ABSTRACT
Usually understood as a paean to heterosexual love, the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) has also been interpreted and appropriated in a queer manner. This chapter looks at how the Victorian poet and painter, Simeon Solomon, and the contemporary English playwright, Neil Bartlett, twisted or queered the biblical source and used it alongside other texts to explore issues of perception, description, intimacy, defiance, and difficulty. The difficulties of Solomon’s prose poem A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (Figure 3.1) are associated with perception through closing eyes and description through partial silences. Bartlett took Solomon’s title for his 1989 play, which adapts the prose poem and details of the Victorian’s life to assert defiance in the face of the AIDS crisis and associated homophobia. The difficulties of Bartlett’s play center around its engagement with difficult issues and its self-presentation as difficult art, where audiences are discomfited by the actor’s nakedness. Exploring difficulty through its common usage to denote what is demanding or challenging, this chapter crosses time and genres to explore how queer Victorian desires and late-twentieth century tragedies intersect with the Song of Songs in the lives of difficult queers.
