Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  “That strain again!” he called out to the musicians.

  “It had a dying fall,” Orsino explained, turning back to me. “O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets.”

  “Slide the hookah back over here,” I replied.

  And that’s how I entered my twenties: languishing with Orsino in a haze of sexual dissatisfaction, self-pity, and hookah smoke.

  Until one night when I wandered into the desert and met a goat and a girl, and the fog began to clear.

  TWELFTH NIGHT IS so hot.

  If Shakespeare was determined to derail my mission to unsex myself in Oman, he could not have chosen a better play than Twelfth Night. It touches my specific erotic quirks to an absurd degree.

  After Viola washes ashore in Ilyria and disguises herself as a man named Cesario, she gets a job as a servant to Duke Orsino. It’s the relationship between Orsino and “Cesario” that slays me. I can’t get enough of it. They have such an immediate connection that after only three days, Orsino tells Cesario: “I have unclasp’d to thee the book even of my secret soul.”

  As I mentioned, I’ve always been seriously drawn to platonic relationships between men that include a disciplinary element of power imbalance. It’s a problem: there is no clear stand-in for me in my own fantasies! So it makes sense that I adore Twelfth Night. In Orsino’s relationship with Cesario, Shakespeare solved my dilemma: it’s a platonic male-male relationship—in which a woman gets to participate!

  On top of that, she’s his servant! At one point, he scolds her! And—

  Excuse me, I need to go . . . run a bath.

  But behind Twelfth Night’s amazing (and, I concede, very specific) erotic potential, there is an undercurrent of tragedy. Viola is mourning the presumed death of her twin brother, Sebastian, from whom she got separated during the shipwreck. Duke Orsino is in love with a woman named Olivia, who is mourning a dead brother, too. Romantic affection in Twelfth Night is, for the most part, unrequited: Viola wants Duke Orsino, who wants Olivia. Malvolio, a steward in Olivia’s household, also longs for Olivia. And if you ask me, Antonio, the sea captain who rescued Sebastian from the shipwreck, seems to have more-than-platonic affection for the man he saved. In Twelfth Night, everyone is longing for something.

  I was longing for something, too. I just didn’t know what that was.

  I began to lurk around the English department at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Muscat. I wanted to weasel my way into a Shakespeare class and listen to Omani students share their interpretations of some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays. There was nothing innovative about my plan. People all over the world, from a wide variety of backgrounds, have found ourselves in Shakespeare. The Arab world is no different. Shakespeare made his Middle Eastern debut in 1884, when the first Arabic translation of Othello was performed in Cairo. That production sparked a widespread interest in the region in Shakespearean literature, and inaugural Arabic productions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet soon followed.

  “In Shakespeare, there is doubtless something Arabic,” wrote the celebrated Lebanese poet Khalil Mutran. “Has he read our language or was it transmitted to him in some accurate translation? I don’t know. But between him and us there are puzzling and numerous common features. . . . On the whole, there is in the writing of Shakespeare a Bedouin spirit which is expressed in the continuous return to innate nature.”

  Mutran was not the only person to sense a “Bedouin spirit” in Shakespeare’s work. Iraqi scholar Safa Khulusi argued for the “Arabness” of Shakespeare, and the Lebanese writer Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq even claimed that Shakespeare was actually an Arab man named “Sheik Zubayr.” The Algerian scholar Nasib Nashawi drew comparisons between Othello and a similar work by the Syrian poet Dik al-Jinn, and even questioned whether Shakespeare might have had access to al-Jinn’s work. These connections were also recognized outside of the Middle East: Anthony Burgess, for example, theorized that an Arab woman was the “Dark Lady” of the sonnets, and Frances Yates argued that Shakespeare had read Latin translations of Arab science.

