Where Would you Fit the Coconuts? The Reinstatement of Sexual Stereotypes in a Mock-Biopic

On 9 May 2016, at the height of the “Shakespeare 400” celebrations, BBC proposed the first instalment of what was destined to become an extremely fortunate series: The Upstart Crow, a mock-biopic of William Shakespeare written by Ben Elton and starring some of the best comic actors of British television. The series would run for two more years, for a sum total of 20 episodes; at the same time, Elton wrote another Shakespeare biopic, if a more elegiac one – All is True (2018), directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also played the lead. The timing of The Upstart Crow was impeccable: not only did the series appear at a moment in which the planet was united in celebrating one of the world’s literary geniuses; it was also riding on the back of a surprisingly high number of academic and semi-fictional biographies, partly motivated by the two anniversaries (2014 and 2016) which had increased the always high interest in the playwright. These biographies had not only re-opened ancient controversies on Shakespeare’s life and on the authorship of the play, but also called into question the very nature of biography as a genre. In spite of the relatively scant information on Shakespeare’s life, therefore, The Upstart Crow could meet the audience at many different levels and work on the assumption that the composition of the individual plays was closely interlaced to different biographical phases; at the same time, it could rely on the audience being familiar, at least at a superficial level, with Shakespeare and his work for the theatre. Like other films based on Shakespeare’s life, such as Shakespeare in Love, this series could send different messages: for the academic audience, or the lovers of Shakespeareana, it would resurrect and play with ancient myths, half-forgotten characters, and tread the thin line between historical characters and theatrical personae; for the television-loving audience, it could mock staples of British TV sit-com and evoke facile comparisons with contemporary issues, from Brexit to the general disarray of the British public transport. The present paper explores a rather delicate issue of The Upstart Crow, that is, its treatment of racial and sexual stereotypes. The mixture of the academic and the populist mentioned above makes such allusions especially difficult to deal with, since they are not located within a firm ideological agenda, but rather feed on the ambiguity that pervades the whole series. The series in fact tends to rely on the audience’s complaisance – given its overall tone of mockery of one of England’s great national myths – in order to allow for the presentation of stereotypes that might be unacceptable elsewhere. I will therefore discuss, in this context, the ideological compromise that is often imposed by the very genre of mock-biopic.