“One is not born but rather becomes a woman.” This famous statement by the French existential feminist Simone de Beauvoir highlights the fact that gender, as opposed to physical sex, is something into which someone is socialized, not which exists as a universal construct (Butler, 1988, p. 519). The 20th century feminist theorist Judith Butler took De Beauvoir’s thesis one step further to argue that gender is a performance not connected to the physical body at all and both men and women can effectively perform the female role. This notion is not as radical and contemporary as it may seem. As the film Shakespeare in Love highlights, in Elizabethan times, women were considered to be inferior beings, incapable of acting on stage at all. The film is a highly fictionalized version of life on the Elizabethan stage, and its final, climatic scene is that of a young woman named Viola dressed as a boy actor pretending to play Juliet on stage.The film ultimately suggests that Viola, who is supposed to be Shakespeare’s love interest in the film, gives a more real performance than the highly trained boy actor, simply by virtue of her physical status as a female. Rather than a radical reading of gender, ultimately the film offers a highly essentialist construct. Furthermore, it engaged in pink-washing, or endorsing the heteronormative view of history. For example, in the film, William Shakespeare is shown writing a sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” to the blonde, delicate Viola. In reality, he composed this sonnet to a man. But in the context of the film, his love sonnet is reduced to a purely heterosexual impulse, just like his urge to write Romeo and Juliet. In reality, Romeo and Juliet was written for two boy actors, but in the film, his intention is to write it to be played by the woman he loves. Communication is gendered in an essential way, and only true love is heterosexual, male-male love (as was the case in the original context of the Elizabethan, Shakespearean theater and the original performances of Shakespeare’s plays) is affirmed by the presentation of Will and Viola’s love as the only authentic love. Granted, the film does acknowledge non-authentic forms of heterosexual marriage, such as the arranged marriage Viola is forced to enter, paralleling that with those of Romeo and Juliet’s. But it offers an ultimately conservative view of history and gender, versus a radical, performative view.

Literature Review: Performative Gender

According to Judith Butler, the notion that a body, much less a gendered body, exists, is a “historically mediated expression in the world,” not manifest reality (Butler, 1988, p. 521). This is perhaps nowhere more evident in the manner in which gender was expressed on the stage in Elizabethan times, given that female gender was performed...

Although this seems to be the most radical aspect of gender as performance back in that era, it was also considered radical for non-aristocratic actors to impersonate the gentry. Many of Shakespeare’s plays contain reflections about the irony of actors embodying different roles—both gendered roles (as boy actors play boys playing girls) and also the idea of kings and other people playing a role in society.
Butler stresses the idea that identity does not exist outside of performance and all social action is, at least to some degree, a performance. This is also highlighted by the fact that during Shakespeare’s era, many roles that we consider self-evident truths, such as the existence of queer identities, were not present; there were only same-sex acts, not same-sex identities (Charles). Half of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to a younger man, while half were written to the so-called dark lady, who eventually went on to have a relationship with Shakespeare’s younger friend (their betrayal is also the subject of the sonnets). This is not presented as an area of sexual contradiction within Shakespeare, although it has bothered some modern audiences. “Men and women did not define themselves as a distinct group because of their sexual practices” (Charles, 1998, p.521). Sexual orientation, in other words, was equally a performative category as gender. One performed same-acts that today would be considered gay; gayness was not a stable identity. This may have given performers additional freedom, however, to embody alternative modes of sexuality, given that sexuality was more fluid and less fixed.

On the other hand, while performance in the Elizabethan era may have contained different performance-based conventions in regards to gender, there were also clearly more conventional ways to represent romance, such as the highly regulated form of the Shakespearean sonnets. But these once again stress the very constructed nature of love and gendered roles in earlier eras; one occupied positions but not necessarily embodied particular characters (Cunningham, 1980). In fact, it many dramas before the establishment of more fixed sexual conventions, there was a deliberate irony to happy endings, and deliberate irony about the happy ending of marriage in general. Just as in Butler, “to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of ‘woman,’ to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility,” so is accepting a particular narrative about that body, whether it be romance or marriage (Butler, 1988, p. 522).

Criteria for gender as performance:

· Sex is different from gender.

· Gender is performed and attached…