Performing Queer Shakespeare.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which a few theater companies at the turn of the millennium have presented certain productions of Shakespeare’s plays, and specifies how these performances emblematize queer theater. It considers how iconic aspects of lesbian and gay identity (sexual role-playing, camp, drag, historical figures, spaces of community, Gay Liberation, AIDS activism, gay-bashing) figure in the strategies theater companies use to stage Shakespeare (visual allusions, characterization, cross-gender casting, production metaphors, design choices). Rather than presenting a comprehensive account of queer theater, queer Shakespeare, or queer Shakespearean performance, I seek out flashes of queerness in present-day productions, and connect those flashes with the strategies used by a number of theater companies performing Shakespeare. This dissertation contributes to queer cultural history, to theater studies, and to literary/critical explorations of gender and sexuality as identities performed on the post-modern theatrical stage. Drawing on theater history, cultural studies, lesbian and gay/queer studies, performance studies, and literary analysis, I attempt to answer several interdisciplinary questions: What does it mean to queer Shakespeare? What does it accomplish when critics, scholars, historians, activists, and artists bring Shakespeare and queer theater into collaboration? And finally, if contemporary performance offers a viable means of queering early modern plays, what are the implications for Shakespeare criticism and performance, theater history, and queer cultural studies? I examine Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre Company’s productions of several Shakespearean plays, including Hamlet (Giles Havergal and Philip Prowse), Titus Andronicus (Keith Hack and Amanda Colin), Antony and Cleopatra (Havergal and Prowse), and Troilus and Cressida (Prowse), arguing these productions re-signify iconic aspects of gay male culture, creating the roots of queer Shakespeare. Turning to Cheek by Jowl’s As You Like It (Declan Donnellan), I argue that cross-gender casting can be a powerful tool for queering Shakespearean romantic comedy. Finally, I compare all-male post-millennial productions of a single play – Twelfth Night – by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre (Tim Carroll), Cheek by Jowl (Donnellan), and Propeller (Edward Hall), in order to delineate those strategies, besides cross-gender casting, that make Shakespeare queer – or not queer.