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Queer theory has long been fascinated with Shakespeare’s works, finding in them a fruitful environment to investigate and question concepts of gender, sexuality, and identity. The Elizabethan period’s difference from our own, in terms of our heteronormativity versus an Elizabethan non-gender coded mode of desire, makes Shakespeare all the more suggestive in how his works force us to question the centring of and debates over our concepts of desire and sexuality. Despite these invitations to queer theoretical study, his works remain a highly unstable field, because Shakespeare’s Elizabethan rhetorical theory relies on concepts of antithesis, chiasma, and radically ironic dramatic strategies which constantly destabilize any theoretical hold scholars might gain on Shakespeare’s achievements. To shed light on this very instability, I deploy the theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lee Edelman, foundational scholars of queer theory, through the lenses of both Lacanian psychology (Edelman’s lens of choice) and Shakespeare’s own dramatic rhetoric, including a medieval motif signifying Romeo as a pilgrim knight, to reread Romeo and Juliet in search of Shakespeare’s own achievements in representing the terms with which I began. In this way, I uncover homosocial structures of desire and psychological-linguistic significations of desire. Furthermore, I argue that Shakespeare figures desire through metaphor, the implication of which is that for metaphor to work, for meaning in the world to work, signification of any linguistic meaning must remain untethered from any attempt at fixing concrete understanding of words and meanings. The implications of my analysis are as follows: Juliet becomes, to use Edelman’s terminology, a sinthomosexual, that is, a signifier of queer instability that threatens the anthro-normative society of Shakespeare’s Verona; moreover, metaphor becomes, arguably, a signifier of Lacanian desire, if not dramatic poetic desire, for that for which it stands. On a structural level, then, comedy stands for tragedy. On a narrative level, Romeo stands for desire as dramatized by Shakespeare and at the centre of a flow of desire represented by Mercutio and Tybalt, who both, in some way, want to change metonymically, into Romeo. The instability that generates these results, is, I argue, Shakespeare’s queer theory.

This paper traces how Milton characterizes the physically unphysical air of its world in two ways: put simply, physically and absurdly. It will serve as an interesting gateway to understanding the vitality of the very things that surround and incarcerate us. In an epic deeply rooted in the dichotomy between good and evil, how does the natural fit into such conflicts and distinctions? Is nature exploitable, or perhaps the only truly neutral force in a world where no one or thing else can be neutral? In the climate of Renaissance exploration and curiosity, Milton’s portrayal of the natural, agential world is particularly interesting. His treatment of air transcends the limiting bounds of tendency, typicality, and topicality; for Milton, air is a multifunctioning, multidimensional, tangible and yet wispy enigma. I will use that as a starting point to explore air as a force in the world of Paradise Lost, to examine the ways in which Milton uses and differs from Renaissance attitudes and understandings of air. His use of the concept of air in Paradise Lost is complex; it is clear that he is engaging with certain scientific ideas about air as a gas, but there is a tendency to give air unexpected properties of physicality, gender and power. This tension between standard ideas and unique modifications is what makes examining Milton’s usage of air such an interesting pursuit. While he was not the only seventeenth-century poet concerned with materiality, and more broadly vitality, his take is made unique by his abstract experimentation with and insistence for the multifaceted nature of nature: his treatment of nature far exceeds that of greenery and transcends the bounds of personification as it engages with metaphysical contemplations about an air that is both essential to life and has the ability to produce divine judgments, change colour, shape and size, act as a physical conduit for chemical and magical reactions, and be literally substantiated in the physical world.