Queering Shakespeare
“Queering Shakespeare” students come together in person to analyze, perform, and reimagine William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Twelfth Night. Students also read John Lyly’s Galatea. Outside of early modern comedies, students watch She’s the Man, a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, starring Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum. Class discussions focus on through lines of queerness. Specifically, how do same-sex relations and gendered-performances impact characters’ relationships with themselves and others? Students analyze characters’ relationships to the ocean to interrogate gender’s construction in the early modern period. For instance, some characters’ gendered-identities are reborn through water, while other characters attempt to control and colonize waters as a means for reinforcing gendered identities. In exploring common thematic elements, the class illuminates how our contemporary, capitalist society both rewrites and reinscribes early modern conceptions of queerness and transness. Students learn how to read and analyze Shakespeare, among other dense texts, in four one-page explication papers. Students then take those short-papers and build on them in their three major writing projects. In their first three-page writing assignment, students imagine how characters move and speak within a chosen scene to bring their reading of Shakespeare to life. In another three-page paper, students draft up a mock application for the role of an actor/actress who seeks to revitalize a Shakespearean character through performance. Finally, students read scholarship and design their own Shakespeare or Lyly production to assume the role of a director in their final papers. Acting as readers, actors/actresses, and directors of Shakespeare ultimately reveals how contemporary conceptions of gender can be traced back to the early modern period. Returning to early modern moments of gender and sexual-fluidity further allows students to reimagine contemporary, gendered landscapes to be uncontainable as the ocean.