Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  “You must understand, Othello cannot control his jealousy. It is his nature as a man to be jealous,” said Zahra al-Hassan, another student in the class, when I asked her who is to blame for the tragedy of Othello. “The question that occupies me is, why wasn’t Desdemona more aware? She should have investigated more, noticed more.”

  In all three plays, the women agreed, the male characters—and men in general—are the victims of their inherent gender flaws. But their firm belief that women are “superior,” to my surprise, didn’t empower the female characters at all. It just put higher expectations—and therefore greater responsibility and culpability—in their hands. Almost all of them criticized the female characters for failing to capitalize on the gifts inherent to their gender. Khalila best articulated the judgment that fell on Juliet, Desdemona, and Ophelia: “She should have known better.”

  But there was one exception: Najla al-Shadi, a girl with sunken eyes who never spoke up during class.

  It infuriates me when people paint all of Shakespeare’s transvestite female characters with the same brush. Male clothing no more makes Viola the same as Rosalind, the fierce character who disguises herself as a man in As You Like It, than male clothing makes Falstaff the same as Romeo. Rosalind is a troublemaker. She’s fierce and uninhibited. In disguise, Rosalind finds freedom and a voice. But Viola’s disguise is merely a way to hide herself. (Anne Barton points out that, for Viola, the Cesario persona “operates not as a liberation but merely as a way of going underground in a difficult situation.”)

  Twelfth Night is a comedy, so I understand why so many actresses play Viola as if they were playing Rosalind: brash, energetic, and confident. But, someday, I would love to see Viola played as she describes herself: “patience on a monument, smiling at grief”—scared, suppressed, and, above all, as still as a statue.

  People make the same absurd mistake with Omani women. Their clothing (the outer layers of clothing that we can see, that is) is alike, so those women are often described as if they were interchangeable. But Najla al-Shadi was as different from Khalila, in personality, experience, and literary perspectives, as Rosalind is from Viola.

  For weeks, she had listened from a distance to my conversations with the others (which drifted away from Hamlet and toward recent episodes of The O.C. more often than I’m proud to admit). She never jumped in to contribute.

  “You should talk to me,” Najla finally said, one afternoon, in a low voice. “I’ll tell you the truth.”

  Najla had grown up near Sur, a small fishermen’s town on the eastern Omani coastline. Sur isn’t as diverse as Muscat, and has a rural propensity toward conservativeness. While most women in Muscat only cover their hair and necks, most women in Sur cover their entire faces, even their eyes, with thin black fabric. Najla explained that this was how she used to be able to recognize other girls on campus from her home region, without even speaking to them. But after some boys disguised with face veils managed to sneak into the girls’ on-campus dormitory, she told me, SQU prohibited female students from covering their faces, and Najla was forced to remove her niqab at school. Her face was expressive and serious as she told me about her discomfort during the first weeks after that rule was enforced.

  Najla had come to SQU to study mathematics, a discipline that she told me runs through her veins “like blood.” But the circumstances by which she had transferred from the math department to the Shakespeare seminar were not good. When her father learned that Najla shared her coeducational math classes with male colleagues, he forced her to switch to the all-female Shakespeare class. When Najla resisted, begging her father to let her stay in the math department, he whipped her.

  “There is a proverb, ‘love is blind,’ and Ophelia is blind to what these men do to her,” Najla told me. “My sister loves her husband even though he beats her. He doesn’t care if she is pregnant or not, if she is sick or not. He tells her she cannot go to our parents’ house. But she loves him, even though these things happen. She doesn’t see that he is cruel and selfish. Do you see how love is blind?”

  The expression “love is blind”—which Najla called a proverb, but also happens to be a line from The Merchant of Venice—is appropriate in Oman, where arranged marriages are so common. On rare occasions, the bride and groom are not able to meet even once before the wedding ceremony, so, in a sense, the betrothed couple is blinded by circumstance. Considering Najla’s rural background, it was unusual that at twenty-three she was still unmarried. But given other details of her background, her reluctance to commit herself to a husband made sense.

  “I relate to Ophelia, because she is a victim,” she told me. “Ophelia is a toy in the hand of her father and her brother. I know I am giving you a bad story of our culture, but men abuse their wives and daughters. It is a fact. They abuse women.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry, Najla,” I murmured. “You deserve better.”

  “It’s terrible that people can just beat your body, and there’s no way to stop it,” she muttered. “It’s the worst thing. Do you know what that’s like?”

  My neck tightened.

  “No, I don’t,” I replied.

  It was a lie. I felt sick and uncomfortable.

  Najla nodded.

  “Oh,” she said, simply.

  I shifted in my seat.

  “Najla,” I began, and then stopped. My tape recorder was looking at us. I turned it off.

  “You—you’re so smart,” I told her. I didn’t know what else to say.

  She shook her head.

  “I’m afraid to get married,” she said. “I don’t want to live like my sister.”

  I swallowed.

