SOURCE: “Hal's Desire, Shakespeare's Idaho,” in Henry IV: Parts One and Two, edited by Nigel Wood, Open University Press, 1995, pp. 35-64.

[In the following excerpt, Goldberg examines representations of male homosocial relations and normative masculinity in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, particularly with regard to Hotspur and Falstaff. The critic also compares Hal to the fair friend of the sonnets and contrasts the latent sexuality of these plays with the explicit sexuality of Gus Van Sant's cinematic adaptation in My Own Private Idaho (1991).]

The Henry IV plays are, no doubt, history plays, yet their relationship to at least one kind of history—the history of sexuality—has gone largely unexamined.¹ The reasons for this are not all that difficult to understand. Sexuality is often thought to be nothing other than heterosexuality, and there is, especially in relationship to the central drama of these plays—the prince's ascendance to the throne—little to be said on that score. The fact that women seem exiguous in this political plot could make the plays available to the kind of gender analysis that takes as foundational and virtually transhistorical the exclusion and subordination of women (assumptions that shape the argument of Phyllis Rackin's Stages of History (1990)); such analyses often assume as well that gender relations are always already structured invidiously by an equally transhistorical heterosexuality. Thus, to raise, as I will be doing here, questions around the history of sexuality might have consequences for how one understands the historicity of gender, and might lead, even by way of such unpromising texts as the Henry IV plays, to the prospect of a more fully inflected reading of gendered difference.

The history of sexuality is by no means a field that is so established that one can refer to it in an offhand fashion, however. For my purposes here, since it is his title that I am using, the name of Michel Foucault might be invoked (along with other historians who advocate social constructionist views, among whom Jeffrey Weeks (1981; 1990) might be cited as of particular importance), especially for a set of pronouncements in The History of Sexuality (Foucault 1978) which I take as guiding assumptions: that the regime of heterosexuality is a modern one, that it came into existence at the same time as (if not slightly later than) the identification of a sexual identity formation called homosexuality, and that the early modern period in which Shakespeare wrote did not know such distinctions. Rather, Foucault audaciously argues that sexuality per se is a modern phenomenon (the argument may be familiar by now, but it remains remarkably counter-intuitive to many); while the Renaissance and ages before had managed marriage relations between men and women as a means of conveying property, title, privilege—a host of social relations that Foucault calls alliance in The History of Sexuality—these socio-legal ties are not the site for sexuality if by that term one means a supposed personal core that defines individual desire and structures identity as a consequence of such desires. In the nineteenth century, Foucault argues, a vast sexual science was developed; from its panoply of sexual possibilities (masturbators, zoophiles, sadists, masochists and fetishists of every imaginable variety) emerged the dichotomy in which everyone is presumably straight or gay, and in which object choice alone defines sexuality. (The confusions around these suppositions, and the reasons to be sceptical about them, are a central subject of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's recent and immensely powerful Epistemology of the Closet (1990).)

What Foucault's argument implies in terms of a reading of the Henry IV plays within the history of sexuality is that the absence of women from the central drama of the play—which might, now, be recast as Hal's desire to arrive in his father's place—does not make the plays simply available for a reading of homosexuality in them. Such an alternative reading would be as deeply anachronistic as any that mistakes the management of gender relations in Shakespeare for an account of heterosexuality in the Elizabethan age. Gay readings of Shakespeare have been made, of course, particularly in relation to the sonnets, from Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889) on; however, the history of criticism on the sonnets (the academic formation being, as it happens, virtually coincident with the history we are considering here) has in large measure been characterized by massive evasions of the erotics of the poems or, more recently, as in Joseph Pequigney's Such Is My Love (1985), by dehistoricized banalizations of them. (Pequigney is to be credited, however, with pointing out that the ways in which the sonnets have been ‘universalized’ has involved treating them as the repository for timeless wisdom about love, the timeless and the universal always turning out to be nothing other than the heterosexual.) In reading male-male relations in the Henry IV plays I will be arguing that the syntax of relations mapped in the sonnets also can be found in the plays, not to argue (as Wilde does in The Portrait of Mr. W. H.) that these texts participate in some tranhistorical homosexuality, but to seek to understand how male-male relations in the plays—relations which are or which could be construed as sexual—are to be read before the modern regimes of sexual identities can be presumed as reference points.

Luckily, powerfully suggestive ways to address such questions have been provided before. Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982) and the reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Sedgwick 1985) provide necessary analytic tools for this enterprise. Sedgwick's importation of the social scientists' term homosocial provides literary critics with a crucial lexical item to describe male-male social relations that can, but need not, be sexual. Bray's book is keenly attuned to the fact that its title advances an anachronism that its every page seeks to address. ‘To talk of an individual in this period as being or not being “a homosexual” is an anachronism and ruinously misleading’, Bray writes (Bray 1982: 16); rather, he focuses on terms available in the period, particularly on sodomy as the nearest word in the Renaissance lexicon for what moderns might call homosexuality. In doing so, he agrees with Foucault, who points to sodomy as that which ruins alliance, sodomy thereby comprising a range of sexual practices all bent on frustrating the marital tie and the presumption that marriage exists only to ensure legitimate sexual acts—those leading to procreation. Memorably, Foucault labels sodomy an ‘utterly confused category’ (Foucault 1978: 101), and one of Bray's aims is to show that the term includes a wide range of sexual practices. It would limit and confuse things to assume that the modern homo-hetero distinction gives one much analytic purchase in dealing with a socio-sexual order that found sodomy a term capacious enough to include bestiality, adultery, rape and prostitution, to name only some of the possible kinds of debaucheries that are not organized in terms of the distinction of gendered object choices. (This is not to imply that sodomy occupies an archaic register utterly unavailable to us now (the term and some of its ancient confusions survive into modernity in US law); nor is it to imply that something like an archaeology of the homo-hetero distinction cannot be traced in the Renaissance, a point to which I will be returning.) Even more to the point of a reading of the Henry IV plays—indeed, this is crucial—is Bray's insistence (fully congruent with Foucault's pitting of sodomy against alliance) that these sexual possibilities register only in particular social circumstances: sodomy names a crime, not a behaviour, and sodomites were those as likely to be accused as well of treason, atheism (or Roman Catholicism, virtually the same thing in Renaissance England), sedition and the like. If alliance is part of a social fabric, sodomy destroys it.

