ABSTRACT

James Grantham Turner (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 224 pp., £10.95 (paperback)

Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 320 pp., £12.95 (paperback)

What troubles Jonathan Goldberg about the Gulf War is an American T-shirt showing Saddam Hussein’s face superimposed on the rear end of a camel, and the problem he identifies in Sodometries, the aspect of the T-shirt that disturbs him most, is not so much the gross imperialism of the image, but its homophobia. The point, made at the beginning of a scholarly work on the undecidabilities detectable in the texts of Renaissance sexuality, is as arresting as it is scandalous, and that, of course, is part of the point. Only a dull, lumbering mind, we are to suppose, would fail to recognize that Goldberg’s analysis takes for granted the outrage of the systematic Allied demolition of a third-world infrastructure (and numbers of their own side into the bargain). But can we, should we, I am compelled in my pedestrian way to ask, ever assume a shared revulsion against instant militarism, in a world where the West increasingly undertakes to police every dispute and to ‘resolve’ political problems by violence?