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perspective, Chiron and Demetrius’s desire to obtain sexual, physical, and
verbal mastery over Lavinia in Titus exceeds the desire of Tereus in Ovid's
original version of the story. Thus “Ovid becomes the primary source of whose
story Shakespeare presents the derivative . .. But Shakespeare also undermines
this understanding of causal origin by refusing to allow Ovid’s tale to contain
what is ultimately a story of desire’s excess” in his play (97). Indeed, Titus's
“approach to desire is homo rather than hetero, based on excess rather than
containment, desire rather than sexuality. . . By invoking Ovid, then, Titus
Andronicus both demonstrates our need for a primary source, and destroys our
hope for causal containment by insisting that desire exists always in excess of
such a framework” (102). Hence origins are revealed to be, ultimately, as
slippery and unreliable as facts, and as unable to contain desire as citations. And
without facts, citations, and origins for support, teleology crumbles.
Authenticity is the subject of Chapter 5 of Unhistorical Shakespeare, in
which the 1998 American film Shakespeare in Love receives sustained attention.
Menon begins this section by documenting the reactions of two prominent
Shakespeareans—Stephen Greenblatt and Valerie Traub—to Shakespeare in
Love. While both scholars liked the film, they also felt that it was misleading
and inauthentic in its portrayal of Will Shakespeare’s sexuality. Menon, on the
other hand, argues that “though the film may well be heteronormative, it also
complicates what we understand by heteronormativity . . . Shakespeare in Love
suggests that expectations of a certain mode of sexual authenticity are
themselves normative, and adversely affect our reading, not only of desire, but
also of the past in which that desire is nominally situated” (120). She adds: to
“accuse Shakespeare in Love of being heteronormative is to read the film simply
for the sake of its plot and not enough for its text. We insist on the straightness
of Shakespeare in Love because of our unwillingness to read the queemess of
(its) desire” (127). Shakespeare in Love thus “throws into sharp relief, not
Shakespeare’s heterosexuality, but rather, its audience’s desire for an authentic
sexuality” (136). Centuries of biographical scholarship have shown us that our
Shakespeare likely had an erotic predilection for members of his own sex even
though he was also married to a woman and the father of children. What the
debate about Shakespeare in Love reveals is that some audience members
wanted not only Will Shakespeare’s sexuality to be represented unambiguously
on the big screen as either homosexual or heterosexual, but the film’s entire
sexual/desiring ethos to be depicted just as unambiguously. But the film refuses
to pander to either a hetero-historical or a homo-historical binary and instead
presents us with the excessive multiplicity of desire that homohistory demands
full belief in. As such, Menon’s work here shows that there is no such thing as
an authenticity, especially when it comes to human erotic desire.
After deconstructing teleology, facts, citations, origins, and authenticity,
Menon offers readers a brief and compelling anecdote. In doing so, of course,
she cleverly reverses the New Historicist method of literary criticism which
begins with an anecdote then proceeds to explore the anecdote’s importance