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"What led Shakespeare to write his most cryptic poem, "The Phoenix and Turtle"? Does the Phoenix represent Queen Elizabeth, on the verge of death as Shakespeare wrote? Is the Earl of Essex, recently executed for treason, the Turtledove, lover of the Phoenix? Questions such as these dominate scholarship of both Shakespeare's poem and the book in which it first appeared: Robert Chester's enigmatic collection of verse, Love's Martyr (1601), where Shakespeare's allegory sits next to erotic love lyrics by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston, as well as work by the much lesser-known Chester. Don Rodrigues critiques and revises traditional computational attribution studies by integrating the insights of queer theory to a study of Love's Martyr. A book deeply engaged in current debates in computational literary studies, it is particularly attuned to questions of non-normativity, deviation, and departures from style when assessing stylistic patterns. Gathering insights from decades of computational and traditional analyses, it presents, most radically, data that supports the once-outlandish theory that Shakespeare may have had a significant hand in editing works signed by Chester. At the same time, this book insists on the fundamentally collaborative nature of production in Love's Martyr. Shakespeare's Queer Analytics is a much-needed methodological intervention in computational attribution studies while developing a compelling account of how collaborative textual production might work among men during the early modern period. It articulates what this book calls queer analytics: an approach to literary analysis that joins the non-normative close reading of queer theory to the distant attention of computational literary studies, highlighting patterns that more traditional readings overlook or ignore"--
List of contents
List of Plates, Figures, and Tables
Series Editors' Preface
Preface
Acknowledgements
Note on Text
Introduction: Love’s Martyr and the Case for Queer Analytics
Queering Computation
1. Queerness at Scale: The Radical Singularities of Love’s Martyr
2. Competitive Intimacies in the Poetical Essays
Computing Queerness
3. “Neither two nor one were called”: Queer Logic and “The Phoenix and Turtle”
Appendixes
with Jonathan Hicks
1. Technical Appendix
2. Love’s Martyr’s Poetical Essays
3. Love’s Martyr’s Dialogues and Cantos
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About the author
Don Rodrigues is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis, USA. He specializes in early modern literature and culture, queer theory, and computational approaches to early modern literature. He has published on Shakespearean authorship and presented widely on computational stylistics, early modern literature and culture, and gender and sexuality. Rodrigues has held fellowships with the Folger Shakespeare Library, Vanderbilt University's Center for Digital Humanities, and Harvard University's metaLAB.
Summary
What led Shakespeare to write his most cryptic poem, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’? Could the Phoenix represent Queen Elizabeth, on the verge of death as Shakespeare wrote? Is the Earl of Essex, recently executed for treason, the Turtledove lover of the Phoenix? Questions such as these dominate scholarship of both Shakespeare’s poem and the book in which it first appeared: Robert Chester’s enigmatic collection of verse, Love’s Martyr (1601), where Shakespeare’s allegory sits next to erotic love lyrics by Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston, as well as work by the much lesser-known Chester.
Don Rodrigues critiques and revises traditional computational attribution studies by integrating the insights of queer theory to a study of Love's Martyr. A book deeply engaged in current debates in computational literary studies, it is particularly attuned to questions of non-normativity, deviation and departures from style when assessing stylistic patterns. Gathering insights from decades of computational and traditional analyses, it presents, most radically, data that supports the once-outlandish theory that Shakespeare may have had a significant hand in editing works signed by Chester. At the same time, this book insists on the fundamentally collaborative nature of production in Love’s Martyr.
Developing a compelling account of how collaborative textual production could work among early modern writers, Shakespeare’s Queer Analytics is a much-needed methodological intervention in computational attribution studies. It articulates what Rodrigues describes as ‘queer analytics’: an approach to literary analysis that joins the non-normative close reading of queer theory to the distant attention of computational literary studies – highlighting patterns that traditional readings often overlook or ignore.
Additional text
Shakespeare’s Queer Analytics is an illuminating look at the perennially puzzling Love’s Martyr. Rodrigues skilfully brings computation, attribution studies, and queer theory together and makes important contributions to each of these fields.
