Sex in the Wooden O: Exploring a Hetero v. Queer Matrix in the USF Productions of Much Ado about Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth

Abstract

The Shakespearean plays performed during the 2010 summer season at the Utah Shakespearean Festival—Much Ado about Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth—staged a sustained engagement with what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have called “public sex.” All three productions relied on an implicit queer v. hetero logic by staging confrontations between the normative (hetero) and the deviant (queer) that expanded on and drove home themes already evident in the play-text. In the process, the queer was systematically associated with non-reproductive desire in the plays, and her censure by the hetero was accordingly a censure of queer desire qua non-reproductive and an affi rmation of the heteronormativity of Shakespeare studies. Ironically, this seemingly focused celebration of heteronormativity in the 2010 season of the USF paradoxically participated in and undercut a tradition of heteronormative rhetoric in the west.