Shakespeare Was Gay: On Allen Bratton’s “Henry Henry”
Allen Bratton | Henry Henry | Unnamed Press | April 2024 | 350 Pages
Even if you haven’t read Shakespeare since high school, you probably remember Prince Hal. He’s in his twenties. He drinks too much. He’s charming, funny, full of potential. He’s throwing his life away, but he has a plan: he’s going to get his shit together, and everyone will be so impressed when it finally happens.
Prince Hal is still on his way there when we meet him in Henry Henry: hungover at Mass and trying not to vomit up the Host. Hal, our lord of perpetual repentance, is not so much a lapsed Catholic as a constantly lapsing one. The book has barely gotten started when he’s in church again, confessing to all the sins he’s accumulated in between services. As the therapist he doesn’t have, but greatly needs, might say: he’s stuck in a toxic cycle.
Rather than attempt to teleport the feudal politics of Shakespeare’s “Henriad”—the four-play cycle following the reigns of Kings Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V—into 2014 London, in Henry Henry, Allen Bratton transposes its cast of characters onto the modern era, imagining how they might respond to the indignities of moldy leftovers, anal douching, and internships. In Henry IV, Part 1, for example, Harry Percy (aka Hotspur) is the fiery young standard-bearer for a noble, if doomed, rebellion. In Henry Henry, his self-righteousness manifests differently. Still a scion of the landed gentry, he’s now also a bisexual aspiring prime minister with a blundering enthusiasm for feminism and Edward Saïd.
In Bratton’s rendition, Percy’s family still has their ancestral grouse moor, but the intervening centuries have been rough on Hal and his forebears. Imprisoned and stripped of much of their wealth during England’s transition to Protestantism, the Lancasters are not nearly as rich as they think they should be. Hal is no longer a prince—just a duke-to-be. And it doesn’t help that Bratton has taken away everyone’s armies. This produces an existential anomie for these aristocrats so pervasive that the only thing they seem to be able to do about it is cocaine.
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Henry Henry, Allen Bratton’s first novel, is also the first editorial acquisition of Brandon Taylor, preeminent campus novelist and apostle of messy gay sex, who has been calling for years to “put characters back in bodies.” More graphically, in his essay on “character vapor,” Taylor writes that “when the world demands of them a pound of flesh, we must watch them carve it from the fat of their thigh and offer it.” Here, Hal fulfills that request, as his God seemingly created him only to suffer. Ailments and indignities accumulate: puke, cum, shit, crusty takeout containers, perforated septa, the flu, minor gunshot wounds. The physicality of the text makes it impossible not to notice when Hal slips out of his body. It also helps to explain those slippages. Why would anyone want to exist when existing is so unbearable?
Fear not, for Henry Henry mostly avoids soliciting sympathy for dukes-to-be. Like Shakespeare’s prince, Hal can be cruel on purpose and crueler by accident, both an aristocrat and a victim of the aristocracy: a system that has fewer victims than it used to and so has turned on itself in an act of malignance.
Recently graduated from Oxford, Hal has been spending his time drinking “and avoiding his father” when the latter—widowed for years—announces his engagement to chic Jeanne. This time around, he’s marrying for money. The wedding forces the atomized family to actually spend time together for the first time in a long time, with generally disastrous consequences. Hal is the eldest of six and a terrible example. His drug problem aside, he bullies waiters and talks shit about his supposed friends; he embraces Catholicism but also has lots of gay sex.
As in Henry IV parts 1 and 2, in Henry Henry, Hal commits many of those sins in the company of old, fat, filthy-minded Jack Falstaff, his old friend and favorite bad influence. Few of Shakespeare’s original scenes have perfect parallels in Henry Henry, with one prominent exception: the famous play-within-a-play, where Falstaff impersonates Hal’s disgruntled father, the eponymous Henry IV. But in Bratton’s version, Hal is bent over Jack Falstaff’s knee, pants unbuttoned, when he tells Jack to roleplay as his dad.
