Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  I sat down at her table.

  “I can do a full palm reading of love, money, family, health, and career for one hundred dollars,” she said, “or I can read one topic for twenty-five dollars.”

  I wasn’t about to spend a hundred dollars on a prophecy.

  “Love, please,” I said.

  I held out my palm.

  Prophecies are tricky. After Macbeth assumes the Scottish throne, he becomes paranoid, obsessed with keeping his stolen crown. So he returns to the witches one last time. They give him three final prophecies. The first is that he must “beware Macduff,” the Thane of Fife. The second is that “none of woman born shall harm Macbeth.” And the last is that “Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him.”

  Macbeth laughs.

  “Sweet bodements! Good!” he declares. Everyone is “of woman born,” he reasons, and a forest can never uproot itself and march to a hill. Macbeth feels safe.

  In VivoCity, the fortune-teller picked up my outstretched palm and squinted at it.

  “You have someone,” she said.

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “His name is David.”

  She nodded.

  “You will marry him,” she announced, with total confidence. “Your love line is very long. But—”

  She frowned and leaned down.

  “There is a problem here,” she continued. “Do you want me to tell you?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, your love line is long and strong,” she repeated. “But it has a cut.”

  “My love line breaks?” I asked, surprised. David and I had never even come close to splitting up. But the fortune-teller shook her head.

  “No, it doesn’t break,” she said. “But there is another line that cuts through it. This other line is very short, but deep. Whatever that line is, it is something that will hurt you.”

  My heart sank. My infidelity with Dylan had proven that I am capable of terrible things. What I had done to John was my greatest regret: not because John and I broke up—one way or another, that relationship needed to end, and I had no desire to re-create it in my relationship with David—but because that episode had shown me how far short I can fall of the person I aspire to be.

  “Does that mean I’ll have an affair?” I asked.

  The fortune-teller shrugged.

  “It could be an affair,” she said. “But this intruder line doesn’t trail off. Its end is very abrupt. It could also be an abortion.”

  That did not make me feel better.

  “Now that I’m aware of the risk, I can just avoid it, right?” I asked.

  The fortune-teller shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “There is something in your personality that put this line here. It is already written on your hand. This will happen, whether you like it or not.”

  I shook my head.

  “Damn it.” I sighed. “Damn it.”

  Belieber squeezed my hand.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “This intruder will hurt you. But not for long.”

  Behind me, in the mall, a little kid screamed. I twisted around in my seat to look, but there was nothing there.

  I turned back to face the fortune-teller and gasped.

  Her body hung limp, like a broken marionette. Six empty eye sockets stared at me from above three sets of cracked, lipless teeth. Three rotting tongues crawled in and out of her face, like maggots on a corpse.

  I covered my eyes.

  “No,” I begged, my stomach tight with fear. “I don’t want witches. I want to talk to Lady Macbeth.”

  The mall’s sound system, which had been playing Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” abruptly shut off. A loud, screaming static filled the room.

  “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” the static shrieked, again and again.

  Fair is foul, and foul is fair!

  Fair is foul, and foul is fair!

  Fair is foul, and foul is fair!

  Fair is foul, and foul is fair!

  Fair is foul, and foul is fair!

  The static stopped. Fifteen fingernails scraped down my scalp.

  Three voices, almost inaudible, began to whisper inches from my ear. I didn’t breathe for fear an exhalation would drown out the words.

  “Beware,” they hissed.

  “Beware the equivocation of the fiend—

  “Beware the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth.

  “—The fiend that lies like truth.

  “—Lies like truth.”

  Then it was silent.

  “Rolling in the Deep” crackled back onto the loudspeaker. Laughter and shouts once again filled the mall.

  I uncovered my eyes. The witches were gone.

  “Do you want another reading?” said the fortune-teller, restored as the grandmotherly Belieber she was before. “Maybe career? Or health? Only twenty-five dollars!”

  I swallowed.

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  She nodded and patted my hand.

  “When it comes, don’t worry,” she said. “Your love line won’t break.”

  I walked out of the mall. I stepped into the sunshine, near the monorail to Sentosa Island, and started to feel better. I remembered that I don’t believe in fortune-tellers.

  “THERE’S NO ART to find the mind’s construction in the face,” King Duncan says.

  Thank God for that, right?

  Most nights, after work, I went out for drinks with Nikolai, the director of Macbeth. “You look distracted,” he said one evening. “What’s on your mind?”

  I winced. I knew exactly what was on my mind. Ever since Oman, where some women in the Shakespeare class had introduced me to bootlegged DVDs of The O.C., I’d been a huge fan of the pulpy teen drama. By the time I moved to Singapore, however, the show had been canceled and the Internet had given me something even better: The O.C. spanking fan fiction. It exists, it is awesome, and it, as usual, was on my mind that evening. Nikolai was innovative, artistic, and nonjudgmental. If I had been fantasizing about Angelina Jolie in a black leather catsuit—in other words, the “sexy” stereotype of BDSM—I probably would have shared the fantasy. Nikolai would have laughed. But it’s one thing to be edgy; it’s quite another to fantasize about Sandy Cohen, with the epic eyebrows, spanking Ryan Atwood. So, no, my boss didn’t need to know what was on my mind.

