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A Pair of Gender-Crossed Lovers: Staging Romeo and Juliet to Question Cultural Fears and Hidden Assumptions
 

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is an icon of heterosexual romantic love, not only in Western literature but in Western culture. A "Romeo" is understood to be, positively, one who is lovestruck, and negatively, a player. ^[1] The Reflections sang that their love was "Just Like Romeo and Juliet"(1964), and Dire Straits that "it was just that the time was wrong"("Romeo and Juliet," 1988). Shakespeare's play has been performed continuously since the English theaters re-opened with the Restoration in 1660, was adapted into opera by Gounod in 1867 and into musical theater's West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein in 1957. There have been numerous films, most notably Zefferelli's faithfully hose-and-doublet'd version in 1968 but also including Baz Luhrman's 1996 treatment, with "Sword" brand pistols so that the characters adhere meaningfully to the text, and Andrzej Bartkowiak's 2000 Romeo Must Die, in which the African-American Juliet and her Chinese Romeo do not take their lives but walk hand-in-hand into an Oakland sunset. ^[2] This list barely scratches the surface of the body of works that produce or are based on Shakespeare's play. In the four hundred years since its premier in London circa 1595, Romeo and Juliet has become the definitive story of romantic love between a man and a woman. If any piece of literature can be expected to lay out gender norms for us, this is surely an excellect candidate, as romance is the social activity that defines the gender roles and differences of its participants most strongly. The first Juliet, however, was played by a boy, and one of the most successful Romeos by a woman. Such cross-casting illustrates the beliefs about gender that its audiences held, and I argue that a re gendered production of this canonical text would illuminate our current gendered assumptions.
 

The Elizabethans: "to distinguish betwixt himself and myself"
 

The theatrical context in which Shakespeare worked did not include women actors; instead men and boys in drag would have portrayed Juliet, the Nurse and the Ladies Capulet and Montague. This given circumstance is axiomatic in the study of Shakespeare, but Stephen Orgel, in questioning the reasons for this convention, finds the convention itself "anomalous"(2) in an age when women commonly performed in Continental Europe. ^[3] Additionally, Shakespeare's era followed one in which women were listed as guild members and so might have been involved in the medieval ecclesiastical play cycles, and preceded one in which women certainly acted from the start of the Restoration.
 

One reason for the abscence of women actors is the pervasive fear in Shakespeare's society of women's difference from men. The importance of that difference lies largely in the eye of its beholder, which in a patriarchal society is a male eye. George Wilkins' 1607 play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage includes the following exchange between the suitor Scarburrow and young woman Clare:
 

SCAR: Prithee tell me: are you not a woman?
 

CLARE.: I know not that neither, till I am better acquainted with a man.
 

SCAR: And how would you be acquainted with a man?
 

CLARE: To distinguish betwixt himself and myself.
 

SCAR: Why, I am a man.
 

CLARE: That's more than I know, sir.
 

SCAR: To approve that I am no less, thus I kiss thee.
 

CLARE: And by that proof I am a man too, for I have kissed you.(cite)
 

This interchange both lampoons and illustrates the definition of one gender as relative to the other, and highlights a prevalant unease as to just what constitutes the distinction. Early modern Europe saw a widespread movement to limit women's economic and associative freedom in order to control their sexuality, and such compulsive control only heightened the fear of its loss(Shapiro 182). Romeo voices the Elizabethan culture's fear of a shifting boundary between the sexes with "O sweet Juliet,/ Thy beauty hath made me effeminate"(RJ,3.1.108-9), a fear apparently legitimate since one of the persons most in defiance of traditional gender roles was not on a playhouse stage but on the throne of England.
 

The Renaissance was a watershed for all Europe, in which nearly every aspect of life underwent change and the very moorings of society and culture seemed to be shifting. ^[4] England especially experienced this period as unsettled and unsettling, as the state religion changed from Roman Catholicism to the Church of England--twice--and the country's sovereignty was threatened by the Habsburgs, first through Queen Mary's marriage to Philip of Spain and then by his Armada. Elizabeth I, while the ruler who defeated the Armada and led England to global prominence, was a radical departure from monarchy as England had ever known it. Possibly the most successful performer of her age, Elizabeth realized the power of aligning herself with the men of her realm, notably at Tilbury in 1588--"I have the stomach and heart of a king and of a king of England too"- while also distancing herself from them as an unattainable ideal of womanhood, the Virgin Gloriana. Both she and the boys who played Juliet anticipated Virginia Woolf's assertion that "in every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above"(123). Such an "underneath-above" split was necessary to a boy actor's performance of femininity.
 

