Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality

Queer Shakespeare draws together 13 essays, which offer a major reassessment of criticism of desire, body, and sexuality in Shakespeare. Bringing together some of the most prominent critics working at the intersection of Shakespeare studies and queer early modern criticism, this collection demonstrates that queer Shakespeare studies is a burgeoning scholarly field. Taken together, these essays consider body, desire, gender and sexuality as key objects of analyses, producing concepts and ideas that draw power from a focused study of time, language, and nature of queer Shakespeare. The Afterward extends these inquiries through an engagement of the Anthropocene and queer ecologies with Shakespeare criticism. Works from the entire canon of Shakespeare writing feature in chapters which explore topics like love, glass, antitheatrical homophobia, Italian resources for the writing of desire in the Sonnets, size, narrative, sound, female same-sex desire and Petrarchism, weather, usury and sodomy, male femininity and male-to-female crossdressing, contagion, and antisocial procreation.