Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England

To recent studies of Renaissance subjectivity, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England contributes the argument that masculinity is unavoidably anxious and volatile in cultures that distribute power and authority according to patriarchal prerogatives. Drawing from current arguments in feminism, cultural studies, historicism, psychoanalysis and gay studies, Mark Breitenberg explores the dialectic of desire and anxiety in masculine subjectivity in the work of a wide range of writers, including Shakespeare, Bacon, Burton and the women writers of the ‘querelles des femmes’ debate, especially Jane Anger. Breitenberg discusses jealousy and cuckoldry anxiety, hetero and homoerotic desire, humoural psychology, anatomical difference, cross-dressing and the idea of honour and reputation. He traces masculine anxiety both as a sign of ideological contradiction and, paradoxically, as a productive force in the perpetuation of western patriarchal systems.

• Refocuses attention on heterosexual aspects of Renaissance gender and cultural studies • Sheds new light on our understanding of masculine desire and anxiety in Shakespeare’s England • New readings of Shakespeare’s plays, especially Love’s Labours Lost, set in new cultural contexts

Introduction; 1. Fearful fluidity: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy; 2. Purity and the dissemination of knowledge in Bacon’s new science; 3. Publishing chastity: Shakespeare’s ‘The Rape of Lucrece’; 4. The anatomy of masculine desire in Love’s Labour’s Lost; 5. Inscriptions of difference: cross-dressing, androgyny and the anatomical imperative; 6. Ocular proof: sexual jealousy and the anxiety of interpretation.