there are certain actors that I have a really hard time imagining as modern day people. Lucas Jade Zumann is definitely one of them

Hello I see that your ask is open. I imagine from what I've seen that you know and like the Tennant Richard II and I only recently experienced it (had it forever but the Tenaissance is upon us at the heels of Good Omens) and I would like to invite you to share any feels or flails or complexities you might have in terms of the relationship of Shakespeare to History or Kingship to Divinity or the conflation of Queerness with Otherness etc in the context of that performance

OH NO. YOU REALLY WANT ME TO GO THERE DO YOU. 

First of all: yes, the Tennant Richard II changed my life, after I watched it with @oldshrewsburyian whilst on vacation at the start of June and had to yell at her about my feelings for like ten minutes afterward. I was just SO FASCINATED by the things it did with gender and kingship and queerness (god! It was SO GAY! I was NOT PREPARED! The kiss with Aumerle broke my brain the first time I saw it). I was compiling a preliminary bibliography for my new queer medieval book project a couple weeks ago (which is very interesting, if I do say so myself, and I am really trying to get someone to give me money to research it at their institution) and I discovered an article basically arguing that the RSC Richard II was bad because Richard was portrayed as effeminate and openly queer/bi. Now, to be mostly fair, I think it was because it wanted to critique the association of queer men with effeminacy, rather than being homophobic, but it was still…. a bad take? Or at least a substantially underdeveloped one. It never said why this was bad, it never really got into the gender politics of what it wanted to say about this performance and the queerness thereof, and I was left looking at it like… uh huh, so… what’s your point here pal? (It griped about Gregory Dolan changing the script to have Aumerle kill Richard, but given as every Shakespeare play alters the script or staging or whatever else, I was still waiting for it to say something more about that too. But no. Anyway).

My feelings about Shakespeare, queerness, and queer Shakespeare have recently been noted. I have been working my way through Shakesqueer, which is undoubtedly fascinating, though as a historian I sometimes find all this theoretical vagueness a little TOO broad and am like DEFINE SOMETHING AND SAY SOMETHING ABOUT IT RATHER THAN SAYING THAT YOU CAN’T SAY SOMETHING. But that’s a personal methodological thing on my part, and it certainly has been delightfully helpful in pointing out how none of Shakespeare’s plays are in the least Straight ™ by modern standards, even if technically none of his characters are LGBT. Obviously, they would not be constructed as such by sixteenth-century terms, but that’s another debate. He absolutely left the exact interpretative space that many productions have taken advantage of, some plays are VERY heavy on the subtext, and while critics have argued that the gender subversion and sexual fluidity is introduced only to re-establish heteronormative supremacy at the end, I think that is a fairly shallow reading. Why otherwise HAVE it so consistently, when its negotiation and presence is part of the ways in which these characters can and often have been read? Just because everyone gets married at the end of the comedies doesn’t mean that the queerness has been negated or made irrelevant. Arguably, the opposite.

Anyway, one of my main contentions in this premodern queer lives book project that I’m developing is that when we read the past as queer, we have to take care that we’re not only considering it as thus in comparison to modern heteronormativity, which we consider to be monolithic and transhistorical and applicable to all times and places. Richard Zeikowitz (among others) has made this point in Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century. Male desire that we would consider “queer” either in its affection or formulation was solidly mainstream, and if we read that as Queer/Other, we risk imposing an estrangement on medieval/early modern queerness that may not have necessarily existed within its community. Yes, we’re all aware of the anti-sodomitical polemics of clerical writers, but consider: why did those guys (the equivalent of right-wing religious commentators today) keep having to write things complaining about it if nobody was doing it, if it wasn’t visible or accepted at all in society, or it was only a theoretical concern that had no relevance to anyone’s daily lives? This is why it drives me so batty when the Straight Historians inevitably try the “just because it was being written about doesn’t mean anyone was doing it!!!” erasure tactic. My dude my guys my pals. How do you think rhetoric even works?

