Feminism For Men: Available in Stores Now

Caitlin Moran is a powerful writer to have on the side of the feminism - she writes accessibly, entertainingly, and with frequent references to masturbation - plus her platform for airing her views is a national one. 90% of the time I find myself nodding in agreement with what she says and the other 10% making that noise that Tina in Bob’s Burgers makes. I won’t go and list past moments of stomach-clenchery because actually most of them aren’t relevant to the issue at hand; today I’m specifically addressing her article for Esquire published on International Women’s Day, “12 Things About Being a Woman That Women Won’t Tell You”. 

There has been a huge drive recently to make feminism accessible to men, which is basically A Good Thing. There are so many myths and misconceptions and straw feminists floating around on the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is the internet, that sometimes we need a little accessibility - sometimes you need to invite people in. But there’s a difference between opening the door and standing there clicking your fingers and cooing as though trying to coax an errant pet in from the cold. 

The first six paragraphs of Moran’s article are dedicated to reassuring her male readers that she knows they’re all in favour in equality, that they’re big, clever boys who can tie their own gender pay gap and everything. She states that they’re basically all fine because they don’t hang off the back of buses shouting at girls or honk women’s boobs with wanton abandon. But doesn’t that essentially amount to saying that a man is a supporter of gender equality by doing the absolute bare minimum of not actively behaving like a prick? Moran frames her article as being “extra”, homework for the advanced class, and she knows they can all handle it because they’re “sophisticated, 21st century men”.

“You like women being equal to men,” she writes, “which is all that feminism means. Not all the penises being burned in a Penis Bonfire. Just women being equal to men.” Absolutely that’s what feminism means - but part of its process also means women sometimes needing space to vent about systems that privilege men, and sometimes men find that uncomfortable to hear (in fact, having space to vent is also not the Penis Bonfire but sometimes the two seem to get confused). Moran completely makes the point that when women complain about “Men” or “The Man”, what they are complaining about is the patriarchy, and this where a lot of Feminism For Men starts from, showing men the necessary distinction between an individual and a system:

One man = an individual, capable of acting with great grace or courage or compassion or selfishness or thoughtlessness or outright evil.

The patriarchy = a deeply rooted system of thoughts, behaviours and ideas that benefit and centralise men, in operation in most walks of life.

In other words, you may behave a certain way because of the patriarchy, but you are not the patriarchy. Thus, when feminists attack patriarchy, they are not attacking you. 

Cool.

But. But. I worry that a consequence of re-branding feminism in a way that specifically appeals to men, even flatters them, will mean less space to vent. To just be angry. We’re so afraid of being angry now - those straw feminists on the internet have seen to that. And that’s just another form of being silenced, of not speaking out, only this time inside a space and a community that is specifically designed to give women a voice. The real, unpalatable truth is that if you are a man who is going to engage with feminism or feminist issues, you are going to hear some things that make you uncomfortable. It can’t be all about how cool you are for supporting feminism, even though you are very cool (see? I felt the need to add that last bit. I’m doing it too).

Moran writes, “We’re embarrassed when other women say, "Men can't be feminists!" We don't want to get into an argument, but we just can't see the logic in it.” I am not “embarrassed” by anything “other women” do. There’s enough judging of women’s choices going on in the world. I may not agree - anyone, of any gender, is welcome to call themselves a feminist. (In fact, please do! The more the merrier!) But if I were to talk to a feminist who firmly believes that men should refer to themselves as ‘allies’ rather than ‘feminists’, well, then fine. I’m not embarrassed by that at all - in fact, I see her point. And if a man spoke to her, my hope for that man would be that he would see her side of things and respect that, even if he too disagreed.

There’s another underlying assumption to this approach that is faintly patronising: not only that that men will only engage with feminism when being flattered but also when it directly impacts and/or benefits them. International Women’s Day also saw the #HeForShe campaign releasing its latest hashtag #ILoveMenButHatePatriarchy. Like #HeForShe, Moran also roots her piece in her male readers’ female nearest and dearest - “you’ve got sisters, mothers, lovers - female friends and colleagues”. 

But what if they don’t? Isn’t it harder, more complicated than that? What if they never or rarely interact with women? What if a feminist doesn’t love men or patriarchy? Does the whole idea break down? Does feminism become worthless because there isn’t always an immediately obvious central position for men within it? 

What if men aren’t actually central to feminism?

What if feminism is about women?

The end of result of feminism is a gender equality that benefits everyone, and without a shadow of a doubt issues that affect men are feminist issues, but feminism advocates getting there by aiming to redress a balance that historically and presently has women at a disadvantage. One of the beautiful, frustrating, foolish, optimistic, hopeful things about feminism is that it asks men to put women at the centre of a narrative, to put their name to a cause that has women at its centre - simply because it is the right thing to do.

If you have a problem with that, or would prefer to use the term “Equalist” or “Egalitarian”, maybe it’s time to ask yourself why. Do you really believe that men and women are starting from an equal playing field? That they face equal amounts of persecution, oppression, and discrimination on every level, from the systemic to the everyday? And I mean all women everywhere, not just women in Western or developed countries, because equality can only have been achieved when it is achieved for everyone.

So if I have an appeal to a specifically male audience, it is one that I want to say loudly, once, and then leave you to it. Here it is: take a deep breath and support your feminist sisters and allies because it is the right thing to do, and because one day it will result in a world with less fear, less violence, more love, and more freedom. 

It’s an almost impossible world to imagine, because it requires work from all of us - the work of constantly challenging of our biases, conscious and unconscious. A world of true gender equality means re-making the way we look at gender, and no-one ever said that was easy or simple. Germaine Greer - whatever you think of her now - put it brilliantly in 1971. When asked to describe what a sexual encounter between a man and a women might look like in a world where equality had been achieved, she replied,  “You ask me to describe a state of affairs which doesn't exist, it's a perfectly unreasonable demand. What makes you suppose that liberation has happened?”

Unguilty, or Five Films I Really Like That I Definitely Shouldn't Really Like But I Do

So blogging didn't really work out for me for the last, ooh, all of 2015.  But this is 2016, baby, and we're strapping the typing gloves back on and kicking things off with a good old-fashioned listicle, like what Ma used to make.  There will be opinions, and there will be capital letters.

This latest triumphant return to the blogosphere came out of a pleasant conversation on the Docklands Light Railway, which is sometimes a magical urban safari skyline, and sometimes sweaty and crowded and full of people who haven't yet learned to take their backpack off and put it on the floor, just like any other tube line, and then what is the point of you DLR just be underground think you're so fancy all up in the sky but you're NOT.

I refuse to call these guilty pleasures because to hell with the idea that a pleasure should be guilty, the mixing of high and low culture produces some of greatest cultural landmarks, namely The Muppets etc etc etc blargh blargh bleurgh starting listing the films already.  What this is instead, is a list of films that I will openly admit to liking while a deep-rooted sense of shame coils around my lower intestine. I know they are not good films, either artistically or morally. I am not proud of myself for liking them. But somewhere along the way, something went very wrong in my cerebral cortex and I wound up with a bunch of DVDs* taking up space in my life of which, whenever someone stumbles across them, I have to say, "Oh, well, yeah, y'know, but like, actually it's got this one really good…" and then trail off into justly abashed silence.

And these aren't ironic either, or films I watch to make fun of, or films I think have an unfairly negative reputation.  There are whole different lists for those. These are bad films and I really like them.

Have mercy on my soul.

5) Night at the Museum, and Night at the Museum 2: Another Night, Another Museum (or whatever) (2006/2009)

Ok.  Ok.  I know.  I just.  Bear with me here.

I know it has a 44% Rotten Tomatoes score (and that's the first one).  I know it has a scene where a monkey repeatedly slaps Ben Stiller in the face (actually, screw you, that's an entirely valid reason to enjoy a film).  I know it has Ricky Gervais putting in a level of effort that is only visible on an atomic level.

But.

I think, quite simply, the reason either of these two films are on my rainy day playlist is that they occupy the perfect centre of the Venn diagram between two things I like very much: movies with gangs where the members all have different special abilities, and the past.  All the members of the gang have special abilities, and they are all from the past.  This is not rocket science.

