Womanhood is Melted Into Curtsies: Gender Reversing the Language of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing
Originally published at www.blogger.com.
This Fall, I convinced the all-girls school where I work to put on a gender-reversed production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
I spent the summer meticulously changing the names, pronouns, and mythological references of the play, and wondering if any of the audience would really believe that I changed nothing else. The process, especially followed by a harried but intriguing rehearsal process, proved fascinating in expected and unexpected ways. If you would like to read or even use the script, you can access it here. Please let me know if you plan to produce it! I’d love to see it again. As a bonus, I’ve also done the scansion and noted metrical irregularities in the blank verse passages.
The project started as an attempt to show up the toxic masculinity/purity culture on display in the thoroughly charming play by simply putting toxic masculinity on female bodies and purity culture on male bodies — in the hopes that it would make these dysfunctional double standards noticeable to us once more.
The play was hailed as a success by our audience, but it’s much harder to tell if anyone else was actually thinking about gender norms, especially considering that my original Program Note spelling it out was dramatically reduced. (Read the original here!) To be fair, I’m rather long-winded and we pay by the page.
So here I am, months later, free of the page limit, to document the fascinating changes this project made to my beloved Much Ado. This first post will focus on changing the language. For character shifts and rehearsal discoveries, stay tuned for future posts.
Throughout this peace, I will use the lines and names of characters used in our production. I will try to address likely sources of confusion as they come up. Most of the Italian-style names were easy to change from Leonato to Leonata and should be self-explanatory, but there was no remedy for “Beatrice” and “Benedick” so I simply switched their names/roles between them. Similarly, I decided that “Hero” was a gender-neutral name and that “Ursulus” sounded dumb, so I let the cast choose his name (“Maximus” was their final decision).
I Shall Now Undertake One of Psyche’s Labors
If the process of rearranging an iambic pentameter line to accommodate the extra syllable in “princess” rather than “prince” ever got frustrating or double-checking pronouns got boring, I could almost always count on the challenge of updating a mythological or religious allusion to spice up a frustrating afternoon. Note: I did punt on the “prince” and “princess” thing and decided that “prince” was a gender neutral title now.
My favorite of these comes from the quote above. There are two very prominent mentions of Hercules in the original play:
Don Petra: I shall now undertake one of Psyche’s labors which is to bring the Lady Beatrice and Benedick into a mountain of affection, the one with the other. (Act 2, Scene 1(H))
Benedick: She is now as valiant as Xena that only tells a lie and swears it! (Act 4, Scene 1(C))
The Xena references was one I thought of almost immediately upon deciding to take up the project, despite not being a huge fan in childhood (which was my loss — awesome show). It backfired on me in rehearsal, because the actor playing Benedick (the part usually referred to as “Beatrice”) argued that his “How you doin’?” improvised joke line should stay in Act 2 by citing my modern reference to Xena. I…didn’t have a satisfactory answer, so the Friends joke stayed.
The Psyche example took longer but makes me MUCH happier, and not only because I adore the Cupid and Psyche story. It was an underdog story from the start, originating in a satirical Roman novel called The Golden Ass…which feels like a reference to Dogberry but sincerely isn’t. Yep, the beautiful story of how the formerly human Goddess of the Mind, mother of the Goddess of the Soul, earned her place in Olympus is an awkward aside in a story of a horny idiot getting himself transformed into a donkey then having many mostly-unpleasant adventures.
But other than its origin, the Cupid and Psyche story is something that should be much better known than the story of Hercules for the same reasoning in the tweet below:
The book I’m reading just asked “why is the story of the boy who cried wolf told over and over in our society, and not the story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was never believed?” pic.twitter.com/wGQS3YyVQI
— kerra (@kerra_henke) January 1, 2018
In the same vein, let’s compare the base stories of Hercules and Psyche:
Hercules offends Hera by virtue of existing, so she strikes him with madness. In this state, he kills his wife Megara and their children. When he comes to himself, he is horrified and feels tremendous guilt. To win back his honor, he (not Hera) is punished by being given as an indentured slave to a bitter, jealous king who is allowed to give him 12 Labors that the king uses trickery to expand into 15+ (depending on how you count them), most of which involve Hercules using pure brawn to defeat a monster he personally has no problem with, occasionally with the help of a more clever apprentice. Eventually Hercules gets out from under the thrall of the king and has other adventures only to end up toward the end of his life in another marriage that ends Badly and Violently before being rewarded with godhood after death because…famous.
