Sex with Shakespeare Read online

  Dedication

  Some birds pair-bond for life.

  This is for my Penguin.

  Content Note

  This book describes the sexual orientations and experiences of people who deserve discretion. To that end, I have gone to great lengths to shield their identities to such an extent that, in a few cases, even their own families would not be able to recognize them. Most names have been changed, as have, when necessary, some other identifying details, including nationality, occupation, educational background, or event location. When I did have to change identifying details, I made every effort to change them in a way that keeps feelings, motivations, cultural context, and emotional truth intact. Dialogue has been re-created to the best of my recollection and evokes the spirit of the conversations; when possible, I also pulled direct quotes from journal entries, emails, instant message conversations, and cell phone texts. I am grateful to Peng, Nikolai, and both Davids, who generously allowed me to use their real names.

  In block quotes, I’ve usually followed the punctuation in The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition. However, from time to time, when I felt like it, I embraced literary anarchy and made my own punctuation choices.

  I dislike trigger warnings. But some people feel they are helpful, and I don’t want to impose my personal preferences onto anyone else. So I will be clear: This book discusses themes and events that reflect the Shakespearean canon, including its darker elements. These include but are not limited to sexual and physical violence, rape, racism, homophobia, colonialism, drug and alcohol use, and disease.

  Other sources of concern may include: tortured metaphors, magical realism, heavy-handed literary references, literal and figurative navel-gazing, my opinions, and the state of North Dakota. Each stands accused of traumatic potential of its own.

  Epigraph

  Should anyone here not know the loving art,

  Read this, and learn by reading how to love.

  By art the swift ships are propelled with sail and oar;

  There is art to drive fleet chariots, and

  Love should by art be guided.

  I am ashamed to proceed,

  But Venus whispers in my ear.

  “What you blush to tell,” says she,

  “Is the most important part of the whole matter.”

  —Ars Amatoria, OVID

  MENTIONED IN The Taming of the Shrew, 4.2

  Contents

  Dedication

  Content Note

  Epigraph

  ACT ONE 1.1 A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Stand and Unfold

  ACT TWO 2.1 The Tempest: Were I Human

  2.2 The Winter’s Tale: An Aspect More Favorable

  2.3 Romeo and Juliet: These Violent Delights

  2.4 The Taming of the Shrew: Rough with Love

  ACT THREE 3.1 Hamlet: Nothing, My Lord

  3.2 Twelfth Night: What Should I Do

  3.3 Love’s Labor’s Lost: Wonder of the World

  3.4 Antony and Cleopatra: Here Is My Space

  ACT FOUR 4.1 Macbeth: Double, Double

  4.2 King Lear: Speak

  4.3 Othello: Beast with Two Backs

  4.4 Cymbeline: What We May Be

  ACT FIVE 5.1 As You Like It: What You Will

  Works Referenced

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ACT ONE

  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

  More than cool reason ever comprehends.

  The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

  Are of imagination all compact.

  One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;

  That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,

  Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.

  The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

  Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven;

  And as imagination bodies forth

  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

  Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

  A local habitation and a name.

  Such tricks hath strong imagination,

  That if it would but apprehend some joy,

  It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

  Or in the night, imagining some fear,

  How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

  —A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1

  1.1 A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

  Stand and Unfold

  It was on my mind again.

  I tilted my head past the edge of the curtain and scanned the room. I was alone. Even the owner of the Internet café had run to the mosque across the street to pray. It was a holy moment in Oman. It was prayer time. All around the country, men and women paused their work to speak with Allah.

  I needed to speak, too, but not with God. He was probably busy during prayer time. And I wouldn’t want to make Him uncomfortable. I needed to talk about sex. I needed to be a little bit weird. And in His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said al-Said’s Sultanate of Oman, the few minutes of total privacy after the call to prayer were my best chance.

  I slid a pair of black sunglasses under my pink hijab and retreated back to my computer. (The sunglasses were excessive in the dark café, of course. But they made me feel cool.) Safely ensconced behind a partition, I minimized a PDF of an article on postcolonial interpretations of The Tempest and opened a new browser window. After another quick glance over my shoulder to confirm that there was no one behind me, I typed the word spanking into the search bar and clicked enter.

  I didn’t want to communicate with God, but a higher authority wanted to communicate with me. This time, it was Oman’s highest authority: the government. More specifically, it was the Omani Telecommunications Regulatory Authority. One of the TRA’s stated missions was to protect social values.

  In other words, they censor porn. And they were onto me.

  I could only understand a few words of the Arabic warning that popped up on my computer screen to block me from my unsavory search request. But in my heart I knew what it said. My imagination filled in where language failed.

  “Hi, Jillian,” it read. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  I scrunched my face into an old apple and ran my tongue across my teeth.

  Oh, Omani Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, I thought, sighing. I don’t know.

  “You just tried to access sadomasochistic sexual material from a public Internet café,” the Arabic script replied. “You’ve gone off the deep end. Now every moral authority in the Middle East is coming to arrest you.”

