Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  Maybe Helena does want Demetrius to treat her that way. Maybe that’s what he wants, too.

  Or maybe not. Maybe in Helena, and in all Shakespeare—hell, in all literature—I only see what I want to see.

  But, if so, who cares? The people who crowded into the standing-room section of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre for the first performance of Midsummer weren’t academics and noblemen. There are no gatekeepers here. Shakespeare’s plays were, and are, soap operas: designed for mass appeal. We all have our own versions, and those interpretations are as valid as anyone’s. In “Hamlet: My Greatest Creation,” one of my all-time favorite essays, Norman Holland argues that the reader has as much responsibility for the creation of great literature as the author, since literature is nothing without reader response. Characters are like clouds: we all see different animals hidden in them.

  Shakespeare created Helena, but I can too. My Helena is kinky. In Midsummer, she chooses the love she wants. It doesn’t matter what we think of Demetrius or whether we approve of their dynamic. Helena loves him unflinchingly, and for that she deserves our respect. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play about consent, and its message is clear: not only can we consent to sex, we can consent to love. It only demands our honesty.

  In the desert, I looked up to see if Helena was still with me, and she was. I walked over to her and sat down. The goat stayed behind me.

  In Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote that the purpose of theater is to “hold a mirror up to nature.” But it wasn’t until I sat next to Helena that night and looked into her eyes that I felt, with a sudden jolt of recognition, that Shakespeare might be holding a mirror up to me, too.

  If I could find myself reflected in Shakespeare’s world, maybe that meant I wasn’t as unnatural as I feared.

  “I thought I was the only one,” I told Helena. “I’ve been lonely for a while.”

  Helena winked. “The story shall be changed,” she told me.

  Then she jumped up, dusted the sand off her abaya, and ran into the desert, still following Demetrius—determined to change her story, and mine.

  I realized that I could figure out the Shakespeare Thing. That with time, I could even work through the Spanking Thing. But the Love Thing wouldn’t be so easy. Love is a tricky bastard.

  I would need some help.

  IN PLATO’S Symposium, a group of philosophers comes together to discuss the thorny problem of how to understand eros, the Greek word for passionate love and desire. After dinner and wine, these intellectual giants present their theories. First, Phaedrus argues that love inspires bravery. Pausanias, meanwhile, draws a line between love that is “attracted to the bodies rather than the minds” and love that is “inherently stronger and more intelligent.” Eryximachus says that “the body of every creature on earth is pervaded by Love,” which is “the source of all our happiness.” Socrates concludes that love is the longing for a missing good.

  But I return to Aristophanes’s speech most often. He describes an ancient world of three human genders, each of which had two faces and four limbs. These ancient humans also had two sets of genitals: one gender had two sets of female genitals, the second gender had two sets of male genitals, and the third gender had one of each. These original humans always had the support of their other halves, which gave them power. The gods grew envious of that power, so they ripped these humans in half, splitting their essence into different bodies. Today, we lonely half-humans, now with only two eyes and two legs each, wander the world trying to find the other halves of our original selves. We push ourselves together like locks and keyholes, hoping to find the combination that comes closest to what we lost.

  That, Aristophanes says, is sex.

  “We human beings will never attain happiness until we find perfect love, unless we each come across the love of our lives and thereby recover our original nature,” he warns. “‘Love’ is just the name we give to the desire for and pursuit of wholeness.”

  I want to be whole. And who am I to argue with Aristophanes about how to make that happen?

  Now, I don’t have a symposium of legendary Greek philosophers in my living room. But I can look to what I do have, and have always had: a symposium of Shakespeare’s characters inside my head. And I can bring them together whenever I want. Could this Shakespearean symposium teach me how to love? Could they make sense of the whole impossible issue?

  “To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days,” another one of Shakespeare’s characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream warned me. His name is Bottom.

  Of course that’s his name.

  Bottom had a point. But, on the other hand, I’d been sitting on a rock, in my ridiculous duck pajamas, staring at a goat for the better part of an hour. I was in no position to nitpick what was or was not reasonable. (Or, for that matter, sane.) I pushed Shakespeare’s words of caution aside.

  Instead, I looked to his dare from Hamlet: “Stand and unfold yourself.”

  Challenge accepted.

  ACT TWO

  One fire burns out another’s burning,

  One pain is less’ned by another’s anguish;

  Turn giddy, and be [helped] by backward turning;

  One desperate grief cures with another’s languish:

  Take thou some new infection to thy eye,

  And the rank poison of the old will die.

  —Romeo and Juliet, 1.2

  2.1 The Tempest:

  Were I Human

  It’s an odd thing for a teenage girl to fall in love with a fish, but I did.

  My mom took me to my very first Shakespeare play, at the Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, when I was fifteen. It was The Tempest. An actor named David Ivers played Caliban—the half-human, half-fish “monster” who inhabits a magical island. Caliban crept onstage, his body covered with seaweed and boils, and opened his mouth to speak.

  “As wicked dew as e’er my m-m-mother brush’d with raven’s feather from unwholesome fen drop on you both!” he hissed at Prospero. “A south-west blow on ye, and blister you all o’er!”