Psyche is so beautiful inside and out that she attracts the jealousy of both her two older sisters and the Goddess Venus herself. Venus orders Cupid to make Psyche fall in love with someone ugly and embarrassing, but when Cupid goes to do so, he falls in love with her himself. Rather than just courting her properly (how hard can that be as the God of Love?), he fakes a prophecy that she should be tied to a tree and left for a monster to devour to save her city. HER FAMILY DOES THIS TO HER. By nightfall, she is alone chained to the tree when Cupid’s servants free her, tumble her off a cliff, then carry her safely to a palace with invisible servants and a semi-invisible husband whom she comes to love and lives with happily for months to years before her sisters come to visit, realize that Psyche’s husband is Cupid but instead convince her it must be a monster and she should check to see. Despite being warned that she must never see her husband’s face (why is less clear), she looks, and sees Cupid and gets so excited that she spills wax on him. Cupid runs off (not because he has to but because this minor injury is terrifying and debilitating to him) to his mother to nurse his wounds. Psyche, devastated, wanders the world looking for her husband (while pregnant) and eventually starts completing four harrowing tasks that the vengeful Venus sets her by winning the help of clever people and objects ranging from a blade of grass to the Queen of the Underworld Prosperina herself. Eventually, she does fall victim to Pandora’s trick and falls into a sleep, at which point other goddesses go wake up Cupid and Zeus and she is rewarded with her husband and eternal life and youth for her labors.
I’m just saying — that’s a much better story, and a much better reference for Don Petra’s deceptive plan to convince Beatrice and Benedick to stop denying their feelings for each other.
We all know the basics of Hercules’s story. He even has a Disney movie of his own! (Where, incidentally, he saves Megara’s life rather than taking it.)
But Psyche? A side story in a tale about a man turned donkey who learns almost nothing from his ordeal. Consider this my small offering, Goddess Psyche, that does not go anywhere near close enough to balancing the scales.
You Seemed To Me St. Francis Wrapped in Thorns / As Chaste As Is the Bud Ere It Be Blown
Psyche took an afternoon to come to me. I spent days figuring out how to replace Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, from Claudia’s wedding rant.
Which is how I confirmed what I suspected going in. There is no male god who makes a big deal about his chastity.
I was not the first person to turn to the Internet with this question, and the message boards were full of suggestions of gods who “never married” as placeholders. But there is no male counterpart — anywhere, in any mythology that I could find — to the three Maiden Goddesses who identify with their virginity. There is no male Hestia throwing himself at Zeus’s feet and begging to be allowed to remain unmarried but still the Goddess of the Hearth. There is no male Athena who feels the need to reject all romance to maintain her myriad accomplishments (although I have always loved that her reason for eschewing romance is simply that she cares about other things more). There is no male Artemis defining herself by what she does not want and violently punishing any who presume to change her mind.
My next idea was to turn to Christian saints for inspiration, and while if you read the title above you realize I eventually hit pay dirt…goodness, I waded through a lot of toxic nonsense first.
I’m afraid I don’t have the patience to track down the Catholic Message Board I eventually found, and I doubt I’d have the patience to read it again if I did. It started out very positively with a father noting that the saint book he read with his young son often identified female saints as “Virgins” but never did so for the male saints. He asked if anyone knew of resources to help him raise his son with the same virtues of chastity.
People’s responses, above anything else, demonstrate that his request made them Uncomfortable.
A few employed faulty Latin to argue (and counterargue) that the word “virgo” was originally applied specifically to women so SHUT UP IT’S NOT SEXIST — CALLING MEN VIRGINS WOULD BE WEIRD — I MEAN ETYMOLOGICALLY OBVIOUSLY!
The faux-progressive ones immediately demanded why his son couldn’t just learn chastity from the female saints — ARE YOU SAYING FEMALE SAINTS CAN’T TEACH BOYS LESSONS? YOU’RE THE ONE WHO’S SEXIST! STOP EXPOSING OUR VALUES IMBALANCE AND JUST TEACH YOUR BOY TO RESPECT FEMALE SAINTS IF YOU WANT HIM TO HAVE FEMALE VIRTUES! GEEZ!
Several acted confused by the prompt, pointing out that any male saint who wasn’t married or who took religious orders of one kind or another was obviously a virgin, SO SEE, IT’S ALL EQUAL ALREADY, DO YOU REALLY NEED ME TO LABEL ALL PRIESTS AND NUNS AS VIRGINS???