And the sequel, while lazy and derivative, had more people in the gang who were more from the past, and one of them was Amelia Earhart, so...feminism?

Basically, Owen Wilson is a tiny cowboy and Steve Coogan is a tiny Roman Centurion, and they're enemies and then become unlikely friends. It's both heart-warming and hilarious. Leave me alone.

SO HEARTWARMING

(Honourable Mention: National Treasure, for exactly all the reasons you think.)


4) Down With Love (2003)

Ugh. Ok, so. Ugh. Yeah.

Down With Love, a 2003 'homage' to early 60s romantic comedies starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor…no, I can't even finish this sentence.  There's already too much terrible. It's not that any of those things or people are terrible in themselves, exactly, but somehow when you combine them into one movie, it's a perfect storm of ugh.

Firstly, let's not forget that 2003 pre-dates the serious revival of interest in the feminist movement and things like the 'third wave' and 'post-feminism' were still grimly clinging on by their pink-painted-because-they-definitely-chose-it-themseves-and-it's-empowering-and-not-because-of-gendered-societal-norms fingertips. When you combine that with the sexual mores of the 1960s, in which the film is set, it's just a recipe for ugh, ugh and more ugh. Zellweger is Barbara Novak, plucky girl author of best-selling women's sex book about how to give up men and achieve equality in the workplace, and McGregor is Catcher Block (yep), the quickly-becoming-obsolete Don Draper-esque men's magazine journalist. Oh, but wait.

Between Renee's plan for workplace equality being 'replace sex with chocolate' (WOMEN LIKE CHOCOLATE, SOMETIMES MORE THAN SEX WITH MEN, THOSE CRAZY BROADS), Ewan's plan to nail Renee being 'lie about identity, emotionally manipulate woman into having feelings, bang', and the whole thing turning out to be an elaborate plan to ensnare Ewan into marriage, it could probably send the progress of women's rights back to the Sixties single-film-reel-edly if broadcast with enough frequency. In the name of feminism, we should be hunting it down and scouring its existence from the face of the earth.

But I really like it.

Why do I like it? It's super fun to look at and the design is awesome - it's Sixties, but it's our dumb idea of what the Sixties were like.  Renee and chain-smoking best friend/editor Sarah Paulson (of Studio 60 fame) swish around Manhattan in capes and stupid hats and I want all the things they have in this film. Renee has a remote controlled fireplace. A remote controlled fireplace.

Ahem.

And it's shot in a really fun way, with lots of split screen and simultaneous conversations and general badinage leading to the most inoffensive innuendoes a PG-13 certificate can muster.  In other words, if you've ever seen a Doris Day/Rock Hudson vehicle, then it's pretty much that, only with not quite enough irony or commentary to make it smart.

There is a part of me that knows it's not really ok to switch off your values for the ninety minutes it takes to watch a stupid film. I know the 'Battle of the Sexes' stuff on show here is retrogressive and not handled smartly enough to be a 21st century take on 20th century attitudes. But I think we're smart enough to watch problematic things, know they're problematic, and enjoy them all the same. More on that later.

Also there's a remote controlled fireplace, and David Hyde Pierce** gets swallowed by a sofa bed. Some days, I don't need much more than that.

Also Ewan McGregor makes this face.

3) Treasure Planet (2002)

Let's be clear: this is not on the list because it's a Disney film.  It's on the list because it's an utterly forgettable Disney film.  As you may be able to tell from the super cryptic title, it's Treasure Island IN SPACE.  That's pretty much it.  It's fairly faithful to the original novel - obviously not a patch on the Muppets version, but what is? - with the minor tweaks of making the ship's captain female (good), voiced by Emma Thompson (bad), and making Ben Gunn a comedy robot sidekick voiced by Martin Short (BAD BAD VERY BAD).

I mean, objectively, it's just disappointing.  It has a lot of individual things to recommend it but they never quite add up into a compelling whole. The animation is beautiful - Disney finally (in 2002) getting to grips with mixing CGI and hand-drawn animation (SPACE WHALES), plus doing this create-a-360-degree-virtual-set-now-manouvre-the-camera-like-it's-live-action thing, which means that the Outer Space in question has, well, space and depth and dimensions to it. It's pretty.

Basically, this feels like an animator's pet project, a really cool art school exercise and writers, what writers? We don't need writers. Get outta here. But the art, alas, is not why I like it.

So why do I like it? IT'S TREASURE ISLAND IN SPACE.  Troubled-but-cute teenage protagonist Jim Hawkins is a junior delinquent with an Absent Father so it's also TREASURE ISLAND IN SPACE WITH DADDY ISSUES. It gives me feelings.

So yeah, if you mentally delete all the parts with the robot, it's basically Catcher in the Rye meets Star Wars, and that is just fine with me.

MUCH EARLY 00'S SUCH ANGST SO HAIR WOW

2) Sliding Doors (1998)

I actually used to hold this up as an example of romantic comedy done well.  Smart, I would say. Funny and charming, I would say.  John Hannah, I would say.  But I watched it again and ah jeez, it's just terrible.

The 'smart' 'thought-provoking' conceit that Gwyneth Paltrow's life diverges into two distinct timelines (Gwyneth Prime and Gwyneth Beta is how the film does not refer to them) depending on whether she catches a tube or not is, let's face it, the most first year philosophy undergraduate idea ever, and isn't quite rescued by the eleventh-hour magical realism of the timelines converging.  It's aged very badly, sort of an unintentional period piece, from the weird-looking London Underground trains to brandy being the casual tipple of choice for partying yuppies. Forget every BuzzFeed article you have ever read, the most 90s thing to ever happen is Gwyneth Paltrow smoking in a bar while John Hannah tells her she can easily get another job. (As if to compound this, she does. She finds it in a printed newspaper.) And whatisthedeal with the bizarrely heavy-handed product placement for Grolsh? In my twenty-five years of living, I have yet to encounter anyone who says, "Let's go out for a [brand name here]", rather than just "a beer", if they weren't being paid to do so. Not so in the world of Sliding Doors.  In the world of Sliding Doors, they drink Grolsh. And they want you to know about it.

So why do I like it? Well, mostly John Hannah. He's lovely, and your mum probably fancies him. But on further consideration, even he makes a move way too soon after Gwyneth Prime has discovered her boyfriend in bed with another woman, and actually a lot of his hilarious quips come off like someone who sits alone in a darkened room all day desperately trying to emulate human warmth.  So, a screenwriter, I guess.

What could be said, interestingly, is that he represents an early male version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope - he drops into over-worked, straight-laced Gwyneth Prime's life through a series of seemingly magical coincidences, takes her boating and shows her how to laugh/love again. What's also interesting is that this proves the MPDG apparently doesn't work in any iteration ever, not even as a male character, since - as with John Hannah's Manic Pixie sisters from others films - the quirkiness is incredibly forced. He quotes Monty Python! He makes hilarious gags about trying to give Gwyneth Paltrow cellulite! He quips to his sick mum about moving somewhere she can buy better crack! HE'S NOT LIKE OTHER GUYS!

And re Monty Python, if such a study could ever be done, it would be interesting to find out whether the percentage of conversation made up of endlessly quoting comedians/films/television shows until you actually have to kill one of the members of your group to put an end to it has risen since pre-internet days.  Whatever the answer, today John comes over like a cross between that Daniel Radcliffe interview where he thinks he's the only person in the world to have discovered Tom Lehrer and the tedious mate of a mate that you met in the pub who, for fuck's sake, won't shut up about Monty Python, like, we've all seen the Spanish Inquisition sketch SO MANY TIMES I KNOW HOW IT GOES.

And despite all this, I still like it. I will watch it again. What can I say? It affects me. It actually (there I go) does go to a darker place than most standard rom-coms, and it's painful to watch anyone slaving away to support a partner who's "writing their first novel" while in actuality copping off with their ex. Even Gwynnie Beta. It captures the humiliation of infidelity really well and, for what it's worth, does it while avoiding lazy demonisation of the cheating boyfriend, who has several scenes talking candidly about his conflicted feelings to another male chum. I mean, he's still the worst. But that's why there's John Hannah.

The message is that sometimes we get haircuts that don't work out for us and that's ok.

1) Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)

Hahahahahahahaha you guys it's a musical about rape.  I mean, basically.  It starts when rugged tight-trousered woodsman Adam strolls down from his 1850s Oregon wood-house into town to find himself a bride (maybe made of wood).  Surprisingly Awesome Milly decides she's plucky and spunky enough to make a go of it, and weds him on the spot. So far, so consensual.

Then it all goes to shit.

S. A. Milly ends up keeping house for Adam's six younger brothers too, all of whom are also tight-trousered woodsmen.  She eventually implements a regime of starvation and occasional ladle-based violence until they begin to say "please".  They learn to dance, put pomade in their hair and meet some nice local girls, and it's all set to be lovely until Adam - who got his bride in matter of hours and thus is crushing it on the Man Leaderboard - tells his brothers the story of the Rape of the Sabine Women.  In song.  The song is called "Sobbin' Women".  It is equal parts insanely catchy and horrifyingly misogynistic.  It is the Blurred Lines of 1950s musicals.  He then encourages his brothers to follow the fine example of the Ancient Romans and erase the word "consent" from their vocabulary.

Thus, the titular forest-dwelling Seven Brothers set out to abduct the titular (hee hee, titular) Seven Brides from the town - really abduct, there are blankets over heads - blindfold them and carry them off to their wooden shack, causing an avalanche on the way so that the boyfriends and families of the kidnapped girls can't mount a rescue until the snow melts in spring.   They are only thwarted in their plans by the fact that a) they forget to also kidnap a preacher (see, it's fine, because they just wanted to marry the women against their will), and b) Surprisingly Awesome Milly kicks them all out of the house and makes them live in the barn all winter, while she and the women form a happy matriarchal commune wait for heteronormativity to reassert itself.  Which it does.  The brothers come to see the error of their creepy ways - except for Adam, who storms off to have a patriarchal huff and only realises he might be in the wrong when the news comes through of his newborn baby daughter, thus suddenly forcing him to reassess his worldview that women are objects - and the town girls start doing things like walking past the window in their underwear and throwing snowballs with rocks in them (the traditional mating displays of 1850s Oregon), and it all ends happily if you don't think about it too hard.

But oh gosh, it's SO CHARMING.  There are handsome beard-men wearing plaid and dancing while they raise barns.  They jump over axes.  I don't know what the point of jumping over axes is, but it seems to prove something to them.  They sing "I'm a Lonesome Polecat", which is approximately exactly as ridiculous and wonderful as it sounds.  The backdrops are so obviously, unapologetically fake, you can see the brushstrokes on the trees.  It has that haze of garish 1950s still-overexcited-about-technicolour innocence to it that makes it extremely possible to turn off the sensible, up-to-date bit of your brain, and enjoy it for what it is.

I mean, just do yourself a favour and take three minutes to watch this:

Did you watch it? Do you see now?  Do you understand how much joy this brings me?  The flawlessly timed petulant axe swings?  The almost heartbreakingly simple insight that "a man can't sleep/ when he sleeps with shee-eep"? The one guy out to the side going full Dream Ballet? The fact that it's done in a single take?

No, I cannot, in all good conscience, hate on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  It is a part of my psyche, and a part of my soul, and you too are not above it.  You simply have yet to surrender.

Also there's this unintentionally hilarious bit when the girls are starting to soften towards the boys over the winter and the boys start making excuses to come into the house to fetch blankets and things to catch a brief glimpse of their sweethearts and there's one girl who just looks delighted whoever comes in from the barn, monogamy be damned.

Basically, Seven Brides is - our favourite overused word - problematic when viewed in the above terms (it's maybe not actually as bad as I suggested, the movie makes it pretty clear that the girls are into the guys too, both prior to and once they get over the whole kidnap thing).  But it's also joyous and stunningly made and excitingly danced.  It stands apart from all the others on this list because it is, actually, a great film that maybe I think I shouldn't like. But I'm also a thinking human person with a brain, and I'm not going to go and kidnap anyone to get them to marry me because of it. I might sing Bless Your Beautiful Hide as a form of courtship though. I can make no promises otherwise.


*cunning code for 'illegally torrented files on my hard drive'.
**That marks two entries on this list that feature DHP in a supporting role.  Come on, man. You were Niles Crane.

We Do Not Have Nearly Enough TV Shows About The Biblical King David; Here Are My Thoughts

Friends, I've been thinking about the Bible a lot lately.  Not in any kind of way that might make me a better person - that would be ridiculous - but as source material.  In my continuing quest to slaughter as many cultural sacred cows as one person can fit into a lifetime of poverty and self-doubt ("making theatre"), I seem to have somewhat overlooked the Bible as a potential source of old, familiar stories to mangle beyond recognition.  Which is foolish, because there is a bit when God sends two bears to maul forty two children to death because they mocked an old man's baldness.  Straight up God-murder.

Now, the reason this is on my mind is that I am approximately halfway through the first and only season of NBC's cancelled 2009 series 'Kings': a kinda sorta modern-day-but-not-actually-the-world-as-we-know-it retelling of the King David story.  (David's not king yet though, he's just hanging around being inconveniently Chosen by God while Ian McShane - who is king - Ian McShanes his way through some speeches about butterflies.)  It's set in a fictional kingdom (Gilboa) with a fictional monarch (Silas, who in the Bible is Saul-no-not-the-Damascus-one-a-different-one) but all the clothes and technology and what have you are contemporary.  It's pretty neatly done, the problems of the shows (and there are problems) aren't really with the world-building element of it.  In fact, it's the kind of conceptual approach that you could easily see being theatrical: it's what you might do with a Shakespeare play or a Greek tragedy to keep it, y'know, not dull as fuck.

(Quick sidebar: Why don't we do more Bible plays?  Western theatre tradition practically evolved out of them, what with the Medieval idea that the only thing better than a play was a play on a cart.*  And yet Bible stories are pretty much screen adventures only these days - in fact, it's one of the first things Hollywood did once they figured out they could do picture and sound and colour at the same time.  The new technology came in and Cecil B. DeMille said, "Charlton, go up on that rock, talk to God, and make it sexy."**  And I guess that got into our heads somewhere along the way because, with the exception of nativity plays, I'm far more familiar with the idea of the cinematic Bible epic than the theatrical one.  (Of course, now I've written that I can think of at least three examples of Bible stories being done onstage but screw you brain, you came up with this lame idea for a blog, have the courage  of your convictions dammit.))

ANYWAY. The problem with 'Kings', I think, is that it starts the story in the wrong place. It's ok. Lots of people do it. It happens to the best of us, George Lucas, with our insistence that we meet Anakin at the age of ten and... and that is a different blog. Basically, 'Kings' would be much, much better with the same world-building, some of the same actors, and a totally different plot.  This is the biggest trick that 'Kings' misses: making David a pre-kingship blond-haired big-eyed innocent Luke Skywalker type. Biblical David? HUGE DOUCHEBAG.  The second biggest trick is not only the de-gaying of the David/Jonathan relationship, but the turning of Jonathan into a standard jealous, scheming villain.

A lot has been made out of the Biblical are-they-boning relationship between David and Jonathan, son of Saul, the king that David is nominally serving - Oscar Wilde cited them alongside Achilles and Patroclus as an example of "the love that dare not speak its name", and there was an awful lot of Medieval "THIS IS WHAT A HOMOSOCIAL RELATIONSHIP LOOKS LIKE AND THERE IS NOTHING ELSE TO BE SEEN HERE" wrangling.  My personal position is that you can explain away David and J-Dog kissing and telling each other that they love each other so much more than they love women as an extreme product of a patriarchal society that prized bonds between men above heterosexual relationships but why would you? It's not like there hasn't been enough queer erasure over the centuries, and no-one's going to prove it definitely one way or another, so yes, I am all for it: David and Jonathan, Bible Boyfs.

