Reassessing Shakespeare’s works through a queer lens has been one of the most exciting developments in recent scholarship. A queer framework works to unsettle conservative interpretations of all sorts, decentring heterosexual marriage and reimagining alternative possibilities. It also extends beyond individual desire to challenge structures, timelines and politics. Queer, as one of its foremost critics David Halperin puts it, is ‘whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant’ (Halperin 1995, p. 62).
Its implications are considerable. Queer Shakespeare is unashamedly presentist (that’s to say, it understands Shakespeare as an agent in current debates rather than simply as a messenger in doublet and hose from the sixteenth century), but it also takes some of its energies from history (the attitudes to sexuality have not been a straight — pun intended — line from repressed to out-and-proud). Or, as Madhavi Menon writes in her introduction to a collection of essays called Shakesqueer, queer theory demands that we rethink two ideas: ‘The first is the idea that queerness has a historical start date. The second is that queerness is a synonym for embodied homosexuality’ (Menon 2011, p. 2)
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