Shakespeare, gender, and transformativity

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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

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[eccentric_hat]

I was just thinking about Shylock. Mostly about how he kind of breaks a rule of Shakespearean villains that most of them don't have a particular reason for being so nasty. I read a piece years ago that made the argument that Shakespeare consistently removed the villains' motivation from his source material, so that Iago for instance used to have a good reason to want to get back at Othello, but in Shakespeare he's just kind of nihilistically filled with hate. The few explanations he gives are like "Oh, uh, I think he slept with my wife," which is obviously not true and never comes up again. Or maybe he wanted Othello's job, but then again, maybe not. Whereas Shylock basically comes on stage and says "you bastards, stop spitting on me."

I don't remember why I was thinking about this.

I've only ever read about Christina of Sweden peripherally--when she's come up in music history as an important patron, for example, or in an essay about Greta Garbo as the subject of a film--but I've consistently seen her named as Queen. Swedish Wikipedia is the same, for whatever that's worth.

I think I'm missing your "Sea and the Mirror" connection?

[darkest_light]

Yeah. Even Richard III even has more interest in gnawing on scenery and gloating about how clever he is than he does in having reasons for his actions. The only possible motivations he has is that it's fun to be evil in clever ways. Honestly, it's good for him that he dies when he does because he would be bored to tears by the day-to-day boredom of running a government.

But Shylock. He spends the play trying to do the right thing while the supposed heros run roughshod over his values. Is it any wonder that he's angry enough by the end he's angry and frustrated enough to demand something in recompense? A pound of flesh is extreme, yeah--but I remember being startled when I got to that point in the play the first time I read it because up until then I'd been reading him as a tragic hero.

(I don't know what it says about me that I own a Complete Works of Shakespeare, and also single copies of Richard III and The Merchant of Venice and nothing else.)

Actually, all I really know about Christina comes from Aly's writeup in the program of that production of Hamlet. But there are bits and pieces of it mixed in through the English-language Wikipedia entry. In "Early Life" it says "Her father gave orders that Christina should be brought up as a prince,[4] and Christina took the oath as king, not queen, giving rise to the nickname the "Girl King". " And in the "Queen Regnant" section it says "Although she is often called "queen", her father brought her up as a prince and her official title was King." The rest of the article, though, blithely continues calling her "queen."

The "Sea and the Mirror" connection is mostly "Auden rocked my Tempest-reading world so hard a change in Prospero's gender can't touch it."

[darkest_light]

Heh, clearly there was some sloppy editing in that middle paragraph.

[eccentric_hat]

The Wikipedia part of this exchange is kind of meta to me because I wrote a paper about narrators last semester that used Wikipedia as an example of a narrator-less text, and this is a perfect example of what that means. I'd one hundred times rather have a text that was by somebody and explained the author's use of terms. Anyway--the impression I've been able to form is that she took the position of the king and most of her contemporaries would have called her Queen, and that's how she's generally referenced today, now that we have a concept of regnant queens.

I have mixed feelings about "The Sea and the Mirror" as criticism--I like the poetry very much, but I wouldn't like The Tempest all that much if I read it the way Auden apparently read it. Caliban and Ariel can be aspects of the human spirit, but I find it an unsatisfying and kind of simplistic play if that's all they are. I'm guessing Auden did too and that's why he set out to fix it. But I wouldn't particularly want a production (or film) of the play to take his interpretation. The play's got more in it than that.

All that said, I wonder if this film just isn't produced convincingly enough to present a convincing Prospera. I felt like Across the Universe was more ambitious than successful and have been a little wary of what Taymor could pull off with this film. But now I'm breaking my personal rule about passing judgment on things I don't know anything about.