  But although scholars in the Arabic-speaking world have drawn parallels between their own cultures and Shakespeare’s literature for a long time, there is also a long history of white people stomping around the world on campaigns to culturally dominate the planet. One British colonial officer described the intent to suppress Indian culture by forming “a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.” The world doesn’t need more attention paid to yet another white guy from the most dominant colonial power in history, right? The Complete Works of William Shakespeare has been translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible; it does not suffer from underexposure, to say the least. Literature can empower, but it can also oppress and suppress. I worried that I was a virus, parachuting into a foreign country for a bit of literary-themed cultural tourism.

  After I begged my way into the student body of an SQU Shakespeare class, more challenges emerged. Language differences were the first problem, of course. Shakespeare’s English can be difficult even for native speakers to understand. The Omani students, all of whom spoke Arabic or Swahili at home and had learned English as a second or third language, struggled through Shakespeare’s unfamiliar words. But the language barrier wasn’t my biggest problem.

  My biggest problem was that the women thought I was a spy.

  Specifically, one woman, Khalila al-Khatib, thought I was a spy. She shared her theory with her classmates.

  “The girls say it’s okay for you to sit in on classes,” their Shakespeare professor told me, with an apologetic smile. “But they won’t talk to you. They don’t trust you.”

  It was an intense time to be an American in the Middle East. The United States had invaded Iraq only three years earlier, and photos of torture at Abu Ghraib, reports of abuse at Guantánamo Bay, and the mounting civilian death toll in Iraq had provoked outrage around the world. Omani men and women are hospitable and friendly, and only one person ever questioned me about my political beliefs while I lived there. But no one forgot my nationality. I wasn’t just a person who wanted to ask conservative Muslim women about their romantic lives: I was an American who wanted to ask conservative Muslim women about their romantic lives.

  Therefore, of course, I was a spy. No one wanted to talk to me.

  Then one afternoon, when I was leaving SQU to go home, I strolled into an elevator and hit the button to go downstairs.

  The elevator reached the ground floor, and the doors opened.

  Khalila was on the other side, leaning against a rail with her arms folded across her chest. She tipped her chin down to peer at me from above her black sunglasses.

  “You do realize you’ve been riding the men’s elevator all day, right?” she said.

  Oh.

  After that, the spy rumor disappeared. With Khalila’s endorsement, I was no longer a threat; I was just a dumb foreigner.

  It was easy to see why Khalila was so popular with the group. She had boundless energy, laughing and telling stories and joking about handsome boys on campus. Unlike most of the students in her Shakespeare class, Khalila’s family was Zanzibari and spoke Swahili at home. She shrieked and clapped her hands with delight when I surprised her with some of the Swahili phrases I’d picked up in al-Azaiba.

  “You want to know about love, I think,” Khalila once teased me, smiling. “Maybe that is why you come here to talk about stories of love.” With a grin, I reminded her that she was taking the same class about “stories of love.” She laughed.

  Every woman I interviewed gave me permission, in writing, to use her remarks both in my undergraduate honors thesis and in any subsequent writing I might do. I also protected each woman with pseudonyms. Gradually, my fears about the potential negative cultural impact of this work ebbed, more or less. The women who volunteered to talk with me were truly enthusiastic. Their love for Shakespeare was familiar and undeniable. More
than once, text messages appeared on my phone in the middle of the night to report some midnight epiphany about incest in Hamlet or intercultural marriage in Othello. The Omani students and I were all citizens of Shakespeare’s world; his was our shared language.

  We focused on three plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello. From the beginning, it was obvious that Khalila and the other Omani women understood the major female characters—Ophelia, Juliet, and Desdemona—on a more intimate level than I could. For example, when Juliet must choose between the man she loves (Romeo) and the man her parents want her to marry (Paris), the Omani women could directly relate to Juliet’s dilemma. Most of them had to choose between arranged marriages and “love marriages” in their own lives, too. I understood Shakespeare’s English language with native proficiency, but the Omani women understood Shakespeare’s cultural language with native proficiency. It was a perfect fit.

  WHEN VIOLA FIRST decides to seek employment in Duke Orsino’s court, she boasts that she will be able to “speak to him in many sorts of music”—and that’s exactly what she does. Viola, still in disguise, can’t describe her love for Orsino directly. So she invents a sister who doesn’t exist to hum the love song Viola cannot sing:

  VIOLA

  My father had a daughter loved a man,

  As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,

  I should your lordship.

