Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  “What are you planning to do?” I said. I could hear a hint of anger in my voice.

  “Does it matter?” John replied.

  My eyelids fluttered with my breath. If I were inside that strawberry sunset, I decided, I’d have lunch. I wouldn’t pack much: grapes, a baguette. But I worried my basket might sink into the soil. The painted grass looked too thick and wet, like marshland, to support my picnic.

  “Lean forward,” John said.

  “Just tell me whether it’s plugged in,” I begged, pressing my hands against my stomach.

  But John was right: it didn’t matter. Either way, the next time metal grazed my skin, I gasped.

  SPAIN, AND MY relationship with John, had pulled me away from the fears and neuroses inside my head, but at college, they returned. I reincarcerated myself in my own mind. I knew I wouldn’t fit in at Stanford: I was too dumb, too different, and, although I was the same age as my classmates, somehow too old. I remember that once, during the first week, a new friend cheered in the dining hall that the best part of college was the freedom to skip her vegetables.

  I felt like I was talking to an alien.

  When I arrived at Stanford, I hadn’t read Hamlet and wasn’t particularly interested in it. Pop culture had appropriated the play and stripped it of any insight it had once had. “To thine own self be true” and “To be, or not to be,” felt as rote and useless to me as “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” Hamlet was, at once, too distant and too familiar.

  Nevertheless, college was a good time to get to know that guy everyone talks about. After all, Hamlet is a college student, too. At the beginning of the play, he’s just come home from university to attend his father’s funeral. It’s not a pleasant homecoming. Although his dad has been dead for less than two months, Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, has already married his uncle Claudius—her own brother-in-law. Empowered by this marriage, Claudius has assumed the throne of Denmark. Hamlet suspects foul play.

  Those suspicions are reinforced when the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to him one night. The ghost says that he was murdered by Claudius (who poured poison into his ear), and urges Hamlet to seek revenge. Hamlet agrees to avenge his father’s murder.

  But he’s the kind of guy who overthinks things. He’s a talker, not a doer. He sinks into a deep depression and—perhaps—even insanity. For the rest of the play, Hamlet hesitates to kill Claudius, even as that equivocation, and Hamlet’s resultant frustration, leads to many deaths, including that of Hamlet’s girlfriend, Ophelia.

  Hamlet is a douche bag. In his 1930 essay “The Embassy of Death,” G. Wilson Knight wrote, “that Hamlet is originally blameless, that the King is originally guilty, may well be granted. But, if we refuse to be diverted from a clear vision by questions of praise and blame, responsibility and causality, and watch only the actions and reactions of the persons as they appear, we shall observe a striking reversal of the usual commentary.” Yes, Hamlet is smart. Yes, he’s got a flair for wordplay. But he’s also an entitled, self-important, compassionless jerk. Hamlet is magnificent, but Hamlet is an asshole. He shows no remorse for accidentally killing Ophelia’s father, Polonius, or for intentionally sending his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. When his mother dies, his only remark is: “Wretched queen, adieu.” (Apparently Hamlet is the kind of guy who returns from a semester abroad eager to remind everyone of his newfound multiculturalism by dropping words like adieu.) In both Shakespearean and contemporary literature, we have the unfortunate tendency to obsess about whether female characters are “likable.” Hamlet, meanwhile, gets away with mountains of unlikable crap and remains, for the most part, critically and popularly unscathed.

  I see no reason to love Hamlet as a person, but there are plenty of reasons to love him as a character. He’s a fascinating example of performative self-awareness—that is, he is an innately theatrical figure, whose soliloquies might be more for our benefit than for his own. But Hamlet also has an internal life so vast that we can only guess at it. When he says, “I have that within which passeth show”—that is, that there is more in him than what is publicly apparent—he could be speaking for any of us. We all have things within which passeth show—dreams or details of our personalities that simmer beneath the surface. But in the entire Shakespearean canon, only Hamlet has an inner life so rich with detail that we forgive his considerable shortcomings.

