Mario DiGangi’s latest book is an ambitious and eminently compelling study of sexual types in early modern English literature and culture. Though he may have chosen any number of types available in the period’s cultural imaginary, DiGangi focuses on six: the sodomite, the tribade, the narcissistic courtier, the citizen wife, the bawd, and the monstrous favorite. As DiGangi defines the concept, “the sexual type” is not “the bearer of a sexual identity or subjectivity,” but rather “a familiar cultural figure that renders sexual agency intelligible as a symptom of the transgression of gender, social, economic, or political order” (6). This is not to suggest that sexual types are static ideological formations. Indeed, another chief aim of DiGangi’s book is to show “that when a sexual type is embodied in a dramatic character, the character’s own strategies for resisting the constraints of dominant social and sexual ideologies can disturb the logic of the reductive and vilified associations imposed by the type” (6–7). For DiGangi, then, embodiment becomes an important strategy for unsettling boundaries between the normative and transgressive, the licit and illicit.

DiGangi organizes his book into three parts, each with two chapters. In part 1, “Sexual Types and Necessary Classifications,” he examines perhaps the two most familiar sexual types: the sodomite (chapter 1) and the tribade (chapter 2). Whereas critics tend to emphasize differences between these types, DiGangi considers what they have in common: both “organize social fantasies about what is alien to dominant early modern ideologies of marriage, reproduction, and patriarchal authority” (60). In chapter 1, DiGangi surveys a variety of nonliterary texts that he then puts in conversation with Troilus and Cressida. These materials reveal the sodomite to be a “composite sexual type” that could be deployed both to establish and to destabilize definitions of orderly relations and communities. In chapter 2, DiGangi turns to medical texts and travel narratives that articulate logics of female homoeroticism that belie the imitative thesis critics often impose on the tribade. With these texts, DiGangi usefully rereads Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Paulina in The Winter’s Tale as tribades who are not beholden to the patriarchal and heteroerotic models of sexuality and sociality typically associated with the type.

Part 2, “Sexual Types and Social Discriminations,” juxtaposes the narcissistic courtier (chapter 3) and the citizen wife (chapter 4). In this section of the book, DiGangi is concerned primarily with sexual agency as authorized by, and transgressed through, bodily self-display and economic and erotic exchange. To elucidate the function of dominant ideologies and also the means by which they are subverted, DiGangi devotes each chapter in part 2 to a single play’s meditation on a sexual type. In chapter 3, he interrogates Jonson’s satiric depiction of the narcissistic courtier in Cynthia’s Revels. This depiction links the courtier’s effeminate manners and fashions with self-love and a host of other gender and sexual transgressions. However, in satirizing the courtier’s “proficiency with courtly practices,” Jonson’s play “troubl[es] the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of elite male self-display” (93). In chapter 4, DiGangi looks at the working wives who inhabit The Roaring Girl. Whereas recent criticism has centered on the sexual slander used to define and discipline Moll Cutpurse, DiGangi demonstrates how this same slander is employed to discipline and shame citizen wives who endeavor to assert authority in domestic, economic, and erotic matters.

Part 3, “Sexual Types and Intermediary Functions,” explores the female bawd (chapter 5) and the monstrous male favorite (chapter 6), two types who “exploit same-sex intimacy to orchestrate illicit heteroerotic relationships that advance their own agendas” (16). In these final chapters, DiGangi is keen to illustrate the spectrum of abuses and threats embodied in sexual types. To this end, in both chapters he examines a wide range of plays. In chapter 5, he argues that the dramatic bawd defies the stereotypes of anti-bawd rhetoric, managing to seduce women into sexual relationships that are both pleasurable and financially lucrative. In chapter 6, DiGangi discusses the favorite’s ability to take advantage of royal will by plotting to marry into a noble family. Once discovered, the favorite’s transgressions mark him as the villain of Caroline dramas, but DiGangi reminds us that the successes of the monstrous favorite implicate the noble against whom he conspires.

DiGangi approaches his sexual types with an erudition that is characteristic of his scholarly work. While I found the chapter on the tribade especially edifying, this is more a reflection of my own research interests than the book’s relative strengths. In fact, the book covers an impressive assortment of well-known and less-studied texts that enable DiGangi to intervene in wide-ranging scholarly debates. If I were to offer any critique of Sexual Types, it would be that some readers might be left wondering how DiGangi might illuminate the ideological functions of numerous other types we find in early modern plays and character books. Of course, this negative is also a positive in that DiGangi’s book is sure to generate renewed interest in the important cultural work performed by sexual type and dramatic character.