When exploring such texts [it] feels like there is a lineage between past and present, and it shows up in a way that modern texts perhaps don’t. There is a timelessness to these pieces, even with a modern reworking or ‘unconventional staging’. They will always be there, as will queer people and their stories, as they have always been.
AD (she/her)Footnote 1
IN SEPTEMBER 2023, I held a series of five workshops, titled ‘Queer 4 Shx’, to develop ideas with a team of actors for a new, queer adaptation, titled Love & Faith (and something unholy), which was based on two early modern plays, John Lyly’s Galatea and William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and opened at Qtopia Sydney, Australia, in August 2024. A theatrical pot-luck dinner, Love & Faith included elements of Shakespeare, his predecessor John Lyly, a variety of pop songs, and live drag. Unashamedly queer, the production featured hits from Shania Twain, David Bowie, Lady Gaga, and Cyndi Lauper, among others. It had components of the silly, the sultry, the horrific, and the absurd, jumping from early modern text to hip-hop dance sequences, from Shakespeare to Sapphic nuns. Split into two acts, with an abridged version of Galatea forming Act 1 and an abridged version of Measure for Measure forming Act 2, Love & Faith (and something unholy) queered the source texts thematically and also structurally by virtue of performing them in sequence.
The ‘Queer 4 Shx’ creative development occurred early in the adaptation process and involved exploring the thematic resonances between these two early modern plays. It laid the foundation for the creation of a split-bill performance that tethered the two plays visually and sonically. The shared themes and sharp contrast between their dramatic tones were central reasons for their selection. Galatea, written by John Lyly around 1588, is a delightfully queer love story, featuring two young virgins, Galatea and Phillida, who are disguised as boys by their fathers to avoid being sacrificed to Neptune’s monster Agar. While disguised, they fall in love, each supposing the other to be a man – though as the play continues, their suspicion of the other’s true gender becomes clear (Figure 1).
Left to right: Nymph (JH), Diana (CS), Phillida (MT), Galatea (AD), and Cupid (CC), Love & Faith (and something unholy) (Qtopia Sydney, 2024). Photo by Justin Clarke, courtesy of Justin Clarke Creative.
Measure for Measure, written by William Shakespeare around 1603, tells the story of Isabella, a young nun whose brother Claudio has been sentenced to death for impregnating his betrothed, and who is subsequently propositioned by the Duke’s newly appointed deputy, Angelo, in exchange for Claudio’s life. While the play does not stage explicit queer relationships in the manner of Galatea, scholars have positioned Isabella as a queer figure within the play’s sexual economy, by virtue of her identity as a Catholic nun operating outside of patriarchal social structures, including heterosexual marriage. ‘Only by being a queer virgin,’ Theodora Jankowski observes, ‘can she challenge the sexual economy by creating a category of autonomous female who has the power to resist both Angelo’s illegal – and the Duke’s legal – proposals of sexual servitude.’Footnote 2 Kimberly Reigle similarly suggests that virginity in Measure for Measure ‘becomes a site of powerful contention, and the convent emerges as a space of resistance and agency’ in the play.Footnote 3 These dynamics are further amplified by what Philip C. McGuire describes as ‘open silences’, which might be used by directors and performers to explore these queer dynamisms and grant the play an exceptional ‘capacity for contingency and change’.Footnote 4
Despite their differences, many creative and critical resonances between the two plays became clear over the course of the creative process. Both texts include a fascinating portrayal of virgin sacrifice, which Galatea grapples with literally and Measure for Measure explores figuratively and spiritually. Both texts include notably ambiguous conclusions that hint at compulsory heterosexual unions, but never fully realize them. Moreover, it is possible to locate resonances between certain characters, such as love-hungry Angelo and love-obsessed Cupid, and between heartbroken Mariana and humiliated Hebe.
These resonances proved a fascinating stimulus for creative exploration. However, they were not the sole reason for the plays’ selection. This choice was also informed by my personal, affective relationship with them. I was drawn to Galatea because I was, as a queer person, delighted to see myself in a literary canon from which I regularly felt erased. I did not believe that canonical, important love stories about the kinds of love that I experienced existed – not, at least, from the early modern period. I first saw Measure for Measure in 2005 when the play was produced by Australia’s national Shakespeare company, Bell Shakespeare. The production, sparkling and full of life, portrayed Isabella as a strong, intelligent woman wholly uninterested in heterosexual romance as a result of her religious devotion. While the play did not feature a same-sex relationship, it also looked and felt queer to me.
The present article identifies this personal, affective relationship as a central component of queer adaptations and the creative processes that underpin them – how we, as a community, intuitively gravitate towards certain stories, and in the process discover how these stories have the creative capacity to reflect and encompass our experiences. It further draws attention to the generative tension between the presentist perspectives and historical enquiries that are negotiated and embodied in the rehearsal room when adapting early modern drama. In doing so, it does not seek to impose modern meanings onto an early modern text, nor does it function as an exercise in historical recovery alone. Rather, it considers the reparative function of early modern theatrical adaptation – how queer dynamisms already embedded within these plays are activated through contemporary performance practices, and how such activation may be deeply validating for queer creatives. When approached in this way, the texts begin to bear a strange, inexplicable resemblance to a queer history that is frequently felt, but rarely seen. Framed through this lens, adaptation is not only invested in bringing the texts into the modern day; it also becomes the means through which LGBTIQ+ people can access collective histories that have been lost or erased, a contradictory motion where we project ourselves back whilst bringing the plays forward.