  “I NEED YOU to spank me this weekend,” I wrote to John, in an email. I was stressed out. (Fetishists have as many varieties of spankings as a chef has knives, and one is for stress relief.) But by the time I made it to Los Angeles that weekend, I was way behind on an assignment for my required first-year humanities course.

  “We can’t,” I moaned, when John reminded me of my request. “I have to finish reading this.” I held up Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. It was thick, and I was some two hundred pages behind where I needed to be.

  “Maybe we can do both at once,” John suggested.

  I giggled and rolled onto my stomach.

  “If we can pull this off,” I joked, “I deserve extra credit.”

  In that apartment, John didn’t have a bed frame—just a mattress sitting on the floor. He jogged over to my purse, pulled out my hairbrush, then plopped onto the ground and began to paddle me over my underwear.

  The Spartan King Archidamus—

  The hairbrush landed low, on the sensitive “sit spot” near the tops of my thighs. I winced. I was not even close to being in the right headspace to take wood on my sit spots.

  The Spartan King Archidamus, who led this expedition—

  John hit the same spot again.

  “Hey,” I accused. “You’re doing that on purpose. You know I hate that.”

  John tossed the brush onto the mattress.

  “It’s gone, then,” he said. “This one is for you to relax.” He resumed spanking me with his hand.

  The Spartan King Archidamus, who led this expedition, summoned the generals of all the states—

  Now it didn’t hurt enough.

  “I don’t feel anything now,” I complained.

  “Nope,” John groaned, flopping onto his back on the mattress. “I can’t spank you while you’re focused on Thucydides.”

  I turned my head to look at him.

  “Well, I can’t focus on Thucydides while you’re spanking me,” I retorted.

  John sat up.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have left your homework for the last minute,” he pointed out.

  His face shifted into an expression I knew well: serious, controlled, penetrating. Kinky people call it “Dom Face.” You’ve seen Dom Face before. It’s the expression cops have when they ask for your license and registration. It’s the expression your parents had when you played ball in the house.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” I scolded John. “I’ll never get through this if you’re looking at me that way.” He chuckled and flopped back down onto the mattress. I picked up my highlighter and pointed my face at History of the Peloponnesian War.

  Follow your leaders, paying the strictest attention to discipline and security, giving prompt obedience to the orders which you receive, it read.

  I folded down the corner of that page to revisit later. Maybe I hadn’t given Thucydides enough credit.

  WHAT STRIKES ME most about Hamlet, and Hamlet, is nothing.

  No, really—nothing.

  Whenever Shakespeare repeats a word, I think it deserves special attention. In Hamlet, nothing comes up thirty-one different times. The play begins when a night watchman declares that he has “seen nothing.” Ophelia claims to think “nothing.” Hamlet spends most of the play doing nothing—which might be okay, depending on your opinion, since there is “nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

  I think “nothing” is a fair way to describe Hamlet’s sexuality, too.

  Hamlet is sexually indifferent. He tells us as much whe
n he says, “Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither.” Despite that, I suspect that Hamlet and Ophelia slept together; near the end of the play, when Ophelia goes mad, her comments seem to hint as much:

  OPHELIA

  Then up he rose and donn’d his clothes,

  And dupp’d the chamber-door,

  Let in the maid, that out a maid

  Never departed more.

  . . .

  Young men will do’t if they come to’t,

  By Cock, they are to blame.

  Quoth she, ‘Before you tumbled me,

  You promis’d me to wed.’

  If Ophelia lost her virginity to Hamlet before the play begins, imagine how terrorized she must feel when her father and brother both lecture her on the importance of preserving her chastity. They tell her that she will become worthless without her virtue, but what if that “virtue” is already gone? The possibility makes Hamlet seem that much more cruel when he taunts Ophelia with lewd sexual allusions and tells her to get herself to a “nunnery,” which was Elizabethan slang for a whorehouse. If Hamlet is sexually indifferent, his disgust for sexuality—and contempt for women who display it—seems like a logical (if unforgivable) outlet of that frustration. Hamlet fears that his sexual indifference makes him worthless, so he cruelly punishes Gertrude and Ophelia for their lack of indifference.

