Wednesday, April 20, 2011
It’s Time to Bring Shakespeare Out of the Closet
A fairy queen falls for a man called “Bottom” who, thanks to some mischievous magic, has the head of a donkey. A woman falls in love with a man who is actually a woman posing as a man.
Both are plot developments from works of William Shakespeare that might be considered unusual or “queer”—unless you happen to be a historical traditionalist.
Queer theory is a form of literary criticism through which texts are interpreted from a queer perspective (mostly focused on desire, power, identity, temporality, and language). Many scholars say queer theory is not relevant to Shakespeare’s works because he died on April 23, 1616—nearly 200 years before homosexuality and heterosexuality were “institutionalized” around 1800.
But Madhavi Menon, editor of the book Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare (Duke University Press, 2011), says the gap between Shakespeare and queer theory can be bridged if queer theory adopts a more broad definition of “queer.”
Rather than referring exclusively to homosexuality, “queer” should encompass everything and anything odd, eccentric, and unexpected, such as the fairy queen Titania falling in love with the donkey-headed Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or King Lear’s complicated take on the limits of the human.
Menon, a literature professor at American University, says queer theory’s hitherto straight and narrow definition of “queer” and the notion of Shakespeare as sacrosanct (a phenomenon she calls “Shakesfear”) disregards the Bard’s reputation as an author who speaks across time.
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