ext_255706 ([identity profile] felis-ultharus.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] felis_ultharus 2006-08-12 10:34 am (UTC)

I was being a bit facetious -- playing on the language the religious right uses whenever they invoke tradition ("...the way God intended...").

But that certainly would have been his expectation when he was creating the role. And it's an aspect of the play that's rarely brought up because it tends to make people uncomfortable.

Just like Sonnet 18, it's one of those things that's on the cultural map as a kind of monument of heteronormative love, while the queerer undertones are usually erased.

Over the last 300 years, there have been such tremendous efforts to de-queer Shakespeare's works, to clean him up and make him what we'd now call "family-friendly."

During our sonnet course last semester, we actually spent a week studying the heterosexualization of Shakespeare's work -- the changing of pronouns, the erasure of passages and poems (the sonnets could not be reprinted for a period of 150 years), the long-winded explanations in introductions.

All I'm saying is that I don't think it's too much to ask that we occasionally mount a traditional performance of Shakespeare. It would be nice to see it acted that way for once, since that's the way it was acted in his day, and it would be nice to dislodge certain views people have about the play.

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