  My chest swelled with his words, and, for the first time in years, I really breathed.

  From Caliban’s first moments onstage, I was transfixed. I had been an unhappy kid, and I was an unhappy teenager, but Caliban was a revelation. As Ivers played him, Caliban was angry and abused, flinched easily and often, and stuttered every time he said a word that began with the letter m. He slid down my throat, like a living fish, and into my stomach to writhe and thrash against the acid inside.

  It was his stutter that really stuck in my head. Why m? I imagined there must be a reason.

  At the theater’s bookshop, my mom bought me a small paperback copy of The Tempest. It was my first Shakespeare play. I couldn’t wait until we got home to read it, so instead I sat on the floor of the shop and hungrily pawed through each page. As I circled all the m words, a picture came into focus. All of the most important and painful things in Caliban’s life begin with the letter m: Master. Miranda. Man-i’-th’-moon. Murder. Mother.

  RUDYARD KIPLING SUPPOSEDLY said that since God could not be everywhere at once, he created mothers in his stead. If that’s true, God fashioned my mom in his Old Testament image: angry, vengeful, at once capable of breathtaking generosity and fearsome rage. She could match Prospero at his magical best and furious worst. As a child, I regarded her with equal parts awe and terror. My mother was a woman who, before my birth, had walked with gorillas in Rwanda and traveled to China only shortly after Nixon did. She kept a slide projector filled with images that astonished me—animals I’d only seen in picture books, and people who looked unlike anyone I had met on the sidewalks and in the strip malls of Phoenix, where we lived. She wasn’t the kind of mom who baked cookies. Instead, she taught me to make umeboshi rice balls: Japanese pickled plums nestled inside fluffy rice and crisp sesame seeds. We made the rice balls only that one time, when I was six, and the salty plums had made my face pucker and wince at their tang. But
for the next three years, “umeboshi rice balls” was always my improbable answer when people asked about my favorite food. I imagined my mother in green mountains, crouched only steps away from the baby gorilla who had reached out to touch the tiny white stars on her black gloves, like Adam reaching for God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I was so proud to be her daughter. I felt certain that my mother was the most brave and magnificent woman who had ever lived.

  As I got older, she began to include me in her adventures. My mom loved books, and her travels were usually inspired by things she had read. She inserted herself into the physical worlds of her stories, even when those stories took her to the literal ends of the earth. When I was fifteen years old, she read about Ernest Shackleton, the British polar explorer who was stranded with his crew on Antarctic ice floes for almost two years, and arranged for us to sail on a Russian polar icebreaker to Antarctica. A penguin tried to feed me by vomiting on my foot. I watched the nutritious brown gel roll off the toe of my green boot and onto the snow beneath, and knew that my childhood wasn’t typical. My mom made it clear that, in her mind, dreams came true through force of will. She taught me to question conventional values and find my own priorities. Travel was her priority. I have no memories of my mom buying expensive clothes for herself or visiting a salon: throughout my childhood, she cut and dyed her own hair in the bathroom. Her house was infested with cockroaches that terrified me: I found them in my shoes and, once, even under the sheets in my bed. But when I begged her to hire an exterminator, she refused. My mom saved her money for adventures. Like God creating the world, she built for herself the worlds and dreams she had learned in books. “Follow your bliss,” she often told me.

  My mother’s passion was matched only by her frenetic inconsistency. Her rage was chronic. She was incapable of playing low status, even when it would have been in her best interest to do so. When the police pulled her over for speeding, which happened a lot, she refused to apologize and beg her way out of a ticket. Instead, she yelled, threatened, and antagonized the police, telling them that their radar guns were defective or that they’d been incompetently trained.

  This tactic did not work. She got a ticket every time.

  “Can you believe this?” she’d exclaim, brandishing her ticket in the air with the indignant outrage of a red-haired Norma Rae.

  “Yes, I can believe it,” I’d say. “Stop arguing with the police. You’re never going to win!”

  She’d laugh.

  “I know, I know,” she’d say. “But can you believe this?”

  She saw herself as endemically two steps shy of a greatness that had been snatched away.

  “I had the idea to open a coffee shop long before Starbucks,” she insisted often.

  Although my mother and I lived alone, I felt like there were two other people with me in her house. I could never predict which version of my mother would wake up each morning. She reacted to the exact same provocations in terrifyingly different ways. The first time I saw snow, for example, I made a snowball and threw it at her. She laughed and playfully told me to stop. When I threw a second snowball at her, only seconds later, she slapped me in the face.

  “You’re not crying because it hurts,” she said, more than once. “You’re crying because you’re embarrassed.”

  Although we stayed in the same house and school district throughout my childhood, my mom made me enroll in a different school almost every year. By the time I entered sixth grade, I’d attended seven different schools. I never understood it, but I came to expect and even embrace her pattern: every June, my mother found a reason to hate the school I was in, and would move me to another. The following September I’d start at a new school, in a new room of strangers.

