ABSTRACT
Wiseman’s “The Family Tree Motel: Subliming Shakespeare in My Own Private Idaho” acknowledges that Shakespeare may not save a critique of American masculinity, but he does authenticate the decidedly different cultural narrative of the paternal and filial street bonds of gay hustlers versus those of inherited privilege and social legitimacy, a narrative that the film self-consciously invokes within the scenes it so self-consciously quotes-via Orson Welles’s The Chimes at Midnight-from the Henry IV and Henry V plays. The collection’s closing essay discusses gay versus queer representations in Shakespeare film. Focusing on three straight, mall movies in which Shakespeare is a signifier of gay sexuality, Richard Burt’s essay, “The Love That Dare Not Speak Shakespeare’s Name: New Shakesqueer Cinema,” argues that straight films in which gayness is represented may paradoxically prove more disorienting than self-identified gay representations of Shakespeare.
