Emilia Carter
Trigger warning: themes of sexual assault.
Last month I attended an evening performance of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Cymbeline. Having studied the text during my English degree, I knew it would be enjoyable. The play is packed with everything you could want from Shakespeare: disguises, Roman battles, kings, a headless body, a funeral and even an appearance from Jupiter.
But I also knew that the play deals with sexual assault, and that such production requires, and often lacks, sensitivity and feminist critique. Theatrical companies can’t perform sexual assault, or allusions to such assault, without a determined awareness of its political and social implications.
Though I don’t believe that this performance innately reproduced the myths and norms of rape culture, I do think that its audience reception marked a notable reproduction of it.
Audiences and Violence
“theatre reproduced the normative idea that a women’s body is naturally permissive and available to male sexuality”
Art is reconstructed when it is received. As the audience, we play an active role in what theatre does. And in this case, theatre reproduced the normative idea that a woman’s body is naturally permissive and available to male sexuality.
Rape culture is pervasive because of its ability to simultaneously justify and condemn rape, which makes it conducive to male-dominated, hierarchical societies. In her academic article, Alisa Kessel defines rape culture as a set of “discourses [that] reproduce a culture that normalises rape and other sexual violence as an effective (though outwardly condemned) way to reinforce relations of subordination.”
This normative ambivalence with regards to sexual assault (that prohibits decisive legal action) is a notable theme in Cymbeline, a play that can’t decide whether it is a comedy or a tragedy.
Cymbeline and Sexual Violence
Imogen—the main female character whose love life is at the centre of the plot—is sometimes diminutive and lacklustre. In this production, Amber James’ Imogen was powerful. She didn’t pander to the men around her, but rather staunchly defended her body and person.
“the production left me uncomfortable and angry”
However, the production left me uncomfortable and angry. Not because of how the RSC performed it, but rather how it was received by the audience in which I sat. When dealing with historically significant rape jokes, the director must make the decision of whether or not to “play them for laughs”.
In this performance, Jamie Wilkes —who played Giacomo— seemed to be playing Shakespeare’s rape jokes for laughs through his tonal inflection and cadence.
From the start of the play, Giacomo’s character aims to defile Imogen. He schemes a way to steal her chastity after he bets with Imogen’s lover, Posthumus, that he can. Such chastity is symbolised by a bracelet that Imogen has given Posthumus at the beginning of the play to mark her love and loyalty.
Audience Reception
“a lone snigger should be eerie in such a situation, a warning of the gender violence that exists offstage”
Playing rape jokes for laughs draws on the active participation of the audience; it should make us uncomfortable as we register our complicity in systems of normative assault. A lone snigger should be eerie in such a situation, a warning of the gender violence that exists offstage: everywhere, embedded in our cultural norms.
Instead, the room was filled with laughter that was not guilty nor hushed. Giacomo was merely a clown playing with a toy; toying with the body and sexual autonomy of a symbolic woman.
In Act 2 Scene 2 of Cymbeline, the assault takes place as Imogen sleeps.
In this production, Iachimo took the bracelet from her wrist and thrust his fist into it above the actor’s crotch, repeatedly oscillating through the vaginal symbol as a violent penetration. This is an ostensible violation and eroticised assault.
But the audience erupted into little pockets of laughter. Some of it genuine, and some of it seemingly reactive. It’s your classic Shakespeare laughter. Having grown up in Stratford-upon-Avon, I am very familiar with Shakespeare audiences. They want everyone else to know that they are following what is happening in the often complex plots.
“Sometimes we laugh just to show that we know what is going on”
Therefore, laughter can sometimes be no more than a signal that they follow. But I guess this is true more broadly of human communication. Sometimes we laugh just to show that we know what is going on.
So they did know what was going on as Iachimo emerged from the trunk into the symbolically heavy space of the stage: Imogen’s chamber, embodied by her sleeping, innocent, vulnerable self. The audience knew and they laughed because a “stolen kiss” is normatively received as romantic rather than violent.
They registered a trope they had seen before. When sexual assault is trivialised, diminished or invalidated, I guess we all feel an uncanny recognition. Yes, this is how it is, we think. Which, without active intervention, essentially translates to this is how it ought to be.
Rape Culture: When Theatre Reflects Real Life
In England and Wales, over 99% of rapes that are reported to police do not end in conviction. We have to pay attention to what is going wrong here and how we register it as familiar and unsurprising. Why do people laugh at rape jokes?
When we talk about rape culture, we’re talking about the reproduction of discourse that has tangible, material realities. This includes not only allowing rape to physically occur but allowing those who rape to exist free from conviction.
In Act 2 Scene 2, Shakespeare dilates the play’s temporality. The otherwise fast-moving tempo of Cymbeline is slowed to a meditative rhythm. It is quiet in Imogen’s chamber. As Iachimo makes his way towards her body, he moves indulgently. He opens her nightshirt, verbosely describing: “On the left breast, A mole cinque-spotted, like crimson drops, I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip.”
In the RSC production, without indication from Shakespeare’s text, Iachimo kissed Imogen. A stolen kiss. A final assault on her body.
“And what does the audience in Stratford-upon-Avon do that Spring evening of 2023? They laugh”
And what does the audience in Stratford-upon-Avon do that Spring evening of 2023? They laugh. Signalling to themselves, the rest of the audience, and the actors, that they are part of the joke. They understand. They have followed the allusions to their somewhat frustrated telos (it’s not a proper sexual assault though is it, only a kiss).
Laughter transmits more than humour. It reproduces the discourse that prompted it. It embeds us deeper in what we already know: that men have access to the naturally permissive female body.
Rape Culture
Tracey Nicholls writes in her book Dismantling Rape Culture: The Peacebuilding Power of ‘Me Too’ (2021): “To accept this notion of a special burden to protect oneself from becoming a rape target, a rape victim, a rape survivor, is to accept subordination.”
What does this laughter do? And why are feminists made to feel that our anger about such laughter is grotesque? Our anger is used against us as proof of our inhumanity. But our anger is powerful and we have to note when it occurs and register what it tells us to do. We can’t accept subordination.
“Rape culture” is not a liberal buzzword. It is a fact of our social lives and our embodied realities. We materially orient our bodies in relation to norms such as the permissive model of femininity.
“Rape culture defines who we are by defining our gender expression and experience.”
Rape culture defines who we are by defining our gender expression and experience. The fact that half the population can’t walk around at night alone, or safely go to a nightclub, impacts how we think and feel, even if we don’t personally face sexual assault. This is rape culture.
Rape culture is not a shameful feature of our society; it is our society.
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Featured image courtesy of Emilia Carter.