Throughout the workshops and rehearsals for Love & Faith (and something unholy), I utilized a Practice-as-Research (PaR) methodology, based on Melissa Trimingham’s framework for PaR, which is informed by three sources: hermeneutic methods; social science methods; and ‘action research’.Footnote 5 In the context of my research, this included gathering data from my primary sources (the plays) and secondary sources (critical readings, performance studies, reviews, and productions), and utilizing rehearsal and performance footage to examine how the LGTBIQ+ creative team and cast might imagine and embody these collective histories. Different kinds of qualitative data were also utilized, including my own reflections, notes, and observations as the production’s director and dramaturg, and actor reflections. These actor reflections were gathered after each rehearsal to gain insight to their experience rehearsing the production.
The actor reflections, in particular, raise a broader question central to this article – why adapt early modern drama at all? Why would these plays, as AD suggests, provide ‘a lineage between past and present’ demonstrating how ‘queer people and their stories … have always been’, particularly when other texts with more overt relationships to contemporary queer experiences exist? Christine Varnado provides a partial answer to this question: ‘Early modern England, with its ultracanonical literary tradition organized around the mythologized figure of Shakespeare, is a particularly susceptible and thus important site for dismantling the fixation on the absence or presence of sexual identity.’Footnote 6 Thus, part of the reason lies in early modern drama’s significance in the western literary canon, and in the validating potential of recognizing facets of contemporary queer experience within such culturally important works.
However, such recognition is only possible as a result of the structural and affective queerness already at work in the plays – features that have been well noted by existing scholarship. Melissa Sanchez suggests that through their ‘self-conscious moments of anachronism, preposterous sequencing, and resistance to humanist optimism, Shakespeare’s oeuvre is itself structurally and conceptually queer’.Footnote 7 Examining social and relational structures in the plays, Laurie Shannon suggests that the homosocial nature of early modern society meant that plays often ‘lean on friendship, twinning, and disguise (all species of likeness and resembling)’.Footnote 8 Discussing the affective queerness of early modern drama, Varnado argues that, ‘at times, what is queer about the shape of desire or erotic energy in an early modern text is not a person, an act, or an identity, but rather the larger system or structure through which affects and relations circulate’.Footnote 9 In their reading of Twelfth Night, Jami Ake observes that the play ‘dramatizes the very process by which female-female desire emerges into discourse’.Footnote 10
Important work in trans early modern scholarship shifts attention to questions of historical recovery and temporal framing, following what Chess, Gordon, and Fisher describe as the ‘familiar paths of historical recovery and/or literary analysis with the new aim of excavating the period’s gender-variant practices’.Footnote 11 In doing so, they suggest, early modern trans studies allow us to ‘think about how [these practices] continue to shape – or might reshape – the present’.Footnote 12 Ezra Horbury, for example, performs a ‘transgender rereading of the cross-dressed page’ to undo ‘anachronistic assumptions about gender in the early modern period’.Footnote 13 Simone Chess, while ‘cautious about assuming that early modern crossdressing could indicate an identity’, is nevertheless able to demonstrate how ‘these connections are available; once they are articulated, they change, deepen, and nuance early modern characters’.Footnote 14 These scholarly contributions not only demonstrate how trans readings can contribute new perspectives on early modern texts and the social conditions that shaped them, but also reflect a deep investment in dismantling binary modes of understanding history which frames ‘trans people [as] a recent phenomenon’.Footnote 15
The Reparative Function
Examining actor processes in the ‘Queer 4 Shx’ workshops illuminates how queer artists might similarly engage in this work of rethinking history throughout adaptation processes. Moreover, they highlight the reparative function of this exchange, where queer creatives are able to recognize themselves in the past, thus validating their identities in the present. Exploring the reparative function of the adaptation of early modern plays, I draw on the concept of reparative reading coined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick when engaging with Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic theory of child development, and suggest this model is a productive lens through which to understand the queer adaptation or ‘queering’ of early modern drama. Sedgwick problematizes ‘paranoid’ readings, a mode of reading which operates under a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, where the reader decodes the hidden systems of power the text reinforces, and which must be exposed through the process of reading.Footnote 16 While paranoid readings may indeed reveal hegemonic power structures, Sedgwick problematizes the assumption that such exposure will inherently initiate positive change through this process, or indeed tell us something we don’t already know. Instead, Sedgwick proposes a practice of reparative reading, which looks, not to reveal what is hidden in texts, but to extract ‘sustenance from the objects of a culture’ even when the culture from which this object stems does not aim to provide such sustenance and may in fact wish to enact the reverse.Footnote 17
Adaptors continue to make Shakespeare relevant in politically charged ways, and scholars have already taken note of the reparative potential of such creative endeavours. Examining Whitney White’s Macbeth in Stride, Bailey Sincox observes that the adaptation ‘enacted a “reparative” reading of Lady Macbeth … a reading that is “about pleasure” and “frankly ameliorative”.’Footnote 18 Discussing the fantasy/horror comic book series Locke & Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, Bradley Ryner suggests that ‘adaptation and appropriation always hold out this reparative potential, reworking previous material into the possibilities of something other’.Footnote 19 These examples demonstrate how artists might adapt through the lens of repair. While distinct from the approach taken in this paper, which focuses on artist processes, they underscore the broader significance of repair to adaptation as a whole, where the artist(s) propose(s) alternative ways of understanding recognizable stories.