  After Hamlet mocks Ophelia’s makeup, her flirtations, and other indicators of her sexuality, he says once again that she should go to a nunnery and leaves. Left alone, Ophelia says: “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword.” I have never seen this moment portrayed as anything but sincere and straightforward: Ophelia, we are told, is sad to see such a “noble” mind descend into madness.

  Why do we so often take that sentence at such face value? Something is wrong with it! Hamlet has a courtier’s eye? A soldier’s tongue? And a scholar’s sword? Those parallels are mixed up. If Ophelia means to praise Hamlet (or bemoan his loss) it’d be more apt to say that he has the flattering tongue of a courtier, the powerful sword of a soldier, and the sharp eye of a scholar. But that’s not what she says. Is the mix-up a first indicator of Ophelia’s descent into madness? Or is it, like the bold retort she shoots at her brother, Laertes, when he lectures her about virginity, a sarcastic hint that this woman has more vinegar than we realize? I don’t think Ophelia’s comment seems insane—I think it seems clever. Hamlet does have the shallow, superficial eye of a courtier. He has a tongue that can wound, just as a soldier can.

  As for the sword of a scholar? Well, well. Perhaps murder is not the only occasion to which Hamlet cannot rise. Nothing kills sex like overthinking it.

  The word nothing has another meaning, too. In Elizabethan slang, nothing was a term for female genitalia. (Men have a “thing” between their legs; women have “no thing.”) When Hamlet taunts Ophelia in Act Three, he sexually harasses her with this slang.

  I read Hamlet for the first time in the Stanford Coffee House, and could picture the scene so easily. Hamlet could be any one of the men on campus—some douche bag in a pink polo shirt, no doubt. He strolls into the CoHo, trailed by a string of friends and wallowing in his own prideful pain.

  He spots Ophelia, the pretty freshman he made out with last week at Exotic Erotic. He can’t attack his mother for remarrying so quickly after his father’s death; she’s still a majority shareholder in his late father’s company, after all, and could revoke his trust fund. Worse, he embarrassed himself in front of the freshman at the smuttiest party on campus all year. Maybe he spilled his beer. So he rips into Ophelia.

  “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?” he says. The jibe prompts a round of cruel guffaws and high-fives from his entourage of bros. Ophelia, hurt and humiliated, can’t reply as she would like. (Her sassy side is reserved for her brother, Laertes—the only man who gets to see behind Ophelia’s façade of respectful obedience.) Hamlet is the president of Sigma Nu, and Ophelia wants to pledge Pi Phi. She knows better than to piss off the most powerful asshole in the Greek system. So she swallows her rage and tries to end the conversation.

  “No, my lord,” she replies.

  Hamlet keeps going.

  “I mean, my head upon your lap,” he exclaims, raising his hands in mock horror, as if Ophelia had imagined him inside her, rather than upon her. The Sigma Nu bros snort with laughter. Ophelia shifts uncomfortably in her seat.

  “Ay, my lord,” she replies. Her eyes are fixed on her latte. But Hamlet won’t let it go.

  “Do you think I meant country matters?” he says, emphasizing the first syllable of country so loudly that heads turn across the room.

  Ophelia turns white.

  “I think nothing, my lord,” she mutters. By now, her protestations are almost inaudible.

  Hamlet bends over the table. His face is close to her own.

  “That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs,” he snarls.

  “What is, my lord?” Ophelia replies. She doesn’t realize it, but she just set up Hamlet’s big punch line.

  “Nothing,” he says.

  It’s a timeless coup de grâce. Ophelia’s sexuality is, at once, both “nothing”—nothing valuable, nothing real, nothing worthwhile—and something used to terrorize and humiliate her. It’s no mistake that later, when Ophelia becomes insane and incoherent, Gertrude remarks that “her speech is nothing” (emphasis mine).

