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-A Pair of Gender-Crossed Lovers: Seeing Assumptions and Hearing the Text of Romeo and Juliet-
 

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is a canonical love story in Western culture, and possibly the definitive love story. The play's cultural status ensures that an audience today cannot attend a production of it without knowing, or believing it knows, the story. The popular literary critic Harold Bloom calls Romeo and Juliet "the largest and most persuasive celebration of romantic love in Western literature," and this estimation sums up the majority of both popular and literary opinion of the play. This opinion, the result of Romeo and Juliet's central place in our culture, prevents the play's audience from hearing Shakespeare's words clearly—an inability to see the trees for the forest. The audience of any play brings assumptions about the signifiers that play uses; an audience of Romeo and Juliet also brings assumptions about the script. To question both the signifier of gender and our assumed knowledge of the script, in the fall of 2003 I staged three scenes from Romeo and Juliet using a practice I will call gender-flipping: all male characters were played by women as women, and all female characters by men as men. Romeo was a woman and Juliet a man, and the characters understood and presented the world of the play as one in which women held "patriarchal" power. The audiences I will be referring to in this paper were undergraduates at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia who were enrolled in an introductory theatre course taught by Cathy Brookshire, and various students and community members at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia. The gender-flipped cast, three male and five female graduate students in the Master of Letters program at Mary Baldwin, performed scenes 2.1 (the balcony scene), 2.3 (the boys in the street with the Nurse and Peter) and 3.5 (the morning after the wedding night) for two sections of Brookshire's course on 14 November 2003, and for an audience of about sixty at Mary Baldwin's Fletcher Collins Theatre on 15 November. Members of both audiences completed surveys both before and after the performances. Neither Brookshire nor Megan McDonough, the scenes' director, informed the JMU students of the gender-flip device before the performances; these students initially knew only that they were attending an experimental production of scenes from Romeo and Juliet. The Mary Baldwin performance was advertised with flyers reading, "What if Romeo were a woman—and Juliet were a man? Find out with three gender-flipped scenes from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet." Responses to these performances show both that the production exposed many of its audiences' assumptions and discomforts regarding gender, and that it returned that audience to an Elizabethan method of play-attendance, in which active listening is the most important method of following the narrative.
 

In the initial planning stage of the project, a logical step in flipping the gender of Romeo and Juliet's characters seemed to be to also flip the gendered language, "he" and "father" to "she" and "mother," and vice versa. Examination of the text, however, showed the implications of such a step. The 1.1 exchange between Capulet's and Montague's men, 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.
 

Re-gendering the language quickly becomes contrived and laughable, and in verse would destroy much of Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, which would be especially awkward in so regular a play. Additionally, the connotations of "lady" include "deserving chivalrous attention," while those of "lord" include "master" and "owner," and, to my knowledge, no true masculine equivalent of "maiden" exists. I wished to isolate one variable, gender, and to discover some of the assumptions an audience makes when it sees a man rather than a woman, and a woman rather than a man, onstage. If those assumptions were strong enough to be apparent when a character used opposite-gendered language, as I suspected they would be, Shakespeare's original language would only throw them into greater relief. In consequence our female Romeo, in her long skirt, exclaimed, "It is my lady, O, it is my love./ O, that she knew she were!" when the bearded Juliet appeared in his balcony.
 

Several members of Romeo's audience disagreed with the decision against changing the language, however. One 19-year-old woman wrote, "whenever they addressed each other as 'sir' or 'madam' or other gender-related nouns, it was confusing," and a 20-year-old woman wrote that "'she' should be changed to 'he' and vice versa. That really annoyed me" (emphasis hers). A man who did not include his age on his survey wrote, "lines when Paris was mentioned (as a him) didn't work," echoing a problem that McDonough had raised in rehearsal and to which we found no solution. The problem of references to characters offstage proved a complication of the flip: about half the audience members responded to "what gender is Rosaline? Tybalt? Paris?" with flipped genders and half with the original genders of the text. This confusion, while it does not outweigh the arguments against re-gendering the text, does present a problem that a full-length gender-flipped production would also face, since Romeo and Benvolio speak of Rosaline early in the play and "she" never appears onstage, unless it is to stand by unremarked at the Capulets' party. A program note explaining the gender-flip might help, but Rosaline will probably continue to exemplify the difficulty of grasping the gender-flip intellectually.
 