Despite the prevalence of such adaptations in cultural discourse, adaptation scholarship has tended to privilege a paranoid mode of reading, framing adaptation as a method to reveal and provide commentary on power structures embedded in the text, and at times revise these texts as a strategy to correct perceived power imbalances. Several prominent adaptation scholars have framed adaptation in this way. Julie Sanders suggests adaptation ‘is frequently involved in offering commentary on a source text. This is achieved most often by offering a revised point of view from the “original”, adding hypothetical motivation, or voicing the silenced and marginalized.’Footnote 20 Thomas Leitch also considers how adaptation might ‘rewrite the original, not simply improve its ending or point out its contemporary relevance’.Footnote 21 ‘Adaptations of Shakespeare, in particular, may be intended as tributes or as a way to supplant canonical cultural authority,’Footnote 22 Linda Hutcheon suggests, building on Marjorie Garber’s comment that Shakespeare can be viewed as ‘a monument to be toppled’ by adaptors.Footnote 23
Recent scholarship continues to frame adaptation as a type of intervention which provides commentary on, or corrects through revision, perceived power imbalances. Wieland Schwanebeck examines revision as a form of adaptation specifically, considering ‘how adaptations can read their sources “against the grain”, taking feminist, postcolonial, and intersectional parameters into account’.Footnote 24 Another study by Jo Carney frames feminist adaptations of Shakespeare as a kind of ‘talking back’, stating that it ‘typically implies a rebuke to an authoritative position, but it can also be a less accusatory impulse to continue a conversation’.Footnote 25 Lindsey Mantoan and colleagues are perhaps more critical of this kind of approach, suggesting ‘the legacy of power embedded in the canonized artefacts of our fraught past resists easy deconstruction, and visibility in our ocular-centric moment might trump subversion’.Footnote 26 However, they too have no issue with framing adaptation in this way, observing that, ‘perhaps indicative of a need to reclaim experiences that have been written out of the canon, we make frequent returns to the old texts, occasionally with a revisionist agenda’.Footnote 27
Of course, commentary and revision are important features of queer adaptation. Theatre-makers (myself included) take great delight in creatively fusing new and old ideas in live performance. Moreover, adaptation can and does provide queer artists with the opportunity to centre the voices of minority and marginalized groups. However, by focusing too prominently on adaptation’s capacity to revise, ‘talk back’, or rebuke established power hierarchies as they are represented in a source text, adaptation theorists may inadvertently understate those features of a source text that are inherently queer and which already have the capacity to speak to the collective interests, passions and experiences of LGBTIQ+ people. I suggest that the manner in which queer adaptation is described and conceptualized might be broadened to account for the way that queer artists connect with the intrinsic queerness of certain texts. Bringing creative practice into dialogue with these theoretical perspectives, I argue that queer adaptation, as AD’s quote above demonstrates, also offers queer artists the opportunity to renegotiate our relationship with the past through a process of presentist identification generated by creative embodiment, while simultaneously recognizing historical difference and the recurrence of queer dynamisms across time. This process, I suggest, cannot wholly centre around making something new, because the very feature that allows the text to validate the queer subject is that feature of the text which exists in the past.
Unpacking this process, I consider how the ‘Queer 4 Shx’ workshops brought into focus two interrelated dynamics, which allowed us as LGBTIQ+ creatives to renegotiate our relationship with time itself. First, I examine how we engaged in a process of locating resonances between the text and our own lived experiences, breaking open new interpretive possibilities and added richness to our understanding of Lyly and Shakespeare’s work. Second, I consider how these resonances were validated through the texts’ positioning as canonical and culturally valuable. This perception was deeply intertwined with Shakespeare’s significant position in the western literary canon, which also influenced the actors’ perception of Lyly, who, by his association with Shakespeare as an early modern playwright, was also perceived as culturally valuable in the rehearsal room. Finally, I demonstrate how these two features can cumulate in creative practice as embodied reparative reading, allowing us as queer folk to imagine alternative past(s), present(s), and future(s) through physical exploration and play – alternative temporalities which, I suggest, might be able to provide some of the ‘nourishment and comfort’ that Sedgwick describes.Footnote 28
‘Twinks and Nymphs’: Resonances in the Rehearsal Room
For the ‘Queer 4 Shx’ workshops, I enlisted the help of four actors, all of whom were LGBTIQ+ identifying. Among the creative team, the joy of rediscovery and the pleasure of identification emerged in unexpected and occasionally humorous ways over the course of the workshops. In our first session, I spent some time doing a plot synopsis of both plays with the actors so that they would understand the broader context of the scenes that they would be working on. Throughout my synopsis of Galatea, I was surprised and delighted to feel the collective joy in the room as the actors drew analogies between characters in Galatea and contemporary queer idioms. Despite having no experience with the work, the actors immediately began to invest in how the characters in Lyly’s play related to our own queer archetypes. One performer reflection on the text included a solitary sentence that read: ‘Diana is Tim Curry in Rocky Horror and Nymphs are Magenta, Riff Raff … etc.’Footnote 29 The same performer also wrote further down the page: ‘Hebe is Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls.’ There was no mention of who these figures were, or how they should be represented with regard to historical contexts. Rather, there was a shared delight in the ways that they were familiar.
