Interior (The Rape) by Edgar Degas
Those of you around Atlanta most likely know of a little place called The Shakespeare Tavern. A Globe-influenced building located amongst a sea of asphalt and clubs, it is now the only Shakespeare Company in the country to have completed all of the plays in Shakespeare’s canon, all 39. Imagine their dismay when they discovered, soon after completing the last play, that recent canon’s occasionally include a play of oft-disputed origin titled Double Falsehood. In order to maintain their status and please audiences, they decided to produce a short run of the play, which no one in the company truly believes to be written by Shakespeare.
As my friend Jessica and I are both Shakespeare lovers and avid Tavern attendees, we could not miss the opportunity to see this phenomenon. Keep in mind that Jessica and I both work with Meet Justice full-time, trying to raise awareness of human trafficking. We sat down at our table to begin our evening, when I picked up the program to read a synopsis of Double Falsehood, as neither Jessica nor I had learned about the play previously. The first paragraph was fairly innocuous and rather typically Shakespearean as far as plot: son runs away from father, son needs money and sends his servant to obtain it from said father, father contrives plan to force son to return, nothing terribly special.
When I reached the second paragraph, I let out an audible exclamation of surprise and dismay. This play was about rape. And not only was one of the main plot points centered around the son raping a maiden, his justification afterwards was as follows: “Afterward, confronting his guilty conscience over his ‘brutal violence,’ Henriquez [the son] tries to convince himself that his act wasn’t a rape, with the feeble rationalization that Violante [the girl] did not cry out, however much she struggled physically” (emphasis added). At the time, I had just finished writing an article that addressed some of the myths of rape, and the argument used by Henriquez is one that is still often used by men today.
I immediately grabbed Jessica and read her the passage. We gazed at each other in dismay, was there no place we could go where we were not faced with an issue that involved our work? Was not even The Shakespeare Tavern exempt from this world?
We managed to stick it out and made it to the end of the not quite satisfactory play. The only way we were able to handle it was because of the ridiculous atmosphere the player’s intentionally lent to the words (think 18th century Spanish soap opera). Their attitude to the words, which they were convinced were not Shakespeare’s, allowed us to obtain enjoyment from the experience as a whole.
Afterwards, the director was standing by, shaking hands and saying hello to those who passed. Jessica and I went to him and introduced ourselves and began to discuss the play and its contents- including the rape and ensuing rationales. We explained to him our work and he gazed at us with compassion as he apologized for the play’s theme. He said they actually had to leave out the epilogue, as it was even more offensive and actually had the rape victim Violante apologizing to Henriquez for the rape. They knew they just could not end the play with such a scene. He congratulated us on our work and we moved on, allowing others to comment as they wished.
What really got to me was the argument made by Henriquez. As a most –likely 18th century play, it simply shocked me that, 200 years later men are still using the same arguments. “She never actually said no, that must mean she wanted it,” or “her protestations are really just a way of her saying yes,” and so on. I can’t believe these attempts at justification have lasted for at least 200 years, and some people actually accept them as viable. It is mind boggling.
This was just one of many experiences proving that once you are involved in the anti-trafficking movement, you run into it literally everywhere. One of my favorite TV show’s spring finale was concerned solely with human trafficking, I’ll see billboards advertising “massage parlors” in ways that you can tell they are really brothels. The songs on the radio, the books that I read, and the movies in the theater (take Sucker Punch, for example), almost everything seems to be connected to this issue in one way or another. This is not a job that you can leave at the office when you head home; it literally invades your life.