  DUKE ORSINO

  And what’s her history?

  VIOLA

  A blank, my lord. She never told her love,

  But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,

  Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,

  And with a green and yellow melancholy

  She sat like patience on a monument,

  Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

  We men may say more, swear more: but indeed

  Our shows are more than will; for still we prove

  Much in our vows, but little in our love.

  DUKE ORSINO

  But died thy sister of her love, my boy?

  VIOLA

  I am all the daughters of my father’s house,

  And all the brothers too: and yet I know not.

  Viola’s body isn’t the only thing that needs a disguise: her speech does, too. She can’t tell Orsino that she loves him, so she describes her feelings through this made-up sister.

  My Omani friends and I did the same thing. Shakespeare was a vehicle we could use to talk about love, sex, marriage, and romance—subjects which otherwise would have been taboo. Direct conversations were out of the question. Whenever I asked Omani friends a question about romance—or, God forbid, sex—they usually changed the subject. But Shakespeare was the perfect way to circumvent cultural norms and talk about sex.

  And I do mean sex. Shakespeare was not born in a puritanical time. In Twelfth Night, Malvolio reads a letter that he believes was written by Olivia, the woman he loves. To prove his theory, he analyzes her handwriting. Imagine his words read aloud, as Shakespeare intended them to be heard (emphases mine):

  MALVOLIO

  By my life, this is my lady’s hand. These be her very

  C’s, her U’s, aNd her T’s, and thus she makes her

  great P’s. It is, in contempt of question, her hand.

  In case anyone missed the joke, Shakespeare repeats it in Sir Andrew’s next line:

  SIR ANDREW

  Her C’s, her U’s, aNd her T’s: why’s that?

  Twelfth Night is not the only play with a Shakespearean cunt pun: as I mentioned before, when Hamlet speaks of “country matters,” it’s no coincidence. Shakespearean literature is so bawdy that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some critics tried to distance themselves from its dirty side. In fact, they even tried to distance Shakespeare from the dirty side of Shakespeare, claiming that his lewd jokes were mere concessions to the groundlings—members of Shakespeare’s audience who couldn’t afford a seat, but could afford to pay one penny to stand in the yard—as if low income somehow correlates with “low” taste. “Shakespeare should not be put into the hands of the young without the warning that the foolish things in his plays were written to please the foolish, the filthy for the filthy, the brutal for the brutal,” wrote an early-twentieth-century poet laureate, Robert Bridges.

  If there was any way for a masochistic self-declared castrato to swap cunt jokes with conservative virgins in the Islamic world, Shakespeare was it. Shakespeare is “safe.” He’s a way to talk about sex without talking about sex. Omani women, like young people everywhere, have strong opinions about love and romance. They just wanted a comfortable way to share them. And in Shakespeare, we had found a way to talk about everything.

  “Okay,” Khalila finally said, when she approached me one day after class. “Let’s talk.”

  A FEW DAYS later, Khalila and I sat with Soraya, her best friend, in an SQU courtyard. I drank an iced coffee. Khalila and Soraya fought.

  Does Romeo and Juliet prove the value of Western-style love marriages, as Khalila believed? Or does it prove the value of Omani-style arranged marriages—Soraya’s take?

  “You’re wrong!” Khalila shouted, slapping her hand against the table for emphasis. “Love marriage is much better. Sometimes parents will pick the right husband for you, but sometimes they won’t. How can we know whether Juliet would have loved Paris? We don’t!”

  “But Juliet dies!” Soraya screeched. “Everyone dies! How can you say it is right for her to choose Romeo when everyone dies?”

  For Soraya, this debate was personal.