EXCEPT.  Except for David's aforementioned douchebaggery.  Really, the story of David and Jonathan resembles less Achilles and Patroclus, and more 'The Giving Tree'.  David turns up post-Goliath slaying, and Jonathan is so overwhelmed that he, on the spot, strips off and gives David his armour which, as well as being a real example of a Biblical striptease, symbolically gives David his position as heir to the kingdom.  That is how much he loves him.  David's response is something along the lines of "Oh thanks bro, yeah, did I ever tell you about how I killed a giant just now?" This continues, with David falling out of favour with Saul and running away, at which Jonathan immediately ups sticks, abandoning his father and people, to follow David into exile.  David's response, again, is, "oh hey, um... Jason? Jonathan.  Yeah, no, I knew that." The rest of the time it's Jonathan professing his love and David going, "Well, I am better than you and everyone else, Jonathan."  In the end, there's a big battle and both Jonathan and Daddy Saul are killed.  Then David expresses some affection, composing one of his trademark psalms on the lyre - but then again, maybe he was just the world's first douchebag to pick up a lyre at a party and say, "This is an original composition."

And through all of this, by the way, David is married to Jonathan's sister, Michal.  Whom he bought for two hundred Philistine foreskins.  (The asking price was a mere one hundred, but David knows you get what you pay for.)

So this should be a TV series in its own right, shouldn't it?  It deserves at least a few seasons to let the tragic inequality of the relationship hit home before Jonathan dies in David's manly arms, plus you can set it during the time D&J are in exile together - throw in some kind of Biblical supernatural demon-fighting alongside the overarching plot and you've got a monster-of-the-week set up fuelled by potential slash.  Jonathan is in love with David, while David makes it his mission to bone any man, woman or celestial being that looks at him sideways, along with the occasional implication that David's just scared of his feelings for Jonathan.  Then the series is cancelled before we get anything more than an obligatory drunken kiss episode.  There's nothing a network loves more than some good old queer-baiting, after all.

But it could be a fascinating study of unequal relationships: an opportunity to both loathe David and yet understand why Jonathan is so drawn to him, to empathise with Jonathan, to want him to break free of this toxic, unrewarding state of affairs, and yet still, with a tiny, terrible part of your soul, want him to hang in there because David might - might - one day love him as fully as he deserves.*** But while fighting monsters.****  As in 'Kings', Jonathan will be played by Sebastian Stan because he deserves a chance to do the character in a way that isn't horrible, and David will be played by Idris Elba, because we need to believe that we too would follow him to the ends of the earth on the off chance that we might get a snog.

Rest assured, there will be many such shots of Sebastian Stan crying.

Starting later in the story also allows us to visit the whole final-season Bathsheba debacle. This is where even the Bible has to start acknowledging David's douchebaggery.  Now king, replete with many wives (many wives), he goes for a stroll on the palace roof and sees naked babe (Bathsheba) having a bath - I've never been quite clear whether the aptly named Bathsheba was also bathing on the roof, as Leonard Cohen would have us believe, or whether David was a massive creeper on top of everything else, and once he realised he could see into some girl's bathroom window, did not think the decent thing would be to look away.  Either way, David's reaction is something along the lines of, "Damn, girl, let's get you impregnated." To this, Bathsheba says: WE DON'T KNOW BECAUSE THE BIBLE LITERALLY DOES NOT HAVE A SINGLE WORD ABOUT HER CONSENT IN THIS MATTER.  NONE.  IT JUST SAYS DAVID "WENT IN TO HER".  LIKE, WOW.  WOW, BIBLE.  EVEN FOR YOU.

So anyway, Bathsheba gets all good and impregnated, the only fly in the adulterous ointment being her husband, Uriah the Hittite, who is off fighting for David in a war that he should be in too but, y'know, roof-bath-chicks to nail.  So David calls him back home and does something along the lines of that Monty Python sketch, "Your wife, bit of a goer is she? Nudge nudge wink wink know what I mean maybeyoushouldgoandhavesexwithhersonobodywillknowthechildismine" until poor Uriah has to say, "Look bro, it's not that I don't appreciate the respite from the horrors of war and all, but don't we have this, like, incredibly sacred and ancient rule that soldiers on active duty don't sleep with their wives?" And David says, "Ugh, you are not making this easier for me. I mean, really you are bringing this on yourself." And he sends him to the worst bit of the fighting where he'll definitely be killed.  And he is.  And then David marries Bathsheba because hey, it's good to be the king.

The coda to all of this is that, as aforementioned, even God has to admit he might have not been totally on point when he decided that David was going to be his Super Special Bro on Earth, so - in the manner of people who hate being wrong - he totally overreacts.  The prophet Nathan pops along and tells David that a) his child with Bathsheba will die, b) someone he loves will "take all his wives" and c) everyone is done playing happy families.  Sure enough, the child dies (David, in one final defiant act of gold-medal douchebaggery, mourns while the child is alive and refuses to mourn after the child has died because he knew it was coming), and years later David's son Absolom starts a coup against him that is kicked off by Absolom having sex with all of David's concubines in public.  (I feel like Game of Thrones could step up a little.)  Bathsheba kind of does get hers in the end, as she makes the dying David promise that her son Solomon and not his actual heir can be king next, and I like to think she did it through pinching the tube on his morphine drip until he said yes.

So, obviously, this is the final season of, I would say, about five.  Four seasons of David and Jonathan hunting demons and almost making out, then Jonathan dies, a lot of the original cast departs, and you get one of those slightly weird situations where the show limps on for another twenty episodes before a kindly network exec shoots it in the head. But what a glorious mess it would be.

Or, even better, a PLAY. A big non-naturalistic Greek tragedy style play, in which the first half leads up to David marrying Bathsheba, then there's a time jump, and the second half is Absolom's coup and a big fuck-off civil war, ending with Solomon becoming king.  That's gold dust.  That's the lost Shakespeare play right there.  And someone clever and angry like Howard Barker should write it,  it'll be staged in the Olivier, and the critics will say things like "powerful but overreaching" or "impressive in scale and ambition if ultimately unfocused".  But I'll be happy.  And that's what counts.


Bonus Bible: The Book of Revelation as arthouse film

Like any rational person, I love (the first season of) Sleepy Hollow.  The Tim Burton film also, but specifically the current series starring my eyeliner idol Nicole Beharie, and the excellently-nosed Tom Mison.  If you don't know what I'm talking about - you poor thing - the current Sleepy Hollow series takes the Washington Irving story of the Headless Horseman and says, "Yes but what if it was actually about the Biblical apocalypse?" It's great, trust me.

But as much as I love Sleepy Hollow and its attention to detail when it comes to translating the most whacked-out book of the Bible onto the screen, I cannot help but feel there is a better way of going about dramatising the Book of Revelation.  Which is, essentially, not to bother with plot.

Revelation is the stoner's favourite for a reason.  Most of the Bible is written like an over-excited child taking twenty minutes to describe going to the bathroom - "And then...and then...and then..." - but Revelation doesn't even bother with these attempts at incident.  It just describes John of Patmos's big weekend on a vision quest (at one point a coyote voiced by Johnny Cash turns up).  The easy joke here (that I just made a couple of sentences ago) is to say "stoner diaries" and be done with it.  But it has too much structure and weird, terrifying logic for that. No, I am talking getting the heads behind Fantasia and A Field in England together and letting them have at it. It will feature only Tilda Swinton playing all the parts (probably), and will be so terrifying that the world will literally end.

Go in peace.

*Medieval Mystery plays: actually pretty interesting and often gross.
** Accurate.
***Just describing Sherlock now.
****Or Supernatural.

Happy Birthday, Mr Swan of Avon: And Now Some Completely Uneccessary Lists About Shakespeare

Bringing the month of 450th anniversary celebrations to a close (because we all celebrated Shakespeare's birthday for a full month, with balloons and cake and don't lie to me), today we bring you Lists of Stuff You Didn't Know You Needed To Know But Definitely Do.  About Shakespeare Characters.

Now lists of this kind are ten a farthing: Best Villains, Best Monarchs, Best Women etc (because belonging to a group that comprises 50% of the population is obviously its own genre) but we at Jane Shakespeare pride ourselves on offering you a little more Bard for your buck (not sorry).  From now on, when someone turns to you on the street, cornering you with a look that betokens literary malice aforethought, and snarls, "Quick! Name Shakespeare's five biggest hipsters or I'll slice you up so thin I could print the First Folio on you", your days of gibbering in confusion and idiocy are over.  Really, I am almost too good to you, but the general festivity and several large bumpers of wine I have been consuming daily to mark the occasion mellow my usually tyrannical mood.  "Oh, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains." - indeed, Bill, and Happy Birthday.