  My mom went through distinct but short-lived phases of her own: she had a macrobiotic phase, a mountaineering phase, a Unitarian phase, and more. Her relationships were similarly short-lived: friends drifted in and then, after the inevitable dramatic blow-up, disappeared. I knew my father, who split up with my mother when I was two, but I suspect there might have been a medical explanation for his emotional unavailability: he was incredibly intelligent, but found it impossible to empathize, pick up on basic social cues, or even maintain eye contact during conversations. There were no other relatives. Uncles existed, but I didn’t know them. An aunt existed, too, and cousins. But I didn’t meet them, either. My grandparents died and disappeared without funerals. Family was not a plural concept. My family was my mom.

  It must have been so hard for her. My mom didn’t have any help. She was a single parent with a full-time job, and she hadn’t learned nonviolent parenting techniques during her own childhood. When she was mad at me, which was often, she expressed it with the same uncontrolled impulsivity with which she lived the rest of her life. She flew into screaming rages, saying and doing cruel and unfair things I knew she didn’t mean.

  The first person I loved was also the first person I feared. The implications of that are not lost on me.

  THE TEMPEST IS all about power—having it, losing it, and seizing control of it.

  The play starts with a shipwreck: sailors caught in a life-threatening bout of powerlessness against the elements. As the storm rages, Prospero, a sorcerer and the deposed former Duke of Milan, and his daughter, Miranda, watch the chaos at sea from the safety of their magical island. (Caliban and Ariel, two non-human native inhabitants of the island who Prospero has forced into captive servitude, also live there.)

  Like the shipwrecked sailors, Miranda begins this play about power confronted with her own powerlessness. She is dismayed by the suffering she imagines aboard the sinking vessel, and fears that her father caused the storm. She begs him to calm it, saying: “If by your art, my dearest father, you have / Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.” Then she sadly remarks that if she had been “any God of power,” she would have intervened to save the ship.

  Unlike her father, Miranda is at the mercy of things she can’t control.

  The rest of the play explores the same issues of power and powerlessness. Prospero schemes to confront his brother, Antonio, for throwing him out of power as Duke of Milan. Caliban schemes to murder Prospero and take back the island, which had previously belonged to his mother. In their own subtle ways, every character tries to re-negotiate his or her place in the power structure of the play.

  But I was stuck on Caliban. Like Ariel, he was an original inhabitant of the island. Prospero befriended, educated, and then enslaved him. To explain this dramatic change of treatment, Prospero says that Caliban tried to rape his daughter, Miranda: “Thou most lying slave, whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have used thee, filth as thou art, with human care, and lodged thee in mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate the honor of my child.”

  Caliban doesn’t deny the accusation. “Oh ho, oh ho!” he replies. “Would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me. I had peopled else the isle with Calibans.” In other words, Caliban admits that he had hoped to reclaim power over his stolen island by using Miranda as a sex object to create a race of his children.

  My sympathy and affection for Caliban clashed with my growing commitment to gender equality. I worried at the realization that I cared so much for a character who treated Miranda that way. Miranda was the one who deserved my love and sympathy; instead, I gave those things to her attacker. The literary characters we love can challenge our affections just as much as the people we love—and from the worst perspective, Caliban is an alcoholic, homicidal rapist.

  But there is a more charitable way to understand his character, and I clung to it. Caliban’s native home was invaded by colonizing foreign powers. After initial displays of kindness and even love, they tricked Caliban, took control of his island, and forced him into slavery. Prospero calls Caliban “filth,” and that’s how he treats him. When Caliban insults Prospero early in the play, Prospero threatens to punish him with torturous cramps.

  Miranda, too, is controlled and dominated by Prospero, altho
ugh the control that Prospero exerts over his daughter is less overt. But Miranda and Caliban react to their respective powerlessness in different ways. While Caliban is angry and vengeful, Miranda is careful and calm. It’s no accident that she ends the play in the middle of a chess game—an apt metaphor for the calculated ways she deals with the characters who overpower her throughout the play.

  I am no chess player. The physicality of Caliban’s rage felt closer to home.

  There is something so vulnerable and childlike in Caliban. When Prospero first arrived on the island with his baby daughter in tow, we are told, Caliban didn’t know how to speak—so Prospero, presumably, taught Caliban to speak alongside Miranda. Caliban tells Prospero:

  When thou cams’t first,

  Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me

  Water with berries in’t, and teach me how

  To name the bigger light, and how the less,

  That burn by day and night; and then I loved thee.

  That line always hit me where it hurt. Caliban has memories of a Prospero who loved him and educated him, but he also has memories of a Prospero who says Caliban can only be influenced through “stripes,” “not kindness.” I could have said the exact same thing about my mom.

  My feelings for her confused me. The intense love and loyalty I felt for one version of her clashed with the fear and contempt with which I regarded her other self. The first version of my mother was warm and encouraging; when I was seven or eight, she often sat next to me in the bathroom while I took baths so she could write down the poems I dictated aloud from the tub. She was supportive, and assured me with confidence that my childish poems were wonderful, and that maybe I could even publish one. But the other version of my mother, her second self, once beat me with a dustpan in that same bathroom. Even from an early age, I felt a deep sense of guilt that whenever I thought of that bathroom, it wasn’t the poetry I remembered first. Alongside so many good memories and such extraordinary privilege, it felt unfair and ungrateful that the bad memories stuck.