By Maria-Irina Popescu
Maria-Irina Popescu here answers the question, ‘what does Shakespeare mean to me? She shows us how liberating his work is.
Predictably, when I arrived in England aged nineteen to study English, I thought of Shakespeare as a god. Untouchable, incomprehensible. I’d never read any of his plays, nor had I ever seen them performed. And it wasn’t because I grew up in Romania, where the cult of Shakespeare was strong even under authoritarian censorship.
I avoided Shakespeare out of sheer will.
Fear.
He was too gigantic to comprehend.
Like a mountain so tall, its peak vanishes into the clouds.
Even writing this, I shudder. What’s there to say about Shakespeare that hasn’t been said before? That’s not a cliché about how he revolutionised both the language and the human soul?
Ay, there’s the rub.
The language intimidated me above all. The thee and the thy and apostrophes and opaque, old-timey words. It felt like a trap. A ruse devised by some hostile power to show I didn’t fit in.
Just like Portia, who disguised herself as a male lawyer named Balthasar to outwit Shylock.
Played by a young man, dressed as a woman, dressed as a man.
As someone who eventually did away with the gender binary, there’s no surprise that scene spoke to me.
Shylock’s monologue ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed’ also hit me hard. Perhaps one day I’ll memorise it and shout it at the telly during immigration debates.
Another time the Bard sneaked into my life: after watching David Tennant’s Hamlet – where the prince relatably soliloquises in worn jeans and a T-shirt – I became obsessed with ‘the native hue of resolution’ line. I set it as my email password and typed it daily, feeling its power but not yet its meaning.
What finally gave me the courage to read Shakespeare was a final-year module, ‘Decorum and Decay.’ My irreverent tutor showed us the rebellious underside of human culture, the freedom and excess through which individuals reclaim their agency. I discovered that Shakespeare’s writing isn’t solemn but funny, absurd, and alive with double-entendres.
That was also the first time I laughed at Shakespeare. We were discussing Antony and Cleopatra in a seminar room, all bright lights, lime-green upholstery, and odourless air. I read ahead to Cleopatra’s line ‘O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!’ So naughty. I giggled like in primary school. Guessing, our tutor smiled.
In this play I sensed the possibility that someone (let’s say, me) could let go of who they were told to be and make themselves anew. Cleopatra, she was the master of effortless artifice. Sprezzatura. She made her own reality. Antony, not so much.
My own taste for sprezzatura was emerging.
At the time life felt anything but free. I was studying full time, working towards a scholarship that would allow me to do a master’s. I worked part-time, a zero-hour hospitality gig. I lost touch with old friends and made new ones, whom I never had time to see. I shared a tiny studio flat with my partner. I struggled to accept my identity as a woman.
For some forsaken reason, I decided to write an essay on Antony and Cleopatra. I borrowed my partner’s doorstop Oxford Complete Works and opened it with dizzying slowness. A hollow feeling in my stomach. The pages were thin and the font was tiny. Like a Bible.
What I found surprised me: vivid images delivered in clear language; dialogue that pulsed with life; uncompromising characters.
When Cleopatra pushes Antony to quantify his love, like an emperor claiming new territories, he replies: ‘Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.’ What immigrant wouldn’t like a man who does away with borders?
It wasn’t the concept of romantic love that set me aflame, but their audacious, borderless power, over each other, themselves, even gender.
After all, what is gender if not another border to be crossed?
In Shakespeare’s time, even Cleopatra, a drama queen, would’ve been played by a young male actor. Gender in his plays is both a joke and a comment on performance and power.
Take Caesar’s snide remark: Antony ‘is not more manlike/ Than Cleopatra, nor the queen of Ptolemy/ More womanly then he.’
Or Cleopatra’s account of getting drunk with Antony and dressing him in her clothes while she brandished his weapon, innuendo and all: ‘Then put my tires and mantles on him whilst/ I wore his sword Philippan’.
Isn’t there something more here about the hermaphrodite, playful nature of Cleopatra and Antony’s connection? About how gender has no bearing neither on power nor on pleasure?
Nothing, I understood, stopped me from imagining myself like that. Larger than the gender I was assigned at birth. Playful. Audacious.
And this is how Shakespeare won me over: by pulling me into the minds and hearts of demigods, he taught me to laugh at gender and all its eternal trappings. To laugh at gods and their irrational hold over us mortals.
Come on, he mischievously whispered in my ear. Go out there and play.
Fifteen years later, here I am, playing around on a stage. Doing away with silly notions like what’s a man and what’s a woman. Shaping my own reality like a bloody demigod!
And why wouldn’t I? It’s all quite hilarious.
Read this exchange between Lepidus and Antony, men of power off their faces on wine:
LEPIDUS What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?
ANTONY It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.
LEPIDUS What colour is it of?
ANTONY Of it own colour too.
LEPIDUS ’Tis a strange serpent.
ANTONY ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet.
Absurd, nonsensical, laugh-out-loud funny, these lines contain the real essence of ‘the native hue of resolution’: an easy courage to be yourself. Sprezzatura. Even if, like me, you’re an odd worm, be an easy, brave one.