As Bray argues in the crucial third chapter of Homosexuality in Renaissance England, because sodomy was demonized it necessarily existed at some distance from actual socio-sexual relations (think of the work the word communists used to do, or that terrorists does). There is every reason to suppose that those accused of being sodomites did what others did as well. For, as Bray suggests, in a world that has not assumed that people make sexual choices on the basis of excluding one gender or the other, it seems likely that members of the same sex will be having sex with each other, and in ways so ordinary as to be virtually unperceived—necessarily unperceived, if the only label for such relations was sodomy and if sodomy was a world-destroying practice. Bray assumes, in fact, that the very structures that assured order and provided conduits for power in the Elizabethan age were the sites for practices that might be called sexual, that hierarchies and social differences were maintained or created by sexual relations. It is, to complicate Bray's point, perhaps more accurate to say that upon these sites something that retrospectively would be called sexuality fastened. In this culture, servants regularly slept together or with their masters, as did pupils with their teachers. Indeed, Bray argues, the hierarchies of public life (which, in effect, almost always means male-male relations of the sort featured in the Henry IV plays) were oiled with such sexual possibilities if not virtually requiring them as part of relationships of patronage; in fact, in a recent essay on ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’ (Bray 1990), Bray claims that as the social order swerved farther from the social ties summarized under the word friendship (ties that could include patronage relations, diplomatic bargaining, influence trading of all sorts), the acts that constituted evidence for sodomy came to be increasingly indistinguishable from those that maintained the normative ties. Bray argues that changes in the social structure in sixteenth-century England that marked the breakdown of an older social order are the largest context in which this crisis of definition occurred. The ties of friendship were no longer those uniting gentlemen. Thus, whereas Henry VIII had instituted the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber as his bedfellows, and his companions were nominally aristocratic, by the end of the century, in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), Puttenham could imagine that a social climbing poet might claim such a position too. Henry VIII, he reports in the eighth chapter of the first book of that volume, made Sternhold groom of the Privy Chamber for versifying the Psalms, and what the king did, Puttenham holds up as an example for Queen Elizabeth I.²

It is in such a context that one can see how euphemized it is to speak of the sonnets to the young man as bids for patronage—as Arthur Marotti (1982) does—as if a desire for favours meant only money or position. One can also see that however sexualizable these social relations are—and the language of the sonnets is hardly desexualized—these are not poems about homosexual relations; nor are they about sodomy. The poems are not written with any assumption about exclusive identities, and in that respect it is useful to recall that the first group urges the young man to marry, an injunction that is not seen as an alternative to the young man's relations with the speaker of the poems. Nowhere are the suggestions of sexual relations between men taken to constitute the antisocial behaviour of the sodomite. If anything like sodomy does appear in the sonnets, it is in relation to the so-called dark lady of the final poems, a woman with whom promiscuous, non-marital sex occurs; this is seen as debauched and transgressive sex, not least because it threatens to destroy the relation between the sonneteer and his beloved young man. That conflict, seen in these terms, is not one between homo- and heterosexuality.

Sedgwick's reading of the sonnets, which seeks to vacate the modern lexicon of homo-hetero difference to describe far more labile desires that cannot be captured by those labels, begins to offer tools for further differentiating and relating male-male and male-female sexual relations. Like Bray, she sees that male-male sexual relations need not be read as outside the normative systems that promote male interests at the expense of women (the homosocial order can be the patriarchal one and can seek to erase women, allowing them no function beyond serving as conduits for relations between men); tellingly, she argues that as homosexuality becomes more visible and differentiated in the modern period, men who choose other men as sexual partners become subject to annihilative pressures congruent with those placed upon women. Misogyny and homophobia, while hardly reducible to each other, are also inevitably intertangled. But these relations will not be the same in different historical periods, nor is there an easy calculus to map these volatile relations; the history of sexuality provides necessary leverage for any understanding of the historicity of gender and of gender relations.

It is from this cautionary position that I would mention one final frame for reading the Henry IV plays, one way Renaissance critics recently have adduced ‘homosexuality’ in Shakespeare. I have in mind arguments about cross-dressing, where the presence of the boy actor beneath the woman's clothes has been taken to mean that the only sexual desire that exists in Shakespeare is homosexual desire. Despite major differences in their arguments and approaches, for instance, this is a point of agreement between Stephen Greenblatt, especially in the final pages of ‘Fiction and Friction’ (Greenblatt 1988: 66-93) and Lisa Jardine in Still Harping on Daughters (1989). When Jardine conveniently forgets that women formed a considerable portion of the audience for plays, she leaves out something that must complicate the circulation of desire in the theatre (antitheatricalists, in fact, worry more about promiscuous debauch among men and women than anything else). An account like Greenblatt's betrays a complicity between misogyny and male-male desire, since it assumes that male-male desire can only batten on, even as it opposes, male-female desire. In these accounts (and others as well), transvestism is taken to reveal a homosexuality that is claimed really to be a heterosexuality manqué; the assumption made (even by feminist and gay affirmative critics, who should have no interest in making such arguments) is that the only difference upon which desire moves is gender difference, a position ably dismantled in Michael Warner's ‘Homo-Narcissism; or, Heterosexuality’ (in Boone and Cadden 1990: 190-206). Against such claims, one would want to argue that in a culture like Shakespeare's that did not make the homo-hetero distinction, the availability of either gender as a sexual partner cannot be understood through our modern categories (themselves, it hardly needs to be said, suspect). Valuable at a theoretical level would be the point that Marjorie Garber argues in Vested Interests (1992), that the transvestite is a necessary and foundational third term—or third sex—that disrupts the more usual plotting of sexual difference in terms of binaries and dichotomies. (Their bankruptcy is further suggested by the structuring contradiction that treats men and women both as opposites and yet as ‘made for each other’.) Although Garber's third term may be questioned for its own normalizing and stabilizing effects—she allies it, for example, with the Lacanian Symbolic and, thus, implicitly with the law—she nevertheless points to a highly impoverished way of thinking about gender that is a consequence arguably of the simplification that the hetero-homo distinction makes. In the Elizabethan period, it is, I believe, arguable, just for starters, that boys are a different sex—neither men nor women—that there are at least three genders in the period, and a corresponding geometrically increased number of sexualities. These cut across the binarism of gender, but they also are structured by (or violate) other boundaries—of age and status, most notably. It is these crossings that provide much of the excitement in the sonnets, when the older, often abject sonneteer addresses the young man, whose youth may place him in the position of his pupil, but whose money and social status make him the older man's master; make him that unless, of course, the young man is, as Oscar Wilde in The Portrait of Mr. W. H. and others since have sometimes thought, a boy actor, pretending to more than he has—and also possessed of a beauty that seems to feminize him, casting him as the cross-dressed master-mistress; this is a cross-dressing that he seems virtually to embody, though one, as Sedgwick argues, which, however much it makes him a ‘dumb blonde’, also renders him ‘exaggeratedly phallic … He represents the masculine as pure object’ (Sedgwick 1985: 44). From such observations, Sedgwick delivers a sweeping summary that points the path for the enquiry that follows. ‘Gender and genitals we have always with us,’ she writes (perhaps a bit overconfidently, but one has to start somewhere), ‘but “family,” “sexuality,” “masculine,” “feminine,” “power,” “career,” “privacy,” “desire,” the meanings and substance of gender and genitals, are embodied in times and institutions, literature among them’ (Sedgwick 1985: 47).³

The opening scenes of 1 Henry IV locate Hal's career—his desire for the throne—in the context of others' desires for his arrival there. First, we catch the king in a narcoleptic moment, having virtually forgotten his wayward son and recalling him only as he spins out the fantasy of the son he desires—Hotspur. The king's wish—that ‘some night-tripping fairy had exchanged’ (I.i.86) children, so that Hotspur might be his Harry—conditions the plot of replacement brought to a close at Shrewsbury, when Hal steps into the place of this desired alter ego. How fantasmatic this desire is, both on the part of the king and his son—and therefore how much it might exceed the requirements of paternal succession and royal inheritance and bring the homosocial distribution of power between men on to a sexualizable terrain—is suggested by the degree to which the king's wish resonates with another royal plot of desire, the one in A Midsummer Night's Dream; there, Oberon defeats Titania in order to possess the Indian boy, a changeling like the desired son in Henry IV's fantasy; the fairy king desires him as a companion, not as a successor, however, and this begins to suggest that the paternal fantasy of producing mirror children (the imaginary terrain described by Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream as the paternal power of duplication, the ability to figure or disfigure the wax impression of the child⁴) may be as opposed to the maternal and to procreation within marriage as Oberon is. Such image production also conditions the reproduction of the figure of the fair young man in the sonnets from the moment when the possibility that the young man will marry and reproduce is abandoned.