More illuminating than that an unprepared audience did not unanimously flip the genders of unseen characters, however, is the annoyance of the 20-year-old woman cited above, who was "really annoyed." The same woman wrote, in response to "any other impressions or comments," "I really hated this. I'm not sure why, but it made me uncomfortable and all the actors annoyed me. It confused me in some ways and I really just hated it." Initially, this woman's vehemence seems misplaced; the only character who appeared even partially nude was the male Juliet, who was shirtless at the beginning of 3.5, and while Lord Capulet shouted at Juliet later in the same scene, she neither struck him nor threatened to. So much for overt sex or violence. This audience member's discomfort, I propose, stems from a more subconscious sense of what is appropriate, which is at least partially why she was unable to articulate her reasons. Erving Goffman, a theorist who has written extensively on social interaction, states in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that in playing a part one implicitly asks others to take that part seriously, to believe it. While Goffman is not referring to playing a dramatic part, his remark is readily applicable to theatre, especially if an audience member is at all literal-minded or accustomed to watching naturalistic acting, as any college student who attends movies is. The woman who hated the gender-flip, then, was offended by the actors' implicit request that she take that gender-flip seriously, to admit that it might be, if not real, at least realistic. Even so, why should the idea that a woman might come to woo a man on his balcony, calling him "fair maid," be hateful rather than simply foolish or misguided? Certainly the female Romeo was acting contrary to stereotypes of women, and it is likely that this subversion unsettled the 20-year-old woman because it threatened to impinge on her own performance of femininity. Richard D. Ashmore and Frances K. Del Boca point out that "the period of young adulthood represents the epitome of prior gender-role socialization, at least for the traditional script" (emphasis mine). With "prior gender-role socialization" Ashmore and Del Boca refer to a childhood tendency to dichotomize gender as a method of categorizing and understanding it. A young adult, especially one in college and living apart from his or her family for the first time, will rely strongly on this prior socialization in presenting his- or herself positively to a member of the opposite sex. Young men and women, attempting to secure their specifically personal roles as adults, often fall back on the generalized roles that stereotypes offer, especially in situations of stress. Relations with the opposite sex fall into this category because they are likely to affect both one's current social status and the rest of one's life. We define these gender roles by their opposition to one another; black defines white, male female and vice versa. To return to the young women who was "really annoyed," I surmise that her discomfort is the product of a female Romeo's challenge to the young woman's stereotypically based sense of her role as a woman in relation to men, a role that emphatically does not include calling, "O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?" up to a man's window.
 

This American woman's twenty-first-century discomfort echoes an unease that some of Shakespeare's contemporaries felt in sixteenth-century England, which the casting of the first Juliet indicates. She was played by a male in 1595 also, although not by a deep-voiced 22-year-old man but by a boy actor in a dress, whose voice had not yet broken and who certainly did not bend Romeo over the balcony rail as part of his persuasion that it was the nightingale, and not the lark. Women did not act on the English stage until the Restoration in the seventeenth century. While this circumstance is nearly axiomatic among Shakespeare scholars, it was actually anomalous in contemporary Europe. Women performed in theatres in Continental Europe, including in Spain, where women in general faced much more restriction than English women, who could attend plays with relative freedom. Actresses were "a thing much desir'd in England," but were discouraged for both economic and social reasons that relate closely to the fundamental changes that England underwent in the Renaissance. First, while in the Middle Ages women were needed in the relatively small labor force, the English Renaissance coincided with a population increase and a move toward urbanization that created greater competition for jobs and allowed women to be confined to the home. Second and perhaps more fundamentally, women were a problem category in Shakespeare's England, in that just what they were and might be capable of were difficult to pin down. George Wilkins' 1607 play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage contains the following exchange between the suitor Scarburrow and the 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.
 

This interchange both illustrates and lampoons the definition of one gender as relative to the other, and highlights an unease as to just what creates the distinction. This unease anticipates the twentieth-century psychologists Ashmore and Del Boca's theory that young adults make their gender-role identifications as defined by male and female roles' opposition to one another. For Renaissance England, times were both thrilling and terrifying. The state religion changed three times in forty years, the tiny royal navy and a North Sea storm fought off the Spanish Armada, and on the throne was a monarch with "the body of a weak and feeble woman, but...the stomach and heart of a king and of a king of England too" --the Virgin Gloriana, whose reign and consummate self-presentation were unprecedented, and whose refusal to marry and later to name an heir were a great source of unease to her subjects. From a historical perspective, it is somewhat presumptuous to compare a JMU student's coming-of-age process with England's ascension to global prominence, but I venture that the need for self-definition and the discomfort with shifting categories of gender are not dissimilar.
 

