Front matter

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Shapiro, Michael. Gender In Play On the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.13834. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Part 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

Introduction I

Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England

A Brief Social History of Female Cross-Dressing 15 Male Cross-Dressing in Playhouses and Plays 29 Cross-Gender Disguise plus Cross-Gender Casting 49 Dramaturgical Variations on Variations

The Two Gentlemen of Verona 65

Doubling Cross-Gender Disguise: The Merchant of Venice 93

Layers of Disguise: As You Like It 119

Anxieties of Intimacy: Twelfth Night 143

From Center to Periphery: Cymbeline 173 Epilogue 199

Appendixes

Appendix A: Sources, Analogues, and Models 207

Appendix B: Chronological List of Plays with Heroines in Male Disguise 221

Appendix C: Legal Records of Cross-Dressing 225 Notes 235 Index 277

Introduction

Because of our own fascination with sexual identity and gender roles, contemporary scholarship has devoted considerable attention to various forms of cross-dressing in other historical periods. The period of the Shakespearean stage, roughly from 1576 to 1642, has received the lion’s share of this attention. This book traces cross-dressing as a dramaturgical motif, a theatrical practice, and a social phenomenon in early modern England. For the modern reader or spectator, the heroine in male attire involves cross-gender disguise primarily within the world of the play, where she is usually a female page. In Shakespeare’s day, a cross-dressed heroine, like any female character, also involved a gender switch in the world of the playhouse, for women’s roles were normally assigned to young male apprentices called play-boys. For many spectators, women in male disguise as pages, squires, and the like bore some relationship to women who dressed or passed as boys or men in the audience and in the larger world beyond the playhouse.

Modern scholars continue to discover that relationships between mimetic illusion, theatrical practice, and cultural trends are multifarious, subtle, and intricate. Defining the dialectic between theater and society generates lively debate, while recent studies have demonstrated the social and intellectual diversity of playhouse audiences, depicting London theatergoers as a more heterogeneous sampling of the population than previously seemed plausible.! In addition, as many performance-oriented critics have noticed, even printed texts indicate moments of scripted metatheatrical or metadramatic disruption, some of them involving the play-boy’s multiple layers of identity. In As You Like It, for example, we can almost hear him speak now as the female character, now as the assumed male persona, and occasionally in what might have passed as

S E his own voice. The task at hand is to interpret this formalistic complexity in the light of our equally complex sense of early modern attitudes toward gender and sexuality.

Much of our current theorizing about cross-dressing both on and off the stage has been based on a few well-known historical, literary, and dramatic examples, specifically on the Hic Mulier controversy and on the same handful of plays. I attempt to enlarge the body of extratextual evidence and to consider a wider sampling of texts. I have also tried to adopt a broader and more supple approach to the various forms of crossdressing, considering them in isolation and in combination, as inscribed in the dramatic texts of the period, in the practices of all-male theater troupes, and in social reality.

In approaching the topic of this book, I have learned much from and by reacting to other scholars, and I have indicated my debts and disagreements throughout the book, I fear without complete success. Three scholars whose work on the topic I have found especially helpful and challenging are Stephen Orgel, Jean Howard, and Marjorie Garber, for the insights they offer into early modern forms of cross-dressing not only draw power from efforts to redefine gender and sexuality in our own time but are grounded for the most part in historical detail.

In what promises to be the overture to a larger study, Orgel argues that England preserved its all-male acting companies as a way of containing female sexuality, a force felt to be more threatening than male homosexuality. Women were therefore kept off the stage, he suggests, so that images of women could be mediated by male performers. But as I shall argue at greater length in chapter 2, England may have been late rather than recalcitrant in introducing actresses into commercial companies. Fear of female sexuality, moreover, was common throughout Western Europe, even in countries quicker to permit the innovative practice of allotting female roles to women. Overstressing the maleness of the female impersonator has led other scholars, notably Lisa Jardine, to extrapolate the homoerotic allure of such performances into a more general audience attitude, thus narrowing the range of erotic responses even for men and making no allowance for female spectators.?

If spectators of the Shakespearean stage were like most other theater audiences we know, they probably maintained a dual consciousness of both actors and characters and hence perceived both female characters and female impersonators. What they made of that duality is far from clear, but I would imagine a range of opinions on such questions as hapiro, Michael. Gender In Play On the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. -book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.13834.

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Introduction 3 whether heroines who donned male disguise were thereby empowered to behave more assertively or whether they were confined all the more tightly in a masculine vision of the world. Such a diversity of opinion, I further suggest, would have permitted, possibly even encouraged, dramatists to experiment freely with the disguised-heroine motif.

In a recent essay, Jean Howard seems: to be assuming just such diversity as she delineates the different ways Shakespeare used cross-dressed heroines to explore power relations between the sexes: Twelfth Night strips “female crossdressing . . . of nearly all of