no longer recalls the composition or most of the sixth grade, but the moment of correction—or, more accurately, the memory of his confident, repeated, peculiar spelling—sometimes recurs, when he writes or types the word. How all occasions do inform against him, now.

As I hope to show in more detail, such a narrative would be largely impossible to have lived or told in the early modern period—say, around 1600—because, as is widely known, there was no one standard of correct English spelling with which to discipline the young student, although, as we will see, within certain contexts there was beginning to be the idea of a standard. Second, the anecdote might be taken to suggest that there are, in a way to which I will return, naturally occurring spelling preferences—as suggested by Student A’s apparent individualized preference, when questioned in his untutored state, for the spelling occaision over occasion, and the fact that he continues sometimes to hesitate over the “i” of the keyboard when typing this word, even after years of advanced literary training. But the anecdote also obviously suggests that Student A wasn’t untutored and was attempting to conform to a notion of standardized, phonetic spelling.

The problematic of compositor study—the study of the workmen who set by hand the type of early printed books, and the intense analysis of their spellings as a central feature of mid-twentieth-century Shakespearean editorial practice—resides in this anecdote in another way. For if we were to apply Student A’s story to the seventeenth century without attention to some important epistemic differences, we would reproduce, I think, the way in which twentieth-century textual bibliography has applied, without enough examination, its own assumptions about spelling, regularity, and, as we’ll see, individuality, to conditions of language and subjectivity before the modern era. The words of Charlton Hinman are exemplary in this regard; writing in a 1940–41 essay that precedes and provides a rationale for his immense labor collating and dividing up the compositorial shares of the first folio collection of Shakespeare’s plays, Hinman says that “it is to be expected that any compositor of the sixteenth or seventeenth century would develop certain individual spelling habits, and that these habits may serve to distinguish his work from that of other compositors.”³ Hinman here tells us what he expects, or rather what “is to be expected” of early modern spellers, but there is no evidence supplied for these twentieth-century expectations.

In the course of this chapter, I hope to demonstrate, first, that compositor study—this highly specialized subfield of editorial philology—has instrumentally affected the early modern texts we read and study, especially those texts associated with Shakespeare; second, that the paradigm within which compositor spelling analysis operates is demonstrably related to other deforming narratives about the production of early modern texts and about the early modern “linguistic field”⁴ more generally; third, that these narratives came to life within a particular mid-twentieth-century epistemology that has had, in other spheres, demonstrably toxic effects on actual persons living and dead; and, finally, that there are other ways in which we might think, historically and theoretically, about the people who spelled and pressed the texts we read and study—ways that might be more useful for the study of the history of the book, the history of the language, the history of the subject, and the history of sexuality.

Spell-check

If there were no spelling bees in early modern England, this is not because that culture had not perfected other modes through which the spectacle of a particular subject’s submission to (or divergence from) a larger cultural value could be exhibited, but because spelling was only in the process of becoming such a value and, relatedly, only in the process of becoming an action, a transitive activity—and not yet predicated on the absorption and reproduction of particular “correct” spellings. In fact, one of the earliest meanings of the word spell (as a verb) in English was “[t]o read (a book, etc.) letter by letter; to peruse, or make out, slowly or with difficulty” (ca. 1300–1848).⁵ To spell in English, from about 1300 well into the nineteenth century, meant to read something, to consume a supplied text—to puzzle out a particular exemplar. A set of what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) calls “figurative” meanings continued to spin out from this spelling-as-reading meaning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “To discover or find out, to guess or suspect, by close study or observation” (ca. 1587–1879); “To make out, understand, decipher, or comprehend, by study” (ca. 1635–1886); “To consider, contemplate, scan intently” (ca. 1633–1859).⁶ “[T]he vast discourses of wisest and most learned men,” writes Kenelm Digby in 1644, “are beyond the spellinges of infantes: and yet those discourses spring from the same roote, as the others spellinges doe, and are but a raysing of them to a greater height.”⁷ Digby’s context (an extended metaphor within a scientific discussion) suggests that spellinge for him signifies reading or comprehension—the belabored understanding of children. The acting company’s famous preface to the first folio collection of Shakespeare’s plays can be re-read, re-spelled, in this context: “To the great Variety of Readers,” it begins, “From the most able, to him that can but spell.”⁸ What knowledge of spelling is required to spell Shakespeare?