Such connections made their way into the script of Love & Faith itself. For example, Act 1, Scene 2 of Love & Faith was based on Act 1, Scene 2 of Galatea. In the adapted text, the scene was titled ‘Twinks and Nymphs’ after workshopping this particular moment in the play with the actors in the creative development. In the scene, Cupid encounters one of Diana’s nymphs and attempts to seduce her. The Nymph rebuffs Cupid, promising that she ‘will follow Diana in the chase, whose virgins are all chaste’ (1.2.25–6), and exits.Footnote 30 Insulted, Cupid proclaims: ‘I will practise a while in these woods, and play such pranks with these nymphs that, while they aim to hit others with their arrows, they shall be wounded themselves with their own eyes’ (1.2.34–7).
The team concluded that Cupid was a ‘twink’ – defined in the online Urban Dictionary as ‘a gay or effeminate man, or a young man regarded as an object of homosexual desire, usually a “bottom”’.Footnote 31 Other terms such as ‘lesbian dom’ and ‘big top energy’ entered our vocabulary to describe other characters, referring respectively to Diana as a powerful, Sapphic figure spurning the advances of men, and to Venus as the type of person who is in control in the bedroom. The actors delighted in drawing such analogies between the characters and contemporary queer idioms. At the time, I didn’t give these passing encounters much weight. However, on reflection I began to consider how jokes such as these were a starting point for our reparative reading process, as we were beginning to find resonances between the characters and our community as queer people, thus enabling us to creatively invest in the play-worlds.
In a later workshop, the team explored the various interpretive possibilities presented in our ‘Twinks and Nymphs’ scene. The ensemble separated into two groups. CO (they/them) and JH (she/her) were in Group 1, and CC (they/them) and AD (she/her) were in Group 2. I allowed each group to direct themselves in order to see how their own personal investments and characteristics would influence creative outcomes. Interestingly, both groups organized themselves so that the non-binary actor played Cupid and the woman played Diana’s Nymph. Group 1 were almost immediately on their feet and were playing out the scene incorporating a ballroom-style dance to demonstrate the push and the pull between Cupid and the Nymph. By contrast, Group 2 sat for a long part of the rehearsal time they were given, talking through the scene.
After some time has passed, we regrouped and shared the scenes. Group 1’s scene was humorous and light-hearted. CO played Cupid as a likeable and goofy character, attempting to charm the Nymph with cheesy dance moves. When Cupid entered, he saw the Nymph and cast out an imaginary line, drawing himself into the Nymph as if reeling in a fish. The Nymph was coy but seemed genuinely interested in Cupid. As they spoke, they danced. While Cupid ‘led’ the dance, it was evident that he was not in charge of the scene. He puffed up as if he were a bird displaying its feathers, trying to impress the Nymph. The Nymph enjoyed having this power over Cupid, taking a moment to run her hand across his shoulders, whereupon Cupid stamped his foot and shook as if he were an excited puppy being patted by a beloved owner. As the scene continued, Cupid seemed to get more and more sexually excited and pantomimed premature ejaculation. The Nymph, amused, looked down at his crotch and delivered the line, ‘And so farewell, little god’ (1.2.32). Humiliated, Cupid plotted his revenge as an aside to the audience.
Group 2’s interpretation of the scene supplied a contrast to this light-hearted, farcical reading. Cupid entered and approached the Nymph slowly, looking out at the audience to let them in on his intention (Figure 2). AD’s Nymph was more awkward than JH’s, and was flustered by the god. The scene was very still. ‘[I]s there not one that followeth the sweet thing, sweet love?’ Cupid asked the Nymph, to which the Nymph replied, ‘What mean you by it? Or what do you call it?’ (1.2.14–17). Cupid then sat and beckoned the Nymph to join him. In this dynamic, he appeared to be more of a teacher, the Nymph was his naive student. Cupid leaned in as they talked, and it seemed as if they would kiss. The Nymph, conflicted between desire and duty, pulled away and took a reprimanding tone with the god, before exiting. Cupid was irritated that his seduction failed, and this motivated his desire to prank the Nymph.
Cupid (CC), Love & Faith (and something unholy) (Qtopia Sydney, 2024). Photo by Justin Clarke, courtesy of Justin Clarke Creative.
Having different actors play the scene will inevitably result in different interpretations, but this playful investigation allowed us to locate moments where the power shifted between characters in unexpected ways. In the first version, Cupid was clumsy, goofy, and completely at the mercy of the Nymph; in the other, Cupid was still, powerful, and in control, reminiscent of a hunter stalking a deer. Interestingly, each group’s interpretations mirrored their respective creative processes. Group 1 was up on their feet immediately, enjoying the bawdy humour that the scene lends itself to. Group 2 was more analytical, taking a long time to read over the scene, and keeping the blocking very simple and still. However, perhaps one of the most interesting things about the exercise was not the differences between the scenes, but the similarities. Despite the reversal of power, there was no way for either group to sidestep the scene’s sinister conclusion. As soon as Cupid is rejected, he plots revenge, and for a contemporary audience (particularly in a post-#MeToo era) this moment seems uncomfortably familiar.
Developing the scene with the two groups shone light on the interpretive possibilities at hand, and our work in the rehearsal room demonstrated how the ‘queerness’ of the scene was located at this junction between desire and power. Erotic energy circulates in the scene in an indeterminate fashion. This is perhaps most perfectly captured by Cupid’s reply when Diana’s Nymph asks him, ‘Love, good sir? What mean you by it?’:
A heat full of coldness, a sweet full of bitterness, a pain full of pleasantness, which maketh thoughts have eyes, and hearts ears. Bred by desire, nursed by delight, weaned by jealousy, killed by dissembling, buried by ingratitude. And this is love. Fair lady, will you any?
