1. Introduction
[1.1] In 2014, Riverside Studios London put on a play titled Drag King Richard III. The play is not Shakespeare's Richard III reimagined but rather uses Shakespeare's dialogue to transport its core themes to the audience: "The Richard III scenes draw the audience more directly into [the] experience…linking…one transgender person's perspective to the intense battle between self-loathing and self-love [of Richard III]" (Wootton 2014). In Shakespeare, Richard is physically disabled; the exact nature of his disability is left ambiguous, but the play does open with Richard lamenting that he was "cheated of feature by dissembling nature," "unfinished" and "scarce half made up" (Richard III, 1.1.19–21) (note 1). Richard's relationship to his body seems to resonate with a modern transgender experience of dysphoria enough that even without changing Shakespeare's lines directly, the words accurately describe the feelings a transgender person may have about themselves. In recontextualizing Shakespeare's lines this way, Drag King Richard III becomes itself a transformative work similar to fan fiction.
[1.2] As far as male transgender experiences are concerned, Richard III is an intriguing choice of character. It is reminiscent of Sawyer Kemp's criticism that there is a tendency to look for possible Shakespearean transgender subjects only in characters who cross-dress (2019, 37) even though there may be other Shakespearean characters—like Richard—whose experiences resonate more accurately with contemporary transgender experiences (42).
[1.3] There appears to be something a transgender audience can recognize of themselves within Richard III, more so than with Shakespeare's cross-dressing characters. However, what we recognize comes prepackaged: Our Richard has already been transgendered. There is a process to this recognition: The director of Drag King Richard III, Roz Hopkinson, recognized the suitability of Shakespeare's Richard III to carry transgender meaning, adapted it to Drag King Richard III, and produced the recognition of Richard's experiences being similar to those of contemporary transgender people. Recognition begets recognition. It is that process of recognition producing recognition that I would like to examine further. For that, I turn to Shakespeare fan fiction.
[1.4] Jonathan Pope has suggested that Shakespeare fan fiction in particular "identifies how many contemporary readers and audiences assess Shakespeare…that is, in terms of relatability, the ability—and desire—to see oneself and one's experiences mirrored in the text" (2020, 124). I would like to propose that Shakespeare fan fiction, specifically transgender Shakespeare fan fiction, is a text that is produced through recognition and produces recognition itself.
[1.5] In the following I look at the way this process of recognition works in transgender Shakespeare fan fiction. I split this in two parts: first, the recognition of the fan fiction author of their Shakespearean subject as transgender, and second, the way the fan fiction narrative produces its own fictionalized recognition narrative based on the Shakespeare play. Beforehand, I briefly discuss the criteria for choosing fan fics for this essay.
2. For the sake of transparency: Methodology and criteria
[2.1] First and foremost, permission to cite these fan fics was sought and acquired where possible. I exclusively looked at fan fics from the Archive of Our Own site, and I narrowed down the fan fics I would read using these search parameters: "'Shakespeare William – Works' ‖ 'Hamlet – Shakespeare' -rpf; Tags: Trans." It was necessary to include Hamlet separately because it is not included in the "Shakespeare" parent tag. I had to use "-rpf" (real person fiction) to exclude any fan fics in which William Shakespeare appeared as a transgender character. The tag "Trans" is a parent tag for multiple varying tags that suggest transgender topics and thus would give me the broadest scope. Then, I excluded all fan fics that were crossovers with other works in which the transgender character is not one of Shakespeare's characters.
[2.2] At the time of this writing, my search resulted in thirty-two fan fics out of 4,897 Shakespeare fan fics in total. That is a surprisingly low number. In fact, one of the writers of the fan fics that remained even commented on this disparity: "I wrote this because I searched the trans Hamlet tag and was disappointed to find almost nothing" (remuslupine 2019). Of the thirty-two available fan fics, those I talk about were my personal choices: I chose them because I found them fitting to the topics at hand.
3. Tags, author's notes, and the metanarratives on recognition
[3.1] When it comes to fan fiction, one of its most unique qualities is that—to borrow the words of Jonathan Pope—"it insistently situates individual readers and writers, and their individual…interpretations of a text, at the center of a text's meaning" (2020, 126–27). That quality is what allows me to not only look at the text proper but also at the commentary the authors leave both in the tags and in a section commonly referred to as author's notes. These notes relate the desire for more transgender characters in Shakespeare, citing different reasons that are all, however, essentially personal.
