Havelock Ellis's Literary Criticism, Canon Formation, and the Heterosexual Shakespeare

Abstract

Famous as the author of an early full-length scientific study of sexual inversion or homosexuality, English sexologist Havelock Ellis was also a literary critic responsible for initiating publication of the famous Mermaid Series of “The Best of Plays of the Old Dramatists” in the late-nineteenth century. Personally editing the first volume of plays by Christopher Marlowe and a later collection by tragedian John Ford, Ellis associated these playwrights here and in his scientific work, Sexual Inversion, with ideas about normative and so-called abnormal sexualities at the start of the twentieth century. Ellis, thus, helped give expression to a literary canon of early English dramatists in which modern, anachronistic ideas about sexual subjectivity play a part. While this article does not claim that Ellis was the necessary source for later criticism, it shows how, over the whole of the twentieth century, Shakespeare's priority in the literary canon came to be posited at least in part on his apparent sexual normality in contrast with a supposedly homosexual Christopher Marlowe and other playwrights such as Ford or Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher associated with varying degrees of sexual difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Ellis
• Shakespeare
• Marlowe
• Renaissance
• drama
• inversion
• homosexuality
• heterosexuality
• ideology
• subjectivity

Notes

1. Ivan Crozier, in a series of important articles (2000, 2007), as well as in the introduction to his edition of Sexual Inversion (2008), demonstrates that Ellis's work on homosexuality belongs to a tradition of sexological writings emerging largely but not exclusively on the Continent. Although the sexological model of analyzing sexual behavior as a natural phenomenon continued to define later work (perhaps most importantly that of Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s in America), Crozier (2000) also notes that “[b]y the time of the publication of Ellis' final essay in 1951 [12 years after his death], Ellis was well underway to being eclipsed by Freud” (p. 464). On some of the ways both men's works “supplement” one another's' throughout the twentieth century in Britain, see Waters (1998, p. 166).

2. I do not mean to imply that the literary canon shapes actual social practice in the twentieth century, only that that the assertion of Shakespeare's “heterosexuality” in dialect with the more “deficient” sexualities represented through Marlowe and others in criticism that follows Ellis' work endorses the truths of that binary discourse of sexuality dominating the twentieth century. The ways language shapes knowledge is variously and well-theorized. Althusser (1971) suggested that ideology is not a system of belief that reflects the world but, instead, a material apparatus through which the acts, practices, and rituals of the subject are constituted. In Foucauldian terms, social practice has no meaning outside the discursive formulations that shape it; knowledge constitutes power (Foucault, 1977). Finally, the American New Historicist Louis Montrose (2004) writes that “[t]he notorious Derridean aphorism, ‘il n'y a pas de hors-texte…may also be construed as an insistence upon the ideological force of discourse in general and of those discourses in particular which reduce the work of discourse to the mere reflection of an ontologically prior, essential or empirical reality” (p. 778).

3. Fisher's and my own article serve as companion pieces, both overlapping in the suggestion that the Renaissance has been involved in the construction of sexual ideologies since its inception in the Victorian age. I would like to thank Dr. Fisher for generously sharing with me earlier drafts of his work that have usefully informed my thinking, especially a version, “One Hundred Years of Queering the Renaissance,” read at the 112th Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association in December, 1996.

4. Following Foucault, the early modern period has been a primary locus for historicist explorations of the apparent differences between early modern same-sex arrangements and our own: see, for instance, Bray (1982), Bredbeck (1991), DiGangi (1997), Guy-Bray (1991, 2002), Hammond (2002), and Smith (1991). Most recently, the period has been enlisted in the so-called queer struggle against identitarian constructions of sexuality. Important formulations of this position occur in Traub (2002), especially chapter 1; Freccero (2006), especially chapter 3; and (a succinct summary of the issues involved) Goldberg and Menon (2005).

5. Even though Freccero (2006) argues that the concept of perversion Foucault sees as essential to the formation of modern sexualities existed before the ninenteenth century to produce and regulate women's sexuality, she, nevertheless, concedes, “male homosexuality is … the case where Foucault's argument seems to work the best” (p. 35).

6. Crozier's (2008) edition of Sexual Inversion reproduces the first English version co-authored with John Addington Symonds. Notwithstanding Ellis and Symonds's collaboration, Sexual Inversion was substantially put together and written by Ellis after the death of Symonds, and even this early, co-authored version reflects Ellis's thought. Subsequent editions appeared only under Ellis's name, and in response to new work in sexology and psychiatry (particularly the work of Freud), Ellis substantially revised and enlarged Sexual Inversion, especially the 3rd edition of 1915 (Crozier, 2000). Nevertheless, unless otherwise noted, I cite Crozier's critical edition of the “co-authored” Sexual Inversion because it is more accessible to readers and because the early edition is more proximate to Ellis's literary criticism (hence, more likely to reveal discourses shaping that criticism). To avoid confusion with material cited from Crozier's introduction (Crozier, 2008), I cite material from Sexual Inversion (and provide a separate entry in the References) as (Ellis & Symonds, 2008). Readers should not be confused, however, about Ellis's influence over the ideas I attribute to him from this text. Readers interested in the publication and revision history of Sexual Inversion should consult Crozier's introduction. On tensions between Ellis and Symonds, see Bristow (1998). Those interested in later developments of Ellis's scientific thought should consult the third edition.