The Victorians' Charlotte Cushman: "just man enough to be a boy"
 

Charlotte Cushman, the celebrated nineteenth-century American actress, reversed the Elizabethan cross-gendered convention and played Romeo, illustrating the new direction perceptions of gender had taken in two and a half centuries. Cushman, already successful in the United States, sailed for England in 1844 to establish herself in London, and sent for her sister Susan, also an actress, in 1845. The Victorian theatre had an established tradition of "breeches roles," dating from the introduction of women to the stage in the first days of the Restoration, when disguised-heroine roles such as Shakespeare's Rosalind and Viola became extremely popular for showing off actresses' legs. By the mid-nineteenth century the most successful actresses also played the "gentler" of Shakespeare's heroes, most frequently Romeo and Hamlet, while "utility actresses" played boys and pages. Lisa Merrill notes that, as in the Restoration, the majority of actresses in breeches roles used them to titillate audiences, which were largely composed of men(111). ^[5] Cushman, however, who was accounted neither a beauty nor feminine by her contemporaries, was heralded "as Romeo, not merely as a 'female' Romeo"(115). Cushman, who was tall, square-jawed and deep-voiced, was characterized by one of her audience-members as "just man enough to be a boy"(117), and The Times' theatre critic announced, "the Romeo of Miss Cushman is far superior to any Romeo we have ever had"(Stebbins 60).
 

Having Romeo played by a woman circumvented Victorian unease about sex. Britannia's critic in 1846 applauded the casting: "'Females may together give us an image of the desire of the lovers of Verona, without suggesting a thought of vice'"(Merrill 110). Sentimental friendships between women were common in nineteenth-century England, and were generally believed chaste, though they were often passionate. Victorian culture tended to echo Shakespeare's character Duke Orsino, who tells his page Cesario, "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"(TN,2.4.91-4). Cushman was called a "Sapphic Romeo"(Merrill 124), illustrating a willed misconception that in turn illustrates a cultural refusal to admit the possibility of homosexual relations between women. The love between women in Sappho's poetry was considered romantic but asexual in the nineteenth century, although seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers had defined it as not only sexual but decadent(287,n.50). Similarly, Cushman's contemporaries and even at least one twentieth-century biographer explain Cushman's playing of Romeo as a favor to her sister, while glossing over that she had played Romeo before leaving the United States and continued to play him with great success for years after Susan retired from the stage. Cushman had offstage relationships with several of her Juliets, including Matilda Hays in 1848, with whom Elizabeth Barrett Browning observed that Cushman had "'a female marriage'"(160).
 

An "innocent" Sapphic love, romantic but not sexual, was a necessary outlet for the strain of the separation enacted between men and women in Victorian society, and of the shroud of silence and immorality such separation placed around even "normal" sex. One night during a performance of Romeo and Juliet in the 1851-52 season, during one of Romeo's most tender speeches to Juliet, an audience member snorted mockingly and audibly. Cushman put an arm around her Juliet, Sarah Anderton, and escorted her offstage, to return alone and demand, still in character, "'Some man must put that person out, or I shall be obliged to do it myself!'" The heckler was thrown out and Cushman's chivalry applauded before the play continued(Merrill 127). The Victorian age claimed an affinity with the medieval, and had a strong nostalgia for an Arthurian idealization of courtly love. Cushman, who looked and acted the part of a gallant knight but was physically incapable of heterosexual consummation with her Juliet, was the perfect agent of catharsis for a Victorian audience that could not admit Woolf's "vacillation from one sex to the other." In her skill in playing Romeo, however, Cushman raised the possibility that masculinity was itself an act.
 

Cross-purposes: "Art thou not Romeo?"
 