The date of the folio’s formulation of spelling/reading is 1623, and, as we have seen, Digby’s 1644 text also invokes spelling-as-reading (he also uses the phrase “spellingly reade”), suggesting that this meaning continues to circulate even after the tentative beginnings of what we think of as spelling. According to the OED at least, the recognizably modern meaning of spelling—“To name or set down in order the letters of (a word or syllable)”—appears first around 1595 (Shakespeare is cited among its earliest users, in 1598), though I am not at all sure that the early examples of this usage I know of are (upon rereading) about the production of “correct spellings” in our terms. Spelling in the fully modern sense does not clearly emerge in the OED’s examples until much later in the next century, around 1693.⁹

If spelling in early modern English is about reading (that is, the ability to make sense of particular graphic shapes and forms on the page),¹⁰ we should also note that these shapes might be different, within a certain range, while at the same time not necessarily registering as “different words” in our understanding. As Margreta de Grazia has argued in an important essay on English prior to lexical standardization, in a culture in which there was constant, multiple graphic and phonic overlap among (what we would refer to as) discrete words, there was more polysemic possibility/activity built into this system—if early modern English can even be called a “system.”¹¹ Bourdieu’s “linguistic field” is a better term, taken alongside Juliet Fleming’s reminder that English was “not unruled, but ruled differently—perhaps in accordance with a rhetorical rather than grammatical, lexical, and orthographic order.”¹²

The variability of pronunciations, the intersection of dialects, the ongoing shift from an inflected to a largely uninflected grammatical practice (and the corresponding migration of words among “parts of speech”),¹³ the nonexistence of dictionaries regulating the usage/spelling of everyday words, etymological thinking that linked rather than dissevered similar words¹⁴—all of these factors made for a more fluid and unfixed linguistic field. What we call “single words” were spelled in multiple ways, often by the same person. In Sir Thomas More, the play manuscript often adduced to illustrate Shakespeare’s spelling (and the subject of Chapter 9), Hand D (the handwriting sometimes associated with Shakespeare) spells nearly a fifth of the words he writes more than once in more than one way.¹⁵ An extraordinary, compact example is a line spoken by the crowd (“all”) addressing Sheriff Thomas More and spelled out by Hand D as “Shreiue moor moor more Shreue moore.”¹⁶ The line’s six word forms contain what we would consider two words: one spelled two ways and another spelled three ways. The word sheriff, as Philip Gaskell writes of one Hand D passage, “appears five times in . . . five lines in five different spellings.”¹⁷

Furthermore, as this example (from Shakespeare’s “own” spelling, if such it is)¹⁸ can help to suggest, the OED’s focus on discrete words, sorted into particular (so-called) parts of speech, attached to particular (also discrete) meanings associated with a variety of (past) forms obscures, and imposes a modern order on, the fluidity of early modern practice(s), in which ay sounded like both I and eye/eie and could be spelled I, aye, and ay. Or, to take some other examples we will examine in more detail elsewhere in this book, the pairs of words conversation and conversion, discreet and discrete, even foundation and fundament, were interchangeable. In this context, spelling was conceptualized as the process of processing these forms, not producing them. Production is called not spelling, but writing.

Those familiar with the decades around 1600 might say that I am simplifying the issue: that there were in fact those in English culture who saw this linguistic situation as an issue, a problem, and attempted to fix it. In the 1560s to 1580s, with Thomas Smith’s De recta & emendata Lingvæ Anglicæ Scriptione, John Hart’s An orthographie, and William Bullokar’s Bullokars Booke at large, for the Amendment of Orthographie, there were recurrent attempts to standardize English spelling—that is, to focus on the production of uniform spellings.¹⁹ Such attempts continued in the early seventeenth century. As Jonathan Goldberg has importantly observed in his discussion of some of the texts of this movement, sixteenth-century spelling reform is not devoid of ideological aspirations and effects,²⁰ and the etymological resonance of Smith’s, Hart’s, and Bullokar’s titles can begin to emphasize for us the cultural values with which uniform spelling is associated for its reformers. Spelling reform is concerned with orthography (literally, right-writing); orthos is straight, upright, standing, the opposite of crooked.²¹ Alexander Hume’s unpublished treatise Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue (c. 1617)—the Q-defending text we encountered in the Introduction—makes the connection explicitly: “the printeres and wryteres of this age, caring for noe more arte then may win the pennie, wil not paen them selfes to knau whither it be orthographie or skaiographie that doeth the turne.”²² Hume both dedicates his text to the king and coins a perverse opposite to rectitude in delineating his system of right-writing; skaiographie, as noted above, comes from skaios, “left, left-handed, awkward, crooked,”²³ related to the Latin scaeuitas, “[i]nstinctive choosing of the wrong; perversity.”²⁴

Whether orthography or skaiography doeth the turn, orthography seems always, nevertheless, to have the potential to turn against, to turn back on its advocates, who frequently don’t fare well in the popular culture ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents (A)
• Contents (Q)
• Note on Citations and Quotations
• Introduction. On Q: An Introduction to Queer Philology
• Chapter 1. Spelling Shakespeare: Early Modern “Orthography” and the Secret Lives of Shakespeare’s Compositors
• Lexicon 1. Friendship
• Lexicon 2. Boy-Desire
• Lexicon 3. Sodomy
• Editing Philologies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments