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Shakespeare, gender, and transformativity
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 an equivalent of King Christina of Sweden (Wikipedia has her title wrong). In this production, Hamlet was a girl raised to be King of Denmark until her uncle swooped in to snatch the crown, "Her Highness, the Prince."
Claudius tells her to stop her "unmanly" grief. Laertes tells Ophelia that no matter how strong Hamlet's feelings for her may be, a marriage is impossible:
Prince Hamlet waxes eloquently about her grief while everyone around her assumes she is mad because her emotions are inappropriate. She kisses the girl and throws herself into a grave and kills her girlfriend's father through an arras, and she dies from the thrust of a poison sword. Her male friends from school follow her around making cracks about women's genitalia, ostensibly trying to take care of her while spying on her for her uncle. Her mother smothers her and her father manipulates her to do his bidding and her uncle slinks onto her throne because he thinks she can't handle it.
Her emotions are inappropriate. To survive she needs to be more manly. More rational. Less talk, more action. Somehow I think I've heard that before.
Le Guin is right, gender matters in Shakespeare. Queen Lear raging on the heath about her children means something different to us than King Lear doing the same thing. Changing the gender changes the play radically. It (cough) transforms it into something new. But that new thing doesn't take away from the thing that was there. It rings what was already there like a bell, striking all the bits we took for granted before and making us see them afresh.
And that's always been what I've loved the most about theatre. The words on the page may be consistent, but every director, every cast, every production is an opportunity to create a completely new work from scratch and show us something we haven't seen before. And Shakespeare in particular is a canvas that is ripe and ready for fresh painting. That is why Forbidden Planet works. That is why Ten Things I Hate About You works. That is why the production of A Winter's Tale where the first act took place in the 50s and the second act took place in the 60s and the character of Time was Albert Einstein in an astronaut's helmet worked.
That is why I can read The Merchant of Venice and see Shylock as a gothic hero rather than an Elizabethan villain (I really want to direct that production some day).
Shakespeare intended none of these things. It doesn't mean they aren't there. And it doesn't mean that bringing any of them to light takes away from the things he did mean. There have been plenty of literal productions. There will continue to be plenty of literal productions. Give me this one too, please.
ETA: All that being said, we're talking about THE TEMPEST here. Has Le Guin not read "The Sea and the Mirror"? Or did it just not hit her the way it hit everyone else I know who read it?
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 an equivalent of King Christina of Sweden (Wikipedia has her title wrong). In this production, Hamlet was a girl raised to be King of Denmark until her uncle swooped in to snatch the crown, "Her Highness, the Prince."
Claudius tells her to stop her "unmanly" grief. Laertes tells Ophelia that no matter how strong Hamlet's feelings for her may be, a marriage is impossible:
...Perhaps she loves you now,
And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch
The virtue of her will; but you must fear,
Her greatness weigh’d, her will is not her own,
For she herself is subject to her birth;
She may not, as unvalu’d persons do,
Carve for herself, for on her choice depends
The safety and the health of the whole state;
And therefore must her choice be circumscrib’d
Unto the voice and yielding of that body
Whereof she is the head.
Prince Hamlet waxes eloquently about her grief while everyone around her assumes she is mad because her emotions are inappropriate. She kisses the girl and throws herself into a grave and kills her girlfriend's father through an arras, and she dies from the thrust of a poison sword. Her male friends from school follow her around making cracks about women's genitalia, ostensibly trying to take care of her while spying on her for her uncle. Her mother smothers her and her father manipulates her to do his bidding and her uncle slinks onto her throne because he thinks she can't handle it.
Her emotions are inappropriate. To survive she needs to be more manly. More rational. Less talk, more action. Somehow I think I've heard that before.
Le Guin is right, gender matters in Shakespeare. Queen Lear raging on the heath about her children means something different to us than King Lear doing the same thing. Changing the gender changes the play radically. It (cough) transforms it into something new. But that new thing doesn't take away from the thing that was there. It rings what was already there like a bell, striking all the bits we took for granted before and making us see them afresh.
And that's always been what I've loved the most about theatre. The words on the page may be consistent, but every director, every cast, every production is an opportunity to create a completely new work from scratch and show us something we haven't seen before. And Shakespeare in particular is a canvas that is ripe and ready for fresh painting. That is why Forbidden Planet works. That is why Ten Things I Hate About You works. That is why the production of A Winter's Tale where the first act took place in the 50s and the second act took place in the 60s and the character of Time was Albert Einstein in an astronaut's helmet worked.
That is why I can read The Merchant of Venice and see Shylock as a gothic hero rather than an Elizabethan villain (I really want to direct that production some day).
Shakespeare intended none of these things. It doesn't mean they aren't there. And it doesn't mean that bringing any of them to light takes away from the things he did mean. There have been plenty of literal productions. There will continue to be plenty of literal productions. Give me this one too, please.
