literrorture

[literrorture]

you can't even celebrate the ides of march in true spirit, stabbing someone with your 23 closest friends, because coronavirus has all large public gatherings banned 😔😔

#anniversary

[literrorture]

Do Valentine as the Romans do

[literrorture]

Maurice Hall being a himbo compilation

[literrorture]

greek professors hate him! this man cut his homework time in half with this one weird website

[literrorture]

Oliver Chris as Oberon and Hammed Animashaun as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 

Photograph by Manuel Harlan

[literrorture]

The Glorious Queer Potential of Viola and Orsino in Twelfth Night

for Shakespeare Appreciation Week - Day Three - Lovers Day

This is a long-promised essay/ramble and I’m chucking it under Lover’s Day because it mostly concerns Viola and Orsino. I suppose an alternate title for it could be Orsino: He’s as Queer as the Rest of Them.

Before we begin, brief caveat: queerness exists in many forms and means many things to many people. This is my reading as one (1) singular queer person. Also, as you will have noticed if you read this far, I’m using the word queer. Not only is it an academically accepted term and one of my personal identifiers, it is in many cases the best descriptor for people and relationships in a play written in a time where gender and sexuality were constructed differently than they are today. Am I going to use the word “bisexual” when I talk about Orsino? Probably. But overall, the play’s just queer, in terms of gender, sexual attraction, and social relationships.

Let’s start with Viola (another heads up, I’m going to refer to her mostly as Viola because that’s how she seems to think about herself, and I’m going to use she/her pronouns). I believe @shredsandpatches recently made an argument that Viola can be read as a trans woman, which is an argument I love—she’s clearly uncomfortable with her masculine disguise (“Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness, / Wherein the pregnant enemy does much. / How easy is it for the proper-false / In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms!”) but she also passes as a man marvelously well. Like, people make a few comments about her higher voice, but nobody actually seems to suspect that she’s a woman until she’s finally in the same place as Sebastian and everyone goes “twins?!” Viola being a trans woman would also make the whole “she and Sebastian are literally identical” thing much more plausible, although one should never let “biological technicalities” get in the way of a good twin plot. I think there are also arguments to be made for playing Viola as a gender nonconforming cis woman who thinks, “It’ll be safer if I just pass as a man”, or with some other relationship to genderqueerness. (And by the way, when I say “arguments to be made”, sometimes that can mean the argument is “I, a queer person, feel like playing Viola this way.” Sometimes you just gotta do it for the queer joy, you know?)

So, Orsino. The two most memorable Orsinos I’ve seen have been Nicholas Bishop in the 2017 RSC production and Oliver Chris in the 2017 National Theatre production (truly we were blessed with Twelfth Nights in 2017). The RSC production chose to look at Orsino and immediately go, “This is not a Straight Man” which was valid of them—from the get-go, you understand why Orsino might go for a person who’s got some excellent gender-fuckery going on. In the NT production, Orsino is much more of a jock and, to my interpretation, definitely Thinks He’s Straight, which is fun because you get to see his heterosexuality crumble before his very eyes. (The moment where Viola reveals herself as a woman and Orsino lets out a long “oh thank God” breath can read a little too close to “no homo” for my liking, but Oliver Chris is good at making even asshole characters weirdly endearing, so I will let it pass.)

With both of these productions, you also have to consider the era they’re set in: the RSC is in the Victorian era, the NT in the 1970s (I think. I’m pretty sure it’s the 70s. Could be the 60s?) In the RSC, one could infer that Orsino’s commitment to getting Olivia to love him stems from the homophobia of the society he’s living in. Would he love to be able to just get with men? Sure. But the odds of him getting away with that for his entire life are low. The show’s design really makes this production Shakespeare-by-way-of-Wilde: the sets, the costumes (especially Antonio, who’s literally wearing a green carnation in his lapel). By evoking Wilde and his persecution, the production reminds the viewer that plenty of the people in this play—Antonio, Olivia, Viola, Orsino—can’t show the outside world their true queer selves, however much they might want to be.

Now, the NT production’s version of Orsino reads to me very much like someone going through a bisexual awakening. Source: I have undergone a bisexual awakening and I took one look at Orsino in this production and went *John Mulaney voice* “Oh, okay.” To me, Oliver Chris’s Orsino is going through the motions of compulsive heterosexuality. By all accounts, he should be in love with Olivia. It makes sense to him. He knows all the motions to go through. He’s talked himself into loving her because that’s what you do when you feel you need to be visibly in love with a woman and she’s the most suitable person around.

But once Orsino meets Viola, he seems to immediately adore her, in his own bro way, for herself. This isn’t what he’s used to attraction being like, he doesn’t immediately recognize it because Cesario is a guy, sometimes guys are just friends with other guys and do a lot of homoerotic boxing practice (still not over it) and it’s just dudes being bros and chilling on a table at your fortieth birthday part five feet apart because you’re not gay (spoiler: you’re actually really gay, and by gay I mean pick your favorite flavor of polysexual queerness).