2014 Falstaff is a washed-up actor with underwhelming talents. So, as in Henry IV, when the flagellation Jack offers proves insufficiently convincing, Hal takes over the role of the affronted father, ranting about AIDS-infected gays, the Church of England, and how disappointed he is in the man his eldest has become. It’s a surprisingly thorough introduction to the elder Henry’s neuroses for a scene that ends in an orgasm.
This Henry, a psoriasis-ridden hypochondriac, lives alone in the shabby grandeur of a Belgravia townhouse. That house is Hal’s “body outside of his body,” Bratton writes, “and if he had a choice not to go into his body, he wouldn’t do that either.” But choice doesn’t play a role in it. When Henry freezes his son’s bank account to force Hal into a visit, Hal spends a day and a night drinking himself into oblivion with the money he can still scrounge together, and then, in the morning, moves toward the Belgravia house “like he would move toward the stench of something dead, certain of what he would find and pleading with himself to overcome the impulse to find it.”
Hal doesn’t talk about his father’s sexual abuse. It’s the kind of thing that exists outside of language. Only once did he tell a priest, as a teenager, and when the priest told him he was being hurt, Hal was furious: he wanted to be assigned penance, not told it wasn’t his fault. Even years later, he’s far more comfortable being called a sinner than a victim. He used to be a good boy, succeeding at Catholic boarding school “through a conformity so painful he might as well have been breaking his bones to fit through a too-narrow passage.” But even as he now does his level best to disappoint his father during most of his waking days and nights, he lapses into that old obedience when they’re face-to-face, too dissociated to imagine resisting.
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In Henry IV, Part 1, Shakespeare’s prince is prone to a similar reflexive obedience to Bratton’s Hal, speaking in prose with his good-for-nothing friends but switching to a sophisticated, webby verse when summoned before the king. This is the true Hal, Shakespeare tells us, and the bad-boy act is strategic: “My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,” the prince says, “Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes/ Than that which hath no foil to set it off.”
It’s kind of a bummer to see Prince Hal fulfill his potential. The miscreant’s playful prose is more entertaining than the formal speeches of his lordly alter ego, and the unreformed prince has more charm than the King Henry V he’s destined to become. Henry Henry doubles down on this tension, altogether rejecting the future that Shakespeare’s play preordains. Even if all the drinking and troublemaking is difficult to watch, submission to the expectations of dukedom would clearly constitute a more devastating and permanent self-destruction than rebellion.
For heirs of the aristocracy, adulthood promises fortune but produces no autonomy. There is no coming of age, there is only waiting for your father to die so you can fill his shadow. How can Hal resist his father’s abuse when he’s “literally made of Henry’s sperm,” “allowed life only on the condition of total obedience”? “He wasn’t a man,” Bratton writes, “he was Henry’s son.”
By the end of Shakespeare’s Henriad, Hal fulfills the obligations of the prodigal-son archetype, casting off his unworthy associates and surpassing his father. But what if Hal’s dissolution is an appropriate response to the dissolution of the aristocracy? He spends his life trying to piss off his father, and perhaps, Bratton proposes, the elder Henry deserved it all along.
All of this might be unbearable if Henry Henry weren’t also a love story. In Shakespeare, Henry IV finally stops telling Prince Hal to act more like Harry Percy when Percy goes to war against him. In Henry Henry, Percy stops being Henry’s go-to comparison at about the same time he starts fucking Hal.
There’s a lot of sex in in this novel—hot, filthy, and often plagued by shame. Hal, understandably, feels little ownership over his own body. “I’ll tell you to stop if I want you to,” he says to Percy at one point: It’s a lie. Hal will be turned on in one moment, and in the next hyper-aware of the “obscene” merging of “the closed and private systems of their individual bodies,” dissociation turning desired encounters into grotesquerie.
By the end of the book, we do see what redemption might look like for Hal—if only for a moment. He’s been compared all his life to his uncle, whom the family hates for not dying of AIDS quickly enough, and has generally ignored his widower Edward’s friendly overtures, too uncomfortable to get too close. But after getting into a fistfight at his father’s wedding, with nowhere else to go, Hal finds himself driving through the middle of the night to his uncle’s old seaside cottage, where instead of hell, he finds Edward and his new lover in a commoner’s Eden, one that has been persisting quietly for years.