The wildly various expressions of sexuality available to us in the twenty-first century provide their own argument that gender is a public role. If both a beauty pageant queen and a butch dyke are women, if a transvestite can fool us as to his/her biological sex, then we must, of necessity, let go of the gendered expectations that more straitlaced societies imposed on their members. Surely we are more open-minded that the Elizabethans and Victorians, and are well on our way to real equality between men and women--if we have not achieved it already! ^[6]
 

Our words tell us different. Language is one of the strongest indicators of a culture's embedded beliefs and preoccupations. Compare the rapidity with which even a casual student of Shakespeare learns the definition of "cuckold" (and this word is still present, if rare, in modern usage) to the number of scholars in any field, including womens' studies, who are familiar with the term "cuckquean"--a woman whose husband has committed adultery. While feminists and members of the politically correct movement have amended current English to include "chairperson" and to allow "they" to refer to a singular but sexually unspecified person[1], pejoratively gendered expressions remain in frequent current use: "dick," "pussy" and "cunt" are probably the most common, and "pussy" is especially interesting, as it generally gives the most serious offence to males. These insults' direct link to sex indicates both a continuing unease in gender relations and a pervasive association of specific characteristics with a given gender.
 

Romeo and Juliet initially seems the last dramatic work that would allow us to examine our specific gender hang-ups; an audience cannot approach it without almost overwhelming cultural baggage. Of all Shakespeare's plays it is the most generally known, owing both to the adaptive and derivative works created from it and to its prescence in almost every secondary school curriculum in the United States, Britain and much of the former British Empire. Harold Bloom calls Romeo and Juliet "the largest and most persuasive celebration of romantic love in Western literature"(90). Is it, though? "Largest," "romantic love," and "Western literature" are all apt terms, but Shakespeare's language argues against Bloom's "persuasive celebration." With more dick jokes than any other Shakespearean play, a fatal conflation of swords and penises, and the repeated equation of sex with death, Romeo and Juliet reads much more like a critique of hormonal love, and specifically of testosterone. Romeo enters the play in love with a woman called Rosaline, but more in love with the idea of being in love and with the language of love, which he delivers in ejaculatory clichés: "Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate,/ O anything of nothing first create;/ O heavy lightness, serious vanity,/ Misshapen chaos...Dost thou not laugh?"(RJ,1.1.169-76). ^[7] Benvolio is at least rolling his eyes by this point; "heavy lightness" indeed. Yet these observations do not contest the play's genius. If Romeo's language initially prompts laughter, Juliet, all fourteen-years-come-Lammastide of her, does belong in a celebration of love and of sparkling language, and she raises Romeo, if not to her level of discourse and strength of purpose, at least to an apt consort. In their first exchange Juliet not only answers Romeo's quatrain with her own but co-opts one of his rhymes to do it, and Romeo has wit enough to recognize a bargain well made when she answers his vows of love with marriage. The macho and sexually paranoid culture of Tybalt and Mercutio arrests Romeo's progression away from the Capulet-Montague feud and dooms the lovers to the chain of events that will end with their deaths, while Juliet responds to the Nurse's condemnation of Romeo with a leap to her new husband's defense, and turns toward reconciliation rather than revenge.
 

Romeo and Juliet's familiarity to its audiences is precisely the tool available in interrogating our culture's beliefs about gender, and in turn that interrogation will return audiences (from the Latin audientia, 'hearing') to the text's critical implications. H.R. Coursen states that no audience attends a play without some sense of meaning, if not in the script then in the signifiers(cite). Clearly audiences come to Romeo and Juliet with a sense of meaning of the script, though it may not be the meaning that is actually in that script's words. But what if we change the signifiers, trusting the Elizabethan playwrights' belief "that theatrical disguise could be a revelation of truth about men and women"(Dusinberre 233)? What I propose is an experimental production of Romeo and Juliet in which the variable of gender is isolated by switching male to female and vice versa, what I will call a "gender-flipped" production. By "gender-flipped," I mean that Juliet, the Nurse, and the Ladies Capulet and Montague would be played by men, as men. All other characters would be played by women as women, and the world of the play would be understood by the characters as one in which women hold "patriarchal" power.
 

I initially thought to re-gender the language, a simple switch of "he's" to "she's" and vice versa, with some "fathers" changed to "mothers." On examination of the text, however, I dismissed this idea. The exchange between Capulet's and Montague's men in 1.1, for instance, would read:
 

GREGORY: Do you quarrel, ma'am?
 

ABRAHAM: Quarrel, ma'am? No, ma'am.
 

SAMSON: But if you do, ma'am, I am for you. I serve as good a woman as you.
 

ABRAHAM: No better.
 

SAMSON: Well, ma'am.
 

Enter BENVOLIO
 

GREGORY: Say 'better.' Here comes one of my mistress's kinswomen.
 

SAMSON: Yes, better, ma'am.
 

ABRAHAM: You lie.
 