  “You said that love is blind, Najla,” I replied. “But you are not blind. You see things very clearly. You will know what to do.”

  Najla nodded dispassionately.

  “Do you want to go to a movie or something?” I asked. “Do you want to just forget all this and go have fun?”

  “No,” she replied. “I want to be heard. I want you to hear me.”

  I nodded. “I’m listening,” I said.

  She pointed at my tape recorder.

  “Are you recording?” she asked.

  “Oh,” I said, looking down at it. “I turned it off just now. I thought—”

  “Turn it back on,” she ordered. “What’s your next question?”

  So it was only Najla, with the sad eyes and casual references to abuse, who refused to blame Ophelia when I asked her who is responsible for Hamlet’s tragic end. She considered the question for a long time—so long, in fact, that I was tempted to repeat myself when she suddenly spoke.

  “Polonius,” Najla declared—Ophelia’s father. “Polonius makes the tragedy. But Ophelia, perhaps, should have freed herself more.” When I asked Najla if she considered herself free, she sighed and did not answer.

  Najla’s passion for Ophelia, and the conviction with which she volunteered comparisons between herself and Shakespeare’s undervalued heroine, were very powerful. But I want to stress that Najla was unique among the Shakespeare students at SQU; the experience she described fits many unfair and often inaccurate stereotypes about women in the Middle East. Unlike Soraya and Khalila, who loved their families and had huge amounts of self-confidence, Najla had endured an abusive past and steeled herself to accept an abusive future. She is not representative of the many fulfilled women I met in Oman. In the only photo I have of her, Najla is a small, unsmiling slip of hurt.

  But Ophelia is as unique among her peers as Najla is unique among hers. She is not like Rosalind or Cleopatra or Lady Macbeth or Juliet: Ophelia exists only in the shadow of the play she inhabits. As uncomfortable as I am with anything that seems to support a stereotype, I can’t ignore Najla any more than I can ignore Ophelia. Both women say something to me about the pain humans can bear. Even in the final moments of her life, before she disappears beneath the water, Ophelia shuts out the brutality of what she has suffered and gathers flowers.
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br />   Weeks after I finished my final interviews, Najla called and asked to see me again. When I returned to SQU to meet her, Najla said that she had been thinking about me and about our conversations. She said that, early on, she hadn’t understood why I wanted to study Shakespeare in, of all places, Oman. She couldn’t imagine why I traveled across the planet to join her Shakespeare class—especially since she never wanted to join the class herself. But finally, she told me, she had figured out the reason I came to Oman to talk about Shakespeare.

  “Could you tell me why I did?” I asked, with a laugh. “I’m not sure I know myself.”

  “Write it down,” she told me. “This is important.”

  I pulled out my notebook.

  “In Oman, we are Ophelia. Our fathers and brothers do not hear us,” Najla said, choosing her words deliberately. “I want to be Claudius. I want to utter more loudly. I want to face this world.”

  A few hours later, I sent Najla one last text message. It was a quote from Emilia, a woman in Othello who refuses to be silent even under threat of death:

  ’Twill out, ’twill out! I peace?

  No, I will speak as liberal as the north:

  Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,

  All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.

  —Othello, 5.2

  “Yes,” she wrote back. “We must remember those words, you and I.”

  IN MY LAST few weeks in Oman, as I geared up to return to Stanford and finish my degree, I got an email from the president of my college Shakespeare club.

  “Some new members joined while you’ve been gone,” she wrote. “Connect with them on Facebook, okay?”

  I scrolled through the list of faces. They all seemed friendly enough, but one profile photo stopped me cold. In it, a handsome but unsmiling man flipped off the camera from beneath the brim of a frayed baseball cap. Next to his photo, in the status update section, he had written: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” It was from Hamlet.

  I knew exactly how he felt.

  “You and I haven’t met yet, but I can already tell that you’re a very good addition to Shakes,” I wrote to him in a message.

  “It’ll be nice to finally meet you when you come back!” the man replied.

  Flourish. Enter David, a man.

  I would say that’s how, in the same Internet café where I had broken my self-imposed prohibition on kink a few months earlier, I met the love of my life. But that’s not quite true. In a sense, I’d met him years before. I just didn’t know it yet.

  “Journeys end in lovers’ meeting,” a love song in Twelfth Night declares.

  Journeys begin that way, too.

  3.3 Love’s Labor’s Lost:

  Wonder of the World

  In Love’s Labor’s Lost, the King of Navarre and his three men, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine, commit themselves to self-neglect in pursuit of scholarship. For three years, they vow to avoid food, sleep, and the company of women.

  It’s a doomed mission. Their oath of celibacy dissolves the second the Princess of France arrives to conduct business in Navarre, accompanied by three women of her own: Rosaline, Maria, and Katharine. The numbers (and attractions) are a perfect match. Soon, everyone is in love. In Shakespeare, affections overpower oaths. The play ends with a cliffhanger: a messenger arrives to tell the Princess of France that her father has died, and the women prepare to return home—with the expectation that their loves will find them again in one year.

