Shakespeare in Love Gender Communication

“One is not born but rather becomes a woman.” This famous statement by the French existential feminist Simone de Beauvoir highlights the fact that gender, as opposed to physical sex, is something into which someone is socialized, not which exists as a universal construct (Butler, 1988, p. 519). The 20th century feminist theorist Judith Butler took De Beauvoir’s thesis one step further to argue that gender is a performance not connected to the physical body at all and both men and women can effectively perform the female role.

This notion is not as radical and contemporary as it may seem. As the film Shakespeare in Love highlights, in Elizabethan times, women were considered to be inferior beings, incapable of acting on stage at all. The film is a highly fictionalized version of life on the Elizabethan stage, and its final, climatic scene is that of a young woman named Viola dressed as a boy actor pretending to play Juliet on stage.

The film ultimately suggests that Viola, who is supposed to be Shakespeare’s love interest in the film, gives a more real performance than the highly trained boy actor, simply by virtue of her physical status as a female. Rather than a radical reading of gender, ultimately the film offers a highly essentialist construct. Furthermore, it engaged in pink-washing, or endorsing the heteronormative view of history.

For example, in the film, William Shakespeare is shown writing a sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” to the blonde, delicate Viola. In reality, he composed this sonnet to a man. But in the context of the film, his love sonnet is reduced to a purely heterosexual impulse, just like his urge to write Romeo and Juliet.

In reality, Romeo and Juliet was written for two boy actors, but in the film, his intention is to write it to be played by the woman he loves. Communication is gendered in an essential way, and only true love is heterosexual, male-male love (as was the case in the original context of the Elizabethan, Shakespearean theater and the original performances of Shakespeare’s plays) is affirmed by the presentation of Will and Viola’s love as the only authentic love.

Granted, the film does acknowledge non-authentic forms of heterosexual marriage, such as the arranged marriage Viola is forced to enter, paralleling that with those of Romeo and Juliet’s. But it offers an ultimately conservative view of history and gender, versus a radical, performative view. Literature Review: Performative Gender According to Judith Butler, the notion that a body, much less a gendered body, exists, is a “historically mediated expression in the world,” not manifest reality (Butler, 1988, p. 521).

This is perhaps nowhere more evident in the manner in which gender was expressed on the stage in Elizabethan times, given that female gender was performed by male actors. Although this seems to be the most radical aspect of gender as performance back in that era, it was also considered radical for non-aristocratic actors to impersonate the gentry.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays contain reflections about the irony of actors embodying different roles—both gendered roles (as boy actors play boys playing girls) and also the idea of kings and other people playing a role in society. Butler stresses the idea that identity does not exist outside of performance and all social action is, at least to some degree, a performance.

This is also highlighted by the fact that during Shakespeare’s era, many roles that we consider self-evident truths, such as the existence of queer identities, were not present; there were only same-sex acts, not same-sex identities (Charles). Half of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to a younger man, while half were written to the so-called dark lady, who eventually went on to have a relationship with Shakespeare’s younger friend (their betrayal is also the subject of the sonnets).

This is not presented as an area of sexual contradiction within Shakespeare, although it has bothered some modern audiences. “Men and women did not define themselves as a distinct group because of their sexual practices” (Charles, 1998, p.521). Sexual orientation, in other words, was equally a performative category as gender. One performed same-acts that today would be considered gay; gayness was not a stable identity. This may have given performers additional freedom, however, to embody alternative modes of sexuality, given that sexuality was more fluid and less fixed.

On the other hand, while performance in the Elizabethan era may have contained different performance-based conventions in regards to gender, there were also clearly more conventional ways to represent romance, such as the highly regulated form of the Shakespearean sonnets. But these once again stress the very constructed nature of love and gendered roles in earlier eras; one occupied positions but not necessarily embodied particular characters (Cunningham, 1980).

In fact, it many dramas before the establishment of more fixed sexual conventions, there was a deliberate irony to happy endings, and deliberate irony about the happy ending of marriage in general.

Just as in Butler, “to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of ‘woman,’ to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility,” so is accepting a particular narrative about that body, whether it be romance or marriage (Butler, 1988, p. 522). Criteria for gender as performance: · Sex is different from gender.

· Gender is performed and attached to roles, tropes, and physical exteriors such as clothing. · Gender categories are historically created. · Gender stereotypes vary from culture to culture. Artifact Analysis What is so disturbing about the film Shakespeare in Love is the manner in which it attempts to erase the more fluid concept of gender in the theater of Shakespeare’s time, in an attempt to replace with an ahistorical, fixed view of gender. Sex is different from gender.

The fact that teenage boys were used to represent women repeatedly on Shakespeare’s stage highlights the constructed nature of gender within a Shakespearean context. Gender in a play was attached to the costume of the actor, his role, and his gestures. But Shakespeare in Love attempts to subvert that by making Juliet, as played by Gwyneth Paltrow, to look far more real in the eyes of the playgoers than that of the boy actors.

When she enacts the dying of Juliet, the spectators are overcome with weeping and act as if her death is real, in a way they do not when a boy plays Juliet, even though there is no evidence to suggest that boy actors were inadequate in Shakespeare’s historical reality. In contrast, Butler suggests that it is critical to remember that the body itself is a site of self-dramatization in the manner in which gender is stayed.

“The formulation of the body as a mode of dramatizing or enacting possibilities offers a way to understand how a cultural convention is embodied and enacted” (Butler, 1988, p.525). The fact that Paltrow’s body is considered beautiful and feminine is a reflection of gendered ideals, not, as the movie would suggest, something that is innate to beauty and perceptions of femininity cross-culturally and across all eras. Gender is performed and attached to roles, tropes, and physical exteriors such as clothing.

As can be seen in the performative conventions of Shakespeare in Love, acting is heavily stylized for all actors, both men and women. Acting is heavily stylized. Gender, class, and status is attached to the clothing worn by the different actors in the play. On the other hand, the film attempts to circumvent this by showing more extreme reactions to the performance of the play when the female actor Viola is on stage.

This could and would not have happened during an actual Shakespearean performance, but the clear implication is that the gender-bending nature of the theater is less powerful than a relationship between a so-called real woman and man.

Furthermore, the lack of reaction to the boy players earlier in the film contrasted with the extremity of emotion shown toward Romeo and Juliet (which are embodied by so-called real lovers, in other words, Will and Viola are actually involved in a relationship on-screen, seem to explicitly attempt to deny the fact that gender is performed.

Of course, the fact that the actors playing roles are themselves embodied by actors highlights the absurdity of this notion, since it is clearly not necessary to feel the same emotion as one would feel for a real lover to play it on stage. Indeed, many people in sincere relationships would be very awkward and inferior to real people dramatizing their lives on film. Gender stereotypes vary from culture to culture.

Shakespeare in Love does circumvent some notable gender stereotypes in the manner in which it depicts a young woman who longs to become an actor on the stage, despite the fact she has no role models. It inserts a very contemporary vision of feminism to an Elizabethan setting by showing a woman embodying an empowered ideal of feminism and artistic embodiment that did not occur until much later in British theater history.

This similarly highlights the gendered nature of stereotypes from culture to culture, given that in contemporary culture, it is much more common to stereotype the arts as female rather than male in.