Sonnet 29 by Rufus Wainwright

Audio clip:

In 2002 Canadian singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright was invited to participate in a fundraising project for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. The EMI compilation When Love Speaks is a recorded collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets performed by a prominent group of British stage and screen actors including Alan Rickman, Kenneth Branagh, Richard Attenborough, and Juliet Stevenson. The appearance of Rufus Wainwright alongside this elite membership, and his performance of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, allows for insight into the way a space between the original text and the Shakespeare “effect” can be filled by knowledge grounded in an identity based on difference.

Rufus Wainwright

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 begins with the words “When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,/ I all alone beweep my outcast state.” In a world where one’s sexual identity is assumed to be heterosexual until proven otherwise, Rufus Wainwright never waited for the inquiry to begin. Standing alone, centre stage, at Toronto’s Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church some time late in 1998 Wainwright faced a mob of screaming girls and asked the crowd, “Where are all the screaming boys?” As the Toronto stop of his first cross-country tour, a significant investment was riding on what was said and how he said it. Rock musicians or pop stars who hope to be successful in the music industry depend on the image they present and the aura that surrounds this image. The admission, early on, that Wainwright was singing first for the boys established an image that had yet to exist in Canada’s national cultural landscape: that image of the publicly queer pop star.

From this moment forward every song, album, and Gap commercial using the voice of Rufus Wainwright has been unable to escape being associated with issues of gendered identity and queer experience.

This attention to identity-difference is why the appearance of Rufus Wainwright on When Love Speaks is so important to understanding the ways in which adapted Shakespeare can destabilize dominant understandings of gender.

While scholarship interested in questions of Shakespeare and sexuality began to grow in the late 19th century and was reinvigorated with the publishing of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality in 1979, public imagination has resisted challenges to homogenized understandings of Shakespeare (Chedgzoy). For example, as gender play is central to the joy of As You Like It and facilitates the courtroom drama of The Merchant of Venice, it is the gender normality of Romeo and Juliet that capture and hold the public imagination and act to define Shakespeare as a normative figure. Resistance to un-orthodox interpretations of Shakespeare is supported or generated by a system of integration where Shakespeare’s text merges with economic and social ideologies thereby making the goal of the ideology as difficult to question as is the greatness of Shakespeare. The dynamic produces the Shakespeare effect. The Shakespeare effect destabilizes hierarchical ways of knowing that privilege one community over others. By questioning dominant representations of Shakespeare through multiple adaptation techniques, the orthodoxies associated with the Shakespeare effect may be, even if temporarily, destabilized. When a performer whose identity is non-normative (anything other than white and/or heterosexual) uses Shakespeare’s words, the result is potentially revolutionary. Wainwright plays his part in this dynamic as he adapts Shakespeare within a global pop context in which both his Canadian and his queer identities are important signifiers of difference.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 and the remaining 153 lend themselves to engagement with questions of sexuality. According to Bruce Smith, College Distinguished Professor at the University of Southern California, and a prominent Shakespeare scholar, it is the speaking “I” of the sonnets that generates “a still-continuing culture war over the homoerotic desires” being articulated in the sonnets. Of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, the first 126 are spoken to a “fair-complexioned man.” The 28 sonnets that complete the body of work are addressed to the speaker’s mistress. The sexual nature of the speaker’s desire for his mistress is clearly articulated while sexual desire for the “fair-complexioned man” is revealed through figurative language. This is in keeping with an Elizabethan common law that restricted ‘illegitimate’ sexualities: restrictions now associated with the most extreme religious fundamentalisms (Chedgzoy). The punishment for sodomy under Elizabeth’s common law was death.

