Gay Characters in Shakespeare

[Gilbert]

Among the great riches in Shakespeare is the potential for a range of sexual orientation among many of his characters. I remember reading about a production of Othello long ago at the Old Vic with Olivier and Richardson (I think) in which they alternated as the Moor and Iago. The critic felt that Olivier's take on Iago was of a frustrated, repressed gay man set to destroy the man he loved and couldn't.
A novel I've written has just been published that combines two characters named Antonio- one from "Twelfth Night" and the other The Merchant of Venice, and invents his life. Leaning on Harold Bloom's idea in "The Invention of the Human" that we see in Shakespeare's plays the first iteration of most every personality, Antonio is a man we'd recognize as gay. He must flee religious hysteria in Florence, becomes a pirate, an itinerant actor, and a successful merchant. And there's lots of hot sex. It's just out, and already has gotten a great review, I'm happy to report.

[Bryn]

Great idea for a novel, Gilbert. We always suspected they were both named Antonio for a reason--to clue us in to what they have in common. The Twelfth Night Antonio went to my heart early and has stayed there.

Even though I diverge from Harold Bloom again and again, that's such a terrific book: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. How about his chapter on 'The Two Noble Kinsmen' for Shakespeare's gay themes?

[Gilbert]

I'm delighted that another review came out today, the official pub date of "Fortune's Bastard". Here's the link:

http://blog.outinprint.net/2013/03/07...

[Gilbert]

Bryn wrote: "Great idea for a novel, Gilbert. We always suspected they were both named Antonio for a reason--to clue us in to what they have in common. The Twelfth Night Antonio went to my heart early and has s..."

Bryn-
I wanted to reply before now to your post, but work took precedence. I'm back home now, and just re-read Bloom's Two Noble Kinsmen chapter. Your insight is apt- it is the ambivalence that Bloom finds more fully conveyed in Two Noble Kinsmen that I find in many, if not most, of the plays. And I really appreciated Bloom's point about the passion between young women. It is a glaring failure of empathy that allows us so easily to think of those passions as not nearly as heated or as substantial as the marriages that so many of these plots hinge upon. I wanted to flesh out (with the emphasis on "flesh") the male homoerotic that I detect in so many plays: Horatio's love for Hamlet, Mercutio's love for Romeo, which is what I think he's talking about here, in the Queen Mab speech:
I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.

I think the frozen bosom of the north is Romeo's inability to recognize Mercutio's love for him, and the dew-dropping south is Mercutio's melancholy, which he finally cures by committing suicide by dueling Tybalt. We might go on, citing further examples....

[Bryn]

Mercutio, yes; he struck me thus and fascinated me, but I never understood that Mab speech. I'll ponder your interpretation.

I too see queer characters dotted through Shakespeare. Always found them instinctively, but my eyes are opened to them more after I sat down to read the Sonnets, and Two Noble Kinsmen, places where he simply talks outright. I can't doubt he was what we call gay, but his treatment of sexuality -- the range thereof -- I feel I am only beginning to explore. And he's Shakespeare, he has such a lot to say.

[Shakespearegirl]

Do you think society in that day would accept those characters?

[Gilbert]

Shakespearegirl wrote: "Do you think society in that day would accept those characters?"
We have some historical data to approach that question. Some scholars assert that there was no such group as "homosexual" or "gay" before 1870, when a Swiss physician named Westphal coined the term "homosexual." We know that there were laws and terrible punishments for certain sexual behaviors, including sodomy (a very broad term that covered just about anything that was not missionary position coitus) and other things.

I read a book called Homosexuality in Renaissance England by Alan Bray, that describes the records a historian found of men and boys arrested for sexual misconduct. There are similar books about Renaissance Italy: Forbidden Friendships, by Michael Rocke, about Florence, and one about Venice, the name of which escapes me. Society may not have officially accepted gay people, but neither was there a group that self-consiously called themselves gay. There have been laws about sexual behavior as long as there have been laws. But the point that MIchel Foucault makes in his History of Sexuality, is that the laws about sex and the punishments were directed against behaviors that everyone was susceptible to, not against a particular group of people. I hope this helps.

There are many books about homoerotics in Renaissance literature. There were surely men who had sex with men, and women who had sex with women. Their traces are left not only in the classic literature we know (like the Sonnets of Shakespeare, see Joseph Pequigney's "Such is My Love" for a detailed analysis of the sonnets addressed to the beautiful youth, but in drama and fiction consistently up to the present.

[Erin]

I do think we moderns need to be careful about reading too much homoerotic subtext into Shakespeare's works. Elizabethan England is so far removed from us in time as to be a different culture in some respects -- some expressions that might come across to us as homoerotic today likely would not have in Shakespeare's time. I'm all for finding new relevance in Shakespeare, but too much hunting for subtext can warp a play out of all recognition.