[3.2] Author MercutioLives writes that "there's really no explanation or reason for this one. I just really wanted to write Mercutio and Valentine being adorable tiny babies together, and I also wanted to revisit trans Mercutio. So this tiny ficlet happened" (2014a). Mercutio is one of the principal characters of Romeo and Juliet. He is a good friend of Romeo's, and Valentine is his (regrettably often forgotten) brother. Another author, dvldegg (2019), has a similar introduction: "they're both just dumb, in love, and trans and i appreciate them Very Much. thanks bill"; this is in reference to Much Ado about Nothing's Benedick and Beatrice, the play's humorous bickering couple.
[3.3] As for tags, we have examples such as "wrote this for my little gay t4t [transgender for transgender] heart" (ghostknight 2020). "This is just gay trans content about siblings supporting each other" (damientiamat 2019). And "edmund is trans he told me himself" (goosemixtapes 2021).
[3.4] What these notes and tags show is the degree to which fan fiction is often produced through a subjective and personal response. As Kristina Busse puts it, unlike other types of media, fan fiction "often caters to highly individualized reading desires" (2017, 57). Indeed, "emotion, self-insertion, and subjectivity" are all qualities that tend to be encouraged in fandom (Finn and McCall 2016, 28) allowing, as it were, for more interpretative leeway. And that interpretative leeway is what we see at work here; there is something in these characters that makes the fan fic author read them as transgender and produce transgender fiction about them, but there is no necessity to strictly argue that this reading is textually accurate.
[3.5] At the same time, however, any given fan fic does articulate arguments in its own way by using specific instances of the primary text to construct new meanings through establishing the fan fic's narrative and its characters' traits. When goosemixtapes comments that "edmund is trans he told me himself" (2021), this is at first glance humorful exaggeration, but it also betrays the machination behind the process of recognition; in a way, Edmund did tell them himself, as the transgender meaning they have assigned to him is carefully extracted from his dialogue in King Lear. Each Shakespeare character has different reasons for being read as transgender, but in the following I take a closer look at the fan fic preceding this specific statement, as well as another fan fic centered around King Lear's Edmund for comparison. At the same time, I include references from Shakespeare's King Lear to contextualize Edmund's characterization and transformation.
4. "Yet Edmund was beloved"
[4.1] Although they are by separate authors, both of the King Lear fan fics I discuss centralize Edmund as a trans character and explore his transition and relationship with his brother Edgar. In King Lear, Edmund ranks among the chief villains; being the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, he suffers mistreatment by the court and eventually conspires a plot to be rid of his legitimate brother while establishing himself as Gloucester's heir by abusing the good relationship he pretended to have with Edgar. Once in motion, the plot spirals out of control, ending with multiple deaths and Edgar returning to successfully slay Edmund for what he had wrought, even though in Edmund's final moments Edgar arguably forgives him. The following fan fics are both set before the start of King Lear although they allude to passages from it nonetheless, similar to the way Drag King Richard III uses Shakespeare's lines.
[4.2] In "Men Are As The Time Is" by author ERNest (2021), Edmund has already come out as a trans man, and the narrative follows Edgar questioning his own gender while asking Edmund about his. Edmund is the one narrating; thus, even though it is technically Edgar who is coming out, the contrast between what Edgar says and innocently assumes and Edmund's responses to it highlights Edmund's transition rather than Edgar's questioning. In fact, that very questioning provokes Edmund to think that it is "a little pathetic to not even know what he wants to be, just one more thing about Edgar that Edmund will never understand when he wants so much and knows exactly what it is and how he'll go about getting it." Later, Edmund tells Edgar that "at least for that first moment, people know me for who I am, before they learn everything else that makes me lesser in their eyes, and, well, usually a moment is all I need."
[4.3] Edmund's ceaseless desire is to be recognized for who he is, and the issues he faces due to his illegitimacy are being actively conflated with the issues he faces being transgender. In Edmund's second soliloquy in King Lear, he laments that people are quick to blame "the sun, the moon, and stars" (1.2.128) for their misfortune and character and that, being conceived under evil omens, he is seen as "rough and lecherous" (1.2.138). His issue is not that he is seen as such, for he is aware that he is, but that it is blamed on fate rather on than his own personhood: "I should / have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the / firmament twinkled on my bastardizing" (1.2.138–40). The desire to be recognized as himself is part of what drives Edmund, and it is this desire that the fan fic now imbues with transgender meaning.
