ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the discursively connected histories of queerness, sodomy, shame, Catholicism, Irishness and class transgression have a pedigree stretching, at least, right back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It examines a speech by Irish politician Edmund Burke, made in the British House of Commons on 12 April 1780, on the punishment of two men, a 'plaisteref named William Smith and a coachman named Theodosius Reed, for 'the commission of sodomitical practices'. Edmund Burke's measured plea for choosing pillory for these men's sodomitical crimes would have been made with his full knowledge of the ignoble history of violent retribution that the state had already enacted against those it deemed shameful offenders, such as Castlehaven. Burke enacts plasterer William Smith's death for the reader in typically Burkean gruesome detail; he gives a vivid account of Smith's torture and the violence of the mob which both men endured as they stood in the pillory.
