This essay explores the Elizabethan conflation of antitheatricality
and antisodomitical attitudes and its manifestation in Christopher Marlowe's
work. The title originates from Phillip Stubbes' The Anatomie of Abuses
(1583), a tract in which theatrical activity is aligned with male-male
sex acts. This "staging of sodomy" demonstrates the antitheatrical desire
for transparent referentiality. With reference to the Puritanical opposition
of sodomy to the natural order, and the logic of sumptuary codes, how these
codes worked to entrench a gender, sexual, and class specific identity,
and the outrage expressed at the theatre's refusal to adhere to these codes,
I consider how the desire for transparent referentiality is really a panicked
desire found upon a repressed affirmation of the validity of the "play
[of] the Sodomits." Marlowe, as demonstrated in Gaveston's "I must have
wanton poets" speech in Edward II, turns antitheatricalism against itself
by playing it to the hilt. Marlowe deliberately stages "the play [of] the
Sodomits" in order to positively affirm the conflation of theatre and sodomy,
validating theatre and sodomy as not only delightful, but necessary for
the construction of social identity.
05/27: 1045