[4.4] The second fan fic is the aforementioned goosemixtapes's "that i can fashion fit." Similarly to "Men Are As The Time Is," Edmund being a bastard and him being trans come together in his "illegitimacy" and the suffering he experiences at the hands of others because of it although the focus is more on his father than on the court itself:
[4.5] Edmund knows better. Edmund knows very well what their father will think of this; if he ever calls Edmund by his chosen name, it will be miracle enough that Edmund will take up prayer. But then, that is the problem: that Edmund always knows better; that Edgar has never had to. He supposes this scandal will occupy the court for a while. He supposes he is the illegitimate son in more than one sense of the word, now. (goosemixtapes 2021)
[4.6] Edmund is illegitimate as a bastard but also as a son. And his jealousy of Edgar's legitimacy works on both levels as well; at one point in the fan fic, Edgar notes that Edmund's name sounds close to his own, implying he chose it specifically out of emulation. Edmund wants to be Edgar and desires what Edgar has enough to name himself similar to him.
[4.7] Both fan fics share a vision of an Edgar that accepts Edmund and recognizes him for who he is. In a way, the recognition of the self becomes acceptance and legitimacy. These King Lear fan fics are not alone on this, however; many of the transgender Shakespeare fan fics have recognition narratives in which the transgender subject is revealed and recognized as transgender and then accepted and thus recognized as themselves.
[4.8] We see this in examples such as ghostknight's "It May be Different Still," in which Twelfth Night's Orsino tells his lover Cesario, after the latter has revealed being transgender, that "we men who make ourselves, have a harder time of it" (ghostknight 2020). This is one of the rare cases where one of Shakespeare's cross-dressing characters is indeed imagined as transgender, although Orsino, who is very notably not cross-dressing in the Shakespeare play, is also imagined as such.
[4.9] In MercutioLives's "cover'd with an antic face," Mercutio, when seeing his rival Tyablt in women's clothes, tells him to "worry not, my dear Prince of Cats—ah, or is it Princess of Cats, now?…People like you and I, we keep one another's secrets" (2014b). However, I found irlenolacroix's "Servitude," a Midsummer Night's Dream fan fic, to be the most notable: "To Oberon, [king of fairies,] Puck was the boy that he truly was. Maybe that was some form of love" (2015). Recognition here becomes a form of love in its own right. On that, let us return to Edmund briefly.
[4.10] In King Lear, one of Edmund's plays at power involves starting an affair with two of the king's daughters, Regan and Goneril, who are themselves conspiring against their father. At the end of the play, when Edmund lies dying and after having received the news of one of the sisters' deaths, he says, "Yet Edmund was beloved. / The one the other poisoned for my sake, / And after slew herself" (5.3.287–9). Then it appears that he converts away from villainy and to goodness. Although this has been subject of much debate, Richard Matthews has this to say on it:
[4.11] And much as we may shudder to accept it, such a recognition of love, such a compulsion of love, drives Edmund into the final stages of his conversion…But at whatever level, Edmund finds that he has indeed been the object of Goneril's and Regan's love—if their savage lust may be so dignified. He finds that he is lovable. It is a pathetic recognition of a perverse thing, but it is apparently just enough to tip the scale in the direction of goodness. (1975, 28)
[4.12] I would argue that it is not only that the recognition of love that turns him to good but that the desire to be loved is what drives Edmund. If the recognition of the transgender self is in itself a form of love, as irlenacroix's fan fic suggests, these two fan fics only add to the nuance and complexity this begets for Edmund as a character. They shift the focus away from Edmund's relationship with the sisters to instead embellish his relationship with Edgar. However, I would argue that within these fan fics Edgar takes on the role of the sisters, swapping romantic love for familial love. Edmund's desire to be loved is his desire to be recognized, and Edgar fulfills this: "Edgar really does just seem happy to have a brother now, and even happy for Edmund" (ERNest 2021).
5. Conclusion
[5.1] In these texts we find the recognition of the self in the literary other, which in turn produces more recognition when actualized into written fan fic. This is the recognition narrative we have seen in the fan fic text but also the recognition of the possibility of transgender meaning within the primary text by audience and readers. Finally comes recognition as a form of love, something which, at least in the case of Edmund, closes the four-century gap between the play and the fan fic. What we recognize altogether is not what Edmund is but what Edmund can be—that is, of course, should we listen to him.
[5.2] Ultimately, I chose to start with Richard III and dedicated large parts of my discussion to King Lear's Edmund. The question remains whether transgender recognition underlies a similar process in other Shakespeare fan fiction—or, really, fan fiction at large. There is still much that this process might tell us about Shakespeare's plays and the fan fics they have inspired, but that is best left for another essay.