ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the diverse approaches brought to the subjects of gender and sexuality in early modern England at that time and since, and examines how these new seams of critical inquiry brought particular attention to economies of the body. The turn in William criticism to matters of gender and sexuality takes place, as it does in most fields of literary criticism, around 1980. At the same time, other feminist critics eschewed Shakespeare and his male contemporary’s altogether, choosing to explore questions of gendered subjectivity through the recovery and analysis of texts written by women in the early modern period. In a review of Smith's Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England, Peter Stallybrass applauded the breadth of such new scholarly inquiry for its engagement with the sexual politics of the contemporary world even as it attended "to the resistant discourses and practices of Renaissance England". The alignment of queer theory and Shakespeare has been less attached to questions of sexual desire.
