Zia Ravenscroft (he/they/it)
My favourite joke in the world goes, ‘Shakespeare walks into a gay bar. Exit, pursued by a bear.’ While they may not have had gay bars in Elizabethan England, I’m sure my boy William Shakespeare would love to go to one. And I, and dozens of other scholars, are sure he would love to be pursued by a bear—the gay man kind, obviously. (Me too, Will. Me too.)
If you were forced to read one of his tragedies like Macbeth or Othello in high school, you may not be familiar with how funny and relevant his writings are today. One of my biggest pet peeves as a Shakespeare fan is when people (particularly your Year 11 English teacher) make him out to be more academic than his work generally is. Yes, the Early Modern language is a bit incomprehensible to anyone new to it, but that’s nothing a No Fear Shakespeare translation can’t fix. The best Shakespearean actors can convey their emotions and intentions perfectly without you necessarily understanding what the words mean. Shakespeare never went to university, and he wrote for an audience largely of commoners who could go see a cockfight or an execution instead of the theatre. As a result, his plays are full of disgusting sex jokes, dramatic betrayal and scandal, fight scenes, and ridiculously bitchy dialogue, to keep the groundlings’ attention. You also may not be familiar with how insanely queer Shakespeare’s plays are, or that he himself was a bisexual icon and slut of the Early Modern stage. A man after my own heart, truly.
A lot of academics and historians have spent far more time than I have trying to prove definitively what Shakespeare’s sexuality was. I think his own life and sexuality is much less interesting than what he says in all thirty-eight of his plays and over a hundred poems, but anyone still claiming Will was entirely and exclusively heterosexual is possibly just stupid. Out of his 154 sonnets, the first 126 are dedicated to a male ‘fair youth,’ and the majority of these are explicitly romantic and erotic in nature. His most famous poem, Sonnet 18, which begins ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ is one of these. There is debate over who exactly Shakespeare’s fair youth was, and what the nature of Shakespeare’s relationship with him was like. He’s usually considered to be either the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, or the Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert. They were both Shakespeare’s artistic patrons, otherwise known as the original sugar daddy. One sonnet that I really love is number 20, which talks about a ‘master-mistress of my passion.’ Hot. Can I have their number?
When it comes to gay shit and Shakespeare, there’s a lot to talk about. If I had a dollar for every time he wrote about an intense homoerotic friendship who cared for each other more than their actual love interests, I could treat my intense homoerotic friendship to a really fancy cocktail.
There are not one, but two couples in Shakespeare where one of them is dying or already dead, and the other attempts to kill themself because they can’t bear the thought of living without the first. One of these is Romeo and Juliet, and the other is Hamlet and Horatio. The four lovers in A Midsummer’s Night Dream basically invented polyamory. Brutus and Cassius in Julius Caesar are responsible for the single most romantic scene in all of theatrical history: Act Four Scene Three, you will always be famous. I like to flirt by asking someone to read it with me, and trust me, it works. Puck in Midsummer and Ariel in The Tempest are both vaguely genderless fairies (enough said!) It does feel a little bit like a hate-crime that Olivia and Viola don’t actually end the play by becoming lesbian wives in Twelfth Night, but they do in my heart. Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet (and especially in the Baz Luhrman movie I know you’ve all seen) is the inspiration for every gay best friend character. I just know he and Tybalt were having the nastiest swordfights in those hot Verona alleyways, and not with their actual weapons, if you know what I mean.
And there’s also so, so much crossdressing. Literally one in five Shakespeare plays features a character of one gender adopting an identity of another gender to advance the plot in ways they couldn’t otherwise. This is most commonly female characters assuming a masculine identity, like Viola becoming Cesario in Twelfth Night, or Rosalind becoming Ganymede in As You Like It. This convention gave woman characters more freedom and power in the restrictive society Shakespeare wrote in, and made these characters some of his most complex and nuanced roles for women.
Speaking of women onstage—in Shakespeare’s time, there weren’t any! In England, acting was considered a profession only suitable for men up until the 1660s. This meant that all female parts were played by men, which inherently queered the dynamics between characters onstage. In plays like As You Like It, you would have a male actor playing a female character (Rosalind) disguising herself as a boy (Ganymede) pretending to be a girl again. That’s just an average day in the life of my gender.
To paraphrase from possibly my most-quoted book, Gender Trouble by Judith Butler, the performance of gender then becomes a repetition of what is expected—not natural nor created, but adapted and performed. Gender performativity onstage suggests that gender is a persistent impersonation that passes as the real, and destabilises the difference between the natural and the artificial.
There is no difference between a man playing a man, a woman playing a man, a woman playing a woman, or a man playing a woman if gender performativity and queer theory is taken into account in a theatrical sense. It is the character and how they’re played that’s important, not their gender or that of the actor, especially in Shakespeare plays. Another pet peeve I have in Shakespeare is when productions choose to regender characters based on the gender of the actor playing them. This always comes across as if the production company is uncomfortable asking the audience to believe that an actor of one gender can convincingly play a role of another gender—which feels mildly transphobic at best, and just plain bioessentialist at worst. Limiting tension between the actor and the character they portray is never an interesting directorial decision.
Funnily enough, the first Shakespeare role I ever played was Rosalind, in a scene where she’s Ganymede. I was thirteen then, and being Rosalind-as-Ganymede felt right in a way I didn’t have words for yet. The following year, I played Claudio in a genderbent Much Ado About Nothing, feeling so cool in sunglasses and a band shirt borrowed from my older brother and dad, respectfully. I frequently performed male roles throughout high school, but that was the first time I wanted to be a man off stage as well. I didn’t think about this critically for three more years. The first role I had after coming out as transgender in Year 13 was the Courtesan in A Comedy of Errors. I struggled to connect with her character when we began rehearsals. I felt like I didn't know how to act like a woman anymore—until my drama teacher told me ‘Okay, she’s not a woman. She’s a drag queen.’ I even won an award for audience connection at that year’s SGCNZ National Festival, which proved to me the transformative power trans bodies onstage have.
As much as I love Shakespeare, and as great as his impact has been on my own journey of queerness, it’s just as important to champion contemporary queer writers and playwrights. There are more than enough people who call Shakespeare the best writer in the English language already—I certainly don’t need to be another. His treatment of people of colour and Jewish people often leaves something to be desired. Yet knowing that one of the most famous writers ever explored queer themes and characters across so many of his plays, written over four hundred years ago, is still impressive. If there’s one thing I love as a queer and transsexual person, it’s seeing people like me throughout time and in historical texts. And in fucking Shakespeare, no less.
My favourite Shakespeare movie (alright, second to the Zeffirelli Romeo and Juliet) is called Stage Beauty. It’s about the actor Ned Kynaston, famous for playing female parts, struggling with the introduction of women actors into the English theatre. There’s a scene where he and his lover/dresser/rival in womanhood Maria are acting out different sex positions. In each one they confirm who the man and who the woman is, until they get to a point where they can’t tell anymore. The saying goes ‘We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.’ I’d like to propose that we’re all born boy-girl-mirror-men-women, and the rest is Shakespeare.