Went to Washington Shakespeare Theatre Company's free talk about their current all-male version of Romeo and Juliet ("as Shakespeare had intended") yesterday. Two scholars and the director, David Muse, gave a chat about the play and the interpretation on which the production was based. I had never known (and still know very little) how intricate and ambiguous the genders are in Shakespeare's plays, not by the "moral decadence of the modern society" but right from the beginning.
According to one of the scholars, in the Victorian era people believed that men can lose their masculinity simply by "being around women too much." Men genuinely fear that they would gradually take on femininity and literally become a woman by spending too much time around the females (thus they gotta hang with the boys more. Hmm ...). Also, actors were believed to be constantly in peril of turning into the people they pretend to be on stage --- women, rich people, and (the horror, the horror) even kings and queens.
Not only is it within the Victorian theater tradition, David Muse explained, but the all-male cast brings to focus the context of this teenage romance --- it was a male-dominated world in which two kids rebelled and behaved outside of their socially assigned guidelines ... and paid for their rebellion with their lives. Romeo and Juliet is the quintessential heterosexual classic, as iconic as it gets, yet, the gender ambiguity was ingrained right from the beginning of its creation.
Assume that male homosexuality is ever present in humanity and has a natural affinity for theater and the performance art. Imagine then how intricate and titillating it had been back in the days when traditionally all-male theater troops nightly put on all the Bard's plays that are full of cross-dressing, gender confusion, sex jokes, and steamy romantic poetry. Such vast confusion is utterly unimaginable in the rigid, frigid, and frightened American modern society we live in now.
http://www.shakespearetheatre.org/plays ... 4&source=l