  Not likely, I thought. But I left a handful of rials on the front desk for the shopkeeper to find when he returned from prayers, and I fled anyway.

  I walked home and sat on the edge of my bed. With a sigh, I reached up and pulled off my hijab. My ponytail spilled over my shoulder, and I absentmindedly pulled at the end of it. Minutes passed. Maybe hours, I don’t know.

  The porn blocker had a point. What the fuck was wrong with me?

  A knock on the front door startled me out of my malaise. It was Sabihah, an elderly neighbor who had taken it upon herself to absorb me into her family when I arrived in her apartment building months earlier without male protection. I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Sabihah insisted that I eat dinner with her each night and that I report my daily plans to her each morning. When she saw, to her horror, the collection of jeans in my bedroom, she even started to make clothes for me on her sewing machine.

  “Were you with a man?” Sabihah demanded as soon as she saw me.

  I sm
iled. It had been a while since someone had taken such a detailed interest in disciplining my choices. I didn’t want Sabihah to worry about me. But it was a comfort that she did.

  “No, Auntie,” I replied, shaking my head. “There was no man. I went to use the Internet.”

  Sabihah narrowed her eyes.

  “Okay,” she said, with a curt nod. “Get in the car. Bring some clothes. Enough for two days. Don’t dress like an American.”

  “Where are we going, Auntie?” I replied. “I have Arabic class on Saturday.” (At that point, Oman’s weekend, like neighboring Saudi Arabia’s, fell on Thursdays and Fridays.)

  “Don’t argue with me,” Sabihah scolded. “Hurry!”

  That afternoon we climbed into a tattered gray sedan with Sabihah’s adult daughter and drove to a tiny village deep in the desert to visit their relatives. The village was another world, a place where goats were more common than cars and sun-dried mud walls were typical. That night, after the men disappeared into another room, the other women and I chatted in a jumbled mix of Arabic, Swahili, and English and snacked on dates (but only in sets of odd numbers, such as three or five, Sabihah reminded me, with a sharp rap on my knuckles when I reached for one too many, because that was the practice of the Prophet Mohammed). Finally, sometime after midnight, the other women set mats on the floor and settled down to sleep.

  I lay on my mat, stressed out. I was frustrated. I was awake. Soon, long, heavy breaths filled the room.

  The others were asleep.

  I stood up, grabbed a flashlight from my overnight bag, and pulled a long black abaya on over my pajamas. The door didn’t have a lock. I slipped out into the village and walked down the dirt road as far as I could. Beyond the end of the road was the desert, and I kept walking. When I couldn’t see any houses behind me, I stopped and passed my flashlight in a circle over the land. This seemed like a good place.

  Out here, no one would hear me scream.

  Years earlier, when I was in high school, I had developed a unique stress-relief ritual. I was sixteen at the time and reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In it, a woman named Helena loves a man named Demetrius.

  No—Helena doesn’t love Demetrius, exactly. She craves him. Helena pursues Demetrius obsessively, while Demetrius, in turn, pursues Helena’s childhood friend, Hermia. But unlike Helena, I didn’t have a high school crush to pour my adolescent angst into.

  So I borrowed hers.

  One afternoon I walked to the edge of my empty high school football field, took a deep breath, and screamed Demetrius’s name for as long as I could. Into his name, I poured all of my fear, desire, anxiety, and grief.

  In the four years since, I’d developed the habit of yelling “Demetrius!” during moments of stress. An occasional scream releases pent-up energy, and as for the word Demetrius—well, why not? It seemed no less appropriate than shit or fuck or any other word I might want to yell in a moment of frustration. After I yelled “Demetrius!” at a college term paper and got an unexpected A, I even started to think of the ritual as a good-luck charm. Demetrius was my four-leaf clover.

  I hadn’t yelled his name once in the months since I had moved to Oman. This night seemed like a good time. If I were going to walk by myself, at night, into the middle of the desert, wearing cartoon duck pajamas and an abaya, just to scream the name of one of Shakespeare’s least lovable male characters, it might as well be on the same day that I tried to find spanking porn in an Islamic public Internet café. Go big or go home, right?

  I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with as much oxygen as I could stand to inhale. Then I coughed it all out in a start.

  My flashlight had just passed over a pair of eyeballs.

  I swung the light back in the direction of those eyes until I found their owner: a goat, sitting on the ground. He was alone. But I’d been in Oman long enough to know that wherever there was a goat, its owner would not be far away. I didn’t want to wake anyone up.

  So I couldn’t scream. I spoke.

  “Demetrius,” I said, looking at the goat. “Hey, Demetrius.”

  The goat blinked. It was not impressed.

  I sat on a rock and stared back at him. At that moment, my best friend in the world was an Omani goat.

  I needed to get my shit together.

