This volume of thirteen essays explores what makes Shakespeare’s work queer. Taken together, the collected essays suggest quite a lot. That is how editor Goran Stanivukovic would have it. In his introduction, Stanivukovic wrangles with the ever-territorializing tendencies of the volume’s keyword: queer. As a trenchant method of troubling identitarian categories, queer theory has often turned to the definition of queer itself. Stanivukovic, however, chooses to diffuse rather than to clarify its meaning, claiming, “Queer Shakespeare … demonstrates that ‘queer’ means diversity of approaches to desire, sexuality, and embodiment in Shakespeare” (4). Trading novelty for political exigency, such a definition accommodates too much. The efficacy of queer theory—like any literary theory—inheres in a rather specific approach to a diversity of topics. Not everything is queer, but everything might be queered. Fortunately, it is on these latter terms that the volume succeeds. From antitheatrical homophobia to excessive narrativity, from the language of size to the queer style of language, from glass to plague, the volume’s essays turn to a variety of subjects to queer Shakespeare.

The volume is divided into three parts: part 1, “Queer Time”; part 2, “Queer Language”; and part 3, “Queer Nature.” A few essays warrant mention for their particular contributions to the intersections between feminist and queer theory, methodologies that have, at times, found themselves at odds. In an inspired reading of Much Ado About Nothing, Holly Dugan examines the phonetics of female desire in the comedy through the lexicographic and philological history of the letter “h.” It is a welcome contribution to a growing body of scholarship on queer philology pioneered by Jeffrey Masten. Offering a feminist critique to Lee Edelman’s reproductive futurism, Melissa E. Sanchez demonstrates how Measure for Measure treats procreation as iterative and generative but, fundamentally, contingently material and nearly nonhuman. In doing so, Sanchez attends to meanings of early modern procreative sex far more queer than modern heterosexual ideology might otherwise conceive. Simone Chess provides an expressly recuperative reading of otherwise abject or absurd episodes of male-to-female cross-dressing in Shakespeare’s plays. It is a welcome addition, but the volume remains wanting in its inclusion of transgender scholars and scholarship.

However compelling Queer Shakespeare is as a collection—and the essays collected within it are, on the whole, compelling—there is a structuring irony to this volume. Because Stanivukovic insists Shakespeare “anticipates queer theory” (13), Queer Shakespeare reifies the desire for Shakespeare in early modern English studies rather than queering Shakespeare’s centrality to the field. This is not just a matter of Shakespeare’s encroachment upon all things early modern. The centrality of Shakespeare to queer theory in early modern studies poses a particular problem, for Shakespeare’s treatments of desire are, if not uniform, rather narrow. There is much to mine in Shakespeare’s oeuvre—this volume demonstrates that through and through—but one cannot help but feel that to queer Shakespeare would be to theorize queerness in early modern English literature without him.

There are glimmers of this possibility in the collection. Ian Frederick Moulton brings together Shakespeare’s sonnets and Becadelli’s Hermaphroditus (ca. 1425) to test the limits of queer literary historiography. Attending to what constitutes nature and the natural in Macbeth, Christine Varnado registers a queer ecology in excerpts incorporated from Middleton’s The Witch (1611). Closely rereading the early modern analogy between usury and sodomy, Eliza Greenstadt shows how the “strange insertions” of biblical text queer the comic plot of The Merchant of Venice (197). In his afterword, Vin Nardizzi muses on how the incorporation of Donne’s Elegy 19 into Emma Rice’s 2016 Globe Theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream reconfigures the erotic relations of an already queer adaptation of the play. All suggest that a queer Shakespeare relies on what is determinatively not Shakespeare.

There is no question that the essays collected in Queer Shakespeare demonstrate the degree to which Shakespeare remains vital to queer theory, and with their revitalizing readings, the scholars collected herein make a case for queer theory’s enduring vitality to Shakespeare studies. Queer Shakespeare is, in the end, a welcome addition to both, but more welcome if it were the last such addition for some time.