(1.2.16–20)
The contrast of antithetical pairing is a prominent feature of so-called ‘euphuism’, the distinctively elaborate rhetorical writing style that John Lyly pioneered, and which served (as Jonas Barish put it) to ‘intensify the terms under consideration’.Footnote 32 Cupid’s speech here demonstrates that effect: one can immediately see, for example, how such words as ‘heat’ and ‘sweet’ are counterpoised by their natural opposites (‘coldness’ and ‘bitterness’), at the same time as reinforcing their contrasted sense in their perfectly paired rhymes. Barish further suggests that Lyly’s use of antithesis allows the dramatist to imagine different possibilities in order to recognize the ‘contradictory nature of experience … unravelling the complexities that inhere even in apparently simple things’,Footnote 33 and that the author ‘sometimes hesitates between two interpretations of one event’.Footnote 34 It is interesting to consider what this can signify in a rehearsal room. Lyly offers us a spectrum of desire within which the characters operate, but he never gives us a definitive understanding of where his characters are situated within it. Is Diana’s Nymph curious or tempted, lustful or naive, when she asks Cupid what love is?
‘I have neither will nor leisure,’ she later proclaims, but I will follow Diana in the chase’ (1.2.25–6), and scholars have long remarked that, in an early modern context, Diana can often be viewed as an allegorical emblem of Elizabeth I. As Leah Scragg notes in her edition, ‘For the Elizabethan spectator, attuned to the conventions of the age, it would have been clear from the outset of Galatea that the figure of Diana, goddess of chastity, was intended to reflect Elizabeth in her persona as the Virgin Queen’ (p. 12). Written for the Boys of St Paul’s, the entire play is exemplary of early modern pastoral drama, a form that, as Louis Montrose notes, provided Queen Elizabeth’s subjects the opportunity to ‘perform a wide range of symbolic operations upon the network of social relationships at whose center was the sovereign’.Footnote 35 Pastoral, Montrose suggests, ‘puts public relations of power into intimate relations of love’, acting ‘not as a desired escape … but as a foil for the exercise of power, not as a rejection of aspiration but as an assertion of authority’.Footnote 36 Interestingly, however, Lyly’s play does not consistently endorse such authority, and to return to Cupid and Diana’s Nymph, the dynamics of desire here at play have the potential to disrupt Diana’s authority rather than reaffirm it. If Diana represents a stand-in substitute for Elizabeth, there is no question but that Diana’s Nymph would follow her unswervingly and absolutely. However, given this information, why then is Cupid so angry at the Nymph’s refusal to ‘Try’ love in favour of following ‘Diana in the chase, whose virgins are all chaste’ (1.3.24–6)? Why, moreover, would Cupid attempt to seduce Diana’s Nymph in the first place, if they are known for such chastity and devotion to a virgin goddess?
Such questions demonstrate the oddities of the play-world of Galatea and the incongruous relationships and dynamisms that circulate within it. While our initial readings did not necessarily make their way onto the stage for the performance the following year, they nonetheless encouraged the creative team to consider the affective relations in the scene in a more nuanced way, and drew attention to a limitation of framing queer adaptation primarily through the lens of revision. As textual meanings themselves are not firmly fixed, it is unclear what specifically we are supposed to revise. After the exercise, we asked ourselves if it would be possible to ‘fuse’ and/or ‘merge’ our interpretations, such that we might be left with a scene that captured a push-and-pull between Diana’s Nymph and Cupid, where power, like desire, is transferred between the characters in order to capture the various, and occasionally conflicting, possibilities evoked by Lyly’s language. This proved a useful insight when rehearsing the scene some months later, when a much more equal relationship was established between the Nymph and Cupid, which offered space for this circulation of power to materialize.
A final and significant implication of our workshopping this scene was its impact when we came to adapt Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Love & Faith (and something unholy) utilized double casting, and it soon became clear to me that Cupid, who throughout the play is love-obsessed and motivated by the desire to ‘play … pranks’ on the Nymph (1.2.35), should double as Angelo, who, throughout Shakespeare’s ‘problem play’, demonstrates a similar desire to assert control over its other characters, not least by blackmailing Isabella with the threat of her brother’s execution. It was interesting to notice that Cupid’s dual nature, which can be played as both comic and sinister, seemed to influence the actor’s reading of Angelo in a series of meaningful ways. So while Angelo is recognizably the villain of Measure for Measure, the same actor often created moments of sympathy due to this earlier, more light-hearted characterization. For example, when trying to pinpoint the moment where Angelo begins to feel attracted to Isabella in Act 2, Scene 2, I noticed that an unexpectedly maternal quality arose between them during rehearsals of the scene. AD (playing Isabella) looked at CC (Angelo) from across the stage and softly uttered the lines:
Go to your bosom,
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know
That’s like my brother’s fault. If it confess
A natural guiltiness such as is his,
Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue
Against my brother’s life.
(2.2.139–44)Footnote 37
AD’s Isabella slowly approached CC’s Angelo as she said these lines, as if to avoid spooking him, regarding him with a calm, almost pitying eye. When she reached his side, Angelo appeared childlike, an image compounded by CC’s small stature in comparison to AD’s taller frame. Angelo did not meet her eye as he responded to her, asking her to ‘come to me tomorrow’ (2.2.158). The dynamic established here between the two actors reflected a reparative mode of reading the characters, which allowed moments of vulnerability, hesitation, and unexpected sympathy to co-exist with an awareness of Angelo’s capacity for harm.
