One could reasonably question the designation of ‘queer’ applied to the poet and Shrewsbury schoolmaster Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890–1918). The elite institutions of which he was a member (educated at Eton, and in Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge) alone, it could be argued, disqualify him from this moniker. Yet I. convincingly demonstrates the appropriateness of this label to Bainbrigge in the volume under review. I. has recently developed an impressive body of scholarship on the importance of Rome at the intersections between the fields of classical reception studies and the history of sexuality (e.g. the edited volume, Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities [2015]). Masculine Plural continues this trajectory, adding further nuance through several case studies, and sets out to explore what a ‘truly queer Classics’ could look like (p. 5).
I. reads in tandem several texts published by men in the early decades of the twentieth century: the Dialogus. Jocundus: Robertus, a fictional neo-Latin dialogue by Bainbrigge between two public-school educated boys, where the older provides a sexual education for the younger, privately published in 1926; Praefanda, a scholarly article by A.E. Housman, published in Hermes 66 (1931), 402–12, and written in Latin because of its ‘sensitive’ subject matter; and Achilles in Scyros, a verse-drama, also written by Bainbrigge in 1911 (the manuscript presents different dates, see p. 234), privately published in 1927, and staged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1977 by students from University College London, to enthusiastic reviews (pp. 221, 224–5).
I. builds on earlier work that considers the importance of nineteenth- and twentieth-century receptions of classical ideas about sex and gender for the history of sexuality (e.g. A. Blanshard's Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity [2010], G. Nisbet's Greek Epigram in Reception. J. A. Symonds, Oscar Wilde, and the Invention of Desire, 1805–1929 [2013] and D. Orrell's Sex: Antiquity and its Legacy [2015]) and provides a ‘Romosexual’ (to use an I. neologism) complement to the more Hellenocentric (or should that be ‘Hellenosexual’?) studies of ‘Greek love’ already available. I. is keen to disrupt perceptions of ancient Roman sexuality as decadent and deviant (p. 2) and does so by demonstrating that Bainbrigge's engagement with antiquity is a refreshingly positive one: ‘Bainbrigge unapologetically treats sex between males as pleasurable’, I. writes, ‘Nor is sex treated with circumspection, or else sublimated, rejected, or even simply ignored – all of which are more typical methods of approaching the topic among his contemporaries’ (p. 92).
Similarly, I. aims to showcase how Latin could be used as a medium through which classically-trained men like Bainbrigge and Housman could express their same-sex desires or scholarly and personal interests more freely. Latin, therefore, was not only the scientific language of scholarship used by sexologists, for example, in this period, but also ‘performed a liberatory function for the public school-educated men who experience homoerotic desires, as it provided them with a tool for communicating on taboo sexual matters with an audience who could be expected to appreciate their writing from the standpoint of a shared homosocial educational experience’ (p. 9).
After an introduction, which sets out the scope of the project and offers both a biographical sketch of Bainbrigge and a survey of the place of classical education and sexuality in Victorian and Edwardian England, I. provides her edition of Bainbrigge's Dialogus (incorporating errata and notes) with facing ‘domesticating’ English translation (pp. 75–87), and is to be thanked for making this fascinating work accessible to a wider audience than the classically-trained one initially intended by Bainbrigge: I. notes, ‘only someone who had been through a public-school education could have produced it, and, as its Platonic vocabulary of initiation shows very clearly, it is aimed at a similarly elite group of readers’ (p. 147).
‘In Decent Latin’, the following section, opens by presenting Housman as an early reader of Bainbrigge's dialogue. His estimation, recorded in a letter sent to his publisher Grant Richards in 1927, was as follows: ‘It is in decent Latin, and the matter is mildly interesting, though it leaves me calm’. While initially this comment might seem to offer faint praise of Bainbrigge's piece, I. is right to point out that it ‘nevertheless suggests that the great Latinist – and notoriously scathing critic of others’ command of the Latin language – was somewhat impressed by its Latin’ (p. 90) and goes on to note that the phrase ‘in decent Latin’ is probably a double entendre on Housman's part. Finally, I. provides a detailed discussion of the text in terms of its genre (Greek dialogue is behind the work's generic structure; Plato's Symposium is arguably the key text behind any serious discussion of homosexual erôs, which Bainbrigge himself translated; his translation has unfortunately not survived, p. 132), literary allusions (e.g. Plautus, Lucretius, Cicero, Catullus, Caesar, Latin love elegy, Martial, the Carmina Priapeia, Christian Latin, Plato, Lucian, Rabelais and more are suggested) and the context of its production and circulation (similar material is presented in e.g. E.M. Foster's Maurice and Charlie Broad's David, as well as within the history of production of pornographic texts in Latin, such as the Satyra Sotadica of 1660, the work of sexologists, e.g. Richard von Krafft-Ebing's 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis, and finally also within the homosocial circles of Victorian and Edwardian British classically-educated littérateurs).
Chapter 2, ‘Sex, Latin, and Scholarship’, provides a detailed study of Housman's 1931 scholarly article Praefanda, itself a meticulous study, written in Latin, of various passages from Latin literature dealing with sexual subject matter. The article was initially accepted for publication by Classical Quarterly, only later to be rejected, at which point it was submitted instead to (and published by) Hermes (pp. 166–7). I. demonstrates that the ubiquitous division of ‘Housman the Scholar’ and ‘Housman the Poet’ is unhelpful in understanding the man and his work, both in his scholarly and creative outputs; and indeed, that reading his scholarship in light of the elite and semi-private intellectual networks shared by Bainbrigge reveals Housman to be a proponent of a radically queer classicism.
Next, I. prints Bainbrigge's Achilles in Scyros (pp. 197–220) and follows it with a close reading of the play in Chapter 3, ‘Here Aphrodite is Not’. I. teases out the way that Bainbrigge's recasting of Achilles’ sojourn on Scyros disrupts conventional views of ancient gender and sexuality; Bainbrigge's play goes further than its Statian counterpart in presenting not only male transvestism, but female cross-dressing too; the play collapses ancient age-distinctions in the erotic encounters between men – Achilles is both lover and beloved of Patroclus; and Bainbrigge presents a chorus of Scyrian maidens as separatist lesbians following Sapphic and Swinburnian models.
I.’s Bainbrigge, through ‘his queer insight and reading practices’ (p. 291), like her Housman, emerges as an engaging and subtle reader of classical literature. What I.’s volume presents to readers are the receptions of a complex community of readers (not only of Housman as reader of Bainbrigge, or Bainbrigge of Swinburne, for example, but also of both men as readers of classical literature). To fully appreciate and trace the nuances of the texts produced by men like Bainbrigge and Housman requires an impressive knowledge of many diverse fields: Classics, Latin lexicography and especially its rather technical sexual vocabulary, the history of classical education in Victorian and Edwardian Britain and the homosocial networks of elite public-school educated men in these periods, as well as a firm grasp of the history of sexuality and queer theory. In these, I. shows herself to be a more than able guide.
Concluding his monograph Classical Culture and Modern Masculinity (2011), D. Orrells quotes a poignant line from E. Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990), noting that gay people ‘seldom grow up in gay families … [They] always belatedly [have] to patch together from fragments a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or resistance’ (p. 274). Not only does I. ‘patch together’ a community from Bainbrigge's and Housman's ‘fragments’, but illustrates the potential that their elite positioning afforded them to present a positive view of the queer desires that they experienced against the dominant discourse of their day (see esp. p. 155 n. 257). For this reason, both Bainbrigge and Housman, and indeed I.’s volume, deserve ‘the attention of classicists, and anyone with an interest in the history of sexuality’ (p. 73).