SAMSON: Draw, if you be women.(RJ,1.1.46-55, re-gendered)
 

And so on. The language is densely gendered, and quickly becomes contrived and laughable. In verse, re-gendering will destroy much of Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, especially awkward in so regular a play. I did not attempt to change the names in the above passage; "mistress's kinswomen" muddies our reading quite enough. Re-gendering the language is both affected and misses the point of re-gendering the cast, which is to discover the assumptions we make unconsciously on seeing a man or woman onstage. If those assumptions are apparent even when a character uses opposite-gendered language, as I believe they would be, Shakespeare's original language will show them in greater relief, and preserve the controlled experimental value of such a production.
 

After an informal gender-flipped reading among several friends that told us little except that the roles are near-archetypes of gender to us, Alecia Magnifico, a Swarthmore classmate of mine now teaching at Sacklan Valley School in Berkeley, California, suggested an alternate laboratory: her classroom. Her fifth-grade class, in the 2001-02 school year, was made up of four bright girls who had been asking to work on Shakespeare--the perfect guinea pigs. I re-gendered the three boys-in-the-street scenes, 1.2, 1.4 and 2.3[2] (re-affirming the awkwardness of revising Shakespeare), and Alecia swore their parents to secrecy. ^[8] She told the girls that the scenes she presented to them were drafts that never made it into a finished play, but were the work of Shakespeare. I left California to go on tour at the end of February, but Alecia documented her impressions and published them online: "Scene 1.2 reads scarily well gender-flipped. The concept of talking a best friend into attending a party to check out other potential partners works for my liberated young women, and the 'lovesick' speeches of Romeo's translate well into today's depression over lost love. They are not struggling. I, on the other hand, am. C[hris Cutler, another Swarthmorean] pointed out that the gender seems integral to how we know the plot. ^[9] His comment came out of my initial observation that it's damn hard to teach a play 'backwards' when you know it inside-out the other--'proper,' if you will--way. I've been in the damn thing twice, taught it twice, directed scenes three different times, though never the whole play... but why should it be so hard to flip it? It's the same play, with the same stage directions, the same speeches, the same characters. But I cannot keep them straight anymore, even though I know the story cold. It's tricky, and definitely challenging. ^[10] But I think also an interesting commentary on how we really do understand ourselves and each other in terms of gender and society."(Magnifico, indent?) Alecia's students figured out the hoax long before they performed the scenes for their school in June, but not before they had made the text their own, and to Alecia and to me their performance was much more reminiscent of Rosalind and Celia than of Romeo and Mercutio--except that they were Romeo and Mercutio. Alecia's difficulty with scenes involving only one gender promises extensive mental spasming in producing the entire play.
 

My initial interest in a gender-flipped production of Romeo and Juliet stemmed from curiosity about the gender roles we assume unconsciously, but as I have explored the idea, I have become even more interested in the link between those roles and the language through which we implement them. My goal in my proposed production has therefore become twofold: to examine current gender assumptions and to hear Shakespeare's text with a fresh ear. I expect to encounter significant cognitive dissonance at the sight of a female Romeo startling a male Juliet as he sighs, "Romeo, doff thy name,/ And for thy name--which is no part of thee--/ Take all myself"(RJ,2.189-90). A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but it would also lead us to re-examine the rose, ourselves as its namers, and our language as an integral part of our gendered identities.
 

footnote [1] A linguistic abomination.
 

footnote [2] See appendices (not included in this posting; they're just the re-gendered scenes)
 

Works Cited
 

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

Coursen, H.R, Shakespearean Performance as Interpretation. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.
 

Dusinberre, Juliet, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1975.
 

Magnifico, Alecia, "#126 - shakespeare, but not" in Nearly There.... http://www.dodgeandburn.net/nearly/entries/126-17042002.html.
 

Marcus, Leah S, Janel Mueller and Mary Beth Rose, ed, Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
 

Merrill, Lisa, When Romeo Was a Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.
 

Orgel, Stephen, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
 

Shakespeare, William, Romeo and Juliet in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1997.
 

Shakespeare, William, Twelfth Night in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton and Co, 1997.
 

Shapiro, Michael, "The Introduction of Actresses in England: Delay or Defensiveness?" in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
 

Stebbins, Emma, Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life. New York: Benjamin Bloom, Inc, 1972 (first published 1879).
 

Wilkins, George, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage. (Find this)
 

Woolf, Virgina, Orlando. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1928.
 

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