Which I felt, incidentally, ignored the “lost years” of many of our greatest saints (male and female) before they had their conversion experiences. But that’s probably the least of the ways in which those posts missed the point of the question.
A few even audaciously argued that virginity was a more important and valued quality in female saints…I’m just gonna leave that one there.
The most helpful posts pointed out lesser-known stories about male saints primarily famous for other feats, like St. Francis. I sincerely doubt the story of the thornbush is why our current pope chose his name. St. Francis did a lot more important things with his life than roll about in a thornbush in order to purge himself of lustful thoughts.
But it’s certainly more visceral than “Dian in her orb”, Goddess of the Hunt sitting up there untouchable.
We are really, really uncomfortable with making virginity or even chastity until marriage an enshrined, celebrated, glorified virtue among boys and men. Across ancient cultures and even today. In our very language, we struggle with the words. Even among otherwise lauded holy men who felt chastity was an important virtue to honor, we tend to expunge that part from the record.
For how this attitude affected our version of the wedding scene, where Claudia attempts to slut-shame our male Hero, see future posts.
Rather Than Hold Three Words Conference With This Troll
Finding a male version of a “harpy” took nearly as long as Dian in her orb. I actually ended up using two in the course of the play. We just don’t have an ancient stereotype of a man who constantly harangues people who are trying to accomplish something great.
Negging, undermining, verbally abusing just for the heck of it…apparently these are inherently female-monster traits.
Except in Japan! Where we have the Tengu!
I confess to not doing much research into the mythology (that link above takes you to Wikipedia) beyond what my good friend Jen Wang (check out her writing here!) told me in response to my open Facebook call for suggestions. I was delighted to learn that not only does the Tengu share a tendency to nag and a reputation as a harbinger of war with the Harpy but also, like the harpy, has avian features and appears as varying degrees of half-avian.
One problem: no one knows the Tengu in Texas.
I used the Tengu reference in a speech in the first act that I felt had enough context to carry the audience through the unfamiliar word (my tactic with Renaissance terms as well). This reference was actually a Fury, which shouldn’t strictly speaking be confused with a Harpy. Sorry.
Beatrice: There’s [Hero’s] cousin, and he were not possessed with a tengu, exceeds him as much in beauty as the first of May doth the last of December. (Act 1, Scene 1C).
But if there are two words for a woman shouting mean nonsense at you in this play, there should be two words for a man who does it, right?
Plus, the use of “harpy” is on a very important end-of-speech line that’s mean to be easily understood and serve as a zinger. “What’s a tengu?” would ruin the flow of the scene.
Beatrice: Will Your Grace command me any service to the world’s end? I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on. I will fetch you a tooth-picker from the furthest inch of Asia, bring you a scale from Cleopatra’s asp, fetch you a hair off the Great Cham’s braid, do you any embassage to the Pigmies, rather than hold three words’ conference with this troll! (Act 2, Scene 1(F)).
The Cham’s beard/braid and Cleopatra substitution for Prestor John’s foot were a great deal of fun.
Troll took ages.
But our image of an internet troll today is unquestionably masculine, and it matches the modus operandi (MO) of the harpy perfectly. Assumed ugly, usually pictured only from the waist up, attacks those who are actually doing things, usually without an actual goal or plan in mind, nasty and personal and unrelenting.
Fair to all depictions of trolls and harpies? No. But our modern world has developed the need for a monstrous name to assign the mostly male monsters outed by the semi-permanent record of the Internet. It’s sadder, actually, that we’ve come to need the male version of this word. But it’s something of a relief that we don’t just assign it as a feminine flaw anymore. That seems like a tiny, tiny first step to addressing the problem.
You can’t fix a problem you can’t admit exists even enough to name it.
But That I Will Put My Bongos in A Glass Case All Men Shall Pardon Me
Moving to a much less serious but still quite vexing situation, I have always felt very awkward dealing with the dirty jokes littered throughout Shakespeare’s plays. Because — never forget! — Shakespeare was writing for the Groundlings. He was a for-profit writer, not an isolated genius. He was a shareholder in his company who got paid by producing popular work that put bums on seats (or on their feet in the Yard).
But when you’re dealing with a “nest of spicery” or “bugle in an invisible baldrick” with young and still-innocent (moreso than they think) students? What do you do?
