Shakespeare and Social Justice
“ The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
I had the great pleasure, a few months ago, of getting to see a play at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford(upon-Avon) England. The play was As You Like It, one of the more controversial plays on Shakespeare's docket, yet, one of my favorites nonetheless.
During the play, while I enjoyed many parts of it, I was heartily disappointed in other areas, even to the degree that shortly after I wrote a steaming rant based on my disappointed expectations.
Being the characteristically impulsive individual that I am, I agreed upon request to read my piece aloud to the group I was with. And, for my pains, I received due sentence.
"Christianna," our instructor told me, "to put it plainly, you're a chump."
You should have seen the look on my face when he said that.
It was firstly one of confusion, for I confess, I didn't know what the word meant, but as he went on to explain himself, and the meaning dawned on me, I suddenly felt very like a chump indeed.
The fact was, I wrote very authoritatively on Shakespeare and how he should be performed. I, Christianna Hellwig, 22 years old with a B.A. in music not even literature or drama. What I say really doesn't matter to people unless I can pull together a logical argument based on individuals who have earned the right to speak with authority. The message was precisely what I needed. I can preach my opinions until I'm blue in the face, but unless I have a foundation on which to set them up, my opinions will sink into the dust and matter not one title.
And so I am going to attempt exactly that.
My big problem with the performance was twofold, first off, that they turned the moody, cynical character, Jacques, into a woman, so he became "Madame Jacques," and then, they turned the Shepherd, Silvius into a Shepherdess(Silvia), basically pushing the lesbian, feminist agenda of our time.
There are several technical problems with the latter shift, most blatant being that the Shepherdess Phebe whom Silvius loves, scorns him for Ganymede who is actually Rosalind disguised as a boy. In the end, Ganymede convinces Phebe to marry Silvius when she reveals herself as Rosalind and a woman.
With the Shepherd being a woman, now, there seems no reason for Phebe to marry Silvius, ahem, Silvia, when she finds out Ganymede is a woman.
One might argue that when the Shepherdess discovers she had actually fallen in love with a woman, she could accept the thought of marrying another woman, but that completely changes the intentions of Shakespeare when he wrote the play, as is evidenced when he has Phebe say upon seeing Rosalind as herself:
"If sight and shape be true,
Why then, my love adieu!"
One might twist it as he will, but in my rant I went on to make the statement the Shakespeare ought not to be twisted in any such manner, my exact wording was, "leave Shakespeare alone!"
Sir Ronald Harwood, an An Academy Award-winning screenwriter, author and playwright
echoes my sentiment when he says that to change something like that is "so disrespectful to the author." Harwood is pretty well known for being opposed to Gender blind casting, "It's a political form of casting," he says, "which I'm deeply against." In other places, Harwood speaks more to this dislike with the statements that the author, be it Shakespeare or anyone else(he used King Lear as an example), creates a character with a gender, and that gender cannot be separated from the character.
As for my first problem with Jacques becoming a woman, I simply found the character bland as a woman. To me, the part was so obviously meant for a man. This I say at risk of being called a chump once more, but I think Sir Harwood would agree with me here. I know if I wrote a play with five men and two women, I would be outraged if someone tried to turn one of my men into a woman, or vice-versa. Harwood himself was very particular about not having any cross-genders in his own plays.
I think Mike Lawson who is a writer for the Guardian sums it up well when he says,
"cross-dressed or cross-cast Shakespeare seems more likely to be problematic than enlightening. The two best justifications for the practice are a relative shortage of major roles for women and a desire to freshen up overfamiliar texts. Yet, although Peake played Ophelia to Christopher Ecclestone’s Hamlet at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and was Doll Tearsheet in a TV adaptation of Henry IV, she has far from exhausted the female Shakespearean canon. And, if the governing aim of a production is to make the play seem different, perhaps those involved ought to be doing a different play."
This is true on both counts. There may be more roles for men, but this does not negate the fact that women have plenty of wonderful female roles to choose from in Shakespeare. And I know, if I want to go see something different, I'll do that, but when I go to see Shakespeare I fully expect to see Shakespeare as Shakespeare wrote it, not someone else's concoction of it.
So, what do you all think, is Gender-blind casting legitimate? Have you ever experienced similar frustrations?
I'll mention briefly, one other thing they did that I didn't care for was to cast an Ethnic African man as Orlando and an Asian man as his brother Oliver, while I appreciate the effort to include anyone, I have a really hard time seeing the two as brothers. People tell me I'm supposed to use my imagination, but if we take that route, I might as well sit at home with the script in my hands and read through all the parts myself, rather than pay $45.00 to see it at a prestigious theatre.
Anyhow, there's a revised version of my rant, I'd love to hear anybody's thoughts on the issue, and for now, my friends, in the words of the bard himself:
"If it be true that good wine needs
no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs noepilogue; yet to good wine they do use good bushes,
and good plays prove the better by the help of good
epilogues"
My epilogue comes in the form of a piece of music, since I will take any excuse to throw that in anywhere. I'm sharing with you, in honor of As You Like It a romance by Dvorak, it's one I'm currently learning on the violin, may it speed you on your way.
What fools we all are. And yet, God still loves us and takes delight in us anyway. What a glorious prospect!
~ Christianna
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