Come Ruin or Rapture

Last weekend, a woman won a Best Actress Oscar for playing William Shakespeare’s lover. The last time this happened was twenty-eight years ago, when Gwyneth Paltrow played Lady Viola De Lesseps in Shakespeare in Love. The 1998 romance from the late playwright Tom Stoppard is one of my favorites; I can quote almost every line. I saw the film in a double-feature with Hamnet on Black Friday. But on that weekend when many Americans celebrate a genocide, I saw Shakespeare in Love as the tragedy of a woman who glimpses a beautiful life of love, sex, and poetry, but leaves it behind, choosing to become a colonizer instead. Viola is a cautionary tale for white women and those of us in proximity to power. But it didn’t have to end that way. 

Shakespeare in Love takes place in 1595 in London. Our heroine, Lady Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow), is enraptured with poetry. In particular, Shakespeare is the “writer of plays that capture [her] heart.” William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) is fighting writer’s block and an empty pocket. After Viola arrives, dressed as a man, to audition for Shakespeare’s play, the two meet and fall in love. Viola plays Romeo by day, and reads sonnets and makes love by night. “I will have poetry in my life,” Viola says. “And adventure. And love. Love above all…Not the artful postures of love, but love that overthrows life. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. Love as there has never been in a play. I will have love.” 

Meanwhile, Viola’s parents are preparing to trade her and her dowry for a noble title. Lord Wessex (Colin Firth, excellently cast against his Darcy-ish type) is a colonist with a tobacco plantation in Virginia, but lacking the fortune he needs for startup capital. Viola’s father is a shopkeeper, rich in gold but poor in title. “Your father has bought me for you,” Wessex says. If she marries him, Wessex bestows his title on Viola’s family, while Wessex gets five thousand pounds to invest in his plantation. Wessex is a nasty man, conferring with Viola’s father about whether or not she will “breed.”

In 1595, Britain had just begun its colonization of North America. The first British colonists came to Roanoke territory in 1584 and settled the Roanoke Colony in North Carolina the following year. Settlers didn’t establish the Jamestown Colony in Virginia until 1607; by 1610, the colony had a profitable tobacco crop. (Tom Stoppard is taking a bit of creative license with the story, treating 1595—when Romeo and Juliet was actually performed—as 1607). Throughout the mid-to-late 1500s, British lords—with Queen Elizabeth I’s blessing—began trading stolen, enslaved human beings with the Spanish colonies. In 1619, British settlers brought enslaved Africans to Virginia to work on tobacco plantations. “Virginia was named for Queen Elizabeth I of England, who was known as the Virgin Queen,” writes Imani Perry in her history/memoir South to America. “Her unwillingness to marry allowed her to consolidate her power. Her virginity protected her from certain humiliations and allowed her to stay atop the pedestals of patriarchy.”

At the end of the film, Viola marries Wessex, “a daughter’s duty and the queen’s command.” Her mother weeps as Wessex and her father sign the papers. “Don’t cry,” Wessex says blankly, “you’re gaining a colony.” Viola immediately gives her bridegroom the slip, running off to the theatre, where she steps in at the last minute to play Juliet in the play’s premiere. Ultimately, Queen Elizabeth (Judi Dench) commands that she leave with Wessex on his ship to the “new world.” The credits roll to a long overhead shot of Viola walking on a massive deserted beach—an image of terra nullius. 

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Gweneth Paltrow starred in another, very different movie around the turn of the millennium: Sliding Doors, a film that portrays two vastly different versions of the life she could have led depending only on whether she caught or missed the sliding doors of a train. It’s a speculative exploration of two different futures, two different “what ifs.” So, to continue our quest, let’s give Shakespeare in Love the Sliding Doors treatment: How would Viola’s life—and history—be different if she goes with Wessex or refuses? 

If we were to continue on in the fictional world of the film, Viola would participate in the violent dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous people. Within three years of establishing the settlement, “Jamestown military leader John Smith threatened to kill all the women and children if the Powhatan leaders would not feed and clothe the settlers as well as provide them with land and labor,” writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. The leader of the Powhatan Confederacy replied, 

And so the settlers declared war on the Powhatan people. By 1622, Jamestown colonists also systematically destroyed all of the local Indigenous agricultural infrastructure. 

Viola’s dowry, 5,000 pounds, would be $1.6 million today. Within this story’s universe, that dowry is crucial seed money for the plantation economy, starter capital for mass enslavement and genocide. In the movie, under patriarchy, Viola is the property of her father and then her husband. Patriarchy—enforced by the queen herself— demands that she become a colonizer. By obeying this system, Viola condemns herself to a miserable life: no love, no poetry, no theatre, marriage to a vile man, being “bred” to produce his heirs, and likely marital rape. While consenting to a dismal life for herself, she also joins (and kicks off!) one of the most violent projects in human history. Shakespeare in Love is a case study in the ways patriarchy and colonialism are intertwined. It is a Shakespearean tragedy—not just for Will and Viola, but for the millions murdered and enslaved by the colonial system she helps get off the ground. 

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I’ve seen Romeo and Juliet maybe a hundred times, and every single time I think The messenger will get there! It could be different this time! In Shakespeare in Love’s final scene, Will and Viola, our star-crossed lovers, acquiesce to the queen’s command and say farewell. If Viola had followed her deepest, truest desires—for love and poetry—she could have both built a beautiful life for herself and thrown “sand in the gears” of genocide and enslavement (to quote Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi). 