  AT ITS MOST basic level, Shakespeare is physical and biological. It’s even sexual. The metrical rhythm of iambic pentameter—the syllabic building block of Shakespeare’s poetry—mimics the ba bump pattern of a heartbeat. His words circulate, speed up and slow down, skip beats, and flutter in perfect symmetry with the human heart. It’s not an accident. I feel it in my bloodstream every time.

  This story is about the Shakespeare Thing. And the Spanking Thing. But most of all, it’s about the Love Thing.

  I moved to Muscat, the capital city of Oman, roughly two months before my quiet midnight confrontation with the goat. I was twenty years old.

  Oman is a thick slice of country in the Persian Gulf, wedged between Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Oman’s ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said al-Said, assumed control of the country after he overthrew his father in a palace coup in 1970, and today Oman remains one of the last absolute monarchies in the world. Although Sultan Qaboos is well respected and even beloved among Omanis, he also maintains strict control over the country. When I lived there, regulations governed even small minutiae of life in the sultanate. One law, for example, required that almost all buildings in Muscat be painted white, which gave the city a dreamlike quality. In its aesthetics, politics, and culture, Oman was a fierce mix of old and new. It was the kind of place where once, on my way to buy a frothy cappuccino and a flaky croissant, I got stuck in a traffic jam caused by a wayward camel. It was the kind of place where I could admire waves of perfect golden sand dunes—and then surf down them.

  The Shakespeare Thing is what drove me to Oman in the first place. When I “stopped out” of college and moved to the Middle East, I told myself it was a responsible choice. I had just spent a term at Oxford, where I studied under a tutor who specialized in “Shakespearean cartography”—the study of how maps and mapmaking interact with Shakespeare’s plays. (Yes, that’s a real thing.) I followed that with a summer research fellowship, for which I read about Shakespeare, wrote about Shakespeare, watched Shakespeare, and did little else.

  But as much as I loved Shakespeare, he wasn’t an employable plan. As the imaginary career counselor inside my head reminded me, I needed to pick up a useful skill. Oman seemed unfamiliar and exciting, but, more to the point, people spoke Arabic there. I decided I would learn Arabic, renounce my less-than-practical Shakespeare habit, and equip myself for a reasonable job. In Oman, I thought, I could finally break up with William Shakespeare and start my grown-up life.

  And I wanted to sexually neuter myself. There was that, too.

  Which brings us to the Spanking Thing.

  In Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky wrote: “There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.” That’s true. Here’s what I, for decades, was afraid to tell myself: I’m obsessed with spanking.

  I don’t use the word obsessed casually. Plenty of people enjoy an occasional erotic swat, but that is not me. It would not be accurate to say that spankings “turn me on,” or that I “enjoy being spanked.” Those phrases don’t describe obsession.

  What would be accurate is to say that all day, every day, for my entire life, I’ve thought about spankings. Spanking is not part of my sex life; spanking is my sex life. (To be honest, I could almost drop the word sex from that sentence.) My fetish is my sexual orientation, or maybe just my orientation. It isn’t something I chose, or an experimental phase, or a “preference,” or a trend that I opted into. It’s the core of my sexuality, and an innate, unchosen, and lifelong center of my identity. My phone is saturated with pictures of wounded butts—not only of my own, but photos of my friends’ bottoms, too.
Every morning I wake up to dozens of text messages in our group chat, where my fetishist friends and I swap photos and stories about our adventures in gluteal perversion. If I had to give up sex—all kinds of sex—or spanking, I’d flush sex like a drug smuggler ditching his stash in an airport bathroom. My fetish isn’t something I do. It’s something I am.

  That is what I mean when I say I’m obsessed with spankings.

  It sounds weird, I know.

  BDSM, the blanket term for sexual identities on a spectrum with my own, has a lot of definitions: bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. But even within those categories, there are subcultures. As for corporal punishment enthusiasts, like me, the broader BDSM community calls us spankos. But I can’t stand that word. I suppose it’s short for spankophile, but the abbreviation makes my skin crawl. It sounds like a processed food product, and there is nothing more thoroughly unerotic than that.

  The linguistics of BDSM are as complicated as its practice. No semantic approach can satisfy every perspective. Paraphilia, for example, is the most formal, clinical term for my obsession, but I’ll use the word fetish instead, since it’s more widely understood. I’ll also use the word kink at times, since fetishes and kinks often overlap. But there is also a significant difference between the two. Put simply, it’s possible to opt into kink. But fetishes are not chosen.

  I identify as a masochist, a bottom, and, in rare cases, even a submissive, depending on the context, so all three words will appear at different times. But that should not imply that those terms are interchangeable, because they’re not. Masochists aren’t necessarily submissive, and submissives aren’t necessarily masochists. And the term vanilla—the most common way to describe people who aren’t kinky—does not imply that a person is boring or conservative. (Just as fetishists aren’t necessarily interesting or adventurous.) Plenty of vanilla people explore kink as an accessory to sex. The difference is that fetishists explore sex as an accessory to kink. Our fetish is our baseline. It is our first, and most fundamental, need. This is about identities, not activities.