Queer Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, Midsummer, and Me
Delilah Delgado
When I was nine, my parents took me to see my first Shakespeare production: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In preparation, my mother read the story aloud from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, a slightly watered-down (though faithful) collection of Shakespearean stories intended “for the use of young persons.” Although Charles and Mary Lamb succeeded in conveying the gist of Shakespeare’s plot, they could never have prepared me for the spectacle that awaited onstage. It was glamorous and entrancing, full of rustling fairy wings and lovers’ quarrels—and with every scene, I felt myself falling head-over-heels in love with Shakespeare’s prose.
I owe the beginnings of my love affair with Shakespeare to the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, where I first saw Midsummer. As a high school junior, I participated in the Globe’s Pam Farr Summer Shakespeare Studio for teen actors. I returned to their summer program as an intern in 2022—coincidentally, the year the Globe presented Midsummer again, for the first time since my childhood—and again as assistant director in 2023. I was drawn in by the chance to surround myself with people who love these works just as much as I do, who understand what I felt when I saw Midsummer for the first time.
As I continued to watch and interact with Shakespeare’s works, however, I felt a lot more than awe and admiration. In high school, I was cast as Viola in my school’s production of Twelfth Night. Having seen Twelfth Night several years before at the Old Globe, I remembered my character’s story well: Viola cross-dresses to disguise herself as a man, and comical hysteria ensues when various characters confuse her with her long-lost twin brother, Sebastian. The gender ambiguity of certain scenes easily lent itself to a queer reading of the text—a notion that I, as a newly-out queer teen, was acutely and painfully aware of. But I didn’t yet have the knowledge or the self-acceptance to truly explore the potential her character holds for queerness and androgyny.
I found an opportunity to return to Viola’s story last year, when a college friend—the beautiful writer and brilliant thinker Vanessa Silva—penned a creative thesis that reimagined many of Shakespeare’s women with a focus on witchcraft, femininity, and queerness. She scripted new endings for all of these characters, expanding upon the destinies Shakespeare wrote for them. One of her subjects was Viola, now portrayed as a rebellious and gender-nonconforming student. Revisiting Viola through Vanessa’s writing, now comfortable in my queerness and proud of my identity, opened up a completely different experience for me. Instead of shying away from the non-normative ways in which Viola’s character expresses sexuality and gender throughout Twelfth Night, I connected deeply with the queerness of her new story, celebrated and emphasized by my friend’s writing.
Shakespeare wrote beautiful, moving works of art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is a place for honoring that work as it was written, and there is also value in building upon it as twenty-first century readers. And sometimes that means that the readerly experience becomes a writerly one, reimagining and reframing pre-existing narratives.
In the Old Globe Summer Shakespeare Studio program, we ask the teens to relate excerpts of Shakespearean text to moments in their own lives—problems they’ve faced, challenges they’ve overcome, memories they hold dear. Watching brilliant young actors easily draw connections between their lives and those of characters written hundreds of years ago solidifies for me the importance of holding space for my own personal interpretations. Shakespeare’s authorial intent is decidedly unknowable, especially to contemporary audiences. Did he purposefully imbue his works with themes that today read as “queer” (a term not used to refer to sexual or gender identity in Shakespeare’s own time), including cross-dressing, sexual fluidity, gender non-conformism, and arguably coded homosocial friendships? Speculation over Shakespeare’s own sexuality has, in fact, spurred academic and cultural debates for centuries, dating all the way back to analyses such as scholar George Steevens’s 1780 interpretation of several sonnets “addressed to a male object.” But whatever Shakespeare’s intention was 450 years ago, the fact remains that I’m here today reading ideas that resonate with contemporary notions of queerness in his works.
And I’m also engaging with the work of others who feel the same way I do. Reading inclusive themes back onto texts of the past can be hugely empowering, but it’s also empowering to see oneself reflected purposefully and explicitly in contemporary literature and theater. In the past few years, I’ve found myself turning to explicitly queer adaptations and rewritings of the stories I grew up loving. From YA novels such as Preston Norton’s Where I End and You Begin (a queer Twelfth Night inspired fiction!) to performances like the BBC’s 2016 queer Midsummer Night’s Dream, contemporary queer creatives inspired by Shakespeare’s work have made it their own. My lifelong love of Shakespeare remains a constant source of joy and inspiration because it evolves right alongside me, growing and changing as I progress as a queer thinker, writer, and artist.
