Gender as Performance in Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Introduction

"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 biological sex, is something into which someone is socialized — not a universal construct that exists naturally (Butler, 1988, p. 519). The twentieth-century feminist theorist Judith Butler took De Beauvoir's thesis one step further, arguing that gender is a performance not connected to the physical body at all, and that both men and women can effectively perform the female role. This notion is not as radical or contemporary as it may seem. As the film Shakespeare in Love highlights, in Elizabethan times women were considered inferior beings, incapable of acting on stage. The film is a highly fictionalized version of life on the Elizabethan stage, and its final, climactic scene features a young woman named Viola dressed as a boy actor pretending to play Juliet.

The film ultimately suggests that Viola — Shakespeare's love interest — gives a more authentic performance than the highly trained boy actor, simply by virtue of her physical status as a female. Rather than offering a radical reading of gender, the film presents a highly essentialist construct. Furthermore, it engages in what might be called "pink-washing," endorsing a heteronormative view of history. For example, William Shakespeare is shown writing the sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" to the blonde, delicate Viola. In reality, he composed that sonnet to a man. In the context of the film, however, the sonnet is reduced to a purely heterosexual impulse, as is his motivation for writing Romeo and Juliet. In reality, Romeo and Juliet was written for two boy actors, but the film frames it as a work inspired by Shakespeare's love for a woman. Male-male love — as was authentic to the original Elizabethan theatrical context — is denied, and Will and Viola's heterosexual romance is presented as the only genuine love. The film does acknowledge inauthentic forms of heterosexual union, such as the arranged marriage Viola is forced to enter, paralleling the fate of Romeo and Juliet. Nonetheless, it ultimately offers a conservative view of history and gender rather than the radical, performative view that the historical record would support.

Literature Review: Performative Gender

According to Judith Butler, the notion that a body — much less a gendered body — exists as a fixed entity is a "historically mediated expression in the world," not manifest reality (Butler, 1988, p. 521). This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the manner in which gender was expressed on the Elizabethan stage, where female gender was performed by male actors. Although this seems the most radical aspect of gender-as-performance from that era, it was equally considered radical for non-aristocratic actors to impersonate the gentry. Many of Shakespeare's plays contain reflections on the irony of actors embodying different roles — both gendered roles (as boy actors played boys playing girls) and the broader idea of kings and commoners performing social positions.

Butler stresses that identity does not exist outside of performance and that all social action is, at least to some degree, performative. This is also underscored by the fact that during Shakespeare's era, many categories we now treat as self-evident — such as queer identities — did not yet exist as stable identities; there were only same-sex acts, not same-sex identities (Charles, 1998). Half of Shakespeare's sonnets were written to a younger man, while half were written to the so-called Dark Lady, who eventually entered into a relationship with Shakespeare's younger friend — a betrayal that is also the subject of the sonnets. This is not presented as a point of sexual contradiction within Shakespeare, although it has troubled some modern audiences. As Charles observes, "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, just as gender was. One performed same-sex acts that today would be labeled gay; gayness was not yet a stable identity. This fluidity may have granted performers additional freedom to embody alternative modes of sexuality.

On the other hand, while Elizabethan performance conventions around gender were more fluid, there were also clearly more conventional frameworks for representing romance, such as the highly regulated form of the Shakespearean sonnet. Yet these forms, too, stress the constructed nature of love and gendered roles; one occupied positions without necessarily embodying fixed characters (Cunningham, 1984). In many dramas written before the establishment of more rigid sexual conventions, there was a deliberate irony embedded in happy endings and in the institution of marriage itself. Just as Butler argues that "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 too is accepting any particular narrative about the body — whether romance or marriage — an act of historical compliance rather than natural expression (Butler, 1988, p. 522).

Butler's criteria for gender as performance may be summarized as follows:

Conclusion

Shakespeare in Love was a popular and widely celebrated film. Yet despite its ostensibly radical premise — depicting a young woman who wishes to join a theater company — it ultimately advances a conservative view of gender that runs counter to Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. Butler argues that gender is not attached to a particular body but is instead created by history and by various external tropes — such as clothing, hairstyle, and relational role — that are assigned rather arbitrarily by the surrounding culture.

The film, by contrast, portrays a woman performing a woman's role as more powerful and authentic than a boy performing the same role, despite the fact that boy actors embodying female characters was the accepted and presumably effective convention on the Elizabethan stage. Even the presence of a man who genuinely loves Viola playing her lover on stage is shown to intensify the crowd's emotional response — including weeping and other heightened reactions. This implies that real emotional investment in the theater matters for authentic performance, but it also suggests that heterosexual relations are somehow more powerful than those enacted between males, as was genuinely the case for all of Shakespeare's plays in their original historical context. In this way, the film strips the original performance of Romeo and Juliet of its historically authentic context alongside its misrepresentation of Elizabethan gender conventions.

References

Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–531.

Charles, C. (1998). Was Shakespeare gay? Sonnet 20 and the politics of pedagogy. College Literature, 25(3), 35–51.

Cunningham, C. (1984). Wonder and love in the romantic comedies. Shakespeare Quarterly, 35(3), 262–266.

Artifact: Shakespeare in Love [Film]. (1998).