  Elaine Showalter, an academic rock star, nailed Ophelia’s place within the world of Hamlet. “Deprived of thought, sexuality, language,” Showalter writes, “Ophelia’s story becomes the Story of O—the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality to be deciphered by feminist interpretation.” (The Story of O, of course, is the landmark 1954 erotic novel about sadomasochism, dominance, and submission.) As I looked across the campus coffee shop at Ophelia that day, I finally understood, for the first time, that my own story of O could just as easily become a story of zero: one of emptiness, dissatisfaction, and nothing.

  At the far end of the coffee shop, a door opened. A man walked in and ordered four shots of espresso. My face was pointed at my book, and I didn’t see him.

  I wish I had looked up. If I had, I would’ve seen a handsome face obscured by a baseball cap.

  STANFORD SEEMED SO damn normal. I longed to fit in on campus. But I feared that the Quality Inn that John and I disappeared into every time he came to town was the place where I truly fit.

  “Carolyn and I broke up,” Dylan mentioned one afternoon.

  “Oh,” I replied.

  As physical distance and cognitive dissonance chipped away at my relationship with John, my friendship with Dylan only strengthened. I wanted to set him in porcelain. He seemed so perfect—luminous and unfathomable, like the moon. Dylan was handsome, but that wasn’t the point. He seemed so whole, a shot of organic wheatgrass to John’s rotgut whiskey. I had never seen anyone love Shakespeare the way Dylan did. He could devote hours to a single break in iambic pentameter. In that collegiate temple of intellectualism, Dylan’s unblemished exterior reflected the version of myself I wanted to see.

  But John was the one, wasn’t he? If he could understand my dark side so effortlessly, surely he would come to see my light side, too.

  Once, when I flew down to Los Angeles for a weekend, I found something unexpected in John’s apartment.

  “Is this Twelfth Night?” I asked, picking up a book and a thin edition of Cliffs Notes from where they’d been scattered on a table.

  “You’ve been talking about it so much lately,” John said, with an embarrassed shrug. “I figured I should read the damn thing.”

  My heart swelled, like Cloudbreak cresting toward the shore. At that moment, holding that thin yellow-and-black bumblebee book, I couldn’t imagine my life without John.

  And yet, two months later—no, not even that much, not two—there I was in Dylan’s dorm room.

  “You haven’t read Henry V ?” he
said, incredulously. “You haven’t even seen it?”

  “I haven’t gotten to that one yet.” I laughed.

  “Oh, we’re taking care of this right now,” he said, seriously. He took my wrist.

  I looked down at his hand. God, he was so gentle.

  We rented a copy of the Kenneth Branagh film at the library, then headed across campus to the history corner of the quad—one of the classrooms there had a large screen that could be used like a private movie theater at night.

  “How are things with John?” Dylan asked, as we walked.

  I stuffed my hands into the pouch of my sweatshirt and looked down.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “The truth is, I have a little crush on someone else.”

  “Really?” he asked. “Who?”

  I shook my head.

  “No way,” I said. “I’m not telling you.”

  “Is it a freshman?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” I teased.

  “Come on,” Dylan said, playfully bumping into my shoulder. “Just tell me one thing about him and I’ll leave it alone.”

  I sighed theatrically.

  “Fine,” I said. “I like listening to him talk about Shakespeare. Happy?”

  I thought I was being subtle. I would’ve been less obvious with air-traffic-control lights and a runway.

  Dylan had stopped walking and fallen behind me. I turned around to look at him.

  “Is it . . . me?” he asked. His eyebrows were furrowed.

  I laughed and kept walking.

  “You promised to leave it alone if I told you one thing,” I said. “So leave it alone.”

  Dylan ran to catch up with me.

  “Jillian, is it me?” he said again.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “It’s Stephen Orgel,” I said, referring to Stanford’s legendary Shakespearean scholar. (At seventy-something years old, Professor Orgel and I would have made an unlikely couple.) “We’re star-crossed.”

  Dylan ran to stand in front of me and put both of his hands on my shoulders.

  “Stop walking, Jillian,” he said. “Is it me?”