I have a phobia of Shakespeare professors. I think they are a cult.
There is ample evidence to support this. Both of my Shakespeare teachers were creepy, lecherous (in a creepy way you see), had lots of facial hair, and wore purple.
They also were intellectual snobs and didn’t read much beyond Shakespeare, but that’s off-topic.
The wearing purple seals the deal. Shakespeare Nazis are born, not made. They are like a race unto themselves.
One thing that always bothered me about my Shakespeare course I took in senior year is that the Prof-we shall call him Mr. Y because I forget his name-spent a ridiculous amount of time emphasizing the fact that little boys played the parts of the ladies in ye olden tymes.
He drew lots of conclusions from this, and although no doubt some of it is based on evidence of some sort, such as the fact that the plays were popular in Shakespeare’s time, etc, his main point was: we are all naturally attracted to little boys.
According to Mr. Y, the audience would watch these boys play girls and then would ‘realize’ that there is no difference between a lovely lady and these young men. Also, Shakespeare liked little boys, says Mr. Y, because his sonnets are about them and so that makes it okay too.
Mr. Y said he was trying to open up our eyes to the possibility that cultural progress is a myth and that the social mores of different time periods MAY IN FACT BE more tolerant and open-minded than even our own time (hint hint hint Elizabethan England hint hint hint).
Anyway, this always bothered me for many reasons. The sonnets thing can be easily dismissed, first because its a little specious to assume that any possible fetishes of Mr. Shakespeare informed his talent as an artist, and second, because I fucking hate the sonnets.
But this thing about the actual performance always bothered me. Because I am willing to accept that the shows in Shakespeare’s time were indeed successful, and popular, and appreciated, in spite of the lack of women, other than Gwyneth Paltrow, but nobody knew she was a woman.
And there sure is a lot of gender-bending in his comedies.
So did these audiences really fall for these boys and men and apes from the zoo dressed as Juliet?
I guess, according to Mr. Y, there were a couple boys in particular who were great at playing women and famous fancy parts were written for them, like Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing” and stuff.
I think part of what Mr. Y thought was so intriguing was that a boy dressed a woman could most easily accomplish the same thing as a woman dressed as a woman (ergo, a woman). So the plays you see today are no better than the old ones, and maybe even worse, since they were not written to be played be actual women.
But then I remembered: the negro leagues!
Yes, in our history, we have had institutions that exclude qualified people for things.
Let us remember that in Shakespeare’s time women COULD NOT be in the theater.
Just like eligible white males could not play baseball in the negro leagues which unfairly prevented them from playing with such legends as Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell.
It was only when Jackie Robinson begrudgingly consented to play for the Dodgers that African-Americans saw white folks as equal enough to join them in one major league for our great pastime.
Slightly more seriously, the equally significant influx of Latin-American baseball stars, and now even Asians like Ichiro Suzuki and Hdeki Matsui continue to add talent to the game, and many say that players who came before such changes to the landscape of baseball had a tremendous advantage in the inferior talent pool.
Yet nobody takes away Babe Ruth’s accomplishments, or Ty Cobb (even though he was a racist) or “The Big Train” Walter Johnson. Segregated baseball is still considered ok baseball, even though everyone agrees now things are done better.
Anyway, this is a terrible example. Nobody was ‘posing’ in black face in the pre-1940s MLB, it was simply a smaller talent pool. It would be as if Shakespeare wrote plays WITH NOT FEMALE ROLES AT ALL.
But then I thought of an even better example: STAR TREK. This is a perfect example because Mr. Y was also a huuuuuge Trekkie, maybe because of the Patrick Stewart Shakespeare connection.
Anyway, the original Star Trek series was made before space exploration and alien conquest, so they could not use real Klingons. The actors playing Klingons were just very obvious human actors with shitty makeup on their forehead. They looked vaguely ethnic, but not alien.
But by the time they made the Next Generation series, and the Star Trek movies, they found actual Klingons to play the roles. A Klingon named “Worf” was cast as one of the new crew-members of the Enterprise D, and other Klingons were able to perform as well.
Compare:
You see, people still appreciate the old Star Trek series, because of the fun plot-lines and hippy sensibility, and they did work, in a campy sort of way, but would anyone argue that the series might not be better served by having real Klingons playing Klingon roles?
All of this is just an attempt to satisfy myself that the sexiest women are still women and not little boys. And that Shakespeare plays are probably better now than they were so many years ago.
Culture Time 