In the particular case of Richard II, there was absolutely a queer discourse/suspicion of queerness around him in his own time (see Sylvia Federico, ‘Queer Times: Richard II in thePoems and Chronicles of Late Fourteenth-Century England’) and it was part of a larger late-medieval discourse of suspected sodomy around kings and their favourites, not just in England but in other places across Europe. (Henric Bagerius and Christine Ekholst, ‘Kingsand Favourites: Politics and Sexuality in Late Medieval Europe’, and E. Amanda McVitty also talks about Richard, his favourites, chivalric masculinity and homosociality in ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting ChivalricMasculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415′). So…. yes, there is considerable leeway to depict him as queer, and Shakespeare does write it in the text in the scene where Bushy and Green are accused, prior to their execution by Bolingbroke:

You have misled a prince, a royal king,A happy gentleman in blood and lineaments,By you unhappied and disfigured clean:You have in manner with your sinful hoursMade a divorce betwixt his queen and him,Broke the possession of a royal bedAnd stain’d the beauty of a fair queen’s cheeksWith tears drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs.

“Made a divorce betwixt his queen and him/Broke the possession of a royal bed.” Yeah, they’re Richard’s boyfriends. Both we and the Elizabethan audience would have understood it that way. Bushy, Bagot, and Green are fictional, but Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, was Richard’s real-life favourite and was accused by Thomas Walsingham at least of sleeping with him or otherwise having some taint of an “obscene relationship”. But Richard was also notably devoted to his first wife, Anne of Bohemia, so as ever, bisexuality exists, my pals. It can go both ways.

….anyway, this swiftly got away from me, so in conclusion, let me relate an actual dream I had last night, for which we can 100% blame the heat. In it, I was watching some Shakespeare play or other, and there was a scene in which the villain dramatically pushed the blonde heroine into the arms of his muscle-bound henchmen in their flowing trousers, then turned to the hero and announced that he would do the same to him. To this, in what was supposed to probably be a defiant “you just try it” moment in other versions of fictional Shakespeare plays that my subconscious writes, the hero stared him dead in the eye, whisked his tunic off to reveal he was wearing nothing but a jeweled G-string underneath, and announced that lo, NOW HE WAS PREPARED. DO THY WORST.

I can only think that this is exactly what Shakespeare would have wanted.

Anne With An E's minorities

Believe it or not, Anne of Green Gables and its sequels don't have many LGBTQ+ or non-white characters. The books were set in the mid-late 1800s in rural Canada, so long before the legalisation of homosexuality but not long after the abolition of slavery. Lucy Maude Montgomery did not have representation at the forefront of her thoughts when writing her novels in the early 20th century- in fact she probably never considered it at all- and that's okay because as a modern audience we can appreciate her books for the stories they are whilst also realising that they are a centuary old and outlooks have changed a lot in the time between their original publication and us picking up our copies. However, this does not mean that adaptations made in more modern times have to share the same lack of diverse characters.

Anne With An E surprised its viewers in its second season by including a host of many new characters not from the books, and amongst these were a black man and a gay teenage boy. Now here's the thing... as much as I love the books and want the tv show to stick to them completely, I don't hate these two characters (Bash and Cole), in fact I really like them! But it's the way the inclusion of these oh-so-controversial characters was handled that I really don't like. Should I stop watching? Not over this, there are far more egregious things pushed into this story by the tv writers that would make me do that (gold scammers??). Should I start a boycott demanding that PC culture is ruining media? Absolutely not. I shall attempt to explain as simply as I can what I would have done with these characters had I been in charge of season 2. Now I don't expect this will do anything more than leave me feeling satisfied with venting my thoughts, but that's good enough for me.

