Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  One spanking fetishist, who has served several tours in combat zones with one of the most elite branches of the U.S. military, raised an interesting possibility.

  “My shrink thinks my PTSD is from combat,” he wrote to me. “Ha ha.”

  It was the first time someone had suggested a label for the vomiting “episodes” that had plagued me for seventeen years.

  “Is that what this is?” I replied. “PTSD?”

  “That’s what I think it is,” Toby wrote. “I see a lot of it over here.”

  After Toby raised the possibility, I read a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder—both medical descriptions in David’s textbooks and Shakespearean descriptions in Henry IV, Part 1. The symptoms were familiar: flashbacks, avoidance, nightmares, depression, sleeplessness, angry outbursts.

  Every single day from age ten to age twenty-eight, I wrestled with one question: How could I be so viscerally certain that fetishism is not caused by childhood trauma when my own trauma seemed to contradict that? For eighteen years, I poked at that question like a loose tooth. Then one day, just like that, the tooth gave way and blood flowed out:

  Trauma doesn’t cause kink. But kink can cause trauma.

  In other words, if a child’s innate sexuality is nonconsensually inflicted on her, trauma is a natural response.

  Most of my rage, which had been the product of my inability to understand what had happened to me, went away. In the chicken-and-egg question of which came first, I suddenly understood, with perfect clarity and absolute certainty, which did.

  I haven’t had a single flashback or nightmare since.

  Different ideas aren’t easy to swallow. There are more popular ways to interpret King Lear. When Lear tells Goneril that he will resume a prior shape, he might only mean that he’ll regain his former kingly power and authority. It’s important to acknowledge, too, that after Lear bemoans “undivulged crimes” and a seemingly virtuous man who is “incestuous,” he goes on to claim that he, in contrast, is “more sinned against than sinning.” And despite the sexual implications of shafts, bolts, and “coming in,” double entendre alone can’t convict Lear of sexual predation.

  As Lear says, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” It’s easiest to dismiss Regan and Goneril as ungrateful monsters.

  But Shakespeare encourages us to resist that impulse. “Let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart,” Lear also says. Regan and Goneril are cruel, but much is lost if we don’t even try to ask ourselves in what garden those hearts have grown.

  The problem with a sexually abusive reading of King Lear is that it develops a terrifying new tragedy at the expense of the more traditional one. It’s impossible to empathize with a predatory Lear. That version of the character would deserve everything he suffers throughout the play, and more. How can we rob ourselves of the chance to weep for Lear when he rips his clothes on the heath or finds Cordelia’s body?

  An explicitly abusive version of the play robs us of the ability to feel for Lear. But an explicitly sympathetic Lear robs us of the ability to feel for his daughters.

  So I think that the best version of King Lear is exactly the one that Shakespeare wrote: ambiguous. It’s the only version in which each character is frustratingly, but fascinatingly, complex. Cordelia loves her tyrannical and mercurial father, but she can’t bring herself to say it. It’s a paradox—and a question—so rich and sad that Shakespeare required a whole play to explore it.

  I LIKE TO think Cordelia and I would be friends. We’d find a wine bar in Manhattan, someplace decorated with wood and candles, and settle into a quiet table at the back. I’d order a South African shiraz and pour us each a glass.

  “What’s the secret to forgiveness?” I would ask her.

  Cordelia would think for a minute, then open her mouth to speak.

  “No,” I’d interrupt. “Don’t you dare say ‘nothing,’ Cordelia. Aren’t you sick of that by now?” She’d chuckle a little and swirl her wine around her glass. Finally, she’d take a sip.

  “We are not the first who with best meaning have incurred the worst,” she’d say, looking into her drink.

  I’d huff with impatience.

  “Come on, Cordelia,” I’d groan, rolling my eyes. “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

  There would be a long pause. Then Cordelia would say: “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.”

  And there’s no response to that. She’s right. Some things are too heavy to lift to words. They sit in the pits of our stomachs until, with time, they digest—or they settle in the subtext. So I’d pick up the bottle, refill our glasses, and Cordelia and I would drink.

  4.3 Othello:

  Beast with Two Backs

  Sex is one thing.

  The idea of sex is something else.

  “This is hard to show you,” I told David as I slid my laptop, with its essay full of secrets, across the bed. “Also, I’m worried that my paragraph structure is confusing.”

  David began to read.

  I sat next to him. This was uncomfortable. I didn’t want to read over his shoulder, but I wasn’t sure what else to do with my eyes. I looked at David. His Adam’s apple moved. He had swallowed as he read.

  I climbed off the bed and walked into the bathroom. I splashed water onto my face. Just as I had done years earlier, in Spain, before I bent over to inhale that first line of cocaine, I glanced up at the mirror above the sink.

  Acts of self-destruction are supposed to follow a dramatic moment with a mirror, right?

  I turned off the faucet.

  Back in the bedroom, David had finished reading. I leaned against the doorframe.

  “So,” I said.

  David climbed off the mattress and wrapped his arms around my waist. I stiffened.

  “I love you,” he said. “You’re so brave.” He paused for a second, then added: “And there’s nothing wrong with your paragraph structure.”

  Weeks later, when that essay (with David’s encouragement) appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times, it ended with those words.

  The response was overwhelming. Hundreds of emails poured into my inbox from people around the world. I heard from people of all ages and backgrounds, with stories, questions, and fears just like mine. I got an email from a woman close to my age who wrote to me from her refugee camp to ask how she should tell her boyfriend, also a refugee, about her own spanking fetish. (Before her country fell into brutal civil war, she had been an English teacher, which is why she was able to read my New York Times article.) We struck up a friendship.

  “I’m always happy to talk about spanking,” I wrote to her one day. “But I feel embarrassed to focus on that when you face such bigger problems.”

  “I have many problems in my life, yes,” she replied. “But it is the loneliness that is the worst. It is the feeling I am broken.” Her words took my breath away.

  “Great article. From a fellow . . . Brasenose alum,” a man named Cyan wrote to me, only a few hours after the essay appeared online. (He had read about my educational history on my website.)

  I called for David to come look at my computer screen. Years earlier, when I had spent that term at Oxford University, studying Shakespearean cartography, Brasenose had been my college, too.

  “A Brasenose person wrote to me!” I exclaimed. “Small world, huh?”

  David snorted.

  “That’s not his point, Jillian,” he said.

  I scrunched up my nose.

  “Why would he lie about that?” I replied.

  David laughed.

  “I’m sure it’s true that he went to Brasenose,” he said. “But that’s not his point.”

  My eyes widened.

  “Oh,” I said, as the implication of Cyan’s ellipsis dawned on me. “Oh. I’m so gullible.”

  David kissed the top of my head.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, walking off.

  Cyan followed me on Twitter. I fol
lowed him back.

  But the most common question I received, given the essay’s unresolved ending, was: What happened next?

  Like I said, the idea of sex is one thing.

  Sex is something else.

  “Get on your hands and knees,” David suggested, only a few days after the article ran. “I’m in the mood to do this doggy style.”

  I giggled.

  “Okay,” I agreed. The point is, my butt was right in David’s face.

  And he didn’t even touch it. Not once.

  “Do you feel paralyzed by pressure?” I asked after, my fingers on my forehead. “Are you overwhelmed?”

  “I promise, I’m not overwhelmed,” David said. “I just forgot. That’s it.”

  I looked up and pointed at my computer. The screen showed my email inbox. In the previous hour, I had received twenty-eight new unread messages. Most of them were from people who wanted to talk about my essay.

  “People around the whole world heard what I’m trying to tell you,” I said, starting to cry. “How are you the only one who missed the message?”

  “Oh, honey, I got the message,” David said. “I just forgot.”

  He smiled.

  I tried to brush away my tears. But I was terrified.

  “We can take it slow,” I insisted. “We’ll go at whatever pace makes you comfortable. I don’t want to rush you. But you have to talk to me.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” David replied. “I love you. I support you.”

  I shook my head.

  He did spank me sometimes, of course. Much more often than he had before. But something was missing.

  As our sexual life struggled to find its footing, our professional lives exploded. David was swamped with his clinical year of medical school. For my part, the gamble I’d made when I cut out my heart and sold it to the New York Times for five hundred bucks paid off. Suddenly, I was a journalist. Editors invited me to pitch them stories about sexuality; I responded with other ideas. I got to write about human rights in North Korea, tourism in Bosnia and Herzegovina, nuclear security in Iran, and dozens of other issues, for publications I’d idolized for years. Work often took me away from New York. Even when I was in town, David was usually at the hospital.

  Months passed, and I woke up in the Philippines.

  The theater company I had worked for when I lived in Singapore had flown me back to Asia to deliver a new series of Shakespeare lectures in conjunction with their newest production, and I took advantage of the transpacific flight to work on articles for the Washington Post, Slate, and the Atlantic. Journalism inflamed the same part of me that had been so focused on international politics back when I lived in Spain, and I was hungry to learn as much as I could.

  One morning, I tweeted a question about the Spratly Islands, a disputed archipelago off the Philippine, Malaysian, and Vietnamese coastlines.

  An instant message window popped up on my screen.

  “Why are you learning about the Spratlys?”

  I frowned at the user name. At first, I didn’t recognize it. Then I realized it was Cyan—the fellow “Brasenose alum” who had praised my spanking article six months earlier.

  “Oh, that’s right,” I typed back. “You work in foreign policy, don’t you?” Cyan and I had never had a conversation in real time before, but I’d followed him on Twitter long enough to get a sense of his job. He sometimes tweeted a remark about one of my articles, but other than that he left me alone.

  “I focus on North Africa and the Middle East, but I’ve done some Asia work,” he replied. “I might be able to answer your questions.”

  “Why are you awake?” I asked. “Isn’t it like three A.M. in the U.K.?”

  “It is,” he wrote. “But I live in D.C. now.”