(A/N: I was originally going to include a 'Top 5 Characters Most in Need of an Intervention' list but a) I had trouble limiting it to five and b) most of my notes* were "ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL" written in increasingly manic handwriting.)


Top Five BFFs
There's nothing a Shakespearian protagonist needs more than a trusty second in command, someone to wipe away the tears when everyone just won't stop trying to kill you, and provide wise words of comfort when the incestuous overtones start getting a bit much.  I would personally be very grateful to have any of these at my side, and probably more than a little aroused.

5) Enobarbus (Antony and Cleopatra)
Who's BFF? Mark Antony
Why? Sometimes you just need someone to describe in fulsome terms why your girlfriend is awesome. Antony, bless him, is not the most loquacious tool in the shed, and much of his dialogue could be replaced with "totes", "STFU" and "soz babes" and you'd still very much be in reception of the gist.  Enobarbus, however, comes out with one of the most famous speeches in the canon (you know, barges, burnished thrones, that one) about his best pal's lady friend, bringing the entire Roman Empire perilously close to going "actually yeah, I'd totes provoke a civil war for her too, let's just have an amphora and call it a day". Points deducted for the fact that he eventually jumps ship for Team Octavius, who has terrible hair and his parties are lame, but he has a great speech while he makes the decision.

 4) Cassius (Julius Caesar)
Who's BFF? Brutus
Why? Every hero of a regime turned renegade needs a power behind the throne to topple that regime.  Cassius is the ideal Second in Command, the manipulator who sticks to the shadows in order to let you shine.  He's a Pete Campbell, a Littlefinger, redeemed by his totes-no-homo love for Brutus - and seriously, imagine if either Pete or Littlefinger decided to truly and deeply love another human being. Terrifying.  My version of Julius Caesar is basically called "Brutus and Cassius' Excellent Adventure", and it ends when Cassius turns to Brutus with tears in his eyes and says, "you love me not" in Act 4 Scene 3, and Brutus gives his angstful reply, "I do not like your faults", voice cracking with emotion, presumably while manfully clasping the back of Cassius' neck and peering deep into his soul. Cue Snow Patrol.

3) Poins (Henry IV Parts 1 and 2)
Who's BFF? Prince Hal
Why? Poins is kind of a weird anomaly in the Henry IV tavern scenes - he appears to belong to some kind of aristocracy but, like Hal, spends his time hanging around with lowlives and drunks.  He and Hal seem to have a closeness to rival Hal and Falstaff, tag-teaming each other for a series of hilarious public-schoolboy-style practical jokes (public humiliation of the elderly, torment of minimum wage service workers etc), and Poins is never around when Hal isn't, leading to the inevitable conclusion that Poins is desperately in love with Hal and follows him everywhere trying to pluck up the courage to tell him.  (This is a recurring theme in the selection of this list.)  Hal also unburdens himself to Poins in Part 2, when everything is going a bit mopey and minor key, and Poins gives him a sharp "suck it up, Crown Prince of all England" talking to, which is only slightly undercut by the revelation that Poins has been telling all and sundry that Hal is going to marry his sister, but I won't insult your intelligence by pointing out how obviously that's a displacement tactic for unrequited homoerotic yearning. Like Cassius, the relationship breaks down with Poins' armour-piercing line, "My honey sweet lord, you love me not." Not in a gay way though. (Totally in a gay way.)

2) Celia (As You Like It)
Who's BFF? Rosalind
Why? Celia wants to jump Rosalind's bones. Yes, I know they're cousins, and yes, I know she ends up married to a man, but these are minor details on the road to pastoral sapphic bliss.  There is no way Oliver is anything other than a beard, and perhaps a way to spite Orlando-obsessed Rosalind by stealing her thunder for continuously and concertedly ignoring the woman who has been at her side from Scene 1. Celia loves Rosalind more than her own father.  More than she loves sleeping in a soft bed, or having nice things to wear, or not smelling like sheep all the time. When people point out that Rosalind overshadows her, she does not give a single solitary fuck. She dreams of being overshadowed by Rosalind, ifyouknowwhatImean, andIthinkyoudo.  She is her friend, her constant companion, her support, her conscience and, admirably, survives the extreme sexual confusion of seeing Rosalind dressed as a boy.  When asked to perform the marriage vows for Rosalind and Orlando, she says simply, "I cannot speak the words." I will brook no other interpretations, though I admit it is entirely possible that I should have called this list 'Top 5 Cases of Unrequited Homoerotic Longing'.

1) Horatio (Hamlet)
Who's BFF? Hamlet
Why? Oh, everything.  Everything about Horatio is precious and understated and we should celebrate him like the special sunflower that he is.  It cannot be easy being the best friend of an emotionally fragile bereaved philosophy student, but somehow he manages. As with the best of Shakespeare's supporting characters, he has his own quiet arc happening in the background of the play, going from enlightened man of reason who politely exposits on Denmark's political situation to Captain of Team Hamlet, supporting him through shipwrecks, funerals and sword fights alike. He is the Agent Coulson of the Shakespeare universe. He is not afraid to call Hamlet out on his bullshit ('no, buddy, you just murdered two of our best friends, that's totally what you did') or express uncharacteristically instinctive concern for his wellbeing ('I just have a really bad feeling about this duel thing'), and even tries to die with his friend but ultimately agrees to live and honour his memory by telling his story, when, like, literally everyone he knows is dead.  And I hope you appreciate that I made it this far without pointing out, once again, that Hamlet and Horatio are totally gay bones for each other.



Top 5 Hipsters
Whilst we tend to think of hipsters as a modern invention, along with selfies and emoticons and all the loud music the kids listen to these days, Shakespeare is, as always, ahead of the game.  These five would not be out of place sporting ironically nostalgic t-shirts featuring 8-bit video game characters whilst shuffling through the Shoreditch night as the music of plastic-framed glasses clacking sounds in the background, the mating call of the hipster.

5) Edmund (King Lear)
There is no doubt in my mind that Edmund spent his school days carving the anarchy symbol all over the desks and going to detention for wearing non-regulation skinny jeans rather than school trousers.  Do not talk to Edmund about legitimacy because legitimacy is, like, so mainstream.  Edgar is legitimate and Edgar probably listens to Coldplay.  Give Edmund half a joint and ten minutes and he will be expounding his complex socio-political theories about why the system is totally fucked, man, and the only thing to do is tear it down and start again.  Later though, because there's this band playing but you haven't heard of them and you wouldn't know where.

4) Apemantus (Timon of Athens)
Timon of Athens is not performed often because it is, essentially, not a very good play.  Timon is a man who has lots of nice things and then gives them all away and then is very surprised when this leaves him with no nice things.  Timon is not very good at maths.  In the second half of the play, mostly spent wandering a wasteland that is conveniently near Athens, the only character who joins him is Apemantus.  Apemantus feels the same towards Timon now that he's poor as he did when he was rich, because he hated Timon when he was rich and he still hates him now he's poor because he hates everybody because fuck society man.  It is one of Nick Hytner's greatest failings as artistic director of the National Theatre that in his production last year, Apemantus did not sport a deep vee and unimpressive moustache. And that is all there is to be said on the matter.

3) Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing)
One cannot deny that there is more than a touch of the black-rimmed specs about Beatrice.  She definitely has a moleskin journal, and she definitely uses it to write performance poetry about why the patriarchy means the institution of marriage is inherently corrupt and also stopping her from getting a boyfriend.  She has many impressively insensitive speeches about why everyone around her is stupid and tedious and marriage is for mainstream idiots, which she then follows up with various weakly delivered lines that amount to, "Not you though, Hero.  I just meant people exactly like you."  As with most hipsters, her presence is politely tolerated by family and friends until she can be foisted off onto another of her kind.  After that, she and Benedick write each other ironic love poetry on their typewriters.

2) Hamlet (Hamlet)
Prince of Denmark, Prince of the Hipsters.  An interesting case, this one, because almost every generation has given forth a production of Hamlet in which he embodies a predominant teen stereotype of the day - grunge, emo, public school, and now hipster.  Perhaps this is because there is a certain type of studenty pretentiousness that never really dies (it just comes at the cost of crippling debt now), but nor would we want it to.  Hamlet scores pretty high on this list because he is quite a loveable hipster, really, and also has somewhat more cause than most other entries here.  Having said that, I do not want to think about how many scarves he and Horatio had in their shared student flat in Wittenberg.  Also, they definitely used to invite Rosencrantz and Guildenstern round for ironic board game night and then always pick Articulate and always win.