Orsino continues to refer to Viola as Cesario up until the end of the play, mostly because Viola is still wearing men’s clothes. In early modern England, clothes were a huge part of gender expression. Cross-dressing was against the law (I’m 99% sure, someone please correct me on this if I’m wrong; it’s been several years since I discussed queer early modern stuff in a formal setting). Orsino referring to Viola as Cesario even when he knows she’s a woman is one of those things that has a reasonable historic explanation, but can also be read nowadays as: he likes it. Orsino’s into genderqueerness, and good on him. Genderqueerness is attractive as hell.

I know we sometimes lament the end of Twelfth Night along the lines of “But Will! Tell us what the original super-gay ending was!!” I totally understand why people want to see Olivia and Viola wind up together (Olivia—another raging queer who I didn’t even get to in this ramble—does seem to be truly in love with Viola and it’s hard to leave her disappointed at the end of the play), and I think we’re all heartbroken for Antonio (he just loves Sebastian so MUCH). However, I want to point out that men and women can still have queer romantic relationships with each other.  A love story between Viola as a straight trans woman and Orsino as a bisexual cis man is still a queer love story.

Happy Lovers Day, my loves! Have a fabulously queer day.

[literrorture]

A midsummer night´s dream (National Theatre, 2019)

(Aka happy pride month)

-Listen I love. Love. Bottom and the Pyramus and Thisbe players with all my heart.

-In this version, Puck serves Titania and makes Oberon fall in love with Bottom. Gay national theatre strikes again.

-Oberons coat I need it

-I could listen to Hermia all day and night gods her voice is so lovely

-the fairies are queer glittery gymnasts and I’m entranced

-“coolcoolcool“

-best audience participation/inclusion ever

-Lysander is a ReBeL er spielt Gitarre und trägt ne Lederjacke

-seine Lieder 10/10

-“PLAYS ARE BOOORING“

-the scene where Oberon and Bottom meet high quality shit

-gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay

-please let Hermia and Helena be happy and make ~out~ up.I mean make up

-“I’ll knock your f u c k i n g teeth out“

-One day I’ll direct this play and I’ll make the fairies eat popcorn whilst they’re watching the lovers fight

-the scene where Demetrius&Lysander are fighting is sooo well made

-die Badewannenszene

-Puck in a black suit surely is a new look

-I need a rude mechanicals sweater please

-Hipolytas facial expressions during Pyramus and Thisbe

-speaking of which the play is fucking brilliant, comedy gold

-“it’s immersive“

-Gut gebrüllt Löwe <3

-Pyramus death is a big ass mood

-DANCE SEQUENCE

-Jedes mal wenn ich dieses Stück sehe komme ich zum Schluss dass Lysander, Helena, Demetrius und Hermia doch eigentlich auch poly sein könnten :,)

-flower crowns

[literrorture]

vergil will be like "I know a place" and guide you through the nine circles of hell and the nine rings of purgatory

[literrorture]

I’m gonna start using Early Dynastic Sumerian statues as reaction images. 

Like, seriously

My body is ready…

Look at all these fucks I give Lugalzaggesi. Look at them. 

[literrorture]

[literrorture]

‘stan clc’ i proclaim. the kpop group, u assume? no i am talking about the cambridge latin course textbook series

[literrorture]

aeneid choose your own adventure:

italiam sponte sequor (go to page 34)

italiam non sponte sequor (go to page 34)

[literrorture]

Romans as social media users

Cicero: makes extremely long callout posts about people he doesn't like. Has to use 'Read More' links constantly.

Caesar: Livetweets literally everything he does down to the most trivial details.

Mark Antony: Drunk tweeter. Has an insta dedicated to snaps of his holidays in Egypt.

Cato: essentially this guy

Crassus: Basically runs a rich kid insta to show of how much money he has.

Agrippa: Runs an insta account that's just videos of him working out and showing off his huge muscles.

Octavian: Exaggerates wildly on his LinkedIn account.

Ovid: Writes cheesy/creepy pickup lines to girls over Tinder. Also hits up girls on weird mediums like the Words With Friends chat.

Vergil: Runs a blog about farming and beekeeping.

Catullus: Vagueposts about Lesbia on Twitter. Also posts photos of himself with birds like, all the time.

Propertius: Runs an anti-imperialist podcast. Also constantly posts about how much he loves his gf.

[literrorture]

'Rome.exe' has stopped working. Please click 'Ottoman' to continue.

My brain everyday at 2.53PM without fail.

[literrorture]

you’ve been hit by

you’ve been struck by

a small eleven-year-old

[literrorture]

me, starting my thesis gracefully: reading ovid is a lot like looking at a fish,

[literrorture]

just as a clarification by ‘ovid’ i am always talking about the prismatic variations of ovid’s poetic persona and/or his Looming (and yet ineffable) authorial presence. the real tangible ovid is obviously Unknowable and that’s probably for the best

#for the best