Antonio's (Happy) Ending: Queer Closure in All-Male Twelfth Night

Antonio’s (Happy) Ending: Queer Closure in All-Male Twelfth Night Chad Allen Thomas t is more or less common knowledge, popularized by John Madden’s IfilmShakespeare in Love, that in Shakespeare’s time male actors played female roles because women were forbidden from appearing on the public stage. Young men (called “boy-actors”) played romantic ingénues, such as Juliet, whereas mature male actors played comic roles and older women, such as Juliet’s Nurse and Lady Capulet. Whatever the historical context, and whatever response these performances elicited from their original audiences, the tradition of the “transvestite stage” (male actors playing female roles) has helped make early modern plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries compelling for scholars of early modern sexuality.1 Shortly after the start of the English Civil War in 1642, Parliament closed the theaters and banned public stage plays altogether; however, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II lifted the restriction against women on the public stage, and cross-gender casting quickly became more or less an antiquated practice in the professional theater. Certainly cross-gender casting remained common enough at all-boys and all-girls schools, and even resurfaced on the professional stage as part of British pantomime in the nineteenth century, but the practice was regarded mostly as a relic of days past. In fact, when Ben Greet directed a professional all-male production of As You Like It at the Central London YMCA in 1920—the first such production in 250 years—he explicitly sought to reconstruct the historical past by capitalizing on the premise of recuperating original stage practices.2 After Greet, the next professional all-male production of Shakespeare did not occur for another forty-seven years; however, it broke with Greet’s proposition that historical re-creation was the main reason to present 221 222 Comparative Drama an all-male production. The National Theatre’s all-maleAs You Like It (Clifford Williams, 1967) toured across Europe and the United States to great acclaim, extolling “the infinite beauty of Man in love—which lies at the very heart of As You Like It.”3 In Williams’s production, “Man in love” is a metaphor for humanity in a spiritually transcendental state, and he argues that the Forest of Arden is akin to heaven on earth, a place that “transcends sensuality in the search for poetic sexuality.”4 Yet Williams staunchly rejected the notion that his casting of men in women’s roles in this romantic comedy might be affirmative of homosexuality; of course, this is not surprising as Gay Liberation would not start in earnest until 1969. Instead, Williams insisted that his production embodied Jan Kott’s idea of “eroticism free from the limitations of the body…a dream of love free from the limitations of sex. It is for this reason that I employ a male cast, so that we shall not—entranced by the surface reality—miss the interior truth.”5 Even though Williams’s production represents a shift from cross-gendered casting as historical recreation to all-male casts in a modern, conceptual context, it nonetheless seems more aligned with the performative traditions of Panto and was lauded chiefly for its comedic effect. For example, in one of his early roles, Anthony Hopkins as Audrey yodeled and sported a blond wig styled in a big bouffant. More recently, however, a return to the practice of cross-gender casting in Shakespeare has taken place, challenging our modern sensibilities, especially in regard to staging erotic possibility, sexual identity, and gender fluidity. As I argue elsewhere, this movement began in the 1970s at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow (or Citz), which reintroduced cross-gender casting as one of several radical aesthetics of performance in an all-male production of Hamlet (Giles Havergal, 1970). Throughout the 1970s, the Citz presented many cross-gender cast productions of Shakespeare’s plays, which, I argue elsewhere, were performed frequently within the context of the Gay Liberation movement. A few years later, in 1991, Declan Donnellan’s company Cheek by Jowl presented an all-male As You Like It that shared in the Citz’s interest in gay male culture, but approached cross-gender performance in an entirely different way—as performative, certainly, but lacking the glamour and flamboyance of the Citz. While the influence of the Citz on Cheek by Jowl is never explicitly acknowledged in the historical record, both companies nonetheless helped develop a cross-gendered Shakespearean aesthetic that is sexy, Chad Allen Thomas 223 provocative, queer, and often emphasizes homoerotic attraction. At the Citizens Theatre, the directors were most audacious in casting a male actor to play the titular Egyptian queen in Antony and Cleopatra (Giles Havergal and Philip Prowse, 1972) and in presenting Achilles and Patroclus as glam rock lovers in a jockstrap version of Troilus and Cressida (Philip Prowse, 1973), more or less set in a gay sauna. Cheek by Jowl, on the other