While these practical encounters may seem relatively straightforward investigations of interpretive possibilities in the rehearsal room, they also draw attention to the value of examining adaptation from the perspective of the adaptors. The actors went from a process of identifying resonances (such as CC’s Mean Girls analogy) to embodying resonances, formulating the logic of the scene based on their own creative preferences and personal experiences. Workshopping Galatea, we experienced two versions of the text – one comic, energetic, and physical, and the other deliberate and predatory. While these readings differed, both groups shared an impulse to locate textual meanings that aligned with their intellectual understanding of the exchange, their emotional response to the characters, and their physical bodies in space. Exploring Angelo and Isabella’s relationship in Measure for Measure revealed how resonances might manifest when embodying the unlikeliest (and, indeed, most unlikeable) characters. In both instances, the actors did not experience the impulse to revise the scene, but rather entered into a playful exploration, within which queer bodies and experiences were able to become a central feature.
‘Lyly Who?’: Authorship and its Impact on Creative Processes
While the workshops demonstrated how the actors related the texts to their own lived experience, it is also important to consider why these resonances are important, and how they might have a reparative function. Moreover, what is it that influences our creative investments in the rehearsal room, so that we are able to locate them in the first place? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to address the larger-than-life question of Shakespeare. Scholars have done a great deal of work unpacking how and why Shakespeare rose to prominence in the western literary canon. Harold Bloom focuses on the quality of his work and suggests that Shakespeare (and Dante) ‘are the centre of the canon because they excel all other western writers in cognitive acuity, linguistic energy, and power of invention’.Footnote 38 Other scholars have examined the conditions that contributed to his meteoric rise in the western canon, Depledge and Kirwan, for example, examining how the book trade from 1640 to 1740 ‘had a profound impact on the representation, the presentation, and – ultimately – the preservation of Shakespeare’.Footnote 39 Emma Smith connects ‘the wider history of Shakespeare’s critical transmission with the more specific material history’ of the First Folio;Footnote 40 Michael Dobson demonstrates how ‘specifically Enlightenment origins and interests’ contributed in a significant way to Shakespeare’s meteoric rise in the canon;Footnote 41 while Jeffrey Wilson addresses both content and context, contending that ‘Shakespeare’s canonization resulted from the confluence of his strategy as an author and the political commitments of his canonizers’, by which his ‘ironic mode made his drama uniquely appealing to the political liberals at the forefront of English culture in the nineteenth century’.Footnote 42
My work does not seek to unpack this topic any further, but rather to reflect on the way in which Shakespeare’s positioning within the western canon influences creative investments when staging early modern plays. According to W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare ‘remains an apparently indispensable category for preparing, interpreting, and evaluating theatrical performance, at least as much for practitioners as for scholars and critics’,Footnote 43 and subsequent scholarship has drawn significant attention to this practitioner perspective. Examples include Alexa Alice Joubin’s account of Wu Hsing-kuo’s solo adaptation of King Lear, and its contemplation of ‘individual engagements or re-framings of Shakespeare’s plays that reaffirm local reading positions’,Footnote 44 and Sunghee Pak’s discussion of the theatricalization of Shakespeare performance itself, via an examination of Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile, where the play is said to dramatize ‘the process of adapting Shakespeare’s plays’, and which, ‘accompanied by uneasy discussions and inner struggles, becomes a tough examination of [the character’s] own identity’.Footnote 45 Curiously little scholarship, however, has been conducted in the rehearsal room itself to consider how Shakespeare’s prominent position in the western literary canon might shape actor processes.
The ‘Queer 4 Shx’ creative development provided an opportunity to do so, and was uniquely valuable because I was able to compare adaptations of Shakespeare and of a lesser-known early modern playwright, in order to determine if the actors approached the texts in markedly different ways. This process also allowed me to investigate the way that actors’ prior knowledge of Shakespeare and his plays might influence their work in the rehearsal room, and whether this knowledge also shaped their engagement with Lyly’s text. Two unexpected discoveries emerged from the process.
In the first place, I expected Shakespeare’s work to be treated with more reverence than Lyly’s, and that the actors would be more resistant to making changes to the script on the floor – altering lines of the text or reattributing lines from one character to another – when dealing with scenes from Shakespeare’s play. Andy Kesson’s research on Lylian reception shaped this initial hypothesis:
As part of the effort to make Shakespeare seem both singular and exemplary, his achievement had to be distinguished from his contemporaries’ and they had to be denigrated, and in the eighteenth century Lyly is repeatedly described as an infection or disease for which Shakespeare was the cure.Footnote 46
Kesson’s work highlights the way that Shakespeare’s singular genius has been constructed, to the detriment of his early modern peers.
