So, I've had plenty of requests to talk about this one...
huge subject. A subject with a lot of...
nuance and history and scholarship surrounding it, and one that I don't feel entirely qualified to talk about, and
and since this is the last Shakespeare video I'm doing this year, and yeah, I'm keeping it short this year and
and since it is Pride Month,
I'm happy to say that-
I'm Rantasmo, and the complete works of William Shakespeare needs more gay.
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold up, hold up!
Yes, Kyle?
-Crossover?
-Crossover!
-So Shakespeare.
-Yeah, I'm excited.
I'm a little overwhelmed to be honest. Shakespeare is such a dense subject.
Oh, yes, there is
literally centuries worth of 
scholarship to wade through and
I barely know where to start.
I mean certainly not with a topic as broad as
Shakespeare and Queer Theory
Well, most of what I could find on the subject was about
the possibility of William Shakespeare 
being either gay or bi, or at least
not straight. He was married to a woman and fathered three children, but that doesn't necessarily mean much.
It seems like when most people talk about the possibility of Shakespeare being queer they point to his sonnets as evidence.
Right. Especially the early cycle. Like Sonnet 18. You know, the one that everybody knows.
Yeah. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
It was addressed to a young man.
The famous "Fair Youth".
Among Shakespeare scholars, his identity has long been a source of speculation and part of that speculation
Involves the precise nature of their relationship.
Whether Shakespeare admired the youth platonically or if it was sexual in nature.
Sure, Sonnet 18 is fairly chaste,
but Sonnet 20? It's worth reading the whole thing.
A woman's face, with nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose
nothing
but since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.
Translation?
"You're hot. Shame about the penis."
Wow. There's a lot to unpack.
There's some pretty casual sexism
in that whole "shifting change is as false women's fashion".
As if he's setting up feminine aspects as being inferior to masculine ones.
Plus the line "master-mistress of my passion"
definitely seems to be, at the very least, blurring the boundary of gender.
It's worth mentioning that early editors of Shakespeare would scrub hints of queerness from the record,
replacing male pronouns with female ones.
Even suggesting that Shakespeare's passion towards this young man was purely platonic.
And, for better or for worse, we're still doing this.
Scholar Eve Sedgwick's landmark 
examination of the Sonnets
argue that Shakespeare delineated a male heterosexuality that includes a strong sense of male homosociality
Without stigmatizing love between men or denoting it as somehow lesser
than love between man and woman. Sedgwick writes:
So it's ambiguous enough to be interpreted either way?
Yes, but.
There's one way that's usually favored over the other.
[Viola] "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
"Thou art more lovely and more temp'rate."
Shakespeare in Love suggests that the Fair Youth 
was, in reality, Gwyneth Paltrow.
So Shakespeare still writes his sonnets to a young man.
But in this version, it's a woman in a man's disguise.
It's fanfic heteronormativity.
So even if Shakespeare romances a young man, he stays straight because he "kisses her bubbies".
"He did, I saw him kissing her bubbies."
But this is all assuming that 1) 
his sonnets are autobiographical
and 2) the same standards of heteronormativity 
that apply today, also applied
450 years ago. Neither of which are certain.
Very true.
That's why I'm not all that interested in speculating about what Shakespeare's sexuality might have been.
It's hard to prove his possible queerness,
But it's not hard to show the possible queerness of his plays.
Yeah, but that's difficult too because as you know
So, just to clarify here, the behavior that we associate with being 'gay' or 'straight' has existed for always
But the way that behavior has been perceived,
and the labels and identities that we ascribe to that behavior have evolved greatly over time
So what's queer for us may not have been queer in another era.
In her introduction to Shakesqueer--
Excellent compilation by the way--
 Madhavi Menon describes this very problem.
The problem of getting a good 
working definition of queer theory,
That's applicable to all cultures, 
at all times, in all places.
Menon writes" If queerness can be defined, then it is no longer queer."
Exactly, so a practice like queer coding 
would be highly culturally specific.
I'm not sure how Shakespeare's audience would register a character as queer.
