Shakespeare's Queer Analytics

Don Rodrigues, Jonathan Hope, Michael Witmore, Lynne Magnusson

"What led Shakespeare to write his most cryptic poem, 'The Phoenix and Turtle?' Does the Phoenix represent Queen Elizabeth, on the verge of death as Shakespeare wrote? Is the Earl of Essex, recently executed for treason, the Turtledove, lover of the Phoenix? Questions such as these dominate scholarship of both Shakespeare's poem and the book in which it first appeared: Robert Chester's enigmatic collection of verse, Love's Martyr (1601), where Shakespeare's allegory sits next to erotic love lyrics by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston, as well as work by the much lesser-known Chester. Shakespeare's Queer Analytics critiques and revises traditional computational attribution studies by integrating the insights of queer theory to a study of Love's Matyr . A book deeply engaged in current debates in computational literary studies, it is particularly attuned to questions of...