Rufus Wainwright as Ophelia

Shakespeare’s sonnets that articulate these alternative and perhaps ambivalent sexualities are problematic for a dominant culture comfortable with representations of the Bard as hetero-normative leading man exemplified in the mainstream, Academy-award winning Shakespeare in Love. With debate concerning the identity of the speaking “I” ongoing, it is fascinating that an institution at the centre of British classical theatre training would ask Wainwright, a queer pop star from Canada, to contribute to a project that further inscribes Shakespeare in our collective imaginations. Here, a centre of high culture draws on the resources of the periphery as they further entrench dominant ideologies, which are nonetheless riven with faultlines that challenge those dominant constructs. Along with Wainwright, the compilation also includes South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo generating further questions about how post-colonial readings of cultural production might reveal a scripted role played by historical subjects of a displaced imperialism.

Shakespeare has been made an icon of high culture. His dominance is not naturally occurring. While first a playwright of low or bawdy culture, endearing his work to marginalized communities, the Shakespeare effect can act to whitewash this history so that it is used as a tool of conquest and colonization, a way of disseminating the dominant values of centralized cultures. With the canonization of his texts in colonial education systems and with his words spoken by world leaders, Shakespeare has been made a poster boy for imperialism and now a champion of globalization (See Hamlet of nations). As global culture privileges those who can most easily adapt to dominant values, communities who are never served by Shakespeare will be further marginalized. Any attempt to destabilize the ways Shakespeare is fixed to serve a dominant ideology is in defense of a low culture that the works of Shakespeare more closely represent. Shakespeare’s sonnets speak to the complexity of human sexuality, to the rightness and creative richness/fecundity of other ways of knowing and of being sexual. In doing so they have the potential to support the lives of those oppressed by canonized interpretations of great works.

So, in the midst of dramatic recitations Wainwright offers the text of Sonnet 29 in song. As a Canadian singer/songwriter Wainwright’s appearance on When Love Speaks may honour Shakespeare’s role in the definition of what it means to be Canadian, that is to say a post-colonial subject, but as a queer man singing the words of Shakespeare, Wainwright also pushes forward a discourse of difference that destabilizes a structure that has granted Shakespeare so much authority. The meeting of these identities positions Shakespeare in Canada as a potentially radical tool for social change by offering alternatives to orthodox interpretations of identity.

To return to the text is to illustrate how non-normative desire was understood in Shakespeare’s time much as it is understood today with Rufus Wainwright as the speaking “I”. The difference being that Elizabethan reception of sexuality was related to a specific act, while contemporary reception recognizes an identity as belonging to a cultural community that may share the practice of certain sexualities. The term “queer” broadens this identity to include other sexualities that are also seen by some as non-normative. With the difference in both understandings addressed, it is easy to see where a shared experience is articulated in Wainwright’s reading of Sonnet 29 and Shakespeare’s text.

The speaking “I” of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 addresses the “fair-complexioned man” as his beloved: such desire possibly being the source of his disgrace. Wainwright sings:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state

Raising this experience from the page and a context now 400 years past, Wainwright’s persona as a queer pop star emphasizes a queer reading while de-emphasizing other readings that have thus far been privileged. The intensity of Wainwright’s voice increases as the text shifts from despair to the hope he finds in his beloved. Wainwright’s performance and thus Shakespeare’s text can be understood as an affirmation of a queer identity, which is why the speaking “I” is able to resolve this self-reflection with the couplet:

For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings,

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

While some would note a certain irony in the final signifier “kings”, “queen” being a term both of derision and pride in a modern queer community, what is most significant in this final couplet is the way in which the descending scale and very articulated diction bring the words to the fore heightening this conscious decision to continue identifying and being identified with the term ‘disgrace’. This choice to remain in disgrace or to remain apart from dominant structures of power rather than accept the demands of a dominant social order is a choice the speaking “I” has made. Wainwright is clearly making the same choice through his singing of Sonnet 29 as emblematic of libratory queer discourse.

Ben Walsh

Works cited

Chedgzoy, Kate. “Sexuality.” The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. Michael Dobson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Smith, Bruce R. “Shakespeare, William” glbtq: The Online Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture. Ed. Claude J. Summers. 2002. glbtq, Inc. 17 March 2006. <http://www.glbtq.com/literature/shakespeare_w,7.html>.

Audio clip:

Sonnet 29 by Rufus Wainwright

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,—and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.