7. Ellis plays a role in the “epistemological mutation” towards a “psychiatric style of reasoning” in the second half of the nineteenth century that makes it possible to “detach questions of sexual identity from facts about anatomy” (Davidson, 2001, p. 35).

8. Ellis also edited and appended a biographical introduction to the two volume works of Thomas Middleton. In telling contrast to Ellis's writings on the early dramatists, A. C. Swinburne's and Ellis's (n.d.) critical introduction makes no reference to sex.

9. Ellis's role in the rehabilitation of Marlowe's reputation in the nineteenth century was part of his “effort to attack the Victorian sexual conventions that repressed what he found to be the essential passions of the artistic temperament” (Dabbs, 1991, p. 128).

10. In the 1915 edition, Ellis used the word “bisexual” rather than “psychosexual hermaphrodite” to describe Marlowe's temperament (p. 44). Rather than belabor the differences, I would simply note his insistence in the earlier edition that psychosexual hermaphroditism is barely distinguishable from true inversion. It suggests, perhaps, that he believed Marlowe's sexual temperament to be more fully inverted than he was later willing to concede.

11. The sentence on Tennyson and Montaigne is an elaboration that appears in the 1915 edition. I cite this version because it seems to clarify Ellis's point in the original English edition of the work (compare Ellis & Symonds, 2008, p. 109).

12. As a corollary example, consider Ellis's comments on Richard Barnfield in the 3rd edition of Sexual Inversion in which Ellis uses the language of bisexuality. Ellis (1924) writes that Barnfield's earlier poems imply his homosexuality but that his later marriage indicates that “he was of a bisexual temperament, and that, as not infrequently happens in such cases, the homosexual element developed early under the influence of a classical education, while the normal heterosexual element developed later and, as may happen in bisexual persons, was associated with the more commonplace and prosaic side of life. Barnfield was only a genuine poet on the homosexual side of his nature” (pp. 42–43). His slipping into a language of bisexuality reveals Ellis's belief that acquired forms of homosexuality might ultimately give way to more congenital impulses of, in this case, heterosexuality.

13. Stallybrass (1993) explores what he calls a backward formation of sexuality in critical controversies about homoeroticism in Shakespeare's Sonnets. In the history of reception of the Sonnets, the standard response to any implication of homoerotic behavior has been an almost paranoid reaction to the effect that Shakespeare could not have meant that at all and the consequent assurance that he was certifiably heterosexual.

14. Perhaps not surprisingly, the particular dialectical reasoning around sexuality that Ellis establishes in his uses of Marlowe and Shakespeare does not occur as frequently in criticism of Marlowe. Still, as Stephen Guy-Bray (1991) makes clear, once “critics beganto discuss the homosexual aspects of [the final scene of Edward II] openly,” the discussion was “embedded in a moralistic discourse that disguised itself as ‘psychoanalytic’” (p. 126). Marlowe's supposed homosexuality has been represented more positively only in the past twenty or so years, when Edward II, in particular, emerged as a tool in the post-Stonewall struggle for gay self-determination. For an overview of the criticism, see Charles R. Forker's (1995) introduction to his edition for the Revels Series.

15. Hammill (2000) elaborates fully the theoretical distinction between seeing early modern sodomy as anticipating modern homosexuality and seeing it as expressing “the limit of the literary and the forms of subjectivity produced by it” (p. 113).

16. Mario DiGangi brought this essay to my attention (Personal communication, date unknown).

17. As Stallybrass (1993) argues, the construction of a notion of heterosexuality through the construction of Shakespeare as an author had been taking place throughout the later part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. The point is readily confirmed by even a cursory glance at the history of commentary on the Sonnets in Rollins' (1944) Variorum edition. Before the late nineteenth century, the critical discourse used to describe the Sonnets evoked the language of vice, literary convention, and friendship. (See comments by Coleridge, Dyce, and De Wailly, in Variorum II, 232–33.) By the end of the century, defenses of Shakespeare had turned more and more toward friendship, the sacred, and Platonism. (See Grillparzer and Conrad, in Variorum II, 233].) By the twentieth century, however, commentary on the poems demarcates identity around such institutions as birth, marriage, and sexual object choice, institutions that imply, for us, specific sexuality. (See especially Conrad and Groth, in Variorum II, 235, 237].)

18. By the late 1920s, a fully developed, if anachronistic, line of thinking characterized Shakespeare as homosexual. Following Wilde's teasing story, “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889), Wyndham Lewis (1955) made the extraordinary pronouncement in The Lion and the Fox that Shakespeare's “wits and senses had been sharpened and specialized in the school of Sodom” (p. 153). In academic criticism, the French critic Gillet, writing in 1931, described the young man of the Sonnets in stereotypical terms as the seducer of the older speaker, Shakespeare (see Variorum II, 237), but the idea received perhaps its strongest support from G. Wilson Knight (1955), who argued, not unlike Ellis, that the passion of the sonnets is homosexual and that homosexual attraction is common in men of genius of all times (p. 24).

19. A notable exception, Moulton (2000) links the plays' concern with sexuality to national identity among other things.

20. I am indebted to Jameson's (1981) interpretation of Althusser: “If therefore one wishes to characterize Althusser's Marxism as a structuralism, one must complete the characterization with the essential proviso that it is a structuralism for which only one structure exists: namely the mode of production itself, or the synchronic system of social relations as a whole” (p. 36). In other words, in Jameson's formulation, the relationship of constituent elements to one another constitutes the unity of the synchronic system of social relations, which is, in turn, the single mode for producing ideology.