As we announce our free Pride tours, which explore the history of the LGBTQ+ community in theatre throughout the centuries and on our stages today, we wanted to share four lesser known facts about queerness in Shakespeare's time and works.
A note on queerness
Once used as a derogatory slur, queer is a term claimed and used by the LGBTQ+ community to refer to someone or a group of people who are not heterosexual and/or do not conform to established ideas of sexuality and gender.
When we talk about queer experiences or narratives, it's important to remember that they are not singular - queerness is defined by a diversity of experience and a rejection of heteronormativity, a refocusing of the 'fringe' or 'outlier' narratives and bringing them into the foreground.
It is often difficult to identify LGBTQ+ or queer stories throughout history, as many accounts will have been lost, destroyed or written in a deliberately ambiguous way due to societal norms, prejudices and laws that have evolved over the years.
Additionally, the way we talk about and own our sexuality these days is very different to how sexuality has been considered over centuries. We cannot know for sure what any historical person's sexuality was, but we must remember that all written word is open to interpretation, and that any interpretation is guided by the culture of the time.
Orlando (Alex Waldmann) and Rosalind (Pippa Nixon), As You Like It, 2013, Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
1. Cross-dressing on stage was the norm, and women did perform on stage
In Elizabeth and Jacobean theatre, it was the societal norm for men to perform all the female roles. Though it was not - as commonly thought - illegal for women to appear on stage in Britain in the 16th and 17th century, a woman on a public stage would certainly have caused outrage.
Contrary to belief, women did perform on stage, as dancers, musicians and acrobats, and in court masques. Britain was behind Europe in this respect, where many female actors, singers and dancers often appeared on stage. This changed within 50 years of Shakespeare's death, when in 1662, King Charles II issued a royal warrant that from now ‘women rather than boy actors were to play all female roles.’
Shakespeare understood English audiences' expectations so well, that gender-switching as a plot point plays a huge part in many of his most famous plays. It usually happens when young women dress as young men in order to transgress the expectations and limitations imposed on their sex at the time (though there are examples of men dressing as women, but usually against their will e.g. Falstaff as the old woman of Brentford).
In Twelfth Night, Viola dresses as Cesario to serve a male duke, in The Merchant of Venice, Portia and Nerissa dress as a lawyer and his clerk to lead Shylock's trial and in Cymbeline, Imogen dresses as Fidele to escape court alone and track down her husband. Shakespeare's female characters have plenty of internal agency, but can only perform it when dressed as men, perhaps pointing out the absurd performance women had to go to express themselves in contemporary society - something which still resonates with many communities today.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT WOMEN ON STAGE
2. Ganymede was slang
In Shakespeare's As You Like It, while in disguise, Rosalind calls herself Ganymede. The word Ganymede would have been a recognisable name for Shakespeare’s audiences as street slang for a young, effeminate male sex worker or young male lover.
The name Ganymede came from Roman literature and mythology, being the name of Jupiter’s male lover in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Rosalind is certainly written as 'Ganymedic' alongside the strapping Orlando - Orlando calls him 'pretty youth' and is more than willing to play along with Ganymede's scheme to 'cure' Orlando of his love sickness by calling him Rosalind and declaring his love to him.
At the end of the play, Ganymede 'transforms' back into Rosalind and the Greek God of marriage, Hymen appears to complete the ritual. One of Hymen's origin stories cites that he was so beautiful that he was often mistaken for a girl - which makes a striking and comedic contrast on stage, with Rosalind (a man dressed as a woman, dressed as a boy, transforming back into a woman), and Hymen as - simply - an effeminate man.
The twists and turns of gender and character fluidity are one of the great joys of the play, and give a sense of how the theatre allowed for gender norms to be challenged in public - whether that is a man flirting with another man, or a woman commanding the action.
Letty Thomas played Rosalind, who disguises herself as a young man called Ganymede, in our 2024 production of As You Like It.