  In many ways, Soraya resembled the other girls in the Shakespeare class. She loved fashion, and often wore the stylish embroidered abayas that were popular among young women our age. (My own abaya was embroidered, too.) Despite her devout modesty, Soraya chose not to cover her gorgeous face behind a niqab. Her glasses, she thought, would be enough to hide her beauty from men. Still, she was protective of her virtue, and even missed classes whenever her driver could not bring her to campus. (As a single woman, she refused to take public transportation.) But Soraya and I had a lot in common. We both loved to travel. We both loved theater. And we both loved Othello, the play in which Soraya saw herself more than any other in the Shakespearean canon.

  When Soraya was twenty years old, a male acquaintance from SQU approached her father to ask for her hand in marriage. Soraya had never dated the man; in fact, she had never even been alone with him. Their only exchanges had been brief, at chaperoned coed university classes and events. But Soraya was eager to marry him. Many of her friends had already found husbands, and Soraya felt ready to enjoy the special privileges and freedoms reserved for married women in Oman. She wanted to go out to dinners with her husband, move away from her parents’ house, and have a first kiss. Above all, she wanted to fall in love—an experience that Soraya, like many Omani men and women, believed is possible only after marriage.

  But Soraya’s father unequivocally rejected the proposal. Her suitor was educated, from a good family, and a Muslim; in other words, he satisfied most of her father’s conditions. But he was Omani. Despite Soraya’s similarities to Omani girls her age, she, like Othello, was originally from North Africa. Soraya and her potential husband shared a common language and religion, but Soraya’s father insisted that only an Algerian compatriot could marry his daughter. Like Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, he wanted a husband from his own culture for his only child. Unlike Desdemona, however, Soraya accepted her father’s decision—and she didn’t regret it. In Othello, she had seen conclusive proof that intercultural marriages can’t work.

  Soraya leaned back in her chair and glared at Khalila.

  “You can’t just pick your own husband,” she said, in a serious tone of voice. “This is why Juliet ends up dead; Ophelia ends up dead; Desdemona ends up dead. What do they all have in common? None of them listened to their fathers. You can’t marry someone if your family doesn’t approve.”

  “Well, I can’t marry someone if I
don’t approve,” Khalila replied. “Love is dangerous, but I think that’s how love has to be sometimes. Love is a miracle.”

  Soraya rolled her eyes.

  “You sound like an American,” she said, derisively.

  I looked up from my notebook and protested. “Hey!”

  Soraya pointed at me.

  “I’ve seen your American movies,” she said. “You people are too obsessed with sex, but you tell yourselves that it’s passion. You don’t think about the important things—family, home, life. You don’t think for the future.”

  “What about love?” I asked her.

  “What about love?” Soraya snorted. “Love is simple: you find a good man, and you love him for the rest of your life. Haven’t you read any of these plays you’re always talking about?”

  “Sex matters, too, Soraya,” I pointed out, fiddling with the straw in my coffee.

  She shrugged.

  “So find a good man and figure it out,” she said. “You’re not dead yet.”

  That was true. It’s so easy to forget sometimes.

  “You don’t think love is a miracle?” I asked.

  “I think love is a choice,” Soraya answered, with a nod.

  Did Soraya have a point? Had I missed a message in Shakespeare’s love stories? Was love a choice—something that I could leap, not fall, into?

  Khalila rolled her eyes.

  “Choice, choice,” she scoffed. “Who sounds like an American now?”

  As I continued to discuss Shakespeare with Soraya, Khalila, and the other women in the class, a fascinating pattern emerged. Despite what Western stereotypes had led me to expect, most of the Omani students seemed to think that the female characters were superior to the male characters, specifically because of their gender. They praised Juliet, Desdemona, and Ophelia for their “feminine” qualities, such as intelligence, practicality, and foresight. (Juliet’s insistence that an honorable “bent of love” wait for marriage, in particular, seriously impressed them.) Meanwhile, they dismissed Romeo, Othello, and Hamlet as stupid, impractical, impulsive, irrational, and emotional—in other words, they said, typically “male.” But despite their praise and admiration for the female characters, and their disdain for the male ones, the students ultimately blamed the women for the tragic endings of the plays. Even Desdemona, who dies when her husband, Othello, strangles her in her bed, was held responsible for her own death.