Bash

Oh Sebastian, I do love you but it is such a pity that you were introduced at the expense of another character's development! Gilbert Blythe being stripped of his years of natural and evolving character growth to give him a sad backstory is possibly one of the worst changes I've seen in one of my favourite characters from page to screen (and I'm a Percy Jackson fan so that's saying something!). Of course, if Gilbert was never made an orphan he wouldn't have gone on his soul-searching trip working on a ship and indeed wouldn't have met our Bash. However, if there is a way to keep Bash without sacrificing Gilbert's personality I would find it, and I think I did. It would be oh so simple to keep John Blythe alive and have him hire a new ~controversial~ farmhand who he met in Carmody fresh off a ship and looking for new work. Instead of having Bash and Gilbert be seen as equals (or Gilbert being more senior to Bash because of his race) have them build a relationship wherein Gilbert sees Bash as an older brother. If John is constantly ill he probably doesn't have much time for his son, so Bash can step into certain roles for Gilbert. A big part of why I don't like Gilbert and Anne's relationship in season 2 is that it feels as though Gilbert is far more mature than Anne now, and putting him with the fully grown adult Sebastian makes him seem even older. Of course, this version of Gilbert is free to grow up at his own pace and with him treating Bash as his, for lack of a better word, elder. This is normal for the audience who sees a boy and a man, but for the citizens of Avonlea who largely still don't see black people as equals to white people, them seeing Bash as a superior to Gilbert would shake their core. (Yes, they are supposed to equals as business partners in the show, but it's clear that everyone choses to ignore that. And yes, Bash would be working for Gilbert's dad here, but it can be made obvious that their relationship is more than that.) The storyline with Mary can happen just as it does because it needs nothing changed. They're perfect. The only loss here would be the scene with Bash's mother which I really like. The best thing I can come up with to replace it is a scene where Bash writes to his mum and never sends the letters and explaining to Gil that it's because he knows she can't read or write because she was born into slavery and hasn't learnt since the abolishment because her life has barely changed. It's not my greatest idea, but I'm not a professional writer.

Cole

Cole is a little different... I would prefer to scrap his character altogether. Controversial I know, but so much about him is a bit iffy. Where was he before the plot needed a gay boy for Anne to be friends with? Is it stereotyping to make him an artsy sensitive type whose only friends with girls? Why did they write him out at the end of his storyline? So to begin with I'd like to make an existing character gay. Just for argument's sake let's make it Charlie Sloane. So Anne is up to no good having a snoop in Charlie's desk. Maybe she's dared to, maybe she thinks he's taken something of hers. At the very bottom of the desk, underneath a big stone, is a small folded up piece of paper. She hestitates before opening it, but she's naturally too curious for her own good. Oh how romantic would it be if this were a secret love note! Uh oh turns out she was right, but it's not adressed to Diana or Ruby or even Anne, it's simply addressed to B. Anne brings the gossip to Diana and both are determined to find out who Charlie's girl is, because no-one's name begins with a B and the mystery is just too tempting to not solve. Through some wacky hijinks the two discover that B stands for Billy and uncover Charlie's greatest secret. Anne thinks it's the very pique of tragical romance and let's Charlie know that she accepts him as he is. This can maybe be written to Aunt Josephine in a letter (because saying something out loud in Avonlea means Mrs. Lynde will hear it sooner or later, and some adult input on the situation would be much appreciated). Cue the party where she insists that Anne bring Charlie. Cue the elderly lesbian giving her speech. Only difference is that Charlie isn't left behind. He remains a normal school boy and a constant gay presence who isn't just written out as soon as diversity points are scored in his name.

In short, I think that the decision to add more diverse characters was a good one, but it really does feel like that decision was only made to score points with the diversity patrol! Adding minorities into an already well-loved and established story should be a well thought out process and the communities they represent deserve to be represented better than "insert black character, make him sad about slavery, make white characters like him, racism is over now". I wish Bash and Cole and all other minorities in the show could be given more complexity and have them fit in with the story instead of having them stick out like sore thumbs!