Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern Literature:
Desire, Status, Biopolitics
Ari Friedlander
Shortlisted, Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award
Shortlisted, Shakespeare Association of America First Book Award
Rogue Sexuality introduces the concept of “socio-sexual identity” to reformulate the relationship between early modern sexuality and social status. By analyzing little-studied popular prose texts on crime by authors such as Thomas Harman, Robert Greene, and Thomas Dekker, and connecting them to canonical works of poetry and drama by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and John Milton, it blends the methodological insights of historicist and queer criticism with the broad perspective of social history.
Offering a new account of the historical development of Foucauldian biopolitics, it shows how early modern England came to see itself as a “population,” a social entity whose sexual life and reproduction were key to its political imagination. Ultimately, it makes a case for viewing early modern sexuality as an agent of historical change, illuminating its role in the development of fundamental categories of modernity, including class, sexuality, marriage, reproduction, the cultivation of a population as a national resource, and the modern nation-state.
“In Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature, Ari Friedlander does more than tell the story of Renaissance rogues (the highwaymen, con artists and sex workers of Shakespeare’s England). Through dazzling readings of early modern drama (as well as canting literature, works of early demography and Paradise Lost) he shows us a new way to study the history and culture of ourselves – and how our insatiable desires helped shape the identities we carry today.”
