felis_ultharus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
felis_ultharus) wrote2006-08-11 05:49 pm
felis_ultharus) wrote2006-08-11 05:49 pm
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On the importance of getting back to tradition...
You know, the modern fashion of having women act the women's roles in Shakespeare means that some of the humour in these plays is lost.
Take As You Like It. The big joke of the play is that Rosalind is a woman pretending to be a man. The play is chock full of double entendres, and in-jokes that the audience gets while the characters are clueless.
But if you remember that Rosalind is being played as by a boy -- since women weren't allowed onstage in England until 44 years after Shakespeare's death -- then you realize the double-entendres are actually triple-entendres, and the whole thing is a lot funnier.
To top it all off, Rosalind takes the name Ganymede. Ganymede, ferzeussakes!
For those of you who don't know, Ganymede was the beautiful teenage Phrygian boy that the Greek god Zeus fell in love with, and kidnapped to to his penthouse apartment atop Mount Olympus.
(Mythology does not record the outcome of the story, but I strongly suspect that he was reduced to a Phrygian-boy-sized bloodstain by dinnertime, as Zeus's violently jealous wife Hera did not like to have rivals.)
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a ganymede was yet another word for "passive homosexual" -- intriguingly, the English Renaissance had a lot of words for that -- so Rosalind's nom-de-drag may as well be "What-a-fabulous-window-treatment."
I also hope I live long enough to see a major-motion-picture production of Romeo and Juliet where Juliet is played by a man, the way Shakespeare intended.
Take As You Like It. The big joke of the play is that Rosalind is a woman pretending to be a man. The play is chock full of double entendres, and in-jokes that the audience gets while the characters are clueless.
But if you remember that Rosalind is being played as by a boy -- since women weren't allowed onstage in England until 44 years after Shakespeare's death -- then you realize the double-entendres are actually triple-entendres, and the whole thing is a lot funnier.
To top it all off, Rosalind takes the name Ganymede. Ganymede, ferzeussakes!
For those of you who don't know, Ganymede was the beautiful teenage Phrygian boy that the Greek god Zeus fell in love with, and kidnapped to to his penthouse apartment atop Mount Olympus.
(Mythology does not record the outcome of the story, but I strongly suspect that he was reduced to a Phrygian-boy-sized bloodstain by dinnertime, as Zeus's violently jealous wife Hera did not like to have rivals.)
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a ganymede was yet another word for "passive homosexual" -- intriguingly, the English Renaissance had a lot of words for that -- so Rosalind's nom-de-drag may as well be "What-a-fabulous-window-treatment."
I also hope I live long enough to see a major-motion-picture production of Romeo and Juliet where Juliet is played by a man, the way Shakespeare intended.
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I'm not angry, or picking fights, I just... don't know how I feel about it.
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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.