  “I’m not thinking anything,” I said, too loudly. “Let’s drink.”

  We did. We drank so much that, before long, we were drunk. Nikolai and I stumbled out of the wine bar and danced down a brick path near Robertson Quay, a posh stretch of restaurants, bars, and clubs along the river. A loose brick jutted out from the path.

  “Get it!” Nikolai urged. “Pull it out!”

  Giggling with the rush of being bad, I pulled the brick out of the path and threw it in the river. (I regret this. As a guest in Singapore, I had a responsibility to behave better.)

  Then we ran.

  “We’re in trouble now,” Nikolai joked. “They’re going to cane us!” (As the world was reminded during the 1994 Michael Fay controversy, when an American eighteen-year-old was sentenced to receive four cane strokes on his bare buttocks, the Singaporean judicial system employs corporal punishment.)

  “Not me,” I teased. “Singaporean courts don’t cane women. Only men.”

  “Really?” Nikolai said.

  I nodded.

  “Trust me,” I slurred. “I know everything there is to know about judicial caning.” (Remember all those middle-school book reports on corporal punishment?)

  Nikolai grinned.

  “Since we’re being naughty tonight, shall we be really naughty?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Always,” I replied.

  Section 377A of the Singaporean Penal Code states: “Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or abets the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency
with another male person, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years.” In other words, the Singaporean penal code criminalizes homosexuality.

  Nikolai is gay.

  “Let’s go to a gay bar,” he suggested.

  “Do you know where to find one?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he replied.

  Nikolai didn’t just know where to find one—he knew them all. So we went on a pub crawl that night, walking from nondescript bar to nondescript bar. The more I drank, the less it felt like we were breaking a law. What at first had felt naughty felt, in no time, normal.

  “Are you scared the government will come after you?” I asked the owner of one club.

  He shrugged.

  “Not really,” he said. “They leave us alone.”

  I imagine that with regard to unenforced prohibitions, Singapore is a bit like Shakespeare’s England. During his life, homosexuality was technically punishable with harsh laws. But those laws were rarely enforced. As Bruce Smith pointed out, during the combined forty-five years of Elizabeth I’s reign and the twenty-three years of James I’s reign, there was only one sodomy conviction—and that was for sex with a five-year-old boy, so it would be more accurate to call it a rape conviction.

  King James—yes, the same one who sponsored the King James Bible, and the patron for whom Shakespeare wrote Macbeth—may have even been gay or bisexual himself. (But it’s important to remember that, at that period, those terms didn’t exist. It’s possible that people then understood sexuality as something more fluid. A lot of how we understand our identities is culturally and historically specific.) James had a wife and three children, but he also spoke quite candidly about his passionate love for men, especially George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. “You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else,” said James to his Privy Council in 1617, in what some scholars believe was an early defense of same-sex love. “I wish to speak in my own behalf and not to have it thought to be a defect, for Jesus Christ did the same, and therefore I cannot be blamed. Christ had John, and I have George.” And in 1624, during his last illness, James sent Buckingham a telling letter, begging him to come to his bedside:

  I cannot content myself without sending you this billet, praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting with you, and that we may make at this Christenmass a new marriage, ever to be kept hereafter; for God so love me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you, than live a sorrowful widow-life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.

  Although most surviving literary references to homosexuality from this period refer to same-sex attraction between men, writers were also aware of lesbian attraction. In one remarkable poem, John Donne—a poet and cleric in the Church of England—imagined sexual desire between women:

  My two lips, eyes, thighs, differ from thy two,

  But so as thine from one another do,

  And, O, no more: the likeness being such,

  Why should they not alike in all parts touch?

  Hand to strange hand, lip to lip none denies;

  Why should they breast to breast, or thighs to thighs?

  Shakespeare’s own possible homoerotic interests have also been the subject of debate. Although he married Anne Hathaway and fathered three children with her, some readers cite the sonnets as evidence of Shakespeare’s bisexuality. Twenty-six of the sonnets are addressed to a married woman, who has often been called the “Dark Lady.” But one hundred and twenty-six of Shakespeare’s sonnets, including Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) seem to be addressed to a young man, often called the “Fair Lord” or “Fair Youth.” (Sonnet 20 explicitly bemoans the fact that this young man is not female.) Some scholars theorize that this young man might be the same “Mr. W. H.” to whom the sonnets were addressed. Maybe Shakespeare was bisexual. Others reject that theory; after all, there’s no reason to assume the sonnets are autobiographical.

  What the Singaporean bartender had told me that night seemed true. No one in the club acted worried about an imminent raid. Despite their clandestine nature, the bars we visited did not feel shrouded by fear. I glanced around the room, pausing to wave hello to Antonio from The Merchant of Venice. Patrons laughed and flirted. Everyone seemed to be having a good time.

  Maybe this wasn’t so bad.

  Then I saw a familiar face.