Yeah, about that. Menon argues that there may have been queer coding within the verse itself
While most of Shakespeare's characters speak in iambs, a few speak trochees.
Like Macbeth's witches
Described as female, but bearded.
Or the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream
Huh?
When did "fairy" start getting used as a term for homosexual?
Late 1800s, I want to say?
Interesting.
*Fairies away! Swift as a shadow*
*Up and down and up and down!*
*I will lead them up and down!*
So following this thought, there's a convincing argument to be made that through this coded poetic queerness
Shakespeare's plays may have delineated
modern notions of heterosexual and homosexual
So Harold Bloom may have been onto something when he said "Shakespeare invented the human"
I can see it. The fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream are often played as camp gay
And to me they've always seemed very coded. 
They almost act like they're above sexuality
With Puck as the sassy gay friend who delights in the foibles of the straight drama around him.
Come to think of it, aren't the magical characters often genderbent in modern productions?
I'm thinking of "Prospera" played by Helen Mirren
Well, to some degree?
Actually, now might be a good time to talk about how Shakespeare wrote gender fluidity into the plays themselves
Should we have started with that point?
Too late now.
Let's look at a play like Twelfth Night, a play all about the fluidity of gender.
The Central romance goes as follows
Orsino, a duke, is sad because he loves Olivia, who does not love him back
Viola, a woman, disguises herself as a man, Cesario,
 not just to protect her identity,
but also to revive the memory of her dead twin brother.
Cesario is essentially a trans man
Cesario serves as the messenger for Orsino, 
delivering messages to Olivia
Complicating things, Olivia falls for Cesario
and Cesario falls for Orsino
A woman presenting as male, 
another woman lusting for them as they lust after a man
A queer love triangle
...that's resolved in the straightest way possible: 
by reviving the male twin
Any fluidity within Viola/Cesario's sex and gender
is straightened out by having Viola present as female,
 and giving Olivia a cis male twin to love.
What could have been a genderqueer poly relationship becomes...
Two straight couples.
Yeah, queerness is an obstacle and 
happily-ever-after is always cis-hetero
Shakespeare has done this in other plays too.
As You Like It ditches Roselyn's identity of 
Ganymede for her romance with Orlando,
Despite the obvious affection Celia has for her. I mean the play outright says that they shared a bed.
There's also been a lot speculated about hidden desires suppressed in Shakespeare's villains.
Iago, jealous of Othello's affection for Desdemona.
Not to mention the amazingly erotic pairing of Coriolanus and Aufidius
But it's not only villains who've been reinterpreted as gay
No less a Shakespearean than Ian McKellen
once floated the idea that Antonio from 
The Merchant of Venice is closeted
His first line is "In sooth. I know not why I am so sad"
A plausible theory: Bassanio, his best friend, is getting married, and not to him
But there's one thing that we haven't mentioned 
and it's a big thing and it applies to
every play that Shakespeare ever wrote.
Every last role,
even the most passionate lines between the straightest characters,
were written to be performed by men.
To men.
So, Anthony and Cleopatra? Two male actors. 
Beatrice and Benedick? Two male actors.
"Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake."
And yes, Romeo and Juliet.
"Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take."
Originnally played by male actors
So, even in original performances, the heteronormative endings
were almost always subverted by 
non heteronormative performance practices
Exactly, it's not just the magical characters or the queer coded characters.
Every single character Shakespeare ever wrote can be,
and has been,
uncoupled from normative notions of sex and gender.
A female Hamlet dates back to the 1700s
Hell, the first performance of Hamlet to be filmed starred Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet
And it continues to this day!
In modern performance whether or not the characters are cis-hetero,
every performance of the works of William Shakespeare
holds a queer potential.
And that's great.
To see Shakespeare through a queer lens makes sense. If we're going to continue this narrative that
Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language, that all forms of humanity can be found in his works,
That he "Invented the human"?
Right, wouldn't that mean all forms of humanity?
All genders?
All sexes,
All identities,
All forms of love?
Happy Pride Month
