Sex with Shakespeare

by Jillian Keenan

  Slap slap! Slap slap! Slap slap! Slap slap! Slap slap!

  I giggled and pushed my torso up on my elbows.

  “Are you playing the drums?” I joked.

  “Nope,” David replied.

  Slap slap! Slap slap! Slap slap! Slap slap! Slap slap!

  I frowned. There was something familiar about the tune.

  “Is that a song?” I asked.

  David laughed.

  “Good grief, girl,” he said. “I’d think you of all people would know.”

  Slap slap! Slap slap! Slap slap! Slap slap! Slap slap!

  I looked over my shoulder.

  “Oh, wow,” I said. “You’re not—?”

  David bobbed his head, with a smug grin.

  “Yup,” he said.

  David, my boy with the baseball cap, was spanking me to the rhythm of iambic pentameter.

  “Love is merely a madness,” Rosalind tells Orlando, “and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do. And the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love, too.”

  Screenwriters like to give lovers a “meet-cute.” It’s that moment when two people meet for the first time, often in an adorable and memorable way, and see something familiar and beloved in each other. They know they’ve found something special.

  But who says lovers only get one meet-cute? Why can’t a lifetime include many of them, as each partner meets the more intimate selves inside the other’s Russian doll? Shakespeare seemed to think it was possible. He gave many of his lovers more than one meet-cute. Rosalind and Orlando have at least three: there’s the first meet-cute, when Rosalind sees Orlando win the wrestling match and purrs “O excellent young man!” with a lusty growl. There’s a second meet-cute in the forest, when Ganymede finds Orlando and banters with him. And there’s yet another meet-cute at the end, when Ganymede abandons “his” disguise to reveal the woman inside.

  I believe in love at first sight. But I also believe in evolution. Love at first sight is real love, but it’s an infant love. As love matures, we meet again and again, and discover new parts of our partners for the first time. I’d like to think that Rosalind and Orlando will cycle back to meet each other for the rest of their lives.

  Livers regenerate. They’re the only organ that can.

  I pushed my hips back, off David’s lap, and sat next to him on the bed. I put my hands on his shoulders. Nine years after I read his story from an Internet café in Seville, seven years after he first kissed me on a balcony at Stanford, and two years after I handed him my heart in a thousand words, I fell in love with the man I’d always loved.

  “Hi,” I said.

  David smiled.

  “Hi, honey,” he replied.

  Two months later, in the bedroom of our three-hundred-square-foot apartment in New York City, David and I got married. After the ceremony, David smashed the lightbulb I had given him seven years earlier. We framed the shards.

  Shakespeare’s comedies, as they say, often end with a wedding. After that, there are epilogues. We usually don’t get to see the married couples’ sex lives. So I will, as I’ve always done, follow Shakespeare’s example. I will inhale his words, and let them cycle through my body, until they exhale as my own.

  That’s just a fancy way to say I’ll steal Rosalind’s last speech from As You Like It.

  ROSALIND

  It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue;

  but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord

  the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs

  no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no

  epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes;

  and good plays prove the better by the help of good

  epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am

  neither a good epilogue, nor cannot insinuate with

  you in the behalf of a good play! I am not

  furnish’d like a beggar, therefore to beg will not

  become me. My way is to conjure you, and I’ll begin

  with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love

  you bear to men, to like as much of this play as

  please you; and I charge you, O men, for the love

  you bear to women (as I perceive by your simpering,

  none of you hates them) that between you and the

  women the play may please. If I were a woman, I

  would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleas’d

  me, complexions that lik’d me, and breaths that I

  defied not; and I am sure, as many as have good

  beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will for my

  kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

  With that, I’ll draw a veil around my husband and his wife. This time, a few details of our marriage will stay between us.

  Rest assured: it hurts me more than it hurts you.

  I LOVE SHAKESPEARE the same way I love spankings.

  Neither is easy at first. The poetry, like the pain, hurts. It’s jarring and uncomfortable. It takes a few minutes to adjust.

  But then, in both cases, endorphins kick in.

  Blood circulates.

  Heat rises.

  Things start to feel better: first tolerable, then comfortable, and then (if it’s done right) downright blissful. The unfamiliar Elizabethan English begins to feel simple and magical. The pain starts to feel like pleasure. In an instant, Shakespeare and spankings both feel so natural to me.

  And they’re both that much more satisfying because they hurt at first.

  I ran across an empty subway platform and slipped through the car doors just before they closed. The train coughed and pulled away from the station to take me home.

  I slid into a seat.

  It was nighttime. It felt like there was no one else on the C Train that evening. There are moments when, against all odds, even New York feels lonely.

  But I wasn’t alone.

  I felt His eyes on me before I saw Him. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted, like sunflowers that look toward the dawn. I turned around.

  Just as I’d expected, there He was: the Man with a Million Faces.

  My chest squeezed around my heart.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Promise me this subway tunnel isn’t some metaphorical birth canal,” He replied.

