Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama

Sets out a new history of early modern sexuality by attending to early modern representations of male clothing. Maps utopian fantasies around extravagantly dressed men in early modern theatrical comedies and argues that superficiality and affectation offered alternatives to dominant early modern ideologies governing masculinity and sexuality.

James M. Bromley is Associate Professor of English at Miami University. He is the author of Intimacy and Sexuality in the Age of Shakespeare (2012) and co-editor of Sex before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England (2013). He has been awarded a Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin and a Mellon Foundation Fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

- Introduction: Theorizing Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama - 1: One: Ben Jonson's Imitation Games: Masculinity and Queer Inauthenticity in Every Man in His Humour - 2: City Powd'ring: Materiality, Pedagogy, and Sexuality in Michaelmas Term - 3: "Quilted with Mighty Words to Lean Purpose": Clothing and Queer Style in The Roaring Girl - 4: Cruisy Historicism: Sartorial Extravagance and Public Sexual Culture in Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour - Epilogue