In the second scene of 1 Henry IV, another voice is heard yearning for Hal's arrival, and it, too, offers a model for the legitimate heir based in a rebellious—and self-duplicating—alter ego. Falstaff, like the king, desires the prince's arrival, perhaps even more insistently, as is suggested by the refrain that punctuates the first words he addresses to Hal in the play: ‘I prithee sweet wag, when thou art king … Marry then sweet wag, when thou art king’ (I.ii.14-15, 22). Falstaff's desire for Hal to be a king of thieves is only a hair's breadth from the king's desire for his son to equal or to replace the rebel Hotspur, for him to legitimize the king's desire by being illegitimate, indeed for Hal to arrive in his father's place by being as illegitimate as his father, a usurper and a rebel himself, once was. Falstaff's longing and its echo of the royal desire baffles the commonplace critical distinction between good and bad fathers in the Henry IV plays, complexly intertwining legitimate and illegitimate desires—paternities and surrogate sonships, heirs and rebels. The territory of desire does not seem safely contained by the homosocial and patriarchal orders.

Not that Falstaff is presented in any direct way as a sexual partner for Hal. It remained for Gus Van Sant, in his cinematic translation of the relation between Hal and Falstaff into modern terms in My Own Private Idaho (1991), to realize these possibilities. There, Falstaff, now called Bob, is the leader of a gang of street kids, many of them hustlers, and including Scott, the mayor's son. This latter-day Hal affirms the supposition of his companion—his Poins, the narcoleptic Mike—that he has had a ‘thing’ with Bob; Bob, he says, loved him. Van Sant's film does not present this unequivocally as a sign of a homosexual relationship; rather, he explores the permeable borders between homo- and heterosexuality, and in ways that are suggestive for reading Shakespeare and the cultural situation in which he writes, one that has yet to invent these supposedly opposing forms of love and desire. While, to follow Bray, in Elizabethan culture sex could maintain male-male hierarchies and function as a site of exchange, in the film the cash nexus that defines prostitution allows for sexual crossings that need not testify to choices of identity. Thus, although Mike is a hustler, he also loves Scott and wants to have sex with him for that reason, while Scott claims that he only sleeps with men for money. Indeed, Scott's use of this claim functions as a site of refusal of homosexual identity even as it allows him to have homosexual sex. In this context, Scott's conversion to ‘normalcy’ is markedly different from Hal's in one respect: it involves the assumption of heterosexuality, acquiring a wife, and renouncing not merely Mike and Bob's company, but also, indeed more importantly, sex with men. It remains like Hal's conversion, however, in one respect: it is a site of betrayal.

No such renunciation, in fact, marks Hal's arrival, and no wife appears at the end of 2 Henry IV. This suggests that the Henry IV plays are far less direct in their depiction of sex and sexuality than Van Sant's film is, in part because the sexual domains that characterize modernity have yet to come into existence, and therefore will not define the transformation or self-realization of the prince. This means that what could be called sexual in the plays will not be represented along axes that correspond to modern definitions. It helps to recall Bray's argument at this point: that sodomy in the period always will be voiced through or alongside other charges, and that the possibility of making sodomy visible depends upon its being attached to a social disruption that cannot be ignored. The king sees ‘riot and dishonour stain’ (I.i.84) his son's face, sees Falstaff as the blot on his character, the mark made where the paternal impression should be. One sign of the ways in which this illegitimate mark gets connected to the paternal impression can be found in Hal's lines spoken at the moment of his arrival into his father's place, at the end of Part 2, for he can see no difference between the dead father and the companion he is about to cast off (Van Sant goes even further, allowing Scott to declare his Falstaff a better and more beloved father even as he rejects him, a declaration that therefore functions to mark Scott's ‘conversion’ to heterosexuality as a self-betrayal motivated by social regulation):

My father is gone wild into his grave,
For in his tomb lie my affections.
And with his spirits sadly I survive
To mock the expectation of the world,
To frustrate prophecies, and to raze out
Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down
After my seeming.

(2 Henry IV, V.ii.122-8)

Harry replaces Harry here (V.ii.49) as he had replaced another Harry at the end of Part 1 (‘Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse, / Meet’ (IV.i.123-4)), and the Lord Chief Justice, chosen as father now in place of both the king and Falstaff, is the father only of the newest self-simulation, the artificial paternity that the king first dreamed, the position that Falstaff assumed. Hal is still bent, as he was in his first soliloquy in Part 1, on the mockery of expectation and the falsifications that are coincident with his truth, and this double erasure and the announcement of a new father figure is one more suspect legitimizing gesture. The parallel between this moment of arrival and the defeat of Hotspur at the end of Part 1 is another. All of these suggest that the plays continually negotiate Hal's career in terms of relations between men.

In his first soliloquy in 1 Henry IV, and in the fulfilment of his promise to the king that he will prove himself the king's true son by taking upon himself the form of Hotspur's honour, Hal composes an image of himself in which he is at once both Harrys—Hotspur and his father, legitimate and illegitimate at the same time. Doing so, he makes himself the very simulacrum that the king sees in Act III, scene ii, when he reflects on how much alike they are (144-52). Hal's offer to redeem himself and prove himself the king's true son involves taking the form of Hotspur, the very shape of a royal desire that is all too like Falstaff's illegitimate desire for Hal. (In My Own Private Idaho, one further way in which such complexities are translated comes by having Scott appear for the reconciliation scene with his father dressed in his most outrageous street hustler guise—denim jacket, naked chest, slave collar. When he goes down on his knees and buries his head in his father's lap momentarily it looks as if a blow job is about to occur, thereby recalling the first scene in the film after the opening title sequence, which begins with Mike receiving a blow job and ends with him telling lies about his father.) Indeed, Hal's description of how he will replace Hotspur offers another version of the razing and replacement imaged when dead king and boon companion stand in for and erase one another to produce the final Harry at the end of the pair of plays:

I will redeem all this on Percy's head,
And in the closing of some glorious day
Be bold to tell you that I am your son,
When I will wear a garment all of blood,
And stain my favours in a bloody mask,
Which, washed away, shall scour my shame with it.

