Melissa Sanchez's aim in writing Shakespeare and Queer Theory was “to make new two fields of study that can, if we let them, become predictable and stale precisely because of their institutional prestige” (178). Bringing to the project both an expertise in Shakespeare studies and queer theory as well as a healthy insistence on the contingency of her own participation in an “ongoing, productively unwieldy conversation,” Sanchez succeeds admirably (2). Shakespeare and Queer Theory is an excellent resource for those seeking an understanding of the origins and development of academic queer theory, the history of lesbian/gay/queer Shakespeare scholarship, and the emergence of work that explores early modern queerness beyond homoeroticism. Though accessible to newcomers, Sanchez's judicious, balanced assessments of these scholarly fields, as well as her insightful readings of Shakespearean texts and films, offers much of interest to even experts in these fields.

Following an introduction usefully structured around frequently asked questions—e.g., “Why is this theory called ‘queer?’” “Was Shakespeare gay?”—Sanchez devotes a chapter to the rich intellectual and activist genealogies of queer theory. While lesbian and gay scholarship and activism of the 1970s and 1980s gets crucial acknowledgment but relatively cursory treatment, Sanchez gives significant attention to the role of the “feminist sex wars” (including Gayle Rubin's essential essay “Thinking Sex”), women of color feminism, and HIV-AIDS activism in shaping the foundations of queer theory. Following an account of the classic texts of queer theory—Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990)—Sanchez addresses later challenges to the exclusions of queer theory posed by queer of color critique, transnational critique, trans theory, and disability theory.

In the next chapter, Sanchez posits that exploring homoeroticism in Shakespeare's texts is valuable to queer theory because it can “attune us not only to forms of homoeroticism before nineteenth-century identity categories, but also to the insufficiency of either simple identification with or distinction between early modern and modern sexuality” (58). In addition to the expected discussions of sodomy and friendship, Sanchez addresses queer feminism—i.e., the specifically gendered forms of women's queerness, as in the use of dildos and tribadism—queer Christianity, and humanist education.

An important chapter on “Queerness beyond Homoeroticism” explores the “normativizing force of ideals and expectations that cannot be explained by a homo-hetero binary” (86). Here Sanchez looks at recent work on “queer heterosexuality” (e.g., nonbinary transgender performance, heteroerotic sodomy); the impact of race, empire, and colonialism on sexuality; methodological questions of epistemology and empiricism (e.g., how do we recognize sex in Shakespeare's texts? What constitutes empirical evidence of sex?); work on queer language and rhetoric; and issues of temporality and history, including how “queer studies of Shakespeare and pre-modern literature have both engaged in careful historical and archival research and challenged new historicist prohibitions against anachronism” (103).

Building on these theoretical discussions, the final chapters of the book model queer readings of plays and films. Sanchez examines the mobility of desire in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Venus and Adonis; the racial, ethnic, and religious components of sexuality in The Merchant of Venice and Othello; and queer temporality and historiography in Henry V and Hamlet. These readings demonstrate that Shakespeare's works provide a “valuable archive for queer studies” both because characters’ erotic desires and practices “challenge us to formulate nonce terms and taxonomies” and because moments of anachronism and nonlinear sequencing reveal the plays as “structurally and conceptually queer” (112).

In a chapter on film and a short concluding chapter on the conservative fetishization of Shakespeare's supposed universality, Sanchez demonstrates queer theory's “real and complex engagement with contemporary politics” (173). Focusing on form as a way to “approximate at the interpretive level a queer political attention to the need for radical structural change,” Sanchez analyzes the queer pastiche aesthetic of Derek Jarman's The Tempest, and unfolds the “scathing view of modern biopolitics” in Jarman's Edward II and Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (144, 152). Sanchez concludes by critiquing the conservative racial and sexual politics of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and Julie Taymor's Titus, films that convey heteronormative values under the veil of parodic postmodern style.