1) Jaques (As You Like It)
If Hamlet is Prince of the Hipsters, then Jaques is their king.  Jaques is such a hipster, any production that does not costume him in red trousers and have him entering the Forest of Arden on a fixie bike is…well, probably making the right decision, but you know.  Jaques is so hipster that laughing is too mainstream for him, unless it's laughing ironically with hollow, detached hauteur at the accidental poignancy of the hilarious peasant who probably eats fast food and likes reality television.  Jaques claims the top spot because all his problems are First World Problems in the Firstiest Worldiest way possible.  He has enough money to travel around at leisure, spending an indeterminate period of time hanging with a banished duke and ordering buskers to play weird genre mash-up music that he wrote.  He is, essentially, on a perpetual gap year, forever seeking solace in his own misery, pointing out doomed couples at their own wedding, and refusing to stick around for the disco.  Jaques, he would have you know, does not do disco.

(Honourable mention: Prince Hal. Rich kid, hangs around in East London to annoy his father. Case closed.)


Top 5 Badasses
Joss Whedon once pointed out that Shakespeare kills his characters off all the time and he gets way less flak for it (but then again, Shakespeare didn't kill off Wash). It's a dark, dark universe out there, and only the fittest/least conventionally Tragic survive.

5) Achilles (Troilus and Cressida)
For the greatest warrior ever born, Achilles sure spends a lot of his time avoiding doing any actual warrior-ing, choosing instead to lounge upon silk sheets with snarky boytoy Patroclus (this one is canon, guys, I swear), encouraging him to do impressions of his bosses.  Occasionally his bosses turn up at his tent to ask him to fight and he says something like,"Hey. Hey. How's that war going without me? Never mind, I can't hear you over the sound of me not giving a single embattled fuck." Achilles is essentially every teenage douchebag ever, but with the ability to kill a man with his little finger. Then again, such is the force of his warrior-ing that a little bit of it actually ends the play so maybe he was just being considerate.

4) Lady Macbeth (Macbeth)
Lady M scores low on the list because, despite being indisputably terrifying, she is very much all talk.  We can blame this on Ye Misogynistic Olden Dayes, of course, but we still cannot place her any higher until she actually does some killing, rather than just saying repeatedly, "I TOTALLY WOULD BUT YOU ARE THE ONE WITH THE PENIS HERE". I don't make the rules.** Also you get the impression that maybe if she'd had an actual career, she wouldn't have turned to murder and treason as a funtime hobby.  Despite this, she's still a force to be reckoned with, and thus deserves her spot (hee) for being a badass by proxy.

3) Coriolanus (Coriolanus)
Coriolanus is kind of the explicit badass of the Shakespeare food chain. He captures a town single-handedly and spends most of the first two acts wandering around wearing clothes made of blood (and then, according to some interpretations, takes a sexy shower of angst while ripping his shirt off manfully in a moment that totally contradicts every single other aspect of his character contained in the rest of the play but hey, you got to sell tickets somehow).  He doesn't score much higher though because he is the easiest unstoppable killer to manipulate in history.  The majority of the play is people telling him what to do and him saying "that sounds legit", whether the instruction in question is to don sackcloth and humble himself before the proletariat, or turn around and march on said proletariat.  Unsurprisingly, this ends with arch-nemesis/make-out buddy*** Aufidius getting so pissed off he stabs him in the heart.  Which is maybe overkill, but he was being super flaky.

2) Portia (The Merchant of Venice)
Let's change it up a bit here.  Portia might not fight any physical battles but she is scarier than everyone else in the entire play put together.  The Victorians loved her because she's wise and virtuous and blah blah blah, forget all that, she's a hideous racist bitch, basically.  She's casually xenophobic about nearly everyone who tries to hit on her who isn't the colour of cottage cheese, and completely destroys Shylock's life because JEW (this may also be why the Victorians loved her).  But what makes her most terrifying is her sheer balls.  I don't know if you've noticed, but even by the standards of Shakespeare's day, everything she does in the courtroom scene is hideously illegal.  Impersonating a lawyer, pointing out loopholes that aren't really loopholes, turning the proceedings back against Shylock (who is not, after all, the one being tried) - at the very least, he would be a due a re-trial.  Perhaps this is the point - the court is already so inherently biased against Shylock that they'll allow Portia's shenanigans, but I like to think it's also because she stared the Doge in the eye while running a knife along her teeth.

1) Henry V (Henry V)
As with Portia, there's a lot of bollocks going around when it comes to Henry V.  And as with Portia, he claims the top spot amongst Shakespearean badasses for having pure unqualified moxy.  Where guys like Achilles and Coriolanus know they are top of their game, King Harry plays russian roulette with not only his own life but the lives of an entire army.  He marches a pitifully small force over to France and plays the underdog-iest away game in the history of ever, and all because the French did some French sneering, because they are French (Shakespeare is a balanced and objective historian). At Harfleur, he never has to make good on his threats to let his soldiers rape the women and murder the children of the town if it doesn't surrender, but the jury's out on whether he would or not, had push come to naked infants spitted upon pikes.    At Agincourt, the moment that tips the battle in his favour comes just after he orders the execution of his prisoners of war (straight up war crime, in case you weren't sure).  All in all, Henry wins against extraordinary odds through a combination of fierce chat, strategic ruthlessness and a willingness to play dice with a whole lot of lives.  But I don't know, actually, maybe that doesn't make him a badass.  Maybe that just makes him a dick.



Top 5 Sexiest Characters
I once had a dream that my job was to describe attractive celebrities in entertaining ways.  Until I work out how to monetise this skill and make my dream a reality, I'm just going to write more about which fictional characters I would totally do.

5) Hector (Troilus and Cressida)
Troilus and Cressida takes place in a terrible world full of terrible people.  Shit is just constantly going down over there.  But in the midst of the carnage and betrayal and venereal disease and fedora-wearing Trojans, there stands a beacon of honourable hotness, a bright spot of old-fashioned hunkitude, one DILF to rule them all.  Go thy way, Hector, go thy way, indeed.  Hector will fight your morally dubious war and put up your shelves just because you asked nicely, probably with his baby son in his arms at the same time.  It is but one illustration of how soul-destroying Shakespeare wished this play to be that Hector meets his end at the ignoble hands of Achilles' Myrmidons hiding in ambush.  Let us take comfort, friends, in the fact that even Achilles required back-up to kill Hector, such is the force of his unadulteratedly righteous bodaciousness. Here endeth the lesson.

4) Prince Hal (Henry IV Parts 1 and 2)
I am aware that people do not always share my high opinion of Prince Hal, but then again, people are not always as naturally blessed with such inherent and unwavering rightness as I, and also people can suck it.  Moral ambiguity.  Quick wit.  Desperate craving for fatherly approval complicated by deep love for a surrogate father figure he knows he will ultimately have to reject. Symbolic defeat of his foil in single combat, complete with knicker-dropping Shakespearian smack talk ("I am the Prince of Wales, and think not, Percy,/ To share with me in glory any more./ Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere,/ Nor can one England brook a double reign/ Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales." PHWOAR.)  Hal is a sexy little bundle of angst and quips.  He is, essentially, a Joss Whedon character.  And I can give no higher praise than that.

3) Rosalind (As You Like It)
I think I can best sum this up with a line from The Mighty Boosh: "They call me the Confuser. Is it a man? Is it a woman? Ooh, I'm not sure I mind." But before there was Noel Fielding, there was Rosalind.  Rosalind, let us be clear, will mess you up in the head.  She is a magical fantasy androgynous wizard coquette, and she waltzes through the Forest of Arden like she owns it, leaving a trail of sexually confused hysteria in her wake.  The worst one can say of her, perhaps, is that she bestows herself upon a man not worth her time and who can bring little to the relationship besides some terrible poetry and light vandalism of trees, and perhaps also that she fails to notice Celia waiting patiently at her side (see above).  Whilst in Twelfth Night, Orsino has a visible moment of heterosexual relief upon the revelation of Viola's identity, Orlando - one suspects - is easy either way.  And so, undoubtedly, is the audience.