But to answer that question, really, we must understand how we know what we desire. How do we recognize our deepest, most life-giving longings? How do we cultivate this compass so we can follow it towards integrity? In the weeks she spends with Shakespeare, Viola experiences a force that could steer her towards a better ending: the erotic. In her essay “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde describes “the erotic” as 

The erotic lives in love, sex, and art: Lorde finds it in “writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love” or in the way her “body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms.” Throughout the film, we watch Viola relish in the erotic: In one of the great love scenes in cinema, Viola spins in a circle, lit by candlelight, as Will unwraps the binding on her breasts; a montage shows them rehearsing the play, stealing passionate kisses just offstage; Viola tears an envelope open in a frenzy to read a sonnet (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”); they run lines in bed. Viola’s erotic rampages are also deeply queer: She dresses as a man, throwing off punishing gender roles and feeling the freedom of gender fuckery. Viola catches a glimpse of this “replenishing and provocative force.”

The erotic not only guides us towards a joyful and vibrant life, it also, Lorde argues, acts as a compass towards collective liberation. She says,

At the end of the film, after experiencing the life she most longed for, Viola succumbs to “external directives.” By doing so, she signs onto structures—patriarchy and colonialism—that are contrary to both humanity’s needs and her own. Unfortunately, it would not surprise me if, a few decades after leaving for Virginia, Viola becomes a slave owner² ; in her self-loathing, Viola would numb herself to morality. She would blame the human beings she owns, oppresses, steals from, or destroys for her unhappiness—she would blame the natives for not feeding her. But had Viola fully honored her “internal knowledge and needs,” her “erotic guides,” what choice would she have made, and what might the ripples have been, for millions?

Viola could have refused the Queen and her father and run off to live, love, and make art with Will. Wessex would be five thousand pounds poorer, lacking seed money for his brutal plantations—perhaps stymying, or at least delaying, his colonial plans. Perhaps this would create a butterfly effect across the colonial system, but at the very least, it might prevent some immediate slaughter. Maybe Wessex would try to kill Shakespeare, as he threatened. Viola would likely be shunned and disgraced by her family and the nobility. Shakespeare and his company would likely lose the favor of the Queen. The Magistrate might, as he threatened, “[take] apart the Rose [their theatre] brick by brick.” Maybe the crown and nobility would have made an example of her, as they did of rich-kid Oscar Wilde three centuries later when he flaunted his queerness, Irishness, and anarchism against the British crown—losing family, love, fortune, freedom, and ultimately his life in the process. But, in Viola’s words, she wants love that is “unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.” She could have become ungovernable.

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Viola is an ancestor to many contemporary white women who champion patriarchy and scapegoat Black, Brown, and Queer folks for our chosen unhappiness. For example, Hannah Needleman used to be a ballerina, training at Juilliard. One day, a man started courting her and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He “made a call” to his dad, the CEO of JetBlue, and got himself placed on a flight next to her. A month later, they were engaged. She wanted to finish school, to complete her training as a ballerina in New York, but he would have none of it. Within three months, she was pregnant with her first child (she would go on to have seven more). Not a single other Juilliard undergrad has left school to have a child in recent memory.

Needleman is known as “Ballerina Farm,” a right-wing “tradwife” influencer with over 10 million Instagram followers. Her lifestyle—cos-playing pioneer wife, making everything (down to Cheerios) from scratch, giving birth without painkillers, submitting to her husband—evokes nostalgia for a time when white people were “winning the west,” when a woman’s place was in the home, when America was “great.” Needlemen is Viola’s heir: A woman who had a chance to make art, but acquiesced to the pressures of patriarchy, got married, and enacted the colonial agenda. I shed no tears for Needleman, and I’m not so naïve that I think her “erotic compass” and some ballet classes would have led her to anticolonial politics, but had she made different choices, there would be one less powerful pillar of right-wing propaganda…and she could also have an epidural or a box of ready-made cornflakes if she wanted. I wish she had kept dancing.

Viola is a cautionary tale, a woman who provided starter capital for colonialism. We contemporary white women and other people with proximity to power must heed this story’s warning, but we also have an even greater moral responsibility. It’s hard to know what Viola would have known of the colonial violence that had already taken place by 1595. She could not have predicted that her 5,000-pound dowry would snowball into the suffering and slaughter of millions. She didn’t know she was funding a project that would lead to an existential threat to the liveability of our planet. She certainly didn’t watch a livestream of the Aztec genocide on her phone. She should have known better, but we have no excuse not to know better. As Viola’s heirs, we can clearly see the violence ancestors like her enacted, and—on our phones and in the news and in our neighborhoods—the ongoing slaughter, detention, and dehumanization of Black and Brown people. We can see the wildfires, oil refineries, and wars.  

None of us knows the ripple effects of following or not following our truest desires, but as Will says to Viola, “love denied blights the soul we owe to god.” The only compass that can guide us is “our deepest knowing.” We face ruin and rapture: a fascist climate apocalypse, the ultimate consequence of the plantation economy Viola helped begin. So, day by day, it’s my work to return to what Lorde calls my “grave responsibility”: making the art, staring at a girl I love in candlelight, rioting in the heart and in the streets.

1  Paltrow herself is another example of a white woman who has joined a right-wing project through her wellness company GOOP, which laid the foundations for the MAHA agenda. She is living out Viola’s legacy!

2   On my reading list is Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’ book They Were Here Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South.