(1 Henry IV, III.ii.132-7)

Hal's promised redemption involves a restaining and scouring that produces not exactly himself but, as he goes on to say, an exchange like the one his father dreamed: ‘I shall make this northern youth exchange / His glorious deeds for my indignities’ (145-6). This shameless deed rewrites Harry's brow as unspotted only by casting the northern youth as the locus of his glory; that the lines also promise to ‘engross’ (148) these deeds further implicates this rewriting in the one that Part 2 brings to a close, when Hal's gross companion is cast off, leaving engrossing Hal once again supposedly unstained.

The rewriting here—the staining and erasing—aims at legitimizing the illegitimate. This is a political project, to be sure, but that in no way guarantees—the opposite, in fact—that it will not be played out in a bodily register. Hal can engross, but unlike his fat companion, his body fails to serve as the register of what he has done. Falstaff's gross body is not Hal's engrossed one, and the ‘base contagious clouds’ (1 Henry IV, I.ii.186), ‘the foul and ugly mists / Of vapours’ (190-1) which figure Falstaff's flatulent body⁵ suggest a form of anality—sodomy—that Hal's anal economies seek to overcome.

Hal's arrival—easily exposed as calculating, and involving the defeat of Hotspur and, even more insupportably, the casting off of Falstaff—remains, for all that, something readers of the play may be expected to desire. How this is so depends on recognizing the mechanism the play produces to engage such desires, the way that the desire for arrival serves as an endless dissimulation of legitimate and illegitimate desires. In this context it is worth recalling arguments made by William Empson, some fifty years ago, in a few pages in Some Versions of Pastoral that have never received the critical attention that they deserve.⁶ Empson forthrightly notes the register of desire that I believe must be taken into account. The prince has been cast in the part of the fair young man of the sonnets, he writes, and ‘Harry has no qualities that are obviously not W. H.'s’ (Empson 1950: 108). Falstaff's desire, even what is made of the father's desire, is, in this light, not to be distinguished from the desire of the sonneteer, always ready to take upon himself the faults of the faultless young man.

Henry's soliloquy [at the end of Act I, scene ii] demands from us just the sonnets' mood of bitter complaisance; the young man must still be praised and loved, however he betrays his intimates, because we see him all shining with the virtues of success.

(Empson 1950: 104)

In his soliloquy Hal makes up to the audience by promising to cast off his bad company (by the end of Part 2, as we have seen, his father makes up part of that disreputable crew). As Empson observes, Hal gives one twist further to the dynamics upon which the male-male relations in the sonnets depend: it is the prince, speaking in the position of the young man, who proclaims his own perfection and dumps his faults upon those who love and desire him. Empson concludes: ‘We have the central theme of all the sonnets of apology; the only difference, though it is a big one, is that this man says it about himself’ (1950: 105).

How Hal's self-love and corruption get a saving translation is suggested, for instance, in Falstaff's repeated claims that the prince has corrupted him. For the truth he points to is that no one in these plays is innocent, that predation is endemic, increasingly and overtly so in Part 2. From the first scene in Part 1 in which they are together to the final repudiation, Falstaff stands to be abused. It is often said that we desire Falstaff's resurgence (given in his resurrection at the end of Part 1, half promised in the epilogue to Part 2), but, if so, it is because that is his condition throughout the plays; comebacks are his forte. Falstaff teaches us to see the prince as a sweet wag as well as a thousand ways to prevaricate, to keep believing in the prince as he keeps letting Falstaff down. Somewhere along the line, the abuse of Falstaff becomes the lure of the prince—or, at least, that is what the plays count on, and numerous readers who acclaim the prince's arrival in his father's place attest to this effect; the equation of good and bad fathers at the end of 2 Henry IV is supposed to work to secure our love for Hal. Ideally—ideologically—at least, that is how desire is being channelled to fulfil the play's legitimizing political project. This is more or less what Hal declares in his first soliloquy, positioning the audience to assume the stance of the sonneteer, to love him despite his faults. If this makes us Falstaff, it is the Falstaff of an exchange like this one:

Prince Henry: Sirrah, do I owe you a thousand pound?

Falstaff: A thousand pound, Hal? A million. Thy love is worth a million; thou owest me thy love.

(1 Henry IV, III.iii.130-2)

This declaration of love is protected from being read at face value: Falstaff is once again being shamed, caught out this time lying to the Hostess and defrauding her (Hal can even, for a moment, appear to be the protector of women, a stance given the lie in 2 Henry IV, Act V, scene iv, when the Hostess and Doll Tearsheet are sent off to prison). As Empson says, ‘the more serious Falstaff's expression of love becomes the more comic it is, whether as hopeless or as hypocrisy’ (1950: 109); his love can always look like a form of rapacity. Nevertheless, the complex trajectories of Falstaff's declaration of love cannot fail to remind one of the structure of the sonnets. Indeed, as I remarked earlier, the royal desire for simulation participates in that project too. For, from the moment (at sonnet 17) that the possibility is abandoned that the young man might, through marriage, be the source of an ever fresh supply of duplicate young men, the sonnets seek to propagate the young man through the writing of his perfected image—the image declared perfect despite all the faults and failures revealed. Henry IV never specifies what stains his son's brow; although he characterizes him as a ‘young, wanton and effeminate boy’ in Richard II (V.iii.10), little afterwards would suggest that Hal is spending himself in the company of women (no bawdy houses for him, nor does the king ever think about a marriage for his son). Hal's ‘loose companions’ (V.iii.7) even in Richard II are highway robbers and tavern companions, a lowlife that appears as exclusively male as the public world of court and battlefield. These are the sites of struggle for Hal and in them the plays seem to occupy the terrain of sonnets 18-126, with their production of an image of perfection and the tainted rebounds of that desire—the desire that I have suggested rebounds upon king, rebel, and tavern companion.

That criticism has not followed Empson is thus perfectly understandable, since it would require seeing how its celebrations of Prince Hal might come close to a love only Empson seems to have had no trouble naming. If one follows Empson and historicizes the connection he makes between the prince and the fair young man, one must see that what keeps the play from making more overt the love relation between Hal and his fat companion is the proximity of their relation to sodomy: the terms stain, riot and rebellion suggest as much. The scandal of the play lies in suggesting how close that illegitimate desire might be to the usual workings of male-male relations, patriarchy in the play written, as we have seen, within the register of the sonnets' fantasies of duplicative inscription.⁷ Hal, we know, is stained with riot, and the king fears he might join the rebels. His blot is embodied in Falstaff, his rebellion in Hotspur: they wear two of the faces of what the period calls sodomy. The very fact that Hal's misdeeds are never specified, and that his riots are allied to Hotspur's rebellion but supposed to be enacted in his relations with Falstaff, places his ‘shame’ on that unspeakable terrain. It is arguably that ‘shame’ that Hal scours when he dispatches Hotspur. Yet the defeat of Hotspur at the end of Part 1 importantly marks Hal's path towards becoming the son the king desires; it even points ahead to the end of Henry V, for it is a Hotspur-like Hal who woos a wife (like Hotspur's, named Kate) in the voice of a plain soldier. Around Hotspur the plays negotiate an image of masculinity that serves to define the boundaries of what is allowable in relationships between men and between men and women. Hotspur, I would argue, serves as the site for the production of a misogyny and an incipient homophobia—an incipient heterosexuality—that serves both purposes.

