ABSTRACT
This chapter examines early-modern masculinities from a cultural materialist point of view. The emphasis is not on ideal norms to which the individual may aspire, but on positions in a social and political system that situates individuals in ways that tend to maintain prevailing power relations, both locally and at large. Textual instances are apprehended neither as documentary evidence of how people lived nor as myth or fantasy, but as contested representations through which early-modern society sought to explore its most troubling insights. The processes of desire were uneven and risky and, pursued under pressure, might be threatening to the psyche and, at least in the drama, to life.