I have a pet theory that people’s belief that they can’t understand Shakespeare is in no small part because of teaching Romeo and Juliet during freshman year for so many decades. The first three acts of that play are one long anatomical joke that teachers who do understand them (some teachers don’t and shouldn’t be teaching Shakespeare) often spend their classtime praying that the students don’t understand.
Whereas usually they’d stop to explain any Renaissance-y word or phrase, it’s just SO tempting to let Mercutio’s crude humor slide past them as “hard to understand, moving on!”
Not an option in the rehearsal room.
I could, of course, cut the worst offenders in terms of crude humor (and I often do — even without the catholic school concern, those jokes are often the most obscure Renaissance slang-based), but Shakespeare seemed to anticipate censorship (despite censorship not being about sexual innuendo during his time but rather about political dissent). SO many of the dirty jokes in Much Ado About Nothing are load-bearing. They carry so much character information, they set up needed exposition or wonderful lines. The jokes are written to be non-optional to the scene. So I have to leave them in and figure out how to deal.
I can act like I don’t care about the cheap humor or even particularly notice it, but that’s a short term solution.
My sneakiest teach tool for this situation is better used in class than the rehearsal room. That’s when I go through the scene helping translate for them and suddenly announce, “I’m not explaining that one.” This does three very important things:
- Cues the class that the phrase is a dirty joke, not an incomprehensible mashup of letters.
- Allows students who aren’t amused by such humor to skate on past without worrying about missing something important.
- Makes the students who are the opposite suddenly pay attention and sometimes even do outside research (Jackpot!) to figure out what’s going on with the line(s).
I recommend refusing to explain at least once to any high school teacher semi-translating Shakespeare for her class. It’s just the best when the class willingly works extra hard to understand fully.
But the conceit of the gender reversed show gave me a new option. After all, I had to change the anatomical references on most of the dirty jokes we ended up keeping in the script.
The changes made the jokes really noticeable without me having to explain, especially to the students who were studying/had studied the original play in class. The example that forms the section header above did hold up rehearsal for 10 minutes while everyone laughed helplessly, on the down side. I wish I was exaggerating for effect.
The Marcus/Beatrice scene is even more obvious when compared side by side, for the record.
Therefore I Will Die A Man With Grieving
While the above chronicles the pleasant distractions and odd side effects of adapting the script, Benedick’s speech trying to goad Beatrice into challenging her best friend to a duel is the reason I wanted to do the play in this way. Oh yes, this concept predates by MANY years my current job. For ages, I would pitch the idea and immediately shout, “God that I were a woman, I would eat her heart in the marketplace!”
This is why we did the gender-reversed play.
Benedick: O that I were a woman for her sake or I had any friend who would be a woman for my sake! But womanhood is melted into curtsies (courtesies in original), valor into compliment, and women are only turned into tongue and trim ones too. She is now as valiant as Xena that only tells a lie and swears it! I cannot be a woman with wishing, therefore I will die a man with grieving. (Act 4, Scene 1(C))
The obvious layer of this new version of the speech is women doing the fighting. Girl power!
The next layer down is the stupidity of declaring violence the natural pasttime of one gender. Is THAT idea ever deforming our world.
Then we get to the layer of frustrated helplessness — the abject unfairness of putting Benedick in a box that says his fierce spirit cannot become a warrior even for the best of causes.
The sick helplessness of having to beg your significant other to take on the danger you cannot yourself looks different on a boy than on a girl.
And, perhaps most importantly in our world, the final line charging headlong at the stigma against men showing their ordinary, natural, healthy feelings like grief.
Because we put girls in boxes. We deny their capability. Their obvious capacity for strength and power. We strip them of the options of taking their own revenge and make them dependent on the good will of male protectors.
And we strip boys of the right to grief for those they love, cry for situations beyond their control. We have given them only anger. Seeing Benedick reclaim his right to grieve his own pain and his cousin’s wrong was as important to me as the audience not laughing at the very idea that Beatrice would fight his battles for him.
Which, by the way, they didn’t.
Conclusion (for now)
Now that I’ve written it, I’m a little worried that some of that was better, starker, more interesting before explained. Like most jokes and the best stunts.
But I worked hard in directing the show to disprove a friend’s summary that “It’s not a show, it’s a stunt”, so to compensate, here I write about the parts that were, definitely, a stunt. The pointed tip of the spear that I all but concealed in telling the beautiful, terribly fun story surrounding it.