In this context, it is important to note the purposes that Lady Percy serves in the Henry IV plays. If she appears in Part 1 largely to be abused, and in Part 2 to memorialize her dead husband, she none the less functions between men, in Part 1 thereby legitimizing Hotspur's alliance with the rebel Mortimer by making it a family affair. (In Part 2 she is so much a part of the political atmosphere of the play that her fiction of an ideal Hotspur serves to encourage his father once again to betray the rebel cause.) Under the modern regimes of the supposed exclusiveness of male-male and male-female desire, it would seem as if Hotspur's wife guarantees his heterosexuality. Yet what she guarantees is alliance, and the figure of Hotspur is troubled—in his relations with women and with men—with the spectre of effeminization.

This is explicit in the narrative that Hotspur offers to explain his refusal to behave as a vassal should, why he has not given up his prisoners to the king; in making his excuse, Hotspur fastens on a courtier who arrived on the battlefield speaking ‘holiday and lady terms’ (I.iii.46), talking ‘like a waiting-gentlewoman’ (55), perfumed and taking snuff. Hotspur reports himself ‘pestered with a popinjay’ (50). How threateningly reversible this might be is suggested when Lady Percy calls her husband a paraquito (II.iii.82) when he refuses her embraces in the name of his love for his horse and the masculine camaraderie of the battlefield. This is Hotspur's relation to Kate throughout Part 1; his exactions rebound, however, echoing his father's when Northumberland chastens the ranting Hotspur for what he calls his ‘woman's mood’ (I.iii.236). In that mood Hotspur is as impoverished in his vocabulary as the Welsh woman Hotspur would have his wife echo; he would train a bird—a starling—to parrot nothing more than ‘Mortimer’ (I.iii.223-4); the Welsh woman, Owen Glendower's daughter, can presumably say no more English. What Hotspur's father attempts with his son, Hotspur exacts with his wife in that scene among the rebels in Wales. When she calls him a paraquito she speaks with his father's voice.

These representations of Hotspur serve at least two functions in 1 Henry IV. As the site of a contradiction in the production of ‘proper’ masculinity, Hotspur is, on the one hand, the locus of a normative misogyny defended against women and effeminization (a masculinity linked to that older order of aristocratic arms-bearing, founded in the exchange of women that solidifies ties between men); but, on the other hand, Hotspur also is a rebel; hence, the contradictory nature of the site he occupies, for what he achieves as a normative image is subject to the rebound accorded to him as rebel; thus, rebellion wears the face of femininity and theatricality. Hotspur's masculinity—emblematized by his devotion to his horse—is secured by the supplementary addition of a wife that assures that the all-male rebel world in which he thrives could not be tainted by the effeminacy of a perfumed courtier or of a man like Mortimer who loves his wife too much. But what secures him is also what threatens to make his heroism a sham and his masculinity a performance guarding against what it is always in danger of revealing.

In My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant translates the Welsh scene of 1 Henry IV and the wooing scene at the end of Henry V to Italy,⁸ and has Scott fall in love with a woman whose native language is not English. Carmela has been taught English by Mike's mother—the figure he seeks and never finds in the movie. This suggests that Scott replaces Mike by way of the mother and the mother tongue. The heterosexual object has been produced for him by the woman responsible for Mike's existence, too. At this juncture in Van Sant's film, Mike is as much Hotspur as he is Poins, and the killing of Hotspur, robbing him of his youth, is here, as it is with Falstaff/Bob, a matter of breaking a heart; in both cases, with Mike and with Bob, this is accomplished by making a heterosexual choice. (The conflation of Bob and Mike is suggested by our first glimpse of Mike in the film, wearing a shirt that has the name Bob on it, a crossing of identities that suggests how Shakespearian Van Sant's film is even when its text is not.) Carmela, like the Welsh woman Hotspur would have his wife be and yet whom he fears will emasculate him as she has Mortimer, further troubles Scott's assumption of heterosexual masculinity. Produced by Mike's mother and as a kind of Mike substitute, she suggests that Scott's assumption of heterosexuality obeys cultural compulsions, not necessarily incompatible desires. (The English in which they communicate is not Carmela's mother tongue.) This is conveyed, too, by the fact that the scene in which Carmela and Scott are shown having sex is shot in the same way as the earlier scene in which Scott and Mike have sex with Hans. By shooting these scenes as a series of stills, Van Sant refuses either of them the teleological narrativity associated with sexual identity as culminating in the ‘mature’ form of heterosexuality. It also suggests that the threeway—for money, supposedly—is another opportunity for Mike and Scott to have sex with each other, Scott having only once agreed to sleep with Mike without money being in question. But money is also in question with Carmela; when she appears with Scott in the funeral scene at the end of the movie, she forms part of his retinue as she had in the restaurant scene in which Scott finally rejects Bob. Carmela functions as an acquisition and as part of Scott's inheritance, a guarantee of his new-found respectability like the three-piece suit he wears; she has cash value. The film thereby suggests that compulsory heterosexuality is a form of self-prostitution for the sake of ‘normalcy’.

In the film Scott is not, as Hal is in Shakespeare's play, at the centre; Mike is, and what is plotted is not his arrival. Rather, this is a road movie whose path is recursive, a journey backwards to a mother who is never found, and forwards to a future that remains indefinite. Although Mike hopes to find his mother working at a hotel aptly named ‘The Family Tree’, the movie relentlessly works against the patriarchal plot; Mike's brother is also his father, and the incest relationship is thus as recursive as his journey on a road that he continually revisits and which has no end. That Mike is a narcoleptic has its Shakespearian resonances, for Van Sant is remembering what Shakespeare forgets, the mother of course, but also Poins, one of those Shakespeare characters who simply disappear; the movie remembers him, prompted, in part, by Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight (1966), to which Van Sant pays continual homage, and in which Hal is positioned repeatedly between Poins and Falstaff; if part of Van Sant's rewriting of Welles involves making explicit homosexual relations—which Welles tends to represent either phobically (for example, he represents Henry IV's desire for Hotspur as son as part of his ‘sick’ behaviour) or in euphemized ways (as free-for-all polymorphous perversity or as filial relationship)—through Mike, Van Sant offers a figure that holds up for scrutiny the lie that men cannot love men—a line Scott delivers—or that heterosexuality and homosexuality are necessarily mutually exclusive identities. Van Sant's ‘Poins’ thus also rewrites Welles's, who is cast as a dark angel and a rival to Falstaff; Welles ‘remembers’ him by having him point, at the end of Chimes, to the casket containing the body of Falstaff and to utter his name with utter indifference to his fate.