[Gilbert]

I'm interested in your warning about being careful, as if there is some danger to be avoided. What is that danger? Too much imagination? Too much freedom of thought? That the dominant- heterosexually privileged- order might be disturbed? These are, after all, works of fiction, and the meanings change with each moment of their interpretation. What is the value of making a claim for one truth, one way of understanding the magnificent manifold in Shakespeare?
Perhaps more important, I don't think that hunting for subtext is a particularly valuable effort in Shakespeare. What I think of as subtext in acting or psychoanalytic terms is a motivation that is beyond the awareness of the character. For this reader, I don't think the sonnets to the beautiful young man require any resorting to subtext to understand a passionate same-sex attachment. Nor do I find the passionate attachments between male characters in the plays only show up in subtext. It is often right there on the surface. Antonio, the Merchant of Venice, is the only character who ends up alone, and yet he makes what to my ears are mature declarations of love toward Bassanio. Indeed, he faces death because of his love. The young lovers come across as, well, a bit less steadfast, a bit less loving.
There are plenty of fascinating things that show up with an emphasis on one aspect of the surface. Twenty or so years ago, in one of Kevin Kline's two Hamlets at the Public Theater, this one directed by the late Romanian director Livieu Ciuli, Richard Frank, now, alas, gone, played Horatio as clearly in love with Hamlet. The interpretation was fully supported by the text, and deepened Horatio's role in the play, adding depth and texture. Why would this not be of value? I read about Olivier interpreting Iago as suffering from a denied, frustrated erotic attachment to Othello in a production at the Old Vic a long time ago. Further exciting possibilities have emerged when homosexual feelings are found in interpretations of the relationship between Leontes and Polixenes in The Winter's Tale, for another example.
We know that there was enough same-sex behavior in Shakespeare's time that laws had to be passed to police it. The genius of Shakespeare's plays is that most everything human can be discovered there.
Yet this is not to make any claims to "truth" (yes, in big, post-modern scare-quotes). I'm all for freedom, not for policing the boundaries of what can be found in a work of art. The judgement of what might warp a play out of all recognition surely depends on the imagination of the audience member.
Again, I wonder, what is the danger about which we must be "careful"?

[Stephanie]

My English teacher had mentioned the whole "Iago loved Othello" and yes, there is evidence text to prove it including the dialogue in which Othello and Iago plan to murder Desdemona. That scene in a way made me think about a marriage ceremony.

[Gilbert]

What a fascinating association. You've sent me back to the text- I want to look at it with this in mind. Thanks!

[Stephanie]

What about the players in Midsummer?

[Stephanie]

King Lear's fool?

[Martin]

Gilbert,

don't know if you're following discussions here, but I have for some time been interested in S's pairing of a Sebastian with an Antonio. You mention Merchant of Venice and 12th Night, but equally The Tempest (the current group read) has such a pair ... I'm not sure you can trace character similarities across the Antonios, or the Sebastians, but they do have a common idea: Antonio is older that Sebastian, and acts, or wants to act, as his mentor.

But I wondered if you'd spotted the following:

Sebastian ("Sebastos") is the Greek form of Augustus; Antonio is of course English Antony, or Latin Antonius. Similarly therefore Octavian and Antony in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra make a 4th and 5th pairing of these names.

I realise this idea is rather fanciful ...

(Would you be interested in joining the read of The Tempest?)

[Gilbert]

Martin-
I had thought of trying to include the Antonion/Sebastian pair from The Tempest in my book, but the Antonio in the Tempest is such a bad guy, so poisoned with resentment, and somehow I placed this story after the Merchant section, (probably too married to the order of the plays' composition) so I couldn't make it work. Thank you for pointing out the Antony and Cleopatra link.
I had thought of joining the Tempest discussion. I love the play, and I played Ariel just after drama school- it was the production for which I earned my Actor's Union card. So I was intrigued by the concern about Ariel's gender- (and whether the gender of the actor playing a role need conform to the gender of the character they play. Anyway, I'm traveling at the moment, and preparing to teach a course in September, so I thought I'd not join the discussion, but peek in from time to time.
Thanks so much for this message-
Gil

[Candy]

I have just now seen and caught up with this discussion. I love how it has been re-visited over a year since original posting.

Gilbert I will have to read your story I think.

I tend to want to look at the idea of homoerotic or homosexual in a spectrum sort of setting. I think it's easy to either label a character gay, or label them a man-hater, woman-hater, interloper.

There is a theory that Shakespeares sonnets have a love triangle with two men and a woman, no?

Ah here is something...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_144

I think the spectrum of friendship and love is important. Sometimes homoeroticism can be a metaphor for self-love...or learning to love oneself. As much as I love "hot sex" sometimes there are other layers of meaning between relationships in fiction. For example, the Sonnet 144 may be a love triangle. It could also be a struggle within the narrator to their own "evil" or darkness" their own innocence, their own loss of power within a relationship.

I often think that having a variety of scenarios with mirrored or doubling is a device in order to put the moral responsibility within the audience as an active part of storytelling.