ETA: All that being said, we're talking about THE TEMPEST here. Has Le Guin not read "The Sea and the Mirror"? Or did it just not hit her the way it hit everyone else I know who read it?
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I look forward to a conversation about this with you and M and lots of hand gestures and enthusiasm.
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A lot of her criticism comes down to the fact that 'male' is an unmarked state and 'female' is a marked one, and that characters' actions become strongly-marked when the swap happens. Which is true, it's just that I love to see what the change from unmarked to marked tells us about the way we mark gender, while she considers that a problem.
(But then, my most recent bulletproof kink in fic is the category I can't quite call genderswap, it's the story where the canon male character has always been female and all the other characters in the universe treat them the same way as in canon. It really needs a better name than "always-a-girl![character]", which is what it mostly seems to be called.)
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OH MY GOD ME TOO. The casually-gender-flipped AU is the most awesome thing I have ever seen, because it-- for lack of a better term-- gives us permission to make a female character act exactly the way the male version does, which is something that I feel almost never happens on its own. It frees up so, so much; at the very least, it's a phenomenal writing exercise for the author, and forces the reader to recognize a) that this brand of awesome can be written for a female character! and b) that holy shit, even without thinking about it, we have totally been being harder on female characters for pulling the exact same crap that male characters do.
Which--
Which is true, it's just that I love to see what the change from unmarked to marked tells us about the way we mark gender, while she considers that a problem.
THIS, THIS. I was struggling to come up with a way to put that into words, because I enjoy that sort of thing so much that it's hard to grasp that this might annoy Le Guin-- I would like to live in a gender-free Utopia, too, but damn if I don't enjoy finding dramatic ways to make it obvious that we don't.
And for the record, that Her Highness the Prince version of Hamlet intrigues me and I want to see it SO MUCH. It physically pains me that I can't go see this, because right now it seems vastly more interesting than seeing Helen Mirren as Prospera (which I really do want to see!). GIRL HAMLET OMG.
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I never saw enough Smith theatre while I was at MHC. The one production of Arcadia I saw was incredible, and I just love the theatre building itself so much (I have this thing for modernist architecture in theatres.)
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And, yes. This.
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*hem*
But it can never be said enough?
Someone in discussion at the LJ version of my post on it mentioned that LeGuin is probably trying to express how it alters Prospero's relationships with other characters. I suspect this is true, but that LeGuin is too unable to look past the gender aspect (and, based on some comments, personal biases and possibly some internalized misogyny) to actually express that beyond "Starbuck can't be a woman!" and the examples she uses with other Shakespeare characters actually highlight how, of Shakespeare's works, this may be the one best suited for this type of experiment.
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She seems to assume that her examples are things that no reasonable human could support? Okay. First of all, there is a difference between the first two examples and the last-- I do not recommend destroying priceless works of art, no. But actually? If someone made a reproduction of the Venus de Milo and then chipped at it to get to suit modern ideas of beauty, that would be an interesting piece of commentary.
And as for the Hallelujah Chorus? I'm humming it as a waltz right now. It's catchy.
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The thing that kills me the most is that it's a movie adaptation of a play, and that every goddamn production of a play is, to some extent, a transformative work, and a movie adaptation is more so. Theatre is all about this! Every production is different, and takes on its own translation and transformation of the source-- hell, every actor's take on the character within those productions does the same thing. And that's before you get to the wacky stuff, changing up the setting and the era and God only knows what. My drama department did Twelfth Night with roller skates, water guns, and all the musical interludes lifted from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. That didn't destroy the play. As far as I can tell, this is the same damn thing. Yes, making Prospero into Prospera changes the character. So does setting the play in the Victorian era, something I've seen done more than a few times, or setting it in a modern-day high school as I referenced above. It seems to me that Le Guin either doesn't know about these things-- which I would find extremely odd-- or that she doesn't find them off-putting on the same level that she does a genderfucked Prospero.
I really can't express how much this just PISSES ME OFF. Christ. It's fine to make Othello into a high-school basketball player in contemporary America, but changing the gender of a Shakespearian character is a problem? How in the blue fuck is that even possible?
I feel like I run across this attitude the most in literature folks-- my husband, the lit major, likes to annoy me by proclaiming that performing plays is silly and that they should be kept on the page, where they belong-- and much less so in theatre people and, frankly, musicians (I know many different covers of the Hallelujah Chorus, for pity's sake, and a number of them are terrible and a number are magnificent, and the original. still. exists.)-- there's a clear divide that crops up between performance-based arts and the arts where there's this idea that once you have created it, THAT IS ALL, IT IS DONE. Only, not nearly all of those folks either, because how often have I seen professional authors taking old folktales and doing their own take on them, or just melding them into the background while they use their own characters to perform it? How many statues have been carved echoing the Venus de Milo and tweaking her to their own message, how many paintings made that reach back to reference older works in different styles? Art, all art, is a conversation with the past, a discussion of how things are the same and how things are different. It's us redefining ourselves, using the context of the things that came before. How in the fuck does she not get that?
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