Shakespeare, gender, and transformativity

[darkest_light]

Wow, Ursula K. Le Guin, I disagree strongly with you.

I still haven't seen The Tempest (I... don't watch movies, mostly, unless I can do it somewhere where I can multitask.) But still. The best production I ever saw of Hamlet was at a women's college. Most of the parts were played by women in pants roles, but the role of Hamlet was envisioned as

Comments

[oliveoyl]

One of my lifelong ambitions (and probably one that is least likely to happen) is to be a lady Hamlet.

That said, URSULA, WHAT. I'm glad I actually read her piece, because it is thoughtful and nuanced, but I also strongly disagree, and for all the reasons you set forth so nicely here. Also: I really want to see this movie.

[darkest_light]

Yeah, I love her! And I actually mostly agree with most of what she's saying here, except that everything she thinks is bad, I think is awesome.

[ungelic_is_us]

Wow: um, I have to say I disagree with Ursula too; you hit the nail on the head. WTF Ursula? A play is not like a statue; it it re-made with every performance. The characters aren't set in stone and paint, as still as figures of the Sistine Chapel. They're re-interpreted, played with, re-embodied by every actor and actress who speaks them and, therefore, are as flexible as gender can be. I haven't read "The Sea and the Mirror," so I can't speak to that; but I do know the most powerful Othello I've seen was played with an all-female cast. I think you do have to respect Shakespeare's creations; the plays don't work if you are careless or (too) iconoclastic with the "original" content; but I don't see why a female Prospero is a step too far.

[darkest_light]

I actually agree with a whole lot of what she says about gender in the article, it's just that I don't think that it's a PROBLEM. I think it's the POINT.

I'm the sort of reader who will follow iconoclasm however far it takes me as long as it's done well and it works; often the things that make things not work for me are unrelated to the degree of iconoclasm. The McKellen Richard III doesn't work for me because my brain breaks trying to do the somersaults of merging the War of the Roses and WWI together; but really it doesn't work because the director never sat down and thought all the consequences of the decision through. (Not Shakespeare but) the post-apocalyptic Revenger's Tragedy, which is arguably farther from the source, works excellently because Cox did think things through.

(The Sea and the Mirror actually says nothing about gender etc. It just rocked my world so hard no other interpretation of The Tempest comes close for me)

[eccentric_hat]

I was just thinking about Shylock. Mostly about how he kind of breaks a rule of Shakespearean villains that most of them don't have a particular reason for being so nasty. I read a piece years ago that made the argument that Shakespeare consistently removed the villains' motivation from his source material, so that Iago for instance used to have a good reason to want to get back at Othello, but in Shakespeare he's just kind of nihilistically filled with hate. The few explanations he gives are like "Oh, uh, I think he slept with my wife," which is obviously not true and never comes up again. Or maybe he wanted Othello's job, but then again, maybe not. Whereas Shylock basically comes on stage and says "you bastards, stop spitting on me

[darkest_light]

Yeah. Even Richard III even has more interest in gnawing on scenery and gloating about how clever he is than he does in having reasons for his actions. The only possible motivations he has is that it's fun to be evil in clever ways. Honestly, it's good for him that he dies when he does because he would be bored to tears by the day-to-day boredom of running a government.

But Shylock. He spends the play trying to do the right thing while the supposed heros run roughshod over his values. Is it any wonder that he's angry enough by the end he's angry and frustrated enough to demand something in recompense? A pound of flesh is extreme, yeah--but I remember being startled when I got to that point in the play the first time I read it because up until then I'd been reading him as a tragic hero.

(I don't know what it says about me that I own a Complete Works of Shakespeare, and also single copies of Richard III and The Merchant of Venice and nothing else

[darkest_light]

Heh, clearly there was some sloppy editing in that middle paragraph.

[eccentric_hat]

The Wikipedia part of this exchange is kind of meta to me because I wrote a paper about narrators last semester that used Wikipedia as an example of a narrator-less text, and this is a perfect example of what that means. I'd one hundred times rather have a text that was by somebody and explained the author's use of terms. Anyway--the impression I've been able to form is that she took the position of the king and most of her contemporaries would have called her Queen, and that's how she's generally referenced today, now that we have a concept of regnant queens.

I have mixed feelings about "The Sea and the Mirror" as criticism--I like the poetry very much, but I wouldn't like The Tempest all that much if I read it the way Auden apparently read it. Caliban and Ariel can be aspects of the human spirit, but I find it an unsatisfying and kind of simplistic play if that's all they are. I'm guessing Auden did too and that's why he set out to fix it. But I wouldn't particularly want a production (or film) of the play to take his

[route52]

I couldn't possibly agree more. I think that what a lot of Shakespeare purists forget is that, like eccentric_hat mentions, Shakespeare himself was writing transformative works. In Hamlet - in Romeo and Juliet - in Othello - he took one story, changed some details, and created a new story. I also don't understand why people think that one particular production has the possibility to 'destroy' the original text. Like you say, that's the beauty of theater - you build something up and then you take it down. Performance is interpretation. If it's ok for scholars to offer several different interpretations of various aspects of The Tempest, it should also be OK for performers to do the same.

[darkest_light]

To be fair to Le Guin, her thesis isn't so much "transforming things is bad" as it is "I wish changing Prospero's character wasn't transformative, but it was and that makes me sad."

I just want to respond to her post saying something like "I agree with everything you say, except that all the cases you've mentioned would be awesome, while you think they are bad."

[aamcnamara]

I saw an all-female Macbeth last year and it was fantastic. (Not at MHC, at my (coed) high school--the MHC productions seem to be often all-female merely by default, which makes me sad.) The things they did with gender and presentation and et cetera? Amazed me. Which is to say, I agree with you.

...all her examples of Gender Matters In Passionate Heterosexual Relationships makes me want to do queer versions of Shakespeare, where we work on that conversation about how heterosexual notions of love and relationships affect how queer relationships are conducted. Et cetera.

(I think there are enough ideas for productions in the comments to this post to start a Transformative Shakespeare Company.)

[darkest_light]

Oooh, I'd love to see an all-female Macbeth. Evil is so incredibly gendered in that show, I would love to be able to see it without that filter. I saw a fair number of shows with mixed-gender casts, but yeah, there were definitely a lot of women on stage. Hamlet was the only show I ever saw there that actually used it to interesting effect.

I totally endorse your Transformative Shakespeare Company as well as your Queer Shakespeare Company. Maybe we could open Queer Transformative Shakespeare. Honestly, the only thing I'm not interested in seeing from her post is able-bodied Richard III. Because I've read that novel (The Dragon Waiting) and it's one of my favorites, but it does require that Richard stop skulking around whining about how his twisted body is making him be evil.