Queer Philologies by Masten Jeffrey;

Author:Masten, Jeffrey;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2016-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

[o]f such Dogs as keep not their kinde, of such as are mingled out of sundry sorts, not imitating the conditions of some one certain spice, because they resemble no notable shape, nor exercise any worthy property of the true, perfect and gentable kinde, it is not necessary, that I write any more of them, but to banish them as unprofitable implements, out of the bounds of my Book; unprofitable, I say, for any use that is commendable.39

Spice is, of course, a culinary term; it is also related to specie—in the sense of currency, as Patricia Fumerton notes40—and also to species, or kind. Further, at the moment he draws the boundary or binding of his book, delimiting commentary on those kinds that “keep not their kinde,” Topsell also employs a term (gentable) that occurs neither as a word entry nor in the full text of the OED, 2nd edition, its current online form, or the searchable texts of Early English Books Online.41 What is the “gentable kind”? We can hypothesize that gentable may be related to gentle, genteel, genitable, genital, and gental (= genital).42 The amount of correction and retranslation of early texts required, in fact, for the OED to stabilize the meaning and spelling of genital is, for a word we now think of as commonplace and clinically referential, rather extensive.43 A queer philology of the genital(s) is beyond the scope of this chapter, but this lacunae (or intersection) at the center of Topsell’s marginalization of mongrels can begin to demonstrate how such a study might open out into larger issues of kin/kind at the confused and prolific root gen- in early modern English, bringing into relation the genus, the gentle/genteel/gentile, the congenital: the discourses, that is, of kinship, kindship, social class/nation/religion, and reproduction.44 To take a familiar example that could condense some of these issues: Shylock, called “dog” and “cur” repeatedly in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, though he initially keeps his kind (his daughter does not), is addressed by the Duke in the climactic trial scene with the line “We all expect a gentle answer, Jew.”45 A gentle, not common, answer, yes, but also, as numerous commentators have noted, a “gentile” answer, since the words overlap in spelling and probably pronunciation in the period.46 Given the resonances that several critics have seen in this play and this scene of the pound of flesh as circumcision, “genital” may hover (somewhat nonsensically) in the Duke’s statement as well.47 But, even if a genital/gentable answer is potentially anticipated here, can a character so derogated as a “stranger cur”48 “exercise any worthy property of the true, perfect and gentable kinde” here expected of him? In a context suffused with usury (and indeed in which Shylock himself has earlier compared “use” to “the work of generation” and “breeding”49), he is, at the end of the trial scene, banished out of the bounds of, if not Venice, the play at least—an unprofitable instrument after this scene, of no commendable use.

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