Q&A with Blair Fell

  

Photo by Fitzcreative

 

 

 

Blair Fell is the author of the new novel The Two Wills. His other books include Disco Witches of Fire Island. He is also a playwright, an actor, a producer, and a sign language interpreter, and he lives in New York City.

 

Q: In your new novel’s Author’s Note, you write, “I owe most of the inspiration for this book to Oscar Wilde.” Can you say more about that?

 

A: When I was in my late 20s, near the time I began writing plays, I was introduced to Oscar Wilde’s story “The Portrait of W.H.” The short story is really an essay by Wilde hidden in the guise of a short story.

 

It espouses a theory as to the identity of the male “beloved” in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Wilde argues that the main beloved person written to and about in the sonnets is a young male actor in Shakespeare’s company who created the great female roles in his plays.

 

Remember, at the time I read the essay, the early ‘90s, there was almost zero queer representation in the mainstream culture, and the word gay was synonymous with AIDS.

 

Learning that there were classical writers like Wilde who were (fairly) openly gay and arguing that Shakespeare, arguably the greatest writer in the English language, was also queer, was astounding to me. As a young gay man I really had no “gay heroes” to whom I could revere.

 

Why had I never learned of this question about Shakespeare’s sexuality in any college class? It’s not like this wasn’t a question scholars hadn’t discussed (at least in secret) for 400 years, and yet no one in my academic life had ever mentioned it.

 

I became enraptured with the theory, and eventually wrote a play that was an adaptation of Wilde’s essay called Naked Will.

 

The action of Wilde’s story is basically an argument between covertly queer 19th century intellectuals about the sonnets, and doesn’t actually bring to life the actual love story to which it refers.

 

In my play, however, I had all these moments where Shakespeare, the boy actor and the Dark Lady come to life in unfinished snippets, hinting at the action of the possible love story. This is where the characters started to form for me.

 

The play was eventually nominated for an LA GLAAD award, and had some nice small productions. Thought, to be honest, because they were small limited productions, I felt it never actually got a production it deserved. This was actually part of the reason I eventually stopped writing plays all together.

 

While great actors can take your material and make it soar beyond anything you can imagine, an actor who isn’t fit for a role can utterly destroy a play or at least not live up to what the writer had in mind. While there were some decent productions, none ever matched the story in my head. This is why I write novels now instead.

 

Decades later, when I turned to novels late in life, I knew I wasn’t finished with the topic and decided to ditch Wilde’s argument between intellects and just take the basic love story and completely fictionalize it.

 

The Willie Hughes of my story is not the one Wilde vaguely describes. All you get from Wilde is what he believes he learns from the sonnets, that the boy is unbelievably beautiful, is from humble beginnings (not the aristocrat many believed the beloved to be) and is named Willie Hughes.

 

I created Willie’s ale-house hustler backstory, his insecure bravado, his unrequited (for a while) longing for the Poet, and created Willie’s first great love, Barnaby Stubb.

 

Wilde suggests Marlowe is the rival poet in the sonnets (which I used) but Wilde also barely mentions the Dark Lady in the essay, believing her to be less important than the youth. I felt she is vital to the story, especially since there is a moment in the sonnets where the youth and the Dark Lady get together, and Shakespeare wants to save the youth from her.

 

Another interesting tidbit about Wilde’s essay is that it was used as evidence against him in his trial for gross indecency, which put him in prison and ultimately lead to his death.

 

Heterosexuals don’t like queers trying to claim Shakespeare as our own, so I was like F that. If you read the sonnets, Shakespeare is far more ours than theirs, damnit.  

 

So, I wanted to take Wilde’s theory even further, in honor of him, Shakespeare, and all queer artists who have been appropriated or suppressed throughout history. It was incredibly brave (and foolhardy) for Wilde to write the story when he did, but I’m so glad he did. He saved lives with it.

 

This is why, in this horrible time in which we live, we have to keep telling queer stories, so queer young people can know they are both not alone, and inheritors of brilliance.  

 

Q: Can you say more about how you created your character Willy Hughes?

 

A: As I mentioned, I started with Wilde’s description, beautiful, arrogant, a boy actor, named Willie Hughes. From there I looked to see if there were any other clues in history, the sonnets, or elsewhere as to the nature of the boys and young men who played the female roles.