  One man wasn’t having fun.

  I had met Edwin, a Singaporean friend, at a mutual friend’s beach party on Sentosa Island. We had bonded over our mutual long-distance relationships: my boyfriend was in New York; his girlfriend was in Kuala Lumpur. After that, Edwin and I ran into each other at parties or dinners every few months. He was smart and funny. I liked Edwin, though we didn’t share political views.

  “It’s not biblical,” Edwin told me once when same-sex marriage came up. “It’s perverse.”

  Tonight, in a secret gay bar with no sign on the door, Edwin sat alone. He gazed around the room, both hands on a glass of beer. His eyes were hungry and sad.

  “Double, double, toil and trouble,” begins Macbeth’s most famous incantation. Everything in the play is double. Macbeth and Banquo are like “cannons overcharg’d with double cracks,” who “doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.” When King Duncan stays at the Macbeths’ castle, where he will be murdered, it is “in double trust,” and Lady Macbeth promises that their care of him will be “in every point twice done and then done double.” Later, Macbeth tries to kill Macduff in an attempt to “make assurance double sure,” only to discover that the witches have toyed with him in “a double sense.”

  Macbeth is a play about doubles. But there is a twist.

  In Shakespeare’s tragedies, the hero (or antihero) often has a “double,” or voice—a secondary character who speaks for the central figure, linking him to the real world and to the audience. Marjorie Garber describes these sidekicks as “someone on the stage who encounters things and verifies [that what seems] impossible or unbearable [is], nonetheless, true.” In Hamlet, Horatio fills that role: at the end of the play, Horatio is the one who promises to tell Hamlet’s story. In King Lear, that voice is Edgar. (“I would not take this from report. It is, and my heart breaks at it,” he says at one impossibly sad moment.)

  Macbeth’s obsession with equivocation speaks to this idea of double voices. The word equivocation itself comes from the Latin word æquivocus, which means “of equal voice.” In Macbeth, where even the fundamental premise of the play demands verification—are the witches “real,” or merely a product of Macbeth’s imagination?—that double voice is more important than ever. At first, Banquo fills that role. He links Macbeth (and Macbeth) to the audience. Indeed, Banquo seems to speak for us. “Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?” he asks, after the weyard sisters first appear. We know Banquo saw the sisters, too. Unlike the dagger that Macbeth sees (or imagines) before he kills King Duncan, Banquo’s voice verifies for the audience—and, indeed, for Macbeth himself—that these sisters do exist.

  But Macbeth has a twist that sets it apart from every other Shakespearean tragedy: Macbeth murders his voice. Mad with fear that Banquo’s heirs will seize the throne, Macbeth has Banquo killed. After that, our antihero is on his own. There is no one left to verify what is real and what is not. Macbeth sees—or imagines—Banquo’s ghost at a feast, and from then on, there is nothing good left in his life. In fact, the night that Banquo dies is the very last time we see Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who previously had the strongest marriage in the Shakespearean canon, speak to each other. When Macbeth’s voice dies, everything else disappears, too. Macbeth is alone.

  He can’t survive that way. No person can.

  In the bar, I lowered my face and walked over to Nikolai.


  “We have to leave,” I muttered. “My friend is here.” I had invaded a safe space. Edwin didn’t want to be seen.

  Nikolai chugged the rest of his drink and hopped to his feet.

  “Let’s go,” he said. We slipped out of the club.

  Whenever Singaporean friends tried to defend 377A, they always emphasized the fact that it is rarely enforced.

  “Homosexuals can do whatever they want,” a colleague once told me. “They just have to keep it private.”

  But the look on Edwin’s face that night told me a different story. I recognized the expression.

  “Privacy” is one of the most potent and insidious weapons a sexual majority can use against people with nonnormative sexual identities. “Privacy” sounds good. It sounds responsible and mature. But “privacy” is tied up with isolation and shame. It drives people underground. It puts people in danger.

  “Privacy” palters with us in a double sense.

  Sexuality doesn’t just appear at age eighteen. Like everyone else, kinky kids grow up with questions about our emerging sexualities. The difference is that, unlike people who grow up with normative sexual orientations, we can’t turn to pop culture for answers. There are almost no books, TV shows, or movies that show people like us, or relationships like the ones I craved, in a healthy or positive light. Our fear and shame doesn’t just come from negative messages; it comes from the lack of positive ones. When culture insists that people keep their “private” lives “private,” those who fall outside the norm fall through the cracks. We have no way to learn how to explore our fantasies safely.

  One thing we do have is the Internet. Sexual minorities feel “private” online.

  Predators feel “private” online, too.

  When my friend Beth was sixteen, she met a fifty-four-year-old sadist on an Internet message board. His name was Logan. Beth was exactly like me at that age: obsessed with spanking and desperate to connect. She talked to Logan because she had no one else. After a few months of emails, Logan drove to Beth’s boarding school. She was nervous, but felt obligated to meet him. She didn’t want to be rude. He had made hotel reservations. So Beth got permission to leave school grounds for the weekend.