However, while these processes of reception have profoundly shaped how each playwright exists within the western cultural imagination, in practice I found that Shakespeare’s cultural capital gave Lyly’s work a cachet in the rehearsal room that he otherwise might not have possessed. As such, there was an implicit assumption that both texts were ‘good’. In a passing exchange between two actors reading Galatea, the first accidentally read a line wrong and jokingly said, ‘I improved it,’ to which the other responded, ‘Of course, because it needs improving’ – the jest being that there is no way to improve on the plays. It is interesting to consider how cultural capital can be transferred by association, and how this is important for Lylian adaptation today. For example, discussing their own production of Galatea, Emma Frankland, in conversation with Marlborough Productions, alludes to how his plays in particular might be meaningful to the LGBTIQ+ community:
As LGBTQ people our histories are often erased or confounded to fit the narrative of a cis-normative, patriarchal society. The presence of such a high-profile story as Galatea, a play well known and performed in front of Elizabeth I, should radically alter our attitude towards queer identity today.Footnote 47
Frankland suggests that the play offers legitimacy to LGBTIQ+ people today, providing a pathway to understand marginalized identities through its status as an Elizabethan court drama.
These actor reflections also demonstrate that, while Shakespeare may be associated with a white, male literary canon, his work still holds significance for actors. In these workshops, the actors demonstrated an impulse not to change his work, but rather to locate themselves within it. Furthermore, as Lyly was associated with Shakespeare in the rehearsal room, his work also became a site from which to mine these personal and collective histories. In doing so, it became clear that there were resonances with both texts which could be placed into dialogue with our own lived experience as queer people. This process also drew attention to the connections between the playwrights; this delighted the actors, and they often used their understanding of Shakespeare to access Lyly, drawing comparisons between characters, plot-lines, and the use of language.
Lyly’s association with Shakespeare in the rehearsal room was in part due to his position as an early modern playwright in the Elizabethan era, leading the creative team to consider the similar contexts that shaped their respective works. However, Lyly’s plays, the earliest of which were written less than a decade before Shakespeare’s, were produced under markedly different conditions. Lyly, unlike Shakespeare, specifically wrote court dramas, as the English public theatres had not yet risen to cultural prominence. Moreover, Galatea was written for a juvenile troupe of performers, the Boys of St Paul’s, a common practice of the time which Scragg describes as ‘a staple of aristocratic entertainment’.Footnote 48 Kesson describes Lyly’s plays as ‘the most famous theatrical events of the 1580s’, rising to prominence ‘just as Nashe, Kyd, Marlowe, and Shakespeare began their writing careers’.Footnote 49
As a result, several scholars have noted that Lyly’s writing almost certainly influenced Shakespeare’s own. G. K. Hunter, for instance, suggests that Shakespeare’s plays Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are ‘completely Lylian in their construction’.Footnote 50 ‘It would not be surprising,’ Scragg further notes, comparing Galatea and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘if Shakespeare turned to the greatest work of his most polished predecessor when constructing the finest comedy he ever wrote.’Footnote 51 While this article does not have the scope to unpack the similarities of the two plays further (and indeed this has already been explored in depth by scholars), it is worth noting that, when the actors first encountered Galatea in the rehearsal room, the play looked and felt familiar due to its structural and thematic content. When encountering three plots featuring lovers, magical deities and low-born workers, Galatea was easy for the creative team to access because they were (as most trained actors are) familiar with Shakespeare’s comedies.
This meant that, in the rehearsal room, the actor’s mode of engagement with the texts did not substantially vary when moving between the plays. While the actors had not heard of Lyly, they grouped Shakespeare and Lyly together under the banner ‘early modern drama’ and used the period in time to describe their reaction to the work(s), rather than singling out either author. Reflecting after one workshop, CO wrote: ‘I love creating new worlds … creating a space where we can be free. Free from judgement, the patriarchy, from social norms. Early modern plays feel freeing.’Footnote 52 Nor did AD single out either playwright in their own reflection, and there was never an assumption among the ensemble that either author was ‘better’, or more meaningful than the other. Authorship, in this context, did not moderate the actor’s relationship with the texts in the way I initially expected.
Moreover, the creative team did not seem to want to ‘topple’ Shakespeare at all. Rather, they were deeply invested in Shakespeare’s work and demonstrated a commitment to learning and unpacking the texts with meticulous attention to detail. AD’s performer reflection demonstrates a belief that Shakespeare’s texts could speak to our experiences as queer people in unique ways: ‘they will always be there, as will queer people and their stories.’Footnote 53 As authorship did not moderate our investments in the way I anticipated, the actors and I were able to adopt a creative approach which saw the source texts as two halves of a whole. As the workshops progressed, I concurrently developed the script for Love & Faith, focusing on establishing visual motifs that could be replicated between acts, tethering the work together.
One of the most significant of these was the use of Cupid’s love-knots. In Galatea, Cupid is eventually imprisoned by Diana’s nymphs (4.2) as punishment for playing ‘such pranks’ that, ‘while they aim to hit others with their arrows, they shall be wounded themselves with their own eyes’ (1.2.35–7). On discovering that the nymphs have been hit by Cupid’s love spell, Diana and her love-struck nymphs capture Cupid. As punishment, one nymph orders Cupid to ‘undo all these lovers’ knots, because you tied them’ (4.2.21–2). For the purpose of workshopping the scene in the creative development, Diana’s group of nymphs was consolidated into one character called ‘Nymph’. In the scene, Cupid and Nymph encounter several different kinds of love-knots. ‘Now ’tis unpossible to be undone!’ complains Nymph while going to untie one herself, to which Cupid responds, ‘It is the true love-knot of a woman’s heart, therefore cannot be undone’ (4.2.34–7). Watching Cupid with a different knot, Nymph observes, ‘That falls in sunder of itself,’ upon which Cupid explains: ‘It was made of a man’s thought, which will never hang together’ (4.2.38–40). Other knots are also easily untied, Cupid suggests, ‘because I never tied them. The one was knit by Pluto, not Cupid, by money, not love; the other by force, not faith, by appointment, not affection’ (4.2.45–7).
