Abstract
What if, at least in some cases, representations of early modern chastity and abstinence were about the disinterest itself, as an orientation and practice? This chapter argues that early modern authors used tropes of youth, chastity, and virginity to explore the option of asexuality in their works. When adolescent characters resist or opt out of sex and marriage, that resistance articulates a queer option outside of hetero- and homosexual constructions of sexuality. The existence of asexual adolescent characters in early modern texts (including Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” and Merry Wives of Windsor and Brome’s The Antipodes) presents the possibility of sexual preference and practice that, by its very definition, undermines the assumption that sexual desire is natural and biologically inevitable.
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Notes
- 1.
William Shakespeare , Venus and Adonis in The Riverside Shakespeare (1997), 1799–1813.
- 2.
For just a few examples of arguments that Adonis is sexually immature or pre-sexual , see Mukherji (2013), Rambuss (2006), Streitberger (1975). For arguments that read Adonis as oriented toward homosociality and homosexuality , see Yearling (2013), Bate (1993), Anderson (2008), and Stanivukovic (2000).
- 3.
For a strong example of this approach, see Johnston (2017).
- 4.
The Asexual Visibility & Education Network (AVEN n.d.), an online resource that also serves as a central portal for many individuals seeking connections within the asexual community, gives the following overview definition of asexuality : “An asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. Unlike celibacy , which people choose, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who we are. Asexuality does not make our lives any worse or any better, we just face a different set of challenges than most sexual people. There is considerable diversity among the asexual community; each asexual person experiences things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently. Asexuality is just beginning to be the subject of scientific research.” (“Overview,” Asexuality.org). In 2017, asexuality is still an identity that is at the margins of queer theory ; popularized as an identity category and community in the 1990s and 2000s, asexuality was not available as an early modern concept per se. And yet it can be a productive method for understanding queer sexual practice that falls outside of homo - and heterosexuality . As such, I hope we’ll see it emerge more frequently in the project of queering the Renaissance .
- 5.
In this way, bringing asexuality into discussions of (early modern) sexuality not only undermines the assumed default of reproductive heterosexuality , but also the queer alternative default that assumes that all adults will have some kind of sexual or romantic interest or desire.
- 6.
- 7.
Extreme female chastity in plays like Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, or Shakespeare ’s Love’s Labor’s Lost might be analogous to the types of asexual male chastity that I discuss in this chapter.
- 8.
The production and deployment of male sexuality in the early modern period is discussed at length in Shepard (2003). See also Foyster (1999). Jennifer Higginbotham rightly suggested in her editorial feedback that male chastity on the early modern stage may also be read as a reflection of Reformation and religious attitudes toward celibacy ; see Barnes (2009).
- 9.
- 10.
This question or concern is, of course, not limited to early modern discussions. One of the top “Frequently Asked Questions for Family and Friends” on the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) website, a hub for the asexual community online often credited with creating and popularizing asexuality as an identity category and community, is “Is this just some rebellious phase? Won’t they grow out of it? It seems too young an age to determine a topic such as this” (http://www.asexuality.org/?q=family.html#ff3; accessed February 20, 2017).
- 11.
Shakespeare , “As You Like It ,” The Riverside Shakespeare (1997), 399–436.
- 12.
- 13.
On early modern life stages, see Smith (2000), 71–81. On the slippery distinction between early modern boyhood and manhood , see Shepard (2003) and Smith (1991). On early modern attitudes toward male secondary sex characteristics, see Fisher (2006), Johnston (2011), and Gina Bloom (2000). On early modern understandings of the humoral /Galenic differentiation between men and women, see Laqueur (1990), Simons (2011), Smith (2000), 15–16, and Paster (2004). Helen King (2013) and Donald Beecher (2005) have convincingly argued that the Galenic one-sex model in which spontaneous anatomical sex change could happen was already out of medical and even popular belief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
- 14.
For more on figurations of early modern puberty , mostly for girls , see Kahn (1977–1978), Potter (2013), and King (2004). For discussions that uncouple or complicate the relationship between puberty and adulthood , showing puberty to be variable and subjective, see Sparey (2015), Ben-Amos (1994), Bloom (2007), and Higginbotham (2013).
- 15.
In “Shakespeare ’s Twelfth Night and the Fertile Infertility of Eroticized Early Modern Boys,” Johnston argues that this stage may include a period wherein boys were understood to be able to sustain erections and practice penetrative sex, but not understood to be able to cause pregnancy .
- 16.
See also Butler (1999).
- 17.
Zaborskis (2015). Another possible articulation of early modern age drag might take place in plays performed by children’s acting companies , in which child actors would be performing in adult “drag ,” acting adult sexuality despite their own childhood sexual and social immaturity . See also Janssemn (2010), which discusses “transmature scenarios” in children’s play. See also Lucy Munro ’s chapter for this collection.
- 18.
Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, in The Riverside Shakespeare (1997), 324–360.
- 19.
According to Giorgio Melchiori’s notes in The Arden Shakespeare (2000), Slender’s name also alludes to the “lean physical appearance of the actor impersonating them, possibly John Sinklo” (122, n.9); Sinklo also is believed to have played Sir Andrew Augecheek in Twelfth Night , another character who, if not asexual , certainly has no intuitive sense of the art of romance or wooing . In another potentially queer role, Sinklo played a usurer in Marston ’s The Malcontent , where he is invited (and refuses) to sit between Sly’s legs and also mentions being used as a fit model for women’s clothes (Induction, ll. 18–27). The Arden note also suggests that Slender’s first name, Abraham, “is perhaps an ironical allusion to his clumsiness as a wooer.”