2) Edmund (King Lear)
If there's one thing we love here at Jane Shakespeare, it's a rebel with a cause.  And Edmund is the rebel-iest cause-iest rebel with a cause that ever did rebel, with a cause. As with the best of his kind, he flits back and forth across the line of the redeemable, not so much immoral as twistedly amoral, but (BE STILL MY HEART) in the end, just wants to be loved.  In a play full of world-beating lines, his dying words - "Yet Edmund was beloved" - go straight to the below stairs area as a simple statement of fact from someone who still can't quite believe it.  And when the Marvel films wheel out their Loki version during his inevitable redemption via death (for nothing is truer than the fact that Thor is King Lear In Space), I will cheer out loud in the cinema.  Edmund beat out Hamlet for this list for several reasons (see here for details), but mostly because you get all of the moody introspection coupled with the remarkable ability to get shit done (shit, in this case, is usurpation and eye-gouging by proxy).  Brooding and motivated? Get it, Edmund. Get. It.

1) Cleopatra (Antony and Cleopatra)
There is only one character in the canon whose sex drive starts an actual war (shut up yes also Helen of Troy) and only one character who can justly wear the crown of Shakespearian Bangability. Cleo is not only one of the greatest roles maybe ever, she's also an indisputable MILF.  Part of her appeal is her capriciousness - imperious and coquettish by turns, all throwing shade about Antony's boring wife one minute, and threatening to stab up unfortunate messengers the next.  If 30 Rock's 'MILF Island' was an actual thing, she would win by a landslide.  (New idea. MILF Island: Shakespeare Edition.  NO WAIT - THE HUNGER GAMES: SHAKESPEARE EDITION.****)  But Cleopatra wins mostly because, while she is undoubtedly slammin' of mind and body, all the descriptions of her seem to revolve around the aura of awesomeness she carries with her into the room.  Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety. Cleopatra has sexy in her soul and that, ladies and gentlemen, is something to which we can all aspire.


And that's it. Much as I tried to keep it to one entry per character, Edmund wangled two (he's like that) and looking it over, some of my favourite plays are glaringly, painfully apparent (haha screw you Othello).  All that remains to be said is that, of course, these are only a matter of personal opinion and completely open to debate so feel free to put your own suggestions in the comments.  No, go on.  Really, I would love that.  Disagree with me.  I dare you.

*Yes, I make notes.  These poorly-structured over-emotional outbursts don't just spring into being fully-formed.  (Actually they mostly do, but sometimes I need to procrastinate.)
**Lies.
***No seriously, Aufidius has this whole speech when the two enemies join forces that basically says, "I have such a hate-boner for you.  No seriously, I have dreams about this. Sweaty dreams."
****It cannot be just me that routinely assesses the room they are in by determining the order in which its inhabitants would die in the Hunger Games.

Happy Birthday, Mr Swan of Avon: An Unnecessary and Rambling Defence of William Shakespeare

It was going on four years ago that, casting about for a name for the blog I had decided to start so that I might make the option of engaging with my Doctor Who rants voluntary rather than inescapable, I settled on Jane Shakespeare.  ‘Shakespeare’ is, natch, my favourite writer, which seemed appropriate for a blog that was sure to be devoted to vital and pressing literary journalism and not at all discussions of which fictional characters I’d most like to bang, and ‘Jane’ had a pleasantly anonymous feel to it, making it suitable for my sophisticated and mysterious alter ego.

I shall allow you a moment to finish mirthfully wiping your eyes.

‘Jane’ is also, of course, a reference to my favourite novelist and, as such, she has already been made the subject of a celebratory post.  Shakespeare, though, not so much. There were my reviews of The Hollow Crown, which remains to this day my post with the highest hit count, teaching me the valuable lesson that if you want traffic to your blog, include pictures of Tom Hiddleston in a sauna (I’d love it if there was just an insatiable hunger for over-enthusiastic dissection of televised Shakespeare but I am, occasionally, a realist).  I’ve started Shakespeare-centric posts a couple of times – my top ten characters, the five greatest performances I’ve seen, and so on and so forth.  Shakespeare has featured in several other posts.  But for one reason or another, having his own has never quite happened.  Until now. The man turns 450 this year and by god, I’m going to acknowledge it.

Let’s be clear: much of the 450 celebrations are tourism.  Shakespeare  the ‘national poet’ is an export, a cartoon guy in a ruff with a bald head and maybe he’s like holding a skull or something because that’s from one of the plays right? No snobbery or denigration is intended here (well, not much) because Stratford as a town basically runs off of Shakespeare tourism, despite the irony that he spent much of his life trying to objectively not be in Stratford.  Shakespeare also gets caught up in nationalism debates a lot – when Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (essentially a treatise on the whole notion of Englishness) was in the theatres, one of the most frequent name-drops in reviews was Shakespeare, with the play being received as a kind of mixture of Henry V and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (like, so many feelings about that but the margin being too narrow for my purposes etc etc). Keats has a right old fanboy squee about the “Chief Poet!” and his work: “The bitter-sweet of this Shakespearian fruit” (but I can’t stay mad at Keats for long, bless him).  It’s natural, in a way – there is no more famous writer in the English language, no other playwright who has their own company, their own theatre, their own place on every syllabus at every age. Shakespeare is inextricably part of the make-up, the DNA of Britain – if you don’t believe me, then Hugh Grant says it in Love Actually too (but frankly I’m quite offended that you believe Hugh Grant over me, especially in Love Actually).

But. But. But. That is not a good enough reason to make such a song and dance about it.  Of course it isn’t. Tradition on its own never is. And tradition is not why every single person ever should be acquainted with Shakespeare in some way.  Because I do believe that, I really do.  The first thing to say here is that I’m not saying it should be compulsory in schools (although I think it already is). Schools, for the most part, make kids hate Shakespeare. And no wonder. I get bored reading it sometimes and he is my very favourite playwright ever. But it should be seen and it should be heard and it should be spoken and it should be talked about.  That’s what he wrote it for – entertainment.  To make people laugh and cry and throw up in their mouths a little bit (Titus Andronicus). It’s silly enough to make stupid jokes and high school comedy adaptations of (not an insult, 10 Things I Hate About You was perhaps the peak of artistic endeavour in the early 2000s), and it’s serious enough to bring hope and solace to those in need (personal experience applies but also the Robben Island Bible and so many, many other instances).  I like arguing, and most Shakespeare plays could be argued about forever.  It’s a natural partnership, you might say.

But one of the most common complaints I hear about Shakespeare is that he’s irrelevant.  Who cares what a Dead White Guy has to say about stuff four hundred odd years ago?  And yes, it bothers me sometimes that as both a feminist and a literary person, my favourite writers are pretty much all of the Dead White Male persuasion (notable exceptions included).  I couldn’t say why but early on in my education, Shakespeare, Keats and Austen formed a triumvirate that retains its empire over my heart to this day.  One thing they have in common is that they’re all writers who are passionately misunderstood by their most passionate fans.* Allow me to put on my hipster glasses for a moment.  Keats is thrillingly romantic but he’s first and foremost Romantic, in a small, angry, dying man kind of way.  Austen gives her characters happy endings but I wouldn’t have wanted to sit next to her at a dinner party (actually I totes would, if only because I’d feel more out of the line of fire there than opposite her, and we could bitch behind our fans). Shakespeare...yeah. I say Shakespeare is misunderstood by his fans, because I think to some extent he’s misunderstood by everybody.  Misunderstood isn’t even the right word really – ungraspable would be a better adjective, or unknowable, or subversive. Contemporary accounts of the man himself are rare, and those that exist aren’t always reliable, but they all seem to say the same thing: a quiet man, an observer. From his will, we know he wasn’t especially generous – not so much the second best bed furore, but the fact that his bequeathments to the Stratford poor are negligible compared to what other writers of similar financial status left behind. Then there’s also the fact that, as mentioned, he skipped town to London pretty quickly after his shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway (although again, debate continues over how loving or unloving this marriage was).