hand, took a different approach inAs You Like It, staging Celia’s devotion to Rosalind as romantic love and offering Jaques’s unrequited homoerotic attraction as the reason for his melancholic outsider status. In the case of Jaques, this makes sense, for the experience of the outsider is an important component of lesbian and gay identity and queer theater; it follows that stressing such experiences might also prove a useful strategy for staging Shakespeare in ways that connote queerness. Since the turn of the millennium, interest in cross-gender-cast Shakespeare has increased exponentially; to point, three British professional theatrical companies have presented Twelfth Night with all- male casts: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (Tim Carroll, 2002—recently revived at the Belasco Theatre on Broadway), Cheek by Jowl for the Chekhov International Theatre Festival (Declan Donnellan, 2003, still touring selectively in 2014), and Propeller (Edward Hall, 2006, revival tour in 2013–14). These cross-gendered productions toured internationally, frequently playing in the same venues; however, their approaches to cross- gender casting, and the results, varied greatly. Some of these productions were replete with queer moments, while others appeared, for lack of a better term, more or less straight. This paper examines the recent vogue for all-male productions of Twelfth Night, and analyzes the ways in which different companies handle this strategy of performance, helping to delineate further the emerging aesthetics of queer-performed Shakespeare. In it, I attempt to make more transparent and intelligible the connection between contemporary cross- gender casting and the possibilities for performing queer Shakespeare. As well, I challenge the assertion that cross-gender casting must necessarily reference early modern models, instead suggesting that all-male performance can allude to productions that are more recent, thereby recuperating the practice as an aesthetic of queer Shakespeare. Thus, I develop an understanding of strategies for queering Shakespeare in performance, which might prove useful in examining and staging 224 Comparative Drama future cross-gendered productions of early modern plays. While I have previously written on the visual impact of male actors playing Viola, Olivia, and Orsino in productions of Twelfth Night, here I am interested in a more explicit, textual homoeroticism.6 Antonio and Sebastian are widely regarded as one of the most devoted homoerotic pairs in Shakespeare, so examining whether (and to what degree) a production seems to de/ emphasize their relationship becomes a useful gauge for registering the queerness of a particular all-male version of Twelfth Night. Consequently, in this paper I focus on how post-millennial all-male productions of Twelfth Night approach Antonio’s attachment to Sebastian, and thereby demonstrate (1) how productions perform the possibility of male-male erotic contact and (2) how productions offer these representations in the context of comic endings (i.e. the promise of marriage). Comic Endings and Irreconcilable Characters Shakespearean comedy is often seen (and frequently taught) as the opposite of Shakespearean tragedy. Whereas tragedy deals with the transition from order to chaos and ends with a death (or deaths, depending on the play), comedy starts in chaos and charts the return to order, characterized most often by a marriage at the end of a play. In his classicAnatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye identifies the “Mythos of Spring: Comedy” as such: The movement of comedy is usually a movement from one kind of society to another. At the beginning of the play the obstructing characters are in charge of the play’s society, and the audience recognizes that they are usurpers. At the end of the play the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystalize around the hero, and the moment when this crystallization occurs is the point of resolution in the action.7 Thus, as a genre, romantic comedy tends to focus on courtship and marriage, charting the progression from homosocial pairs to heterosexual couples, which precipitates the (re)establishment of social order. In Shakespearean comedy, this pattern is easy to discern in such pairs as Petruchio and Kate (The Taming of the Shrew), Orlando and Rosalind (As You Like It), Ferdinand and Miranda (The Tempest), and Orsino and Viola (Twelfth Night), to name a few. On the subject of comic resolutions, Catherine Bates argues, “At the end of courtship’s arduous journey, the chaos finally settles. Couples submit to the laws of their society and Chad Allen Thomas 225 take up their rightful positions as mature householders and sexually responsible adults—as parents, that is.”8 Heterosexual coupling celebrates the continuation of the human species and the promise of progeny. Even if an individual has been especially nasty for the majority of the play, like Oliver in As You Like It or Angelo in Measure for Measure, that individual is often incorporated into the new social order.

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