Hal doesn’t stay here long before he returns to London, where he breaks up with Percy (it was inevitable). One night, he gets another one of those calls from his father, who is as usual sick, lonely, afraid of death. He has taken enough sleeping pills this time that he might actually die. Hal cares for his father’s unconscious, vulnerable body as you would a corpse: washing the blood from his wounds, clipping his fingernails, combing his hair. When the sun comes up, Henry is still alive, but Hal has glimpsed a world without his father in it. It’s a glimpse that finally eases the novel’s claustrophobia.
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If you are deeply offended by Bratton’s decision to adapt Shakespeare’s historical masterworks into a novel about incest, addiction, and fucking, consider what he was up against. Would-be adapters of Mark Twain, Mark Seybold has written, “are left to reckon with the sobering task of reanimating the signature characters of a technical virtuouso [sic],” one who “shits better sentences than most of us craft.” Shakespeare’s adapters, who range from film producers to playwrights to contemporary novelists, have always faced similar trials. The prevailing goal of making the story “relevant” for contemporary consumers quickly runs into an existential problem—that Shakespeare’s language, not his stories, have kept his work vital. Notoriously, he plagiarized the plots of many of his comedies and dramas; the histories were ripped mostly from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Where Shakespeare did improve on his source material, many of his storylines have become overfamiliar in the intervening centuries, and often remain so, even when dropped into a contemporary context.
One strategy the contemporary reteller may employ, as codified by fanfiction writers, is to offer something to the plot that is mostly new. A successful alternate-universe story, as Henry Henry is, should start the characters in a familiar scenario and then let them run wild. Rather than disavow his indebtedness to fanfiction, Bratton embraces its fluidity, as well as other tropes from the tradition such as “slash” (writing two male characters into a sexual relationship) and “enemies-to-lovers” (exactly what it sounds like). Hal and Percy’s clever, cutting exchanges produce a frenemies dynamic that is all the more satisfying for having been done before.
Bratton’s depiction of sexual abuse is a riskier example of his tendency to make every relational thread in Shakespeare’s plays as literal and explicit as possible. At the same time, he ultimately complicates the immersive allure of what Parul Sehgal has called the trauma plot. If Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life found dramatic tension in increasingly lurid reveals of the main character’s tortured past, there is little mystery and no intrigue about what exactly Hal’s father is doing to him. For all Bratton’s attention to the suffocating nature of trauma, he pays just as careful attention to moments prefiguring the possibility of escape from it.
At times, those moments seem few and far between. Certain settings and bodily experiences recur throughout the novel, producing a choking sense of déjà vu. Hal rides the bus. Hal vomits. Hal shits. Hal snorts coke. Hal snorts so much coke that his nose bleeds. Hal goes to Mass. Didn’t we read this part already?
But then there are Bratton’s visceral descriptions of physical pleasure: Hal and his siblings jumping in a freezing pond, high on MDMA, the night before their father’s remarriage; Percy kissing Hal “like an anteater probing into a promising mound of dirt,” and Hal enjoying it; the venial pleasures of an early-morning cigarette and the far more damning pleasures of being consensually sexually debased by a boyfriend who loves you. Through Percy, Hal begins to glimpse the alternate futures of which he has been deprived. The heir to an oil fortune, Percy can nevertheless not only recognize that he wants love but also ask for it. “I know where I was born,” he tells Hal. “But I want to go somewhere else.”
Henry spent years telling his son to be more like Harry Percy. In the end, as in Shakespeare’s plays, he was right—he should be—but not in the way his father envisions. Percy, in his stupid, innocent optimism, doesn’t inspire Hal to be a better son and heir to his father. Instead, he shows Hal a way to exist as something other than a son; how to exist as his own man, as a beloved man.
To say that Henry Henry offers a vision of queer healing as well as queer suffering is not to say that Hal heals, but that he begins to see that disinheriting the past may be possible. It’s a fragile possibility, but one that offers a kind of hope—not only to Hal, but also to the worst of us sinners.