  For months, I’d avoided friendships with people who had emailed me in response to my spanking article. But this was different, wasn’t it? Cyan and I shared an alma mater. If he had been a few years younger, we would have been at Brasenose at the same time.

  Besides, it’s not like I could talk about disputed Asian archipelagos with just anyone.

  “Cool,” I typed. “Why are these tiny islands such a big deal?”

  In Othello, the surface of things doesn’t reflect the continental shelf that lies below.

  DURING SHAKESPEARE’S LIFE, people said the liver, not the heart, was the seat of love. In Twelfth Night, for example, Orsino, ranting to Cesario that female love is superficial compared to male love, claims that women love from the palate, not the liver:

  There is no woman’s sides

  Can bide the beating of so strong a passion

  As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart

  So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.

  Alas, their love may be call’d appetite,

  No motion of the liver, but the palate,

  That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt,

  But mine is all as hungry as the sea,

  And can digest as much. Make no compare

  Between that love a woman can bear me

  And that I owe Olivia.

  —Twelfth Night, 2.4

  Livers appear throughout the canon. In Love’s Labor’s Lost, for example, Berowne says of some erotic poetry: “This is the liver-vein, which makes flesh a deity.” In Twelfth Night, when one character senses that a mean-spirited romantic trick will work, he remarks: “This wins him, liver and all.” In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Pistol describes Falstaff as “with liver burning hot,” and in Much Ado About Nothing, one character says of Claudio that “if ever love had interest in his liver”—that is, if Claudio had truly loved his betrothed—he would not have suspected her of infidelity. In Antony and Cleopatra, when a soothsayer tells a woman that she “shall be more beloving than beloved,” the woman retorts: “I had rather heat my liver with drinking.” (The philosophy that love lives in the liver wasn’t unique to Shakespeare’s England: some traditional Arab cultures also believed that when a person falls in love, the beloved steals his or her liver.)

  But Shakespeare didn’t associate the liver only with love and erotic passion: he also connected it to courage (as in Macbeth and Hamlet), to jealousy (as in The Winter’s Tale), and to anger (as in Troilus and Cressida). Strong emotions are born in the liver. They travel through our bodies in its bile.

  In Shakespeare’s words: “Reason and respect make livers pale and lustihood deject.”

  The point is, I think about livers.

  “Can we play tonight, maybe?” I asked David, on one of the rare days when he and I were both home.

  “Of course,” he said. “Sure.”

  I ducked my head. I felt guilty, like a sex offender. I worried I was pressuring a good man into something repulsive against his will.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just . . . need it.”

  David gave me a hug.

  “You don’t need to apologize, honey,” he said. “It’s fine.”

  That night, David came up to me.

  “Do you want to watch a movie?” he asked.

  I blinked.

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  “Total Recall is on Netflix,” he added.

  I shifted on my feet.

  “Or we could watch Secretary,” I offered. “It’s not perfect, but it might spark some conversation.”

  David sighed.

  “Can we save it for another night?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. “I’m so tired. It was a long week at the hospital.”

  I pulled my lips into my mouth, rubbing them against each other.

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

  In Othello, things go unconsummated. From lusty beginning to tragic end, sex is just an idea.

  OTHELLO BEGINS IN Venice. Roderigo, a wealthy gentleman, is complaining to Iago, an ensign, that Roderigo’s crush, Desdemona, has just eloped with a Moor named Othello.

  The racial specifics of the term Moor are open to debate. Technically, the Moors were the Islamic inhabi
tants of North Africa, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula, but during Shakespeare’s life the term was also used to describe anyone of African descent, regardless of religion. Othello does say “I am black,” but Elizabethans routinely referred to anyone with dark hair as “black,” so it’s also possible that Othello is North African or Middle Eastern. (My friends in Oman imagined Othello as a fellow Arab.) However, as Virginia Mason Vaughan points out, Roderigo calls Othello “thick lips,” which was a common racial slur used by sixteenth-century explorers in sub-Saharan Africa and points to that region as Othello’s place of origin. In any case, Othello is a person of color—and racial tension permeates every detail of his play.

  Roderigo is desolate at news of Desdemona’s elopement, but Iago reassures him that he has a plan to disrupt their marriage. Iago hates Othello—in part because Othello, an honored general, passed him over for a promotion in favor of Cassio, a mere “arithmetician” with far less battle experience, and in part because, according to rumor, Othello has slept with Iago’s wife, Emilia. Iago wants revenge. He and Roderigo wake Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, to tell him about the secret marriage. Iago paints a lurid portrait, saying, “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe.”

  The mere idea of this sexual miscegenation is so strong that Brabantio flies into a rage. At the Venetian senate, he accuses Othello of using witchcraft to seduce his daughter. But Othello recounts how words, not witchcraft, won Desdemona’s love. He summons her to confirm that account. Desdemona arrives and declares her love, loyalty, and allegiance to her new husband. As Brabantio storms out, he plants this ominous seed in Othello’s ear: “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see. She has deceived her father, and may thee.”