  I burst into laughter.

  “Oh, God,” I groaned, shaking my head. “It’s not.”

  He plopped down into the seat next to me.

  “So you’re going to write a book about me and spanking, huh?”

  I blushed.

  “I guess so,” I admitted. “Do you mind?”

  He winked.

  “Just give me some material to shake my spear to and I’ll be happy.”

  I giggled.

  “That’s all I get?” I joked. “A masturbation pun?”

  He shrugged.

  “What did you expect?” He said. “I devoted a whole sonnet to ‘having traffic with thy self alone.’”

  The train paused in the darkness of the tunnel. I swallowed the lump in my throat. The train trembled, and so did I.

  I looked down and shook my head.

  “I’m scared that I will never really know you,” I told Him.

  He nodded.

  “I hear that from a lot of people,” He said. “I hear it from students, I hear it from actors. Ken Branagh said it to me last week.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “I’ll tell you the same thing I tell everyone: If you look in my words to find me, you’re searching for the wrong thing. Don’t forget: the purpose of playing was, and is, to hold the mirror up to nature. You may not know me, but I know you. All of you.”

  My eyes filled with tears.

  “Damn it,” I said, scrubbing my face with the back of my hand. “You’ve made me cry.”

  He leaned back in His seat. �
��That’s my way,” He said, with a grin. “I give you an awesome masturbation joke, then I change your life. I’m the best.”

  I laughed through my tears.

  “Oh, kiddo,” He said, reaching out to brush my cheek. “You’ll be okay.”

  I caught His hand.

  “Will we?” I asked, urgently. “I’m not sure. Will we ever stop being so lonely? Is there a cure for this plague you named?”

  He smiled.

  “Do what I did: tell stories about the hearts we have, and the rhythm they all share,” he said. “Forget morality; forget politics, convention, and reception; forget psychology, theology, and pathology; and speak. Speak to be understood. Speak as liberal as the north. Speak in many sorts of music.”

  He squeezed my fingers.

  “And when you can’t find your own words, borrow mine. I left them here for you.”

  I sighed and pressed my hands against my face.

  When people talk about sexuality, they often talk about “empowerment.” I’m not sure why. I have never felt empowered by my fetish. To this day, I still don’t. If my sexuality empowers me, it’s only in the same way as my heartbeat: it is always there, and always has been there—and when it goes away, so will I.

  Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, a vapor sometime like a bear or lion, a towered citadel, a pendant rock, a forked mountain, or blue promontory with trees upon’t that nod unto the world—and mock our eyes with air. At some point, I would need to stop idling in fantasy and get off the train. I was tired. My eyes ached from looking for things I will not find.

  I was the only person in the car. I knew that.

  I opened my eyes, blinking against the harsh fluorescence of the train.

  But He was still there. He hadn’t left.

  He never leaves.

  I smiled.

  “I love you,” I told Him. “You’re the love of my life.”

  He touched my hand. Our fingers intertwined.

  “For your sake, honey, don’t let that be true,” He said. “Give your love to the ones who will love you back, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “I know,” I told Him. “I do want that.”

  He waved away my doubt, as if it were an irksome fly.

  “’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus,” He said. “Our bodies are gardens to which our wills are gardeners.”

  I pressed my lips together and looked down.

  “Are you saying,” I asked, fighting to suppress my smile, “that love is fertilized with will?”

  He winked.

  “I am.”

  I laughed, shaking my head. It’s a lovely thought. It buoys me.

  Our train pulled into a station, and the doors slid open.

  “Is this our stop?” He asked.

  I glanced out the window at the platform: Chambers Street. We weren’t home yet.

  I curled my knees up to my chest and rested my head on His shoulder.

  “No,” I said. “But we’re getting close.”

  Works Referenced

  All quotes from Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin. Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Stand and Unfold

  Ania Loomba. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford University Press, 2002.

  Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering. Edited by Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, and Rafal Rohozinski. The MIT Press, 2008.

  Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Progress Amid Resistance. Edited by Sanja Kelly and Julia Breslin. Freedom House, 2010.

  Norman N. Holland. “Hamlet: My Greatest Creation.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 3 (1975).

  Plato. Symposium. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford University Press, 1994.

  2.1 The Tempest: Were I Human

  W. H. Auden. “The Sea and the Mirror.” Collected Longer Poems. Random House, 1968.

  Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

  Mary Gaitskill. Bad Behavior: Stories. Simon & Schuster, 1988.

  “. . . that question is a pinch more stinging than bees” is a reference to The Tempest, 1.2.

  “You smell like a fish, Cal. . . . A strange fish” is a reference to The Tempest, 2.1.

  “There are brave new worlds to find” is a reference to The Tempest, 5.1.

  2.2 The Winter’s Tale: An Aspect More Favorable

  Andrew Gurr. “The Bear, the Statue, and Hysteria in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983).