In his remembering, Van Sant recasts Mike/Poins as the good angel Scott abandons (another Bob, as the name on his shirt testifies); this rewriting of Welles insists on the homo-erotics that bind Scott and Mike, Hal and Poins/Hotspur. If we return now to the Henry IV plays and their plots of replacement to consider how Harry reproduces Harry—how Hal replaces Hotspur—we might note that the point of crossing is erotic attraction and rivalry. While Hotspur, in his woman's mood—playing out in the sexual sphere what counts as rebellion in the political sphere—suffers no womanish man to compromise his masculinity, it is in the throes of such hypermasculinity that he wishes to meet Harry on the battlefield, Harry to Harry, hot horse to horse (the slight asymmetry in Hotspur's phrase perhaps registers his attempt to maintain his advantage in the relation):

                                                  Come, let me taste my horse,
Who is to bear me like a thunderbolt
Against the bosom of the Prince of Wales.
Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse,
Meet and ne'er part till one drop down a corse.

(1 Henry IV, IV.i.120-4)

Hotspur responds here to Vernon's heavily eroticized depiction of Hal, vaulting ‘like feathered Mercury’ (107), his thighs tightly clenching the horse beneath, throned as Hotspur would be on his roan, the male horse he straddles. This is an image of Harry-as-Hotspur fully to be achieved when his rival lies dead at his feet. From Hotspur, Hal seeks a proper masculinity, a sexuality that will permit relations with men not tainted with effeminacy. But, as Empson suggests, some of this supposed achievement is marred immediately when Falstaff wounds the dead Hotspur in his thigh, delivering a counterfeit death blow that suggests that Hal cannot take from Hotspur what he most desires. The thigh wound is a sexual wound, Empson suggests, no doubt with a handbook like Jessie Weston's in mind, and that Falstaff can deliver it suggests what defeating Hotspur entails—and what was being resisted—and where the charge of male-male erotics lies. If in his defeat of Hotspur Hal becomes the Phallus, it is, to quote Judith Butler, to reveal that ‘the Phallus is always already plastic and transferable’ (Butler 1992: 164), which is to say that it is not in any way the natural consequence of having a penis, is no one's (and no one gender's) property, that as a construct it is movable and thereby contestable. How Hotspur's relation with Kate might redound upon Hal is suggested finally when he woos his Kate in Henry V; within the Henry IV plays, in which Hal is never seen involved with women, the moment closest to these occurs in an exchange with Poins in Part 2, the only other scene in the tetralogy in which a marriage is proposed for Hal, with Poins's sister, or so Falstaff claims. Hal's rejection of Nell constitutes a refusal to legitimize his relation with Poins through marriage with his sister: ‘Do you use me thus, Ned? Must I marry your sister?’ (II.ii.105-6)—such is the rebuff Hal delivers to the man he knows down to the peach stockings he wears.

The refusal to legitimize his male companion along the axis of alliance is not the same thing as the supposed differentiation of hetero- and homosexual object choice enacted when Scott chooses Carmela instead of Mike, although it is very likely that the scene between Hal and Poins conditions Van Sant's understanding of the relationship between Scott and Mike. In the Henry IV plays, the regimes of homo- and heterosexuality are only incipient, and more to the point is the remark the Hostess makes about Falstaff in 2 Henry IV, that ‘he will spare neither man, woman, nor child’ (II.i.12-13), that he is ‘a man-queller, and a woman-queller’ (39-40) hence Hal's gift to him of the page-boy who presciently promises to ‘tickle [the Hostess's] catastrophe’ (45-6—but hence, too, Falstaff's relations with Doll and the Hostess). Falstaff's sexual tastes are those possible for any man.⁹ Yet that these possibilities are not necessarily indifferent, but can be threatening, is suggested both by Hotspur's relation to his wife and the effeminate courtier, or by Hal's negotiation of his relations with men, particularly with Hotspur and with Falstaff. One place this is especially clear is a theatrical scene that Hal imagines in 1 Henry IV, in which his ‘damned brawn shall play Dame Mortimer’ (II.iv.106-7). Dame Mortimer is Hotspur's wife, but also the effeminized Mortimer, and for a moment Hal entertains the possibility that Falstaff might play Dame Mortimer, the woman, the feminized man to Hal's Hotspur. Hal imagines Hotspur and his wife in the same reductive mode that he does in his savage baiting of Francis—the show he does stage while awaiting Falstaff's arrival—all of them reduced to a trim reckoning. The scene participates in complex routings of identification and difference that exceed Hal's economizing, however, and we should note that Falstaff is made into a trial Kate only after Hal has (parrot-like) imitated her voice.

‘O my sweet Harry,’ says she, ‘how many hast thou killed today?’ ‘Give my roan horse a drench,’ says he, and answers, ‘Some fourteen,’ an hour after, ‘a trifle, a trifle.’ I prithee call in Falstaff. I'll play Percy, and that damned drawn shall play Dame Mortimer his wife.

(II.iv.102-7)

This deflection of cross-gender identification has not been noticed by critics who have all too easily read Falstaff as a woman—on the basis of his ‘gross’ body, his corpulence, a reading first offered by W. H. Auden¹⁰ and more recently by Patricia Parker¹¹. Not only would one want to caution against the potential misogyny and homophobia of this connection, one would also want to add that the size of the body is as much an index to class negotiations as it might be to gender and sexuality.¹² Here it would be worth mentioning, of course, that the ambivalences around Hotspur as chivalric and effeminate mark a crucial moment in bourgeoisification. Hal's new regime of trim reckonings (the predations of the engrossing arriviste that write themselves as civilized restraint) would cut the body down to size; it is mobilized against decaying aristocratic corpulence—the fat body that will come to be the body of the malnourished poor—and the woman's body. As Empson brilliantly noted, the point at which the eulogies for Falstaff and Hotspur cross comes when Hal summons up the weight of their bodies. Critics who repeat Hal's agendas in Act II, scene iv, as the truth of Falstaff's ‘female’ body—rather than seeing it as a reflex against his own identification as a woman—or who associate Falstaff's loquacity with the female tongue, are like Hotspur in Act III, scene i, policing Kate's language and sexuality. Hal's imagined scenario with Falstaff is no more benign; he recoils from the possibility of crossing gender, and attempts to put Falstaff where he was a moment before. That recoil must be read if we are to interrupt the route from such grossness to femininity that has been understood as a ‘normal’ connection or even as one that psychoanalysis makes available as the truth (infantile Falstaff now seems to be the mother's body).¹³ It is true that Falstaff claims his womb undoes him, that he compares himself to a sow that has overwhelmed her children; true, too, that Falstaff is the sole adult male in any Shakespeare play to don drag. Feminization, as in Hal's fantasy play with the brawn as Dame Mortimer, may be part of the casting off of the character, the slurring together of an abjected femininity whether male or female, but it also represents the attempt to distinguish male and female as sexual objects. It is just that distinction belied by Falstaff when he fails to know the difference between men and women. Falstaff's ‘femininity’ is not written within the misogynist masculinity of a proto-heterosexuality and homophobia. I do not mean to idealize Falstaff's sexual capacities or to suggest that his relations to women can be shielded from misogyny—he makes both Doll and the Hostess sites of continued demands and repeated frauds. Only to be noted is that unlike Hotspur (or the ‘ideal’ Hal), Falstaff is no supporter of rigidified gender exclusivity. It is the presumed difference between sexualities that Falstaff's body breaches.