From very little evidence and completely unscientific instinct, the picture painted seems to me more writer than man, someone not entirely engaged in the business of living his own life and much more concerned with recording others. But he was a man, and that – I think – is where we go so wrong.  Milton, as a young poet, wrote a sonnet about reading Shakespeare and being helplessly paralysed in the wake of it – what would be the point of writing, when you knew you would never be as good? And that was from the guy who wrote Paradise Lost. But Shakespeare was just a man, and he was a lucky one – he lived at a time when theatre was the dominant form of entertainment, and a form of entertainment that was about hearing, about language, which he was, y’know, pretty good at. The vocabulary of English as a whole was rapidly expanding, he lived through the turn of a century and a crisis of succession, not to mention the aftermath of a hundred or so years of religious wrangling, and the end of a dynasty. It’s all so much more complicated than I can ever fully explain, but something shifted during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and he was the right man in the right place at the right time.  Jonson famously wrote that he was “not of an age but for all time” – true, but it’s the first bit that we tend to forget about. He was completely of his age, and it was the age that he happened to belong to that allowed him to be ‘of all time’.

All this means – confusingly, as someone who obviously loves Shakespeare a lot – that I think we could stand to knock him off the pedestal a little.  Sometimes as a director I get asked why I keep doing Shakespeare plays (of the eleven full length plays I have directed, seven are Shakespeare plays, and that’s not counting workshops) and the answer is always the same: within the Complete Works is every story I could ever want to tell. I believe that it is directors, rather than writers, who are the descendants of storytellers, travelling bards – we don’t make up our own stories, but we take ones that already exist and embellish, alter, bring elements in and out of focus.  Basically, if a play has too many stage directions, I go “nope” and get out the Complete Works again because those plays are robust. They withstand a lot of loving dicking about. Age shall not wither them etc. They don’t endure because Shakespeare is some mysterious dude up on a monument, but because they’re low down and dirty plays, quick and living and breathing and painful. Bad Shakespeare happens when people approach with too much reverence – of course, it also happens when people approach without actually having a single clue about the play they’re doing, which is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum. But at least those disasters tend to be fascinating car crashes that you can’t look away from – the greatest sin, born of too much veneration, is to make it boring.  You can do kind of anything with these plays.  I’m not saying every idea is gold but theoretically, you can.

And to purists who insist that Shakespeare should be performed in tights and ruffs, or have all male casts because ‘original practice’ (yet curiously displaying a casual disregard for ‘original practice’ in, oh, every other area of the production, Propellor, I mean you and your huge amount of Arts Council funding**), to you I say this: he’s been dead for four hundred years. He doesn’t care.  In fact, what with the way Renaissance playwrights rewrote each others’ work to keep it up to date, he’d probably just shrug and be all, “Whatevs, forsooth” if you told him you were relocating A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a secondary school and replacing the fairy music with Miley Cyrus.*** And while ‘original practice’ is actually very interesting and can provide hugely valuable insights into the way the plays work (for example, knowing that The Winter’s Tale was written for the Blackfriars indoor theatre tells you a lot about why the pacing of it is so much statelier and more intimate than, say, Henry V which is a Globe play and involves lots of rushing about to cover all the entrances and exits), that doesn’t mean we have to slavishly reproduce those practices for an audience that has changed a lot in the four intervening centuries.  The fact is, these plays can and do adapt beautifully because they are about people, and people do not change all that much, whether they are in medieval Verona or 1920s Berlin or present day Afghanistan (also Will was not exactly historically accurate himself, cf chiming clocks in Ancient Rome). Furthermore, it is people who are going to see your play, and you have a duty to share your story with them because selfish theatre that doesn’t care about its audience is just no good to anyone, and I could be doing stuff with your funding.

The exception to all of this is that I am an absolute devotee to understanding iambic pentameter and verse – but Picasso did not jump straight in with the eyes on the sides of heads, he learnt how to draw from life first.  It astonishes me the number of Shakespeare productions I see where the director has jumped straight to the concept and ignored the fundamentals of actually speaking the goddamn script – and that, really, is what makes a great production.  One of the best I’ve seen was Thea Sharrock’s As You Like It at the Globe.  I don’t even like As You Like It (ha).  Plus, it was in period dress.  But every single moment was clear and golden and the play just swept you along and Rosalind was a sexy butch lesbian type and Orlando looked like a goddamn rock star and Celia and Oliver**** were real, proper characters, and gah, my heart.  Verse is also something that I hear a lot of uncertainty about.  I won’t lie, it takes some getting used to, and there are rules to it that take some time to learn – but once you do, it unlocks a whole new, extraordinary level of meaning and, from a dramatic point of view, basically tells you how to do the play. Another young director once said to me that she would find Shakespeare too difficult to direct because it was this unbreachable, alien fortress of a thing– I wanted to shout, “No! I’m a fraud! It’s so easy! It’s the easiest thing in the world! The director of every Shakespeare play is Shakespeare! You just have to learn how to listen!” But I did not. But I wish I had. Because you should know that understanding it has absolutely nothing to do with schooling and everything to do with listening and instinct. Anyway.

In the end, the point I wish to make is this.  To end where I began, the episode of Doctor Who that has Shakespeare in it describes him as “the most human human”.  I can’t really get much closer than that.  He is the least Dead, White or Male of any of the DWMs I know and love – his perspective, that quiet, observer’s perspective, is always that of the outsider.  His plays are full of people trying to get in, always excluded from something, no matter what their social status.  His characters are creatures of want, of desire, and their happiness is predicated on getting that thing – I’m not sure Hamlet is a tragedy, and I’m not sure All’s Well That Ends Well is a comedy (ok, well, it’s definitely not a comedy, but I’m not going to get into why ‘problem play’ is too easy a cop-out now).  He takes the part of the dispossessed, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free – there is compassion and sorrow running through and through the veins of Shakespeare, not least in the plays that take place in crappy universes where everything is terrible always (King Lear, Troilus and Cressida). That’s why he’s relevant, that’s why he goes on.  Not always, of course, there are areas that are hugely problematic – Coriolanus’ whole “give political power to the poor? That is ridiculous” stance, the minefield that is the gender politics of The Taming of the Shrew*****, the casual racism of The Merchant of Venice’s deceptively awesome heroine Portia, and so on and so forth forever. But that’s part of the deal. That’s the package of being human, and no production will ever make a definitive discovery on any of this.

I want to direct Shakespeare because, as I said, travelling storyteller. There is not just one Hamlet to tell, there are as many Hamlets as there are actors. I have at least three different ways of doing King Lear, and everything I’ve already directed only makes me want to do it again. It will never stop being new to me, which is exciting and beneficently humbling. With other writers I may direct one of their plays and feel it has been exorcised from me – with Shakespeare it’s just a Zen matter of waiting for the wheel to come full circle, and feeling out when the time is right for a particular story in a particular way.  I am sceptical of the books and talks and teachers who say, “The thing you need to know about Richard III is...” because if you are a sufficiently good storyteller, I believe that in the end the only manual you need is the text itself. By being you, an individual reading it at your place in your time, it becomes a new play again – perhaps this is true of any good writer, but it is Shakespeare, who finds time for every walk of life and every strain of feeling, who lends himself to it most.

And just to prove that I learn from past experience:

You’re welcome.

*Also in this category: Byron.  I’m told that Byron conventions are full of men who think they are Byron, and women who want to go back in time and sleep with Byron, to which I say, ladies, please. Think of the syphilis. Yes, he was a rake and a cad and a brooding, wandering, tortured soul but he was also an absolutely on the ball, incisive and keenly-minded genius and his greatest work is basically a sex tour of Europe, in rhyme.

**I do know Propeller are not in any way purists, and I really enjoy their productions but also I cannot really get on board with the idea of a company being funded to take jobs away from women, especially when there are so few in the first place.

***Not actually being facetious, I would probably enjoy this production a lot.

****Massively helped by Oliver being played by Jamie Parker, who can get it. More Jamie Parker doing Shakespeare, for it is what the people want.

*****I will never stop saying this: it is not a sparky tale of two social misfits playing a sexy sex game, it is a tale of a woman being systematically abused until she gives up her desire to speak her own thoughts, at which point she is rewarded with the opportunity to speak her husband’s thoughts. However, 10 Things I Hate About You will never not be excellent, so maybe let’s all just watch that instead.