put down your binary thinking, and nobody gets hurt

[ex_truepenn]

for blog against heteronormativity day

That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.
      --Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta

That was another wench, and besides, the country's dead.
      --?

truepenny: The hardest thing about studying history, whether for business or pleasure or both, is wrenching yourself out of the mindset you

Comments

[matociquala]

So really, I guess what we're saying, is that in terms of enforcing gender roles, at the end of it, Shakespeare's right there with the chair and the whip.

[ex_truepenn]

Um, yeah. Much as I hate to say it. In the end, you'd better put your dress back on.

[matociquala]

Something I think Marlowe is, overall, opposed to. Er, not-so-metaphorically speaking.

[ex_truepenn]

Ah, the inevitable advent of the sexually suggestive puns.

[angevin2]

Also, in defense of Gay Atheist Spy, I'm not sure silliness should be held up to strict scholarly standards. ;) (I do know its originator to be aware of the complications of how sexuality was perceived -- or not perceived -- in the Renaissance.)

[matociquala]

*g* I know. I know. And it shouldn't be.

It just totally gives me a wiggins.

Shakespeare in Love gives me a wiggins too. And yet, R&GaD does not.

[ex_truepenn]

R&GAD isn't historical. Only textual.

I think it makes a difference.

[angevin2]

Shakespeare in Love doesn't bother me either, since so much of it is really a sendup of the romantic fantasy of Shakespeare. I think, anyway. It is of course entirely possible that I am a) a bad Shakespearean* b) heterosexist c) both.

*But I still totally disagree with you about Tillyard.

[pameladean]

Long ago, I wrote a thesis about the leftover characters in Shakespeare's problem plays. I had never heard the term "genderfuck." But you make me think of that other Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice, whose situation is a pretty good parallel -- he can't walk off hand in hand with Basanio, no matter what else happens. I think of the Prince in Much Ado About Nothing, who in his actions seems more enamoured of Claudio than of Beatrice. I think of Horatio, who is left out of the general slaughter of the end of Hamlet, despite a specifically-stated desire to partake of it. He can't walk off hand-in-hand with Hamlet, not even into oblivion. I don't think this works so well with the rest of them -- Lucio in Measure for Measure, the only one unforgiven, for example. But those four, wow.

P.

[matociquala]

Hermia and Helena can't set up shop as a couple of old spinsters with a lilac bush and Too Many Cats, either.

And somewhere, I have a spectacularly failed trunk story about just how screwed up everything that happens to Titania and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream is.

[pameladean]

Oh, yeah, Titania and Hippolyta ought to get together and trash the entire universe they're stuck in, no doubt about it.

I was restricting myself to characters left out of the endings that Shakespeare had arranged, but of course, as you demonstrate, if one just looks at the circumstances he seems willing to accept, there are a lot more people who aren't really where one might wish to see them.

P.

[matociquala]

Amen. I get Very Mad at Will when I read or watch that play. I just avoid it now.