- 20.
Grace Tiffany, even when she writes about asexuality in the play, focuses primarily on Falstaff’s impotence, with only more general discussion of broader asexual attitudes. Though she argues that the play “resist[s] sexuality with all its implicit regenerative energy,” she does not name or discuss Slender’s sexual resistance (1992, 26).
- 21.
Jennifer Higginbotham caught a wonderful asexuality pun in this line, in which the word “fallow” describes both a brown or red coated greyhound (“fallow, adj. 1.” OED) and a non-producing field (“fallow, n.” OED), a possible gesture toward Slender’s own disinterest in reproduction (or, for that matter, “plowing”).
- 22.
This section of the play contains several bawdy jokes, as Slender describes “playing at sword and dagger” (1.1.265), “stewed prunes” (1.1.267), and “hot meat” (1.1.268); the prunes and meat are, evidently, references to prostitutes . Rather than demonstrating that Slender is allosexual (not asexual ), though, these jokes can also be performed as unintentional; in the same way that Slender often mistakes common sayings, he accidentally uses sexually overt language at the very moment that he is attempting to avoid an intimate or erotic encounter with Anne.
- 23.
Shakespeare similarly plays on the many meanings of “will,” including sexual ones, in sonnets 134 and 135.
- 24.
According to AVEN’s definition, “Grey-asexuality is a part of the sexuality spectrum that is close to asexuality . Grey-as may not want to identify as asexual or sexual for various reasons. A grey-a may experience sexual attraction under limited circumstances or to a lesser degree than sexual people” (http://www.asexuality.org/en/topic/74042-grey-a-and-demisexual-faq-and-link-thread/; accessed April 5, 2017).
- 25.
Melchiori, Merry Wives, 140 n.231, 233; here Melchiori also points out that the quarto “corrects” the Folio’s “content” to “contempt,” but that both might be Slender’s bungled “consent.”
- 26.
Melchiori, Merry Wives, 140 n.233.
- 27.
One major discussion within the asexual community surrounds the challenges that asexuals in romantic relationships with sexual people face; see AVEN’s “Relationship FAQ,” which includes questions like “Can asexuals have successful romantic relationships with sexuals?,” “How can you have a relationship without sex?,” and “Why do asexuals want romantic relationships anyway?” (http://www.asexuality.org/?q=relationship.html; accessed April 5, 2017).
- 28.
- 29.
All citations from The Antipodes will be taken from Anthony Parr, ed., Three Renaissance Travel Plays (1999).
- 30.
Individuals who identify as asexual have pushed back against the idea that asexuality is a kind of immaturity not compatible with adulthood . In The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality, Julie Sondra Dekker reports, “Asexuality is not a signal that a person is necessarily stunted emotionally or physical, and feeling sexual attraction or inclination is not the line everyone must cross to be treated like an adult. Maturity should not be measured by willingness or inclination to seek out or accept sexual experiences” (2014, 7).
- 31.
The Joyless family ’s trip to London for this consultation is the first step in the play’s travel cure, a real journey that leads up to the fake trip to the English Antipodes, a world-turned-upside-down version of London.
- 32.
Before Doctor Hughball unveils his elaborate plan to cure Peregine by taking him on a manufactured adventure to England’s Antipode, Martha has her own queer plan for resolving her husband’s asexuality . She asks an older woman, Barbara, to teach them about sex: “I’ll lie with you and practice, if you please./Pray take me for a night or two, or take/My husband and instruct him but one night” (1.1.260–266).
- 33.
- 34.
The idea that a subject’s “slackness” is a test of his (lack of) sexuality ’s authenticity is reflected in modern medical studies about asexuality , which attempt to measure self-identified asexuals’ responses to sexual stimuli, measuring genital responses among other measures. See Rupp and Wallen (2008).
- 35.
It is not clear that there is an ideal outcome here. Anthony Parr asks, “If Peregrine is restored to a society which in the play at large is satirized as aberrant, is the disappearance of his wanderlust a good thing? Is his obsession with Mandeville an example of that society’s muddled priorities (along the lines of Melton’s satire )? Are we to infer that Peregrine would have avoided derangement if he had been allowed to travel and get it out of his system, as young men in Carolinian England increasingly were doing? Or is his Mandeville madness simply a metaphor for the perils of such distraction?” (1999, 39).
- 36.
Anon., “The Sorrowful BRIDE; OR, The London Lasses Lamentation for Her Husbands Insufficiency (Pepys, 3.244),” UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive, Web, accessed February 17, 2017.
- 37.
I have argued elsewhere that woodcuts that are used repeatedly can create connections across and between ballads that otherwise seem unconnected; see Chess (2012), 33–36.
- 38.
I discuss “queer heterosexuality in “Sport Upon Sport” in Male-to-Female Crossdressing, 124–127.
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Acknowledgment
This chapter emerged in part out of an almost-forgotten seminar paper that I presented in the “Early Modern Boyhood” panel organized by Gina Bloom for the Renaissance Society of America 2007 conference in Miami. Thanks to Gina, panel chair Lucy Munro and co-panelists Will Fisher, and Marie Rutkoski for their feedback on that very early version, and to Jennifer Higginbotham and Mark Johnston for offering me this opportunity to revisit and revise it with their smart suggestions and editorial support.
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Chess, S. (2018). Asexuality, Queer Chastity, and Adolescence in Early Modern Literature. In: Higginbotham, J., Johnston, M. (eds) Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72769-1_2
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