Reading this scene for the first time in the ‘Queer 4 Shx’ development, one participant observed that these love-knots bear a striking resemblance to the relationships in Measure for Measure: the Duke’s love for Isabella could be said to be knit ‘by force, not faith’, and Angelo’s desire something ‘made of a man’s thought, which will never hang together’. This observation allowed me to develop the final scene in the script, where Isabella, having been proposed to (and entrapped by) the Duke, is able to release herself, and on doing so, notices several love-knots left behind from Act 1. By untying these love-knots, she is able to transform the Duke, Angelo, Mariana, and Claudia (gender-swapped from Claudio in our version) back into their characters in Galatea. On locating the final love-knot, she sees that it represents her love for Phillida, which ‘is the true love-knot of a woman’s heart, therefore cannot be undone’ (4.2.36–7). On finding this love-knot, Phillida appears on stage and Isabella remembers her former identity as Galatea. The two share a kiss, finally reunited and able to experience their happy ending.
By creating this queer temporal logic in the narrative of the play itself, the script was able to destabilize a chrono-normative model of storytelling which requires a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, the cast returns to the middle and produces a conclusion in line with José Esteban Muñoz’s proposition that queerness signifies all that is ‘primarily about futurity and hope’, a mode of existence ‘visible only in the horizon’ and yet almost within our grasp.Footnote 54 This kind of creative outcome, one which allows us to produce alternate futures, is only possible because we reassemble our present understandings about history, and our place within it. Thus, by establishing a queer temporality within the creative product, this opens up a new line of enquiry about the texts themselves and the conditions of their production which enable them to support such queer temporal disruptions.
Conclusion: Joyful Futures Ahead
The ‘Queer 4 Shx’ workshops demonstrated the deeply validating potential of locating resonances between the text(s) and queer people, as queer histories and stories have been so frequently lost or erased. For example, Hollywood has a long history of un-queering source texts, a practice dating back to the Hays Code, which Kévin Drif and Georges-Claude Guilbert describe as ‘the set of sexist, homophobic, and racist self-censorship guidelines which regulated the content of American movies from 1934 to 1968’.Footnote 55 Early modern drama has not escaped this practice throughout history. Despite the homosocial nature of early modern society, which Rebecca Bach describes as an order in which ‘male sexual desire for women was seen as a poor alternative to male–male bonds’, we have (until quite recently) been determined to view these plays as straight.Footnote 56 Bach explains this shift, describing a new ‘heterosexual imaginary’ (one which idealizes male–female sexual relations) which emerged in the eighteenth century. As a result of this, Renaissance plays were ‘rewritten and shaped editorially’ to make them conform to heteronormative social ideals.Footnote 57
Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the prolificity of queer early modern adaptations being created in the twenty-first century. Through this lens, the practice does not involve ‘correcting’ the plays, but rather locating facets of ourselves that have perhaps been overlooked or omitted. Discussing this creative impulse in an interview for Rescripted, non-binary artist Will Wilhelm suggests:
I think of it as a duty to go back and reinsert ourselves where we’ve always belonged … There is so much fluidity with gender and sexual attraction that is IN THE TEXT … Queer folks get that, and we have a history of adapting narratives that were not necessarily marketed towards us to fit our own needs.Footnote 58
The ‘Queer 4 Shx’ workshops similarly demonstrated how queer Shakespeare adaptation does not necessarily reflect a paranoid mode of thinking that seeks to reveal or topple dominant structures. Rather, they showed how embodied reparative reading can offer queer artists the opportunity to reform the fragmented pieces of their own temporal existence.
For me, a striking feature of embodied reparative reading is its capacity to produce and sustain joy in the rehearsal room. Working on particular scenes, I observed actors delighting in seeing themselves reflected in the text. This joy did not seem to stem from subverting the plays or exposing normative power structures, but rather emerged from the unexpected pleasure of locating resonances with four-hundred-year-old characters and stories. As Linda Hutcheon observes, adaptation involves ‘repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise’.Footnote 59 What if part of this pleasure – and repair itself – emerges not only through recognition in time, but recognition across time?
The spontaneous joy that occurred in the rehearsal room when locating these resonances (such as CC’s Galatea/Mean Girls comparison) also allows me to consider the possibility that this process of locating alternative histories might also lead to the imagination of better kinds of futures. As Jack Halberstam observes, queer time might not only reflect the absence of futurity, but might, rather, ‘produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’.Footnote 60 The creative, collective impulse to imagine positive futures also seems to be at the heart of adapting early modern texts through a queer lens, engaging in a type of world-building that acknowledges and validates the existence of minority groups – not only considering what was, but what could be.
Finally, it is interesting to consider how theatrical adaptation is particularly suited to this work because it is, by nature, cyclical: the actors begin at a certain point every evening, and return to that same moment the next night. That said, two nights are never the same: while we encounter the same words, the same movements, images, sounds, and objects, our relationship with these shifts is profoundly shaped by each audience’s energy. New dynamisms emerge, and as a result, we constantly exist in the present, the past, and the future, moving towards an ending that is both known and unknown. By engaging in this cyclical process through the lens of repair, adapting early modern drama can achieve more than only revisionist aims. It can also, as we discovered in our small series of workshops in 2023, represent an act of love and faith – shining light on the joyful futures ahead.
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