Hal first casts Falstaff as Dame Mortimer as part of his attempt to cast him off. When Falstaff arrives, Hal attempts to shame the cowardly liar, the monstrous bedpresser. Falstaff catches Hal out—his truth that he robbed Falstaff makes the difference between lying and truth-telling moot. And to the charge of bedpressing, the fat knight has a devastating response, pointing to skinny Hal's pitiful endowment: ‘you starveling, you eel-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish! … you tailor's yard, you sheath, you bow-case, you vile standing tuck’ (II.iv.237-40). His thinness, in these charges, as David Bevington (1987: 190) glosses these lines, carries the accusation of ‘genital emaciation’. Falstaff points to the phallus Hal lacks just as at the end of the play he will mock the one Hal has from Hotspur. The old bedpresser knows where to get the prince.

So much Hal all but testifies to in his first exchange with him. To Falstaff's irrelevant question about the time of day, Hal replies that the time would be of interest to his fat companion only were the ‘blessed sun himself’ to appear like a ‘fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta’ (I.ii.9-10). Hal, we know, thinks he is the blessed sun, and in this line the sun is male; Hal imagines himself as cross-dressed.¹⁴ Hal places this imaginary woman between himself and Falstaff, this imaginary locus of self-identification between them. It looks as if the only desire Hal can acknowledge is male-female desire. It looks as if that is how he acknowledges his relation with Falstaff. Yet the lines intimate the kind of sexual pleasure Hal does have, just as they further suggest why Hal's other alter ego, Hotspur, has a wife and protests against feminization. As with the master-mistress of Sonnet 20,¹⁵ this initial exchange with Falstaff suggests that the prince can be used elsewhere and otherwise, that if his prick is of no concern (as the sonneteer says of the fair young man in that sonnet), this does not exhaust the sexual possibilities. If this seems too crude a supposition, one can point to the ways in which their status difference, which should place Hal on top, is crossed by the age difference that has made Falstaff Hal's tutor and mentor. These crossings of age and status are the sexual locus for the rebound that Hal attempted in his reduction of Francis to a single parrot-like word (‘Anon, Anon,’ Hal's line too, in his economizing). In Part 2, Hal and Poins appear as Francis, and Falstaff has no trouble recognizing the two serving lads, and this is the last we see of Poins. When Gus Van Sant rewrites the taffeta wench into a hustler in black leather he is not very far, after all, from Shakespeare.

Are Hal and Falstaff bed companions? It is perfectly clear why the plays can never answer that question directly. For while the king could sleep with men, he could not be a sodomite. Hence, in Henry V when one of the king's betrayers turns out also to have been his bedfellow it was their physical intimacy that was supposed to have kept Scroop ever from turning traitor to the king. His crime is not what he did in bed. Although Hal is forever casting off his companions, it is not bedfellows per se that are called into question. There is no reason, therefore, not to suppose that Hal and Falstaff were bedfellows, too. In what situation, after all, does Falstaff ask his first question—‘Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?’ (1 Henry IV, I.ii.1)? If he is just waking up, what is Hal doing? What should be made of the fact that the next time we see Falstaff asleep (at the end of II.iv), Hal is in … his pockets? What is Hal talking about when he charges Falstaff with being an exorbitant ‘bed-presser’ (II.iv.235)?

There is no absolutely definitive way to answer such questions, but not because the plays give evidence for the modern supposition that a line can be drawn between homosocial and homosexual relations. That Hal has a bedfellow in Henry V is publicly announced as the scene opens (II.ii.8); with whom a man sleeps in the climb for power is not private knowledge, nor has sex been cordoned to the area of the private as in the modern fantasmatic.¹⁶ We do not know whether Hal sleeps with Falstaff, though, and this points to one way in which the plays police male-male sexual behaviour. For if, on the one hand, it would be unremarkable for men to be sleeping with each other, it would be unspeakable if the wrong men were, if the sex between men was not conducive to maintaining social hierarchies and distinctions. What is at stake comes as close to being made explicit as is possible in that scene in which Hal confronts Scroop as he casts off the treasonous ‘English monsters’ (Henry V, II.ii.85); the monstrosity of the treasonous bedfellow is a way of naming sodomy, and it must be to the point that in the next scene of Henry V Falstaff's death will be described in lines in which the Hostess has pilfered the final page of the Phaedo for her account of how Falstaff's body, like Socrates's, grew colder and colder as she moved her hand up his legs;¹⁷ the corrupter of Harry's youth is also the father of philosophy. What Hal's sexual relation with his bedfellows was is all but spelled out when Henry V declares that Scroop knew ‘the very bottom of my soul’ (97), and held the ‘key’ to Hal's treasure, ‘almost might have coin'd me into gold / Would'st thou have practis'd on me for thy use’ (98-9). The description returns us once more to the sonnets—

So am I as the rich whose blessèd key
Can bring him to his sweet up-lockèd treasure,
The which he will not every hour survey,
For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.
Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,
Since, seldom coming, in the long year set

(sonnet 52, ll.1-6)

—to the very lines that echo Hal's first soliloquy or his father's later ministrations on the economies of royal image production. In Henry V Hal attempts, Hotspur-like, to cast off the revolting male lover who makes the king a queen. One inheritance that critics and readers have from such moments is a resistance to seeing any possibility of male-male sexual relations in Shakespeare plays unless one man is wearing a dress. But what this account of the Henry IV plays might suggest is that, rather than continuing what is by now a zero-sum game of looking at cross-dressing in the comedies as the sole locus of male-male sex in Shakespeare, it is about time to follow the historical paths opened by Foucault and by Bray and the critical paths enunciated by Sedgwick and by Empson. There is no way of knowing in advance where they might lead.

Nor do I mean to suggest that such work has not begun; I would instance Joseph A. Porter's recent book on Mercutio (Porter 1988);¹⁸ it, along with Bray's recent essay, suggests that the representation of friendship in Shakespeare (Hamlet and Horatio, Macbeth and Banquo, Brutus and Cassius, and the list goes on) would be one site that needs to be rethought. One might look again at Antonio and Bassanio, and begin to take stock of how Portia's assumption of masculinity might be read as a response to the threat that relation poses rather than as a further instance of the slide from the homosocial into sexual territory (as if only a woman or femininity could guarantee the slide). One would want, in a similar vein, to look again at Sebastian and Antonio in Twelfth Night, and have more to say about the end of the play than Stephen Greenblatt does in Shakespearean Negotiations when he expresses pity for ‘poor Antonio … left out in the cold’, and to contemplate under what guise and at what cost ‘Orsino does in a sense get his Cesario’ (Greenblatt 1988: 93). It is a pleasure to record that such thoughts are now thinkable—I would instance Valerie Traub's ‘Desire and the Difference It Makes’ (in Traub 1992: 91-116), which articulates female desires in Shakespeare plays that cannot be read within the matrices of the compulsory heterosexuality that conditions much feminist Shakespeare criticism, as well as Elizabeth Pittenger's ‘Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of Pages’ (Pittenger 1991), which allies the unruly woman—Quickly in Merry Wives—with the scandalous mating of males that ends that play.