The woman who "really hated" the gender-flipped scenes was the exception in the JMU audiences, but her reaction is worth considering at length because she represents an extreme that several other audience members at least approached. A nineteen-year-old woman responded to "can you imagine any girl you know behaving like Romeo?" with "no, girls are not supposed to do that in today's society" and to "any guy you know behaving like Juliet?" with "especially no, guys are supposed to control their emotions and stay strong no matter what the situation." One twenty-year-old woman found the scenes "very interesting, but hard to sort out mentally." Alternately, another twenty-year-old woman wrote, "great job! Gives you a different perspective and the actors really showcased the appropriate emotions! I liked it because it really shows the roles men and women take in society," and a twenty-year-old man concurred with "I loved the twist on things. It was very interesting to see how a change of gender would affect my ability to perceive the play in its true form."
 

"To perceive the play in its true form" points to another connection the project made with Romeo and Juliet's original audience, that of listening to what Shakespeare actually wrote. I have mentioned the play's central place in the literary canon, and Bloom's commendation of it as a "celebration of romantic love." Is it such a celebration, however? To read the text as written in the sixteenth century rather than as received in the twenty-first is to find the most dick jokes of any Shakespeare play, a fatal conflation of swords and penises, and the repeated equation of sex with death. Romeo and Juliet suggests, rather than a celebration of romance, a critique of hormones, and specifically of testosterone. Romeo's name has come to mean, according to the JMU respondents, "the type of guy all girls dream of. Almost an idea of a man that is too good to be true"(male, 19) and "someone who would do anything for love and would not let anything get in the way"(female, 19). He enters Act 1, however, in love not with Juliet but with Rosaline, and to a greater extent in love with the idea of being in love and with its language. He expresses himself in "ay me's" and overblown oxymorons: "O brawling love, O loving hate,/ O anything of nothing first create;/ O heavy lightness, serious vanity,/ Misshapen chaos...Dost thou not laugh?" Benvolio's answer, "I rather weep, coz," is possibly a signal that he has been laughing at the melodramtic Romeo but chooses to be diplomatic, unlike the cynical Mercutio, who taunts Romeo's lovelorn state vigorously. Neither Mercutio nor Romeo has a very admirable attitude toward love or women, and one will die for a macho ideal of honor and the other for a tragic-romantic ideal of love, both unnecessarily. These immature and hormonal characters' language tells the story that Shakespeare wrote.
 

Romeo and Juliet is not simply a condemnation of foolish boys, though; one facet of Shakespeare's genius is his refusal to present simple answers, and an audience must not only hear the play but listen to it actively. As the sentimental Romeo's aesthetic redeemer, Juliet does deserve a celebration of romantic love, but her constancy and good sense are overtaken by the fathers' feud and the boys' street-fights, where women have no place. Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin observe, in Engendering a Nation, that the connections and contradictions between "aggressive masculinity, and closeted womanhood...are present in Shakespeare's text, marking it with a modernity that bears investigation." This investigation is one that the play's first, early modern, audience would have made automatically in going to hear a new play. It is a difficult investigation for today's audience to make, however, not only because Romeo and Juliet is culturally iconic but also because audiences today, unlike the Elizabethans, go to see plays. We have become used to spectacle, through lighting, special effects and the cinema. This dependence on our eyes joins with Romeo and Juliet's cultural baggage to effectively deafen us to the play's critical take on teenage love and eye-for-an-eye patriarchy. The gender-flip, however, gave "a dyslexically interesting portrayal" of the classic story, according to a 20-year-old woman at JMU. This "brain teaser" (female, 19) led its audience members to respond to "Are Romeo and Juliet really in love? How do you know?" with "cocky and chauvinistic and proud but not necessarily love" (female, 20), and "it seems more of an obsessive infatuation than true love, Juliet seems more into it than Romeo" (female, 19).
 

The inversion of the usual visual signifiers left the audience with the text as their guide to the action taking place. A 53-year-old woman observed, "I heard words in the lines I never heard before." Probably the character whose words took the most radically different meaning for the audience was Lord Capulet, played by a 5'3" woman who weighed perhaps 105 pounds. 95 of the 110 audience members found Lord Capulet the most frightening character, and a 19-year-old woman elaborated, "because the girl who played the role was small, short and petite and her character did not fit her size." In 3.5 Lord Capulet answers Juliet's resistance to marrying Paris with a long tirade that ends:
 

Thursday is near. Lay hand on heart. Advise. An you be mine, I'll give you to my friend. An you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets, For, by my soul, I'll ne'er acknowledge thee, Nor what is mine shall never do thee good. Trust to't. Bethink you. I'll not be forsworn.
 

