Passion, Inspiration, Interpretation, Conform

Today I watched a film called Stage Beauty in order to get a feel for the late 17^th century time period and theatre in general.  Theatre is about performance, but before the performance, there must be a play made up of written words to perform.  One quote from the film said, “words live long after their passions have died” but what makes great theatre (or any works of literature) from any time period relevant is that the passions that have inspired the words of great playwrights and authors have not yet died.  The reason that Chaucer and Shakespeare, among many others, continue to be taught and given president in educational institutions is because their core themes and the character types used in the works (like the rake, or the always humorous bed-switch plot) speak to human nature and human error rather than to one particular, outdated and very deceased group of people.  The play that is continuously referenced in Stage Beauty, the tragedy Othello, centers on issues of race, gender and class. 

n  Race is central because Othello is a black man who has married a white girl without the permission of her father.  Also, a reference that modern readers may be unaware of is that the villain, Iago, is a Spaniard and not Caucasian, which increases racial tensions in the play.

n  Gender and the social expectations of people based on their gender is thrown into question when Desdemona demonstrates that she is neither obedient, silent and through these unwomanly characteristics is assumed to be unchaste. 

n  The hierarchical class system is upturned when Othello, a higher class military man who is praised for his prowess and morality murders his wife on assumption and paranoid fear.  The higher class was thought to possess a greater morality than those of the lower classes.

What is gender?

Aphra Behn’s “The Rover” comments on the state of women under the misappropriated rule of men and even though it was written in the mid 1600’s, women are still toyed with and objectified, albeit sometimes at their own behest, by men; ergo, the passions that inspired “The Rover” have not yet died.  In “Stage Beauty” there is a sex scene between Maria and Ned where he tells her what gender role she is playing based on her position and in a subsequent scene he attempts to teach Maria how to act like a woman.  Ned assures Maria that he is not trying to teach her to act like a woman, but that he is trying to teach her how to act like Desdemona.  The fact that he is trying to teach her a female role is significant because it betrays the fact that gender is to a very large extent performative.  During the 1600’s, when “Stage Beauty” was set and “The Rover” was written, women had just begun to find some shred of identity because they were finally allowed to play their own gender on the theatrical stage.  Then and to a large degree now, women were told by the patriarchal hegemony how women were supposed to act—they were told that the male interpretation of femininity was the natural behavioral, and even structural (corset?) form of womanhood.  The female identity was determined by a male interpretation of a subaltern and entirely ‘other’ group which they did not and could not understand. 

At one point in “Stage Beauty” the question was asked, “a woman playing a woman—what’s the trick in that?”, and the beauty of it is that once women were allowed to perform, the female gender was no longer a mildly amusing trick.