The Henry IV plays are, undeniably, history plays, but mixed genre plays, too, and the lines of similarity to the comedies are not surprising. But it is not just the histories and comedies that require further investigation. One might want to think about the substitutive logic of a play about lieutenants that lands Cassio in bed with Iago, his leg flung across him; or about Shakespeare's play about the economies of empire and gender, to ponder not only Prospero's relation to the transvestite Ariel, but also his horror at, and inability to punish that conspiratorial pair separated in Twelfth Night but rejoined in The Tempest, Antonio and Sebastian. These are characters Shakespeare could not let go of—Antonio is a byword for the sonneteer. Male-male sexual relations were not an early phase in the playwright's development which he outgrew, nor were such relations the marginal tastes of his culture. Students of Shakespeare—at all levels—have to be reminded continually of ways in which Shakespeare is not our contemporary. In this context, it is important not to enlist him as an unquestioned supporter of the modern regimes—themselves highly imaginary—of hetero- and homosexual difference.

Notes

1. For the purposes at hand, the most notable exception would be Findlay (1989). Findlay reads Hal as the locus of a homophobia inflicted upon the more or less sodomitical Falstaff, an argument which mine seeks to further by marking ways in which the play fails to deliver the exemplary Hal that Findlay's reading assumes. By so doing, I hope to move sodomy from the archaic and marginal position that it occupies in Findlay's essay, and to allow it the space of a recognition that would trouble received readings of the play of various critical stripes.

2. ‘For the respectes aforesayd in all former ages and in the most civill countreys and commons wealthes, good Poets and Poesie were highly esteemed and much favoured of the greatest Princes … king Henry the 8, her Majesties father, for a few Psalmes of David turned into English meetre by Sternhold, made him groome of his privy chamber & gave him many other good gifts’ (Smith 1904, 2: 16-17).

3. In ‘Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe’ (Epstein and Straub 1991: 80-111), Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have suggested that the biologistic bias in gender definition (the assumption that genitals are the physical bedrock upon which gender is founded) is questionable not only theoretically, as has often been argued, but also historically; the assumption is, they claim, a modern one and not to be found in Renaissance texts about the body which posit socio-legal definitions of gender as the bedrock of difference.

4. These patriarchal fantasmatics are traced in Montrose (1983: 70-1). Although Montrose connects the lines that Theseus speaks in I.i.47-51 to the fight over the Indian boy, he is silent about the sexual connection that the child represents; for that point, one can turn to Crewe (1986: 148-51) for a somewhat pathologizing view of Oberon's desire for the boy as, in Crewe's terms, his ‘pathic’. Nevertheless, Crewe sees that the boy is written much as the young man is in the sonnets, and that as changeling he is the very locus for a series of crossings in the play.

5. Hal's imagery answers his initial accusation that Falstaff is ‘fat-witted with drinking of old sack’ (I.ii.2-3); the connection between ‘vapors’ and flatulence is made over and again in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614, pub. 1631; in Jonson 1981-2). See especially IV.iv.45-98.

6. See Empson (1950: 102-9), in the essay on ‘They that have power to hurt’.

7. These are not unlike the terms of patriarchy described by Luce Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray 1985: 192-3). Where this critique parts company with Irigaray is in her supposition that such male-male relations (for example, the pederasty that lurks in father-son relations) mask homosexuality tout court as the secret of homosociality (this is the argument that her nonce word ‘hom[m]osexuality’ conveys), since it leaves no room for the recognition that the policing of homosexuality is complicit with the policing of women, and that there is a world of difference between homosexuality and homophobia. This is a point argued against Irigaray by Craig Owens in ‘Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism’, in Jardine and Smith (1987: 223-4), which draws upon the exemplary discussions of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick such as the one in the introduction to Sedgwick (1985: 19-20).

8. I am grateful to Jonathan Brody Kramnick for suggesting to me this crucial overlap.

9. This is much less true for women given their position under patriarchy and their definitional status acquired through marriage. But it is not entirely untrue, as Valerie Traub begins to suggest in ‘Desire and the Difference It Makes’, in Wayne (1991: 81-114), an essay included in Traub (1992: 91-116).

10. See W. H. Auden, ‘The Prince's Dog’, in Auden (1948), which does make some valuable connections between the sonnets and the relationship in the play, but which also insists on the fat knight's narcissism, infantilism, feminization and alcoholism.

11. Patricia Parker (1987: 20) declares Falstaff an ‘obvious Shakespearean “fat lady”’ on the basis of his girth and his tongue; it is difficult to see in whose interest such an identification is made.

12. Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990-1) offer a sustained meditation on these questions. For the relationships between body size and social organization in the transition to capitalist social organization—towards the modernity incipient in Shakespeare's plays, see Mennell (1987), especially his discussion on p. 397 of the ways in which an older aristocratic corpulence becomes the body of the poor as the new regimes of civilization preach restraint. Falstaff's body is, in these terms, legible under both the old and new regimes.

13. This is Valerie Traub's (1989) argument. ‘The homoerotics of the Henriad deserve fuller treatment’, Traub notes, only immediately to figure that sexuality as Hal's masculinity played in relation to Falstaff's femininity (p. 465).

14. I owe this connection to Jonathan Brody Kramnick.

15. For example:

    A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,
    Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
    A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
    With shifting change, as is false women's fashion; …

    (ll.1-4)

    See also Bruce Smith (1991: 248-52) for a reading which stresses the way that the homosocial becomes homosexual at this point.

16. Fantasmatic since the mechanisms of repression are, as Foucault argued, productive, but fantasmatic, too, because the private is continually policed and regulated to this day, and the sanctioned forms of sexuality that are secured are the ones that ensure the perpetuation of procreative sex within a compulsory heterosexuality. The 1986 US Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, denying any constitutional right to private consensual acts of what the Court termed ‘homosexual sodomy’, makes this all too clear.

17. The man ‘who'd given him the poison, … pinched his foot hard, and asked him if he could feel it, and Socrates said not. After that he felt his shins once more; and moving upwards in this way, he showed us that he was becoming cold and numb’ (Plato 1975: 72). I am aware of the caveat offered by Gary Taylor in his note to the Oxford Henry V, II.iii.22-4, but the resemblance seems too striking to ignore.

18. Porter (1988) reads Mercutio as a figure for Marlowe, and his relationship with Romeo in counterpoint to Romeo's relationship with Juliet.

This essay includes materials (mainly drawn from a chapter entitled ‘Desiring Hal’) reworked from my Sodometries (Goldberg 1992b). The earliest drafts of this essay profited from the advice and enthusiasm of Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, while its current state would not have been possible without Jonathan Brody Kramnick.

References

Unless otherise stated, place of publication is London.

Auden, W. H. (1948) The Dyer's Hand. New York.

Bevington, David (1987) Introduction, in David Bevington (ed.), Henry IV, Part 1. Oxford.

Boone, Joseph A. and Cadden, Michael (eds) (1990) Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. New York.

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