City Powd’ring

This chapter examines how Thomas Middleton’s Michaelmas Term positions the cloth trade as pivotal to the construction of sexuality and sexual relations in the city. Circulating with cloth in the play is queer urban sexual knowledge. Antitheatricalists feared that the theater was a site of sexual pedagogy and initiation in the early modern period. Michaelmas Term subtly embraces that role for the city comedy, and the chapter draws on queer theories of materiality to demonstrate that the play’s relentless focus on the materiality of selfhood is pertinent in querying the limits of biological determinism and essentialism that characterize mainstream politics around sexuality today. The play can prompt us to consider how alternate forms of queer ontogenesis derived from the past have affordances for the production of queer culture in the present.

Introduction

This chapter outlines how sartorial extravagance might be thought of as a kind of queer worldmaking in early modern city comedy. It offers an overview of the book’s application of disability theory and new materialism to the forms of superficial embodiment and queer eroticism that extravagant clothing facilitated on the early modern stage. It argues that more flexible historical methodologies based on queer theories of temporality can move the field of early modern studies beyond the false choice between historicism and presentism. It situates the book in current scholarship on the early modern period and queer theory and previews the remaining chapters of the book.

Cruisy Historicism

This chapter articulates a historical methodology, cruisy historicism, for attending to the erotic possibilities of the resistances from minor voices within a text and the mismatch between text and historical context. Drawn analogically from queer public sexual practices, cruisy historicism is particularly suited to unpacking the queer sexual possibilities that inhere in these multiplicities and misalignments. This methodology is explored via the intersection of clothing and space in Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour. The play depicts lavishly dressed male characters circulating knowledge about queer forms of eroticism and subjectivity in the middle aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral, a place famed for its parading gallants in the early modern period. This chapter uses cruisy historicism to access the utopian fantasies surrounding extravagant apparel that exceed their historical and satiric contexts. In addition, cruisy historicism invites readers to encounter texts that do not seem especially welcoming to queerness so as to rework them into sites in which queer pleasure can animate one’s relationship with the past and compel us to rethink present-day political demarcations of legitimate forms of sexual practice.

Ben Jonson’s Imitation Games

This chapter considers why sartorial affectation holds exemplary status as a “humor” to be purged through humiliating exposure in humors comedies. This exemplarity carries over to city comedy’s depiction of masculinity when Ben Jonson creates a bridge between the genres in his Every Man in His Humour. The play has been traditionally understood as drawing on humoral theory to reaffirm class hierarchies and align masculinity with competitive individualism. However, this chapter demonstrates that when this play is situated in relation to other humors comedies by George Chapman as well as Jonson’s other non-dramatic writings, the distinction between the authentic masculinity of the city gallant, true poet, and trickster servant and its inauthentic imitation in the gull, plagiarist, and braggart soldier falls apart. The chapter draws on the overlap of accounts of nonnormative embodiment within disability and queer theory to help reveal that Jonson’s play encourages a broader range of acceptable variations in masculine embodiment than modern post-Cartesian forms of selfhood permit. These nonstandard forms of embodiment, in turn, are the basis for attachments between men and attachments to the objects of material culture, especially clothing.

“Quilted with Mighty Words to Lean Purpose”

This chapter zeroes in on the sartorial practices of the aptly named Jack Dapper from Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl. Taking up new materialism and ecocritical theory, it demonstrates that through his sartorial extravagance, especially his interest in feathers, and his related fiscal profligacy, Jack resists restrictions upon his sexuality as well as the patriarchal imperatives of wealth accumulation. Furthermore, his superficial embodiment fosters in him, as well as the audience, an awareness that new pleasures attend upon reimagining one’s relationship to nonhuman matter. The chapter also accesses the multiple, partially realized avenues for identification and desire that a text opens up through a minor character in a play whose efforts at characterization, plot, and theme seem focused elsewhere. Such a shift in focus to what seems peripheral and precarious can form the basis of a more nuanced account of the multiple, sometimes contradictory ways that sartorial extravagance could be viewed in the period.

Epilogue

This Epilogue addresses the historicist criticism that theoretical and presentist approaches to literature are narcissistic. It responds to these critiques by showing that defenses of historicism engage in the obscurations and suppressions of difference that presentist approaches are accused of. It draws on the work of Michael Warner to identify a queer idealism within Freudian narcissism, and this idealism can motivate literary criticism’s engagement with the literature of the past. The Epilogue also reflects on why a queer rethinking of sexuality remains necessary in light of recent legal victories for the LGBTQ population in some countries and what role the sartorial plays in our thinking about toleration for nonnormative sexuality.