Introduction: the intimate anus

Though affective relations were increasingly valued in the early modern period according to whether they were grounded in interiorized desire and provided access to futurity through reproduction, this was by no means an instantaneous cultural transformation. In Hero and Leander, narrative forms avoid the teleology of monogamous coupling and critique the consolidation of intimacy. Resistance to this transformation of affective relations is even encoded in texts that more assertively assume a narrower definition of intimate life. William Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well (1604) and Cymbeline (1610) stage the reorganization of characters’ relations with their bodies, seeking to endow them with inwardness and, concomitantly, amenability to marriage and the promise of reproduction. The plays also make available certain penetrative pleasures for men that conflict with the bodily habitation that marriage requires, and they gesture toward the alternate life narratives that might be abstracted from those pleasures. Insofar as psychic depth promotes marriage and heterosexual reproduction by way of a specific relationship of a man to his body, the anus plays a pivotal role in the socialization that leads to marriage. Its function in the expulsion of matter enacts the difference between interiority and exteriority; when it functions as a receptacle, such pleasurable penetration suggests that interiority is fictive, has no content, but is instead waiting to be filled. Both of these Shakespeare plays predicate their male characters’ compliance with marriage upon the repudiation of the anus as a site of receptive pleasure. Typically, readers of Renaissance texts approach such pleasures through the theological-juridical category of sodomy, but by approaching anal eroticism through its relation to the process of socialization, I can give a fuller account of the alternate intimacies imagined in these texts and their interactions with marriage. While demystifying the bodily and psychological violence that often inheres in the process of equating intimacy with marriage, the plays temporarily posit alternate forms of embodiment, pleasure, and affection in order to show their characters choosing marriage. Making those alternatives intelligible for readers and audience members, Shakespeare, perhaps inadvertently, also makes them potentially desirable and their loss an occasion for mourning even within an ostensibly hostile narrative context. This chapter, then, looks at the interaction of narrative strains that reorganize the body and the intimate sphere and that imagine resistance to that reorganization in these plays.