Smith, B.R., 2000, Shakespeare and Masculinity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
What is masculinity and is it attainable? These two questions lie at the heart of Bruce Smith’s 2000 book, Shakespeare and Masculinity. Aimed at a specialist audience, it combines close readings of Shakespeare’s work with a wide cultural exploration of how masculinity was understood in early modern England. Unsurprisingly, Smith builds elements of his argument around Judith Butler’s discussion of gender performativity in her seminal 1990 book, Gender Trouble, with Smith foregrounding that Renaissance masculinity is ‘a matter of contingency, of circumstances, of performance’ (Smith, 2000, p.4). It is both physical and metaphysical, more than just one’s sexual identity at birth but an enactment of gender roles.
Whilst physical gender differences are recognised pan-culturally, the early modern period also understood masculinity through other definers, for example the humours, and the belief that men are ‘hotter’ (p.15) than women because they must ‘endure [manual] labour’ (p.15). Smith also explores the ‘one sex’ (p.15) belief that men and women were considered alternative versions of the same thing; therefore as Floyd Gray writes: ‘Many cases were recorded of women becoming men through the pressure of excitement’ (Gray, 2000, p.142). Whilst this seems laughable to a modern reader, it helps when viewing Shakespeare’s characters within their own cultural moment, and Smith convincingly builds on this with Hamlet’s ‘black bile,’ (Smith, 2000, p.16) becoming more than depression, but a challenge to his sexual identity; melancholic ‘coldness and dryness,’ (p.16) being the opposite of the heat and moisture expected of Renaissance men.
Jane Lunnon, head teacher of Wimbledon High School, has been criticised recently for stating girls should model themselves on Shakespeare’s heroines, but Smith suggests that Renaissance theatregoers did exactly that with Shakespeare’s heroes. He argues that men not only turned to books to self-fashion as gentlemen, (after all, a majority of the population was illiterate) but to theatre also: ‘Shakespeare’s plays represent masculine identity in ways that must have been recognisable from everyday life even as they set up models of action and eloquence that a man might want to imitate’ (p.41). Smith provides an interesting discussion of how aspirational masculinity had changed in the centuries preceding Shakespeare’s own, using Richard II as an example: ‘Bolingbroke’s eventual success in deposing Richard puts the seal on his transformation from chivalric knight to Machiavellian politician’ (p.46). Although the knight in shining armour figure arguably returns through Bolingbroke’s son in Henry V, Bolingbroke symbolises the transition from a romanticised, courtly role model of masculinity to a figure more recognisable to 16th century audiences, an ambitious and contemplative courtier.
Smith’s third chapter ‘passages,’ argues, perhaps predictably, that Renaissance men have many stages of development. Building on the work of author and politician Henry Cuffe, Smith writes ‘Thus, one and the same body is ‘diversely tempered’ at different times’ (p.74). The early modern corpus was moderated through humours and planetary alignment, making it intrinsically volatile. This instability leads neatly onto Smith’s intriguing discussion of the cyclical nature of manhood, that in old age one reverts to infanthood, as identified by Rosencrantz: ‘they say an old man is twice a child’ (p.74). Smith compares this to the Renaissance wheel of fortune, whereby the ‘beggar’ becomes the ‘king’ (p.75). Indeed, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello and Titus Andronicus all demonstrate masculine insecurity through the cycle being reversed, the titular king, or general, becoming the metaphoric beggar.
‘Others,’ is arguably Smith’s most compelling chapter, foregrounding those who threaten masculinity and exploring Derrida and Lacan’s view that ‘Masculinity…is knowable only in terms of the things it is not’ (p.104). There are four main categories that Smith understands as important to defining masculinity against, ‘women, foreigners, persons of lower social rank, and sodomites’ (p.104). With regard to women, whether it is the female/male pairings of ‘Beatrice and Benedick,’ ‘Bassanio and Portio’ or ‘Viola and Orsino,’ (p.110) or the ‘resourceful citizen wives in The Merry Wives of Windsor,’ (p.109) punishing Falstaff’s lusty efforts, or even the vengeful women of tragedy, ‘Tamora,’ ‘Lady Macbeth,’ or ‘Goneril and Reagan,’ (p.113) these women either satirically or sadistically, destabilise male authority. As Smith writes: ‘without Desdemona, Othello would still be a respected military hero. Tragedy portrays the female other as a destructive force’ (p.113). What Smith neglects to mention however, is that it was a man, not a woman who secured Othello’s downfall. In contrast, racial and social others challenge masculinity by demonstrating ‘alternative modes of masculinity’ (p.117). Whether that is Don Adriano de Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Portia’s suitors in The Merchant of Venice, or Othello, all these characters exist as an other to the English male self. In the final part, ‘Sodomites’ (p.122), Smith explores how renaissance men were trapped between appropriate, masculine friendship and the inappropriate ‘female’ (p.123) desires of homosexuality. Nevertheless, Smith is on unstable ground. As there are no universally accepted occurrences of homosexuality within Shakespeare’s canon, any instance of ‘homoeroticism’ (p.123) can only ever be interpretive. Indeed, Smith acknowledges that whilst a contemporary audience is more likely to read desire into the Duke of York’s reaction to the Earl of Suffolk’s death in Henry V, Shakespeare’s audience would have likely seen it as an ‘ideal of male friendship’ (p.123). He is keenly aware of this problem, identifying that ‘the signs of male friendship…are the same as the signs of sodomy’ (p.123). When appropriate masculine friendship and inappropriate, effeminate homoerotic desire look identical, there is an inherent problem in drawing an exemplar of what correct masculinity looks like.
Having suggested that masculinity is difficult to define, perfomative and categorised by anxiety, Smith takes an unexpectedly different turn in his final chapter. He argues against critics who label masculinity ‘as something that is ultimately impossible to achieve’ (p.132), and instead opts for a technique of ‘Coalescences’ (p.133), rejecting the ‘essence’ (p.133) and ‘constructivism’ (p.133) that lies at the heart of contemporary conceptualisations of masculinity. Rather than accepting that masculinity can be reduced to one thing, Smith instead posits ‘multiple identities’ (p.133), either running in tandem or evolving and developing. Smith is not the only critic who feels that a narrow definition of masculinity is unhelpful, as Joseph Gelfer captures perfectly in his more recent, 2011 book The Masculinity Conspiracy, “Masculinity’ in the singular is rather misleading, it should really be ‘masculinities” (Gelfer, 2011, p.3). Therefore, King Lear is simultaneously ‘autocrat, madman, old man, penitent, father,’ (p.133) these distinct roles combining to form his masculine self. Consequently, Smith argues that ‘masculinity is achieved, against the odds, in Shakespeare’s plays and poems’ (p.133). Smith’s use of ‘against the odds’ arguably revealing his own surprise at his conclusion that masculinity can be located within Shakespeare’s plays.
At its core, Shakespeare and Masculinity is about the fragility of early modern masculinity. It provides a fascinating discussion of Renaissance biology in addition to a wide cultural study that demonstrates the anxiety about, and threats to, masculine identity. However, Smith’s conclusion that masculinity is ultimately definable and locatable feels in opposition to the fragility and ambiguity Smith understands to be at the heart of masculinity for the majority of his book.
Word Count – 1131.
Bibliography
Gelfer, J., 2011, The Masculinity Conspiracy, s.l: Self-Published.
Gray, F., 2000, Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.