GENDER BENDERS

Coward was definitely but discreetly gay

Shakespeare loved men but was not

Twice recently I have been to the theatre and thought, “Hang on, something is not right here…”  The first was at the Old Vic where I saw a new version of Noel Coward’s play Present Laughter with Andrew Scott playing a version of Coward himself, a handsome and successful actor besieged by various lovers who give him no peace. The second was Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Bridge Theatre.

In both instances the gender of one of the characters had been changed to give the play a gay dimension. In Present Laughter one of the lovers who attaches himself to the main character is male rather than female. This is understandable because Coward was discreetly gay while Scott is openly so and you could argue that they were merely doing what the playwright wanted to a semi-autobiographical work. In the Shakespeare play, it is Oberon, king of the fairies, rather than his wife Titania, who is made to fall in love with Bottom, which is a far more fundamental change to the plot and involved having characters speak lines written for someone else.

I actually far preferred the Shakespeare play to the Coward one, which was full of self-absorbed and, to my eyes, uninteresting characters. I soon grew fed up with Coward’s one-liners which were meant to be witty but ended up being merely tiresome. The theatre was packed, however, despite the high price of tickets and the audience applauded enthusiastically so I was in a small minority.

Coward was definitely but discreetly gay. He never announced the fact, not least because homosexuality was illegal for much of his life until it was decriminalised around five years before his death, by which time there was not much point. Some old lady in Worthing thinks I am straight, so let’s not disillusion her was his attitude. In any case, despite (or because of) his barbed wit he was instinctively reserved about such matters. ‘Coming out’ would have seemed a trifle vulgar to the elegant Coward and, therefore, unthinkable.

Was Shakesepare gay? In some ways it is a pointless question because the concept did not exist in his day. Men did sleep together quite often - and openly - in a supposedly platonic way and they may have had sexual relations, although performing the male homosexual act was punishable by death in Tudor times. He was married to and had three children with an older woman, although they lived apart for much of his working life. This might indicate a tendency towards being gay, although I doubt if he slept with other men.

However, Shakespeare certainly had some kind of obsession with the young man for whom he wrote the sonnets and, although he fulfilled his brief of encouraging him to marry and produce heirs, there was in the near worship of his subject a homo-erotic undercurrent. The two men later fell out over the same woman – the dark lady of the sonnets – and this gives their relationship an added element, albeit a less mysterious one, of sexual jealousy. He had sex with women but strong emotional feelings towards and bonds with certain men is my guess.

Who was the man in question? It has always been assumed that the subject of the sonnets was Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, and Ian McKellen portrays him as an elderly man of fading beauty in Ben Elton’s story All Is True with Kenneth Branagh doubling up as Shakespeare and director. However, William Boyd put a strong case for the handsome youth being the Earl of Pembroke in his underrated tv play A Waste of Shame. Pembroke lived at wilton House, where Shakespeare almost certainly stayed and, as William Herbert, had the mysterious initials W H. We will never know the answer unless and until someone discovers Shakespeare’s private diaries. Which they won't. Shakespeare wrote for money and fame, not to reveal his inner feelings.

Are directors and theatre companies entitled to switch around the stories to suit a modern audience? We are far more accepting of gay relationships now than when these plays were written and, watching in heaven, Coward would probably give an amused shrug, indicating that Scott’s portrayal was closer to the truth than Coward himself could hope to be. Shakespeare would probably be bemused at the changes in his Dream, although I doubt he would be frothing at the mouth. In a way this production, with audience and actors rubbing shoulders and a highly acrobatic Puck making speeches and distributing fairy dust while hanging upside down, was truer to the spirit of Shakespeare than a more conventional one.

That is not to say that you can always hijack Shakespeare – or other writers – to support a particular point of view. In 1943 Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels authorised a version of The Merchant of Venice which was openly anti-Semitic and seemed to support the Nazi view that it was ok to eliminate the Jews. However, Shakespeare may have started writing the play with Shylock as a conventional villain but he finished it by showing that he had good reason to be embittered after the treatment he received.

One of the most vivid memories of my childhood is my English schoolteacher saying that an audience member shouted out at the end of the play, “This man has been wronged!” I have always found that a moving story and Shylock’s tribulations are what bring tears to my eyes, rather than the triumph of Portia and her complacent friends. This is surely the genius of Shakespeare: he does not let you settle. It also, incidentally, why his plays could not possible have been written by Christopher Marlowe (who definitely had sex with men, women and boys). Just read or watch The Jew of Malta and then turn to The Merchant of Venice. The titles of the two plays may be similar but there is no way on earth (or Heaven) that they could have been written by the same author. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com