In this book, Mario DiGangi identifies and discusses six kinds of dramatic characters that he calls sexual types. These types are the sodomite, the tribade, the narcissistic courtier, the citizen wife, the bawd, and the Caroline or monstrous favorite. Each type gets its own chapter. Like many exercises in taxonomy, this one is not entirely convincing, although it often leads to interesting analyses. I would have appreciated a more explicit rationale for why these six types were identified and not others, such as the adolescent, the heiress, the widow, or the lecherous old man, to pick some examples at random. Within DiGangi's scheme, however, the discussions are, for the most part, cogent and persuasive.
I was least convinced by DiGangi's claim that the Caroline favorite is a very different kind of character than the favorite in Elizabethan or Jacobean plays. To some extent, I suspect that his insistence on this point is the result of a felt need to differentiate his discussion from Curtis Perry's 2006 book on favorites in Renaissance England. DiGangi's argument here is that the favorite in Caroline plays represents a threat to the political order of the kingdom as a whole rather than simply illustrating the personal weakness of the monarch. But Edward II's love for Gaveston in Marlowe's play also threatens to overturn the political hierarchy of the kingdom, and it is important to remember that in marrying Gaveston to his niece and in creating him Earl of Gloucester, Edward, in effect, makes Gaveston a member of the royal family.
A further problem is that the chapter on the sodomite and the chapter on the narcissistic courtier tend to overlap. The problem here is largely the idea of effeminacy. While effeminacy has for some time been seen as one of the main distinguishing features of male homosexuals, in the Renaissance an effeminate man was (in a way that is now counterintuitive for us) more likely to be a man who spent his time pursuing women rather than engaging in more manly (and more homosocial) pursuits such as war. DiGangi admits this point toward the end of Sexual Types, but for much of the book he seems to want to be able to give effeminacy its contemporary signification.
To many readers, it may seem odd that DiGangi deals with, for example, the citizen wife and the bawd, both stock characters on the Renaissance stage, and the sodomite and (especially) the tribade, who do not appear in Renaissance plays—or at least not under those names. To me, however, this is one of the most interesting aspects of this book. DiGangi brings in a great deal of nondramatic literature to demonstrate the prevalence of these types in the Renaissance imaginary, even if there are very few explicit references to them in the drama. Unlike many historicists, DiGangi refuses to be limited by the idea of what is historically plausible, and his book is stronger as a result.
An important part of the value of Sexual Types is the wide range of DiGangi's research. While most books on Renaissance drama now purport to concentrate on the context of the plays under discussion, DiGangi actually gives a remarkably full picture of the sorts of texts to which the plays he chooses can usefully be compared. What is more, DiGangi's range is not limited to prose texts, diaries, and so on. He also, to his credit, deals with a very wide range of dramatic texts, including—especially in the Caroline plays he discusses—a number of very obscure plays. Sexual Types reminds us how small a number of Renaissance plays scholars still tend to deal with. And when DiGangi does discuss a play that could be considered mainstream, his analyses are often fresh and provocative. I was especially struck by his discussion of The Roaring Girl. While this play has certainly attracted a great deal of critical commentary in the last few decades, in focusing on the play's citizen wife characters rather than on Moll herself, or on the two young lovers, DiGangi manages to shed new light on a play that most of his readers will have thought they knew.
People who read Sexual Types all the way through, as I did, will probably not be convinced by DiGangi's taxonomy, nor, I think, will they agree with his claim to be doing novel work on the imbrication of sexuality and class in Renaissance drama. But I think they will feel, as I did, that many of DiGangi's discussions of individual plays are first rate, that he very usefully draws our attention to plays that are not usually discussed, and that he finds new things to say about plays that are usually discussed. As his subtitle promises, his book goes from Shakespeare to Shirley, and his range here is greatly to be applauded.