3. Shakespeare used the singular they/them pronoun in his writing
In recent years, people identifying as gender non-binary has become more common, and more people are choosing to use different pronouns to the binary he/him or she/her, with many asking to be referred to as they/them in the singular.
When a person refuses a request to use another person's chosen pronouns, they will sometimes use the argument that "they/them singular is grammatically inaccurate". But did you know that the singular use of they/them has been used for centuries in the English language, and was even used regularly by Shakespeare?
For example, in Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Shakespeare writes (as Polonius):
Tis meet that some more audience than a mother -
Since nature makes them partial - should o’erhear
Clearly referring to 'a mother', singular, as them. And in The Comedy of Errors, Act 4, Scene 3, Antipholus of Syracuse says:
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend
It was only around the 18th/19th century that grammarians decided English pronouns should be solely divided into he/him and she/her, and that the singular they/them was a grammatically 'incorrect' (similar to split infinitives, it was simply decided it was so).
Shakespeare, who is often held up as a founding father of the modern English language, was incredibly fluid with his words and grammar, coining many phrases, playing with sentence construction and inventing hundreds of new words we still use today.
Dinita Gohil (Viola) and Kara Tointon (Olivia) in Twelfth Night, 2017, Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
4. Same-sex love and marriage used to be common in Britain
Same-sex love has always been a part of human history, and that was as true in Shakespeare's time as it is today - it just may have looked slightly different.
Before Shakespeare's time, close male friendships were very important to many cultures - from the Celts, to the Ancient Greeks and Romans. The poetry of Sappho, a Greek poet writing around 500 BC, paints an unquestionable picture of female homosexual love and desire. Texts from this time would have been a part of Shakespeare's education.
In Ancient Britain, Anglo-Saxons practiced forms of same-sex marriage as far back as the third and 10th centuries. Ancient church liturgical documents describe the 'Office of Same-Sex Unions' and even an order for 'Uniting Two Men', which involved gathering in a church, bledding the couple at the altar and even a banquet afterwards - much like a wedding.
However, as early Christian Roman Emperors blamed gay people for the fall of Rome, laws were passed restricting male homosexuality including, only about 30 years before Shakespeare was born, Henry VIII's 1533 Act for the Punishment of the Vice of Buggerie, England's first civil sodomy law.
Like many laws that restricted or criminalised certain people or actions over the centuries (from female liberation to religious freedom), actions were legally restricted, but people have always found ways to express their beliefs and desires.
Forbes Masson (Katherine) in a gender-switched staging of The Taming of the Shrew for our 2014 First Encounters tour, aimed at 8-13-year-olds.
Shakespeare explores the depths and forms of same-sex love in his works, through characters in his plays (think Antonio's intense love for Sebastien in Twelfth Night, or Brutus and Cassius' deep affection for one another in Julius Caesar). This is particularly seen in Shakespeare's sonnets, most of which (126 out of 154) are passionately dedicated to a 'lovely boy' - his 'fair youth'.
For more, read Will Tosh's essay on Shakespeare and Queer Desire
ON OUR STAGES
From 2023/24's Cowbois, a "joyous queer cowboy romp" (West End Best Friend) conceived for the RSC by Charlie Josephine and co-directed by Charlie Josephine and Sean Holmes, to our more recent production of Edward II, Christopher Marlowe's passionate and tragic play about the medieval British monarch who gave up everything for the love of a man, our work is open to exploring more diverse views of the past, with queer stories often taking centre stage.
Our production of Liz Duffy Adams' Born With Teethcoming to Wyndham's Theatre in August - explores this further through the imagined relationship between William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. What follows is a thrilling - and steamy - duel of wits, words, and powerplay between two literary icons at odds with their time.
Meanwhile, our production of James Ijames' Fat Ham opens at the Swan Theatre in August, where Shakespeare's Hamlet becomes Juicy, a queer Southern college kid, grappling with some serious questions of identity, when the ghost of his dead father comes to him in the midst of a chaotic family barbeque.
Lee Braithwaite (Lou) and Lucy McCormick (Jayne) and the cast of Cowbois, 2023.