She then exited, leaving a male Juliet, Nurse and Lady Capulet, any of whom could easily bench-press her. Despite this physical incongruity, no one in the audiences laughed, and their responses to "do the men (Juliet, Nurse, Lord Capulet) or the women (Romeo, Mercutio, Benvolio, Peter, Lord Capulet) have power in this society? How do you know?" were overwhelmingly "the women." Audience members cited reasons such as "Lord Capulet works Lady Capulet like a part-time job" (male, 24); "Juliet cowered at Lord Capulet's badgering" (male, 20); "Lord Capulet has the ultimate say" (female, 18); and "Juliet's father is forcing her to marry or be disowned from the family" (female, 19). Several audience members stated that Juliet would be thrown out if he disobeyed, which is what Lord Capulet threatens, but a 26-year-old woman commented, "I have never been convinced that Lord Capulet would have disowned his daughter—but damn—she would have!" Belief in Lord Capulet's resolve to disown Juliet makes Lady Capulet's refusal to intercede for Juliet believable, as it does the formerly supportive Nurse's advice to marry Paris, and even Juliet's desperate resolve: "If all else fail, myself have power to die." If Lord Capulet's threats are simply those of a blusterer, the other characters' responses seem reactionary, but by playing the threats as meaningful and menacing, Lord Capulet "came across as more imposing than any other person and she didn't even need a weapon to do it" (female, 21). She just needed her audience to hear her words, and since she looked more like a traditional Juliet, her words were the audience's tools for understanding her.
 

Listening to the text also served the audience's imagination. Shakespeare never raises the question of Juliet accompanying the banished Romeo to Mantua, and in fact changes this from his source, Brooke's "Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet," in which Juliet begs to go along disguised as Romeus' page. While Shakespeare had already used a boy playing a girl playing a boy in Two Gentlemen of Verona and would later in his career play extensively with this joke, Katherine L. Wright concludes that with Romeo and Juliet, a relatively straightforward play in terms of meta-theatre, he dropped the page suggestion "rather than call attention to the boy-actor playing Juliet." What is the audience to conclude, however? The gender-flip audiences' post-show survey asked, "why didn't Juliet go with Romeo when Romeo left for Mantua?" Nineteen respondents answered that they did not know, and one 24-year-old woman wrote, "I've always wondered this." The other ninety, however, came up with their own reasons: "he had to speak to his parents" (female, 19); "because they were planning a secret liason to live their lives under their own domain, not their parents'" (female, 19); "she didn't want to raise suspicion" (female, 18); "her cousin had just died" (male, 19); "their relationship was based on passion and longing, not time spent together" (female, 20). While all of these reasons are plausible, there is no strictly textual basis for any of them. They all follow from the text, however; no one gave "staging" reasons, that Juliet couldn't climb down or wasn't dressed yet. A great many productions of Shakespeare attempt to give the audience all the answers, even when they might not have questions, while Shakespeare's text gives them all they need to both understand what is said and to extrapolate what is not said. This extrapolation involves an audience as active participants and thoughtful listeners, like the original Elizabethan audiences, rather than as passive viewers, like modern television-watchers. The gender-flip's "spotlight on the text" (female, 53) not only encouraged but almost forced the audience to listen: "At times I caught myself thinking that the male who played Juliet was actually Romeo, but I also thought that Romeo (female) was Romeo. I had to keep reminding myself that the roles were reversed" (female, 19).
 

The difficulty of the gender-flip was confusing to some degree for about half the audience members. Several of those members, however, advised staging the whole show gender-flipped to make it clearer, and many more expressed hope that a full-length gender-flipped Romeo and Juliet will follow. The only audience member at Mary Baldwin who matched the JMU student who "really hated" the show was an 18-year-old woman who felt "frustrated and angry" and that "it would have been much more effective if you would have dispelled a few stereotypes instead of perpetuating them." A 19-year-old woman at Mary Baldwin, however, advised, "If you are working with stereotypes stick to them. Make it more clear." A 42-year-old man found the gender-flip enlightening: "opened eyes to how men spar with each other and how much more biting it is when women do the same. Also, how women would be called or considered 'loose' or 'slutty' and men can act the way the opening scene started [with Mercutio and Benvolio drunk and "conjuring" Romeo obscenely]." Similarly, a 20-year-old woman responded to "can you imagine any girl you know behaving like Romeo?" with "now I can, I could not before," and a 19-year-old woman responded to "any guy you know behaving like Juliet?" with "NO, if there is, give me his number." Many audience members wrote that the production was "interesting" and "made you think." A 19-year-old woman observed that "as long as the audience understood what was going on, the lines made sense," and this obvious but important note dovetails neatly with a 63-year-old man's response that "I heard the words more clearly." The gender-flip was successful in both interrogating audiences' relation to their own gendered assumptions and especially in re-introducing them to Shakespeare's text, bringing them at least within imaginative range of what his first audience would not have seen, but heard.
 

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