1. Stephen Greenblatt's "Fiction and Friction" from Shakespearean Negotiations 1988
    2.
    1. Section i--The swerve [and the triple feint]
      2.
      1. Anecdote 1--Montaigne's weaver executed for transvestitism--cross-dressed woman marrying woman
      2. Close to TN's transvestite plot
        3.
        1. in the background
        2. if Cesario married Olivia as promised
        3. play loaded with sexual anomalies could lead to legal travesty; same sex marriage
          4.
      3. Play's conclusion returns to normalcy
        1. events pursue their natural curve--nature to her bias drew
        2. heterosexuality is bent; off center--the bias in bowling; curved path and off-center weight
          1. homosexuality a straight line--"ostensible desires...desired object
          2. nature unbalances
      4. Overall plot resolution is a "swerve" from the expected marriage of Orsino and Olivia
        1. Olivia, like Elizabeth doesnt want to be ruled--but this is not the norm
        2. Orsino expects her to come around; swerve from her vow to him; she swerves elsewhere [great word...swerve]
        3. Other swerves which delay the reaching of expected goal are comic complications
          1. shipwreck, twinning, battles
        4. Swerve is into another comic plot: cross-dressing and cross-coupling 70
      5. Swerving away from the norm/resolution is finally the route to reach it
        1. Viola successful because she can swerve: "I am not that I play." [cf. Iago]
        2. Olivia has gotten what she wants only by not getting what she thought she wanted
        3. It turns out that Viola and Sebastian, though thought inferior, are in the right class for Olivia and Orsino
        4. This agrees with C.L. Barber's view of the play's inversions comfortingly enforcing the norm of absolute sexual differentiation
      6. PERHAPS [!] but...planting suspense 72
        1. "historicize Sh. nature restoring it to relation of negotiation and exchange with other social discourses of the body...break away from textural isolation...formalism
    2. Section ii--lessons of the hermaphrodite
      1. Anecdote 2--Marie le Marcis becomes Marin; first condemned to death; on appeal, after medical examination revealing hermaphroditism, ordered to remain female; gender not resolved.
      2. Source: Duval's On Hermaphrodites...
        1. sexual discourse of early modern period
          1. medical treatises, marriage manuals and literary fictions
      3. Cultural discourses like this create identity; "to implant the defining off-center weight" 75
        1. counter to Burkhardt's theory of individualism in the Renaissance, individuality was a means to the end of social acceptance
        2. Renaissance identity as gender
          1. the most important and inescapable defining trait
          2. fascination with prodigies--e.g. hermaphrodites--as a way of sharpening sense of the norm [Barber]77
      4. Unstable concepts of gender--Galenic heritage
        1. all bodies contain both male and female elements
        2. there is only one fundamental structure
          1. outward and visible in male
          2. inverted and hidden in woman
        3. sexual differentiation to various degrees begins in the womb and continues later, finally producing a range of sexual categories
        4. male and female elements compete for dominance; true femaleness required submission to a male
          1. procreation and sex were difficult for females; required great effort
        5. female is defective or undeveloped male [Penis envy] due to insufficent heat
        6. Pare's examples of girls becoming men; Marie/Germain [another anecdote]; sex change is eversion of organs through heat
        7. Duval critiques this theory to reinforce the distinction of the sexes; one or the other must predominate
        8. Legal principles require that hermaphrodites be sexed
        9. Nevertheless the sexes are conceived as homologous--female ejaculation, both sexes producing sperm; ovaries as eggs not known
        10. Theories of erotic pleasure--Duval
          1. that which enables men to overcome their natural revulsion at defectiveness of women
          2. enables women to overcome reluctance to bear children
          3. beautiful poetic passage [84] about labyrinth of desire; avenge self on death, face to face
        11. Different and competing theories of differentiation of gender; friction between boundaries
        12. Heat is the clue to both, as to the cause of many other physio-psychological processes
          1. seed is produced by cooking blood caused by erotic friction; chafing
      5. Conclusion
        1. counter Barber, normal is constructed on shifting sands of the aberrant [conclusion not clearly warranted--aberrant is probably wrong word--ambiguous, questionable, shifting, makeshift]
    3. Section iii--Fiction and Friction
      1. plot of Marin and of TN are similar
      2. sexuality is central to comedy; sexuality is culturally determined not biologically
      3. how does play gain sexual energy
        1. staged body as prodigious--a prodigy
        2. staged body as transvestite 87
      4. early modern and present day concepts of nature differ widely
        1. theirs is masculine and teleological and yields theatre--the external
        2. ours is feminine and genetic and yields novel--the inward [preposterous]
      5. erotic chafing--friction--produces heat and creates life in characters--it's foreplay
        1. playhouse as Venus' palace
        2. special beauty of erotic arousal in comic heros and heroines
        3. represents the emergence of identity through experience of erotic heat
        4. friction fictionalized; chafing chastened as witty erotically charged sparring
        5. lead to offstage consummation; but its expressed throughout the play as system of verbal foreplay--
          1. cheeky replies
          2. turning words inside out; quote from Feste about chevril glove--amphibology; Marie/Marin
          3. [Greenblatt's Festive wit, coming to a pack of punchlines
          4. dallying with words
        6. wordplay and self fashioning are conceived as prodigious and, especially in women, are aimed at self-effacement and absorption in the norm 91
          1. this is the trajectory of romantic love, which dallies on the way
          2. cross dressing is appropriate for such self fashioning
          3. youth is place where sexual identity not yet emerged
          4. shakespeare's boy actors
            1. small pipe semblative of woman's part
        7. ambiguous ending
          1. Viola doesnt get her woman's weeds yet
          2. after the play in fact she be a boy 92 [Greenblatt's mischievous conclusion]
        8. Rosalind, Viola, Portia pass through state of being men to become women;
          1. This represents that Ren. men had to pass through and separate from female to become men.
        9. an apparent homeroticism in all sexuality
          1. delicious confusions of TN depend upon the mobility of desire
          2. all male cast; boys under woman's costume
          3. the plays make heterosexuality and its friction a fiction
      6. MISCHIEF!!