  Anderson, Mark. Shakespeare By Another Name: The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, the Man Who Was Shakespeare. Gotham, 2006.

  Scott Crider. “Weeping in the Upper World: The Orphic Frame in 5.3 of The Winter’s Tale and the Archive of Poetry.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32 (1999).

  2.3 Romeo and Juliet: These Violent Delights

  Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. Translated by David Wright. Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.

  “. . . as one dead in the bottom of a tomb” is a reference to Romeo and Juliet, 3.5.

  2.4 The Taming of the Shrew: Rough with Love

  John Davies. “In Francum.” The Poems of Sir John Davies. Edited by Robert Krueger. Clarendon Press, 1975.

  James M. Bromley. “Social Relations and Masochistic Sexual Practice in The Nice Valour.” Modern Philology 107.4 (2010).

  Thomas Middleton. The Collected Works. Edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford University Press, 2010.

  John R. Yamamoto-Wilson. Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013.

  David Savran. Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton University Press, 1998.

  Stephen Orgel. “Nobody’s Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” In Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture. Edited by Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum, and Michael Moon. Duke University Press, 1989.

  Dana E. Aspinall. “The Play and the Critics.” In The Taming of the Shrew: Critical Essays. Edited by Dana E. Aspinall. Garland, 2001.

  3.1 Hamlet: Nothing, My Lord

  Emily Dickinson. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Edited by Thomas H. Johnson. Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, 1960.

  G. Wilson Knight. The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy. Routledge Classics, 2001.

  Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Edited by M. I. Finley. Translated by Rex Warner. Penguin Classics, 1972.

  Elaine Showalter. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. Methuen, 1985.

  Pauline Réage. The Story of O. Grove Press, 1965.

  Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. 2nd ed. Translated by Terence Irwin. Hackett Publishing Company, 1999.

  “. . . two months later—no, not even that much, not two” is a reference to Hamlet, 1.2.

  3.2 Twelfth Night: What Should I Do

  Stanley Wells. Shakespeare, Sex, and Love. Oxford University Press, 2010.

  William Shakespeare. ‘Utayl (Othello). Translated by Khalil Mutran. Cairo: Dar al-ma’arif, 1976.

  Neil Barbour. The Arabic Theatre in Egypt. University of London Press, 1935.

  Ferial J. Ghazoul. “The Arabization of Othello.” Comparative Literature, vol. 50, no. 1 (1998).

  Peter Chelkowski. Islam in Modern Drama and Theatre. New York University Press, 1984.

  M. M. Badawi. “Shakespeare and the Arabs.” Cairo Studies in English (1966).

  3.3 Love’s Labor’s Lost: Wonder of the World

  Juliet Dusinberre. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. 3rd ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

  Gordon Williams. A Dictionary of Sexual La
nguage and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. Bloomsbury Academic, 2001.

  3.4 Antony and Cleopatra: Here Is My Space

  Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays. Edited by Sara M. Deats. Taylor and Francis, 2004.

  Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. Translated by Sir George Young. Dover Publications, 1991.

  4.1 Macbeth: Double, Double

  “. . . hoisted it into the air like Yorick’s skull” is a reference to Hamlet, 5.1.

  “Stars, hide your fires: let not my boyfriend see my black and deep desires” is a reference to Macbeth, 1.4.

  Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia. “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text.” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993).

  Bruce R. Smith. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics. University of Chicago Press, 1995.

  John Donne. The Essential Donne. Edited by Amy Clampitt. Ecco Press, 1996.

  Marjorie Garber. Shakespeare After All: The Later Plays (Macbeth, Lecture 6). Harvard University Extension School Video Lecture Series. http://freevideolectures.com/Course/2746/ENGL-E-129-Shakespeare-After-All-The-Later-Plays/6#.

  “‘Privacy’ palters with us in a double sense” is a reference to Macbeth, 5.8.

  Harold Bloom. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998.

  “But the only alternative is to unsex myself” is a reference to Macbeth, 1.5.

  4.2 King Lear: Speak

  Jane Smiley. A Thousand Acres. Reprint ed. Anchor, 2003.

  4.3 Othello: Beast with Two Backs

  Virginia Mason Vaughan. Othello: A Contextual History. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

  Norrie Epstein. The Friendly Shakespeare: A Thoroughly Painless Guide to the Best of the Bard. Penguin Books, 1992.

  T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines. “Othello’s Unconsummated Marriage.” Essays in Criticism 33 (1983).

  4.4 Cymbeline: What We May Be

  “After the cats and blind puppies have drowned . . .” is a reference to Othello, 1.3.

  “In his mirror eyes were all my sins remembered” is a reference to Hamlet, 3.1.

  5.1 As You Like It: What You Will

  Iris Murdoch. The Black Prince. Penguin Classics, 2003.

  Bertrand Evans. Shakespeare’s Comedies. Oxford University Press, 1960.

  “I devoted a whole sonnet to ‘having traffic with thy self alone’” is a reference to Sonnet 4.