 

I looked at age, they could be anywhere from 13 to 24, depending on how pretty they looked. I wanted Hughes to be of an acceptable age for our time, since he was involved in a love story.

 

I saw that many youths came from choir lofts, and would later learn that some companies actually kidnapped young beautiful boys for the children’s acting companies, like The Children of The Chapel Royal, a children’s acting company sponsored by the Queen. (I use this detail for another character in the book).

 

Then it was all about my imagination and the voice from which I drew the other aspects of his character and back story. Willie Hughes’s voice as a narrator came to me pretty quickly and I loved how he was both arrogant and insecure as hell. He was also funny, which I appreciated.

 

He’s someone who, like me,  is very much led by his heart, so finds himself, very fortunately, having fallen into an acting career because of his longing for Shakespeare. Of course he suffers a lot because of this love.

 

This is also my story in a way, so much good in my life came from romantic heartbreaks, so it’s a theme I go back to again and again. Turning that romantic wound into art, into joy.

 

I truly adore Willie Hughes, because while deeply flawed and foolish, he’s got a huge heart, and is relentless on demanding love and all that he deserves from life.

 

Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote the novel?

 

A: Great question. I didn’t want to be barricaded into what we absolutely know, because we actually know almost nothing about Shakespeare’s life.

 

We know he was married, and he left his wife his “second best bed” and then he wrote these 154 love sonnets, 125 of which are written to a young man, and 25 to this woman with dark skin and “wiry” hair. That’s it.

 

So, I abandoned any truth telling as far as the actual biography goes, and just ran with the fact that he clearly loved this young man, and he lusted after this “dark lady,” and he did not like how the surrounding culture criticized him for how he lived his life. (At least in one sonnet he mentions this.)

 

As far as the history of play-making, the environment, the Globe et al., I read a lot of history books on Shakespeare and his times, and tried to stick with what was actually going on.

 

So there is much truth about all that, like the word “theatre” was actually taken from an actual playhouse at the time, and the art form wasn’t called that for a while. Or the fact of kidnapping young boys (legally) to act in companies sponsored by the Queen. That’s also true.

 

So I mined other author’s histories of the period and the facts of theater, the plague, and different professions a lot.

 

I do play loose and fancy free with the chronology of the plays, and the chronology of Marlowe and Shakespeare’s possible working together etc. But so did Wilde, and I might add that Shakespeare himself manipulated history, geography, and everything else to serve a play.

 

So in many ways, this novel is incredibly meta. You can see where I even play with your question in the text.

 

The biggest digression from history is the actual love stories in the novel. As I said, we can’t really know anything more than Shakespeare was married, he also loved this young man, and he also lusted/loved this dark-haired lady. Period. 

 

So the love story of the novel is  an almost total invention inspired by the sonnets, Wilde’s story, and theories by other exegetes like the writer Joseph Pequigney, whose book Such Is My Love was also a huge influence on what I knew about queerness in the sonnets.

 

So beyond just being a total fiction, I also use these loves stories in the novel as my way of exploring how all different sorts of romantic passions (new, old, requited, unrequited, short, long, lost forever) affect us, wound us, create us.  

 

Q: What do you think are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about Shakespeare’s life?

 

A: That we know it at all. That he was straight. That his love sonnets were all written to a woman – which is something we’ve actually known for over 400 years, but didn’t like to discuss, and also didn’t stop Tom Stoppard (a wonderful writer) from still using “Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day” as a love poem to Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love.  

 

This is not only an affront to the young man to whom it was really written, but to the fact that in the sonnets, the 25 written to a woman, were written to/about a woman with dark skin and “wiry” hair – possibly black, North African, Italian, who knows. (I make her North African and Armenian in my telling because that’s a big part of my own racial background.) Sorry Gwyneth, but it ain’t you. This poem was written to a dude.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: Several ideas. The one furthest along is a weird speculative love story about mannequins trying to fight for their freedom in the face of the oligarchy and redundancy. No, they do not come to life.  

 

Then there are several other ideas in different stages, including a follow up to Disco Witches et al. Who knows. I just keep writing. See what sticks. Fingers crossed the publishing world likes it.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: So much. But we all have to accept we shall forever live in ignorance for all we should know. Haha. JK. I think that’s it for now.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb