The Ethiop's Jewel Meets Euphoria's Jules: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in an HBO Appropriation of Shakespeare

A brief moment in Sam Levinson's 2019 HBO television series Euphoria reveals Shakespearean drama's complex persistence in twentyfirst-century media culture and its representations of race, gender, and sexuality. Midway through the show's first season, the transgender teen Jules, played by transgender actress Hunter Schafer, attends a Halloween party inspired by the Capulets' ball in Baz Lurhmann's 1996 film, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. She is dressed—how else?—as Claire Danes's Juliet, angel wings and all. At the party, Jules involves her recovering drug-addict girlfriend, played by biracial actress Zendaya, in a re-enactment of Danes's and Leonardo DiCaprio's famous underwater kiss in the "balcony" scene, which Luhrmann relocates to a pool in the Capulets' courtyard. In presenting a transgender teen using Shakespeare's Juliet to assert her gender identity, Levinson offers an unusual opportunity to consider how the contemporary trans experience might challenge traditional understandings of the male-female binary in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Yet despite the forward-looking gender politics of this appropriation of Shakespeare's text and Luhrmann's iconography, the racializing light-dark binary through which the play fashions transgressive desire troublingly endures.

Rather than proceed chronologically through the play, the film, and the television show's allusion to that film, I begin with Euphoria as a lens through which we may apprehend Romeo and Juliet and its role in our culture anew. I thus engage W.B. Worthen's assertion that performance does not simply interpret but "reconstitutes the text" (1097), as well as Nicholas Radel's analysis of race and sexuality in Luhrmann's adaptation. Through his discussion of Harold Perrineau's Black, transvestite Mercutio in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Radel persuasively shows how "Luhrmann's film helps reveal the (history of the) critical reception of Romeo and Juliet as a racist, heteronormative one" as it "establishes an intriguing dialectic with Shakespeare's play, reading it, reading us, reading it" (18, 21).

Euphoria's reference to Luhrmann, which does not present itself as a performance of the play and, moreover, does not identify Jules's costume the way it explicitly glosses other costumes' references to classic movie characters, further complicates this dialectic between text and performance. By seeming to evade its textual origin, the allusion appears to bypass what L. Monique Pittman argues is an additional dialectic in Shakespeare adaptations between "attribut[ing] authority to the masterpoet as a means of validating the adaptive project" and "assert[ing] the modern creator as independent agent with the power to configure Shakespeare's status anew" (1). In the "teen Shakespeare" subgenre, within which Pittman includes Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, "Shakespeare exists… both as the outdated and moribund object of contemporary renovation and as a universal, enduring, and timeless source of unassailable cultural authority" (99).¹

In not naming Shakespeare, however, but in assuming his recognizability, Euphoria may actually amplify the playwright's cultural capital. But what about the possibility that Shakespeare may not be recognized, especially by a teenaged audience? To explore how Euphoria grapples with both possibilities, it is first necessary to flesh out the TV series's fictional world that appears, at first glance, to be quite far "without Verona walls" (3.3.17).

"This world that's changing every day": Jules's Juliet in context(s)

Not unlike Luhrmann's address to the 1990s MTV generation in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Euphoria, which premiered in June 2019, markets itself as a cutting-edge representation of twenty-first-century high school life "in a world of drugs, sex, trauma, and social media." Executive producer Sam Levinson, who wrote all eight episodes of the first season, hails his adolescent audience with the website tagline, "How do you navigate this world that's changing every day?" (Euphoria).

While race is conspicuously left off the list of hot-button issues from Euphoria's marketing materials and is not overtly addressed in the first five installments, the series's cast, if not its writers' room—Levinson is [End...