  Montaigne argued that “the good that comes of study (or at least should come) is to prove better, wiser, honester”—in other words, that the value of a person’s education is measured by her character. Montaigne’s writings are believed to have inspired Shakespeare: his essay “Of Cannibals” is seen as a major influence on The Tempest—so much so that some people believe Caliban is an anagram of cannibal. Perhaps Montaigne influenced Love’s Labor’s Lost, too, showing that the pursuit of scholarship is meaningless if it doesn’t enrich our lives.

  I decided to learn from the king and his men’s mistake. I would not invest in scholarship and lose myself.

  So when I returned to campus and ran into David, that handsome new guy in my Shakespeare club, outside the athletic center one afternoon, I knew exactly how I wanted to flirt with him.

  “Nice belt,” I teased, pointing at the red canvas accessory around his jeans.

  “I have a leather one, too,” David replied.

  What was that? Ever since I circled every M word in The Tempest, years before, I’d been searching for clues in Shakespeare’s language. Perhaps it was inevitable that, when faced with a new question, I also searched for clues in sexual language. And something in David’s words gave me pause.

  I stopped moving and watched him. Was that a hint?

  LOVE AT FIRST sight does exist.

  I can’t believe that I believe that. I’m not a mushy romantic. I’ve never seen The Notebook. I’ve forgotten my own anniversaries more times than I’ve remembered them. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in Bigfoot. I don’t believe the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.

  But I do believe in love at first sight. How the hell did that one slip through?

  I can only defend this lapse of pragmatism with the fact that some of my favorite friends agree. Aristophanes, in his theory of love from the Symposium, wrote that in the miraculous event that a person finds his or her other half—the same half she was ripped away from when the gods split every essence into two bodies—she knows it. “When one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself . . . the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment,” Aristophanes argued. “These are the people who pass their whole lives together, and yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.” And Dostoevsky, in the first of his novels that I read—Crime and Punishment, of course—wrote: “We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”

  Many of Shakespeare’s characters give themselves up to love in less time than it takes me to order in restaurants. In As You Like It, Shakespeare, quoting Christopher Marlowe, asked: “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”

  The most fascinating moment in Love’s Labor’s Lost hints at a mystery of love at first sight. Rosaline and Berowne, the most prominent pair of the play’s four sets of lovers, apparently have a history that predates the timeline of the play. (Shakespeare often hints at intriguing yet indecipherable backstories to his plays.) How do they know each other? Shakespeare gives us only small clues. Here’s their first conversation:

  BEROWNE

  Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?

  ROSALINE

  Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?

  BEROWNE

  I know you did.

  ROSALINE

  How needless was it then to ask the question!

  I have no idea what to make of this moment. Berowne and Rosaline know each other—and on such an intimate level that they can banter this way—but how? Shakespeare teases us with this riddle, but leaves us few clues with which to answer it. Earlier, when the Princess of France asks about the men who accompany the King of Navarre, Rosaline tells her that Berowne is a great guy:

  ROSALINE

  Another of these students at that time

  Was there with him, if I have heard a truth.

  Berowne they call him, but a merrier man,

  Within the limit of becoming mirth,

  I never spent an hour’s talk withal.

  It seems as if they know each other well. But later, Berowne asks a nobleman, Boyet, about Rosaline, as if he doesn’t know her name:

  BEROWNE

  What’s her name in the cap?

  BOYET
/>   Rosaline, by good hap.

  BEROWNE

  Is she wedded or no?

  BOYET

  To her will, sir, or so.

  If Berowne “danced” with Rosaline “in Brabant once,” why does he not know (or remember) her name?

  It’s possible that “dance with you in Brabant” is a sexual double entendre, referring to a one-night stand. According to Gordon Williams, an authority on sexual language in Shakespearean literature, “dancing schools” may have been slang for brothels at the time. And during Shakespeare’s life, Brabant was located in the Netherlands. (The nether lands. Get it?) There’s something rather romantic about the possibility that Berowne and Rosaline had a torrid one-night stand. He didn’t even learn her name—which would explain why he asks Boyet for that information—but each was so struck by the tryst that they remembered each other, and hungered to meet again. That said, as much as I love the dirty side of Shakespeare, I’ve always been reluctant to see this moment as something carnal. I prefer the notion that Berowne and Rosaline shared a (literal) dance in the (literal) Netherlands.

  In either case, I love that exchange. I love its implication that some people, even without effort, always circle back into one another’s lives.

  Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?

  A few weeks after I returned to Stanford, I invited some friends from the Shakespeare club back to my dorm room for a nightcap.

  To be honest, I just wanted an excuse to hang out with David.

  From the first second we had met, I had a crush on him. As we became friends, I learned the basics of his background: David had grown up on a sunflower farm in rural North Dakota. He wanted to be a doctor. He had joined the Shakespeare club at the encouragement of his roommate, Kyle, who worried that David never had fun, because on top of his premed classwork, David had four part-time jobs.