Afterword

Abstract

In the book’s afterword, Will Stockton considers the queerness of critical projects devoted to a single author, whether it be Milton or the perennially queerer Shakespeare. Taking up Jeffrey Masten’s concerns about queering at the level of the author, Stockton argues that volumes such as Queer Milton, or Madhavi Menon’s Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (in which Masten’s remarks appear), betray the queerness behind an admittedly fetishistic impulse toward subjective or authorial coherence. Through a series of meditations on his own obsessions (past and present, personal and professional), Stockton makes the case that such attachment, unknowable in advance and seemingly inescapable for a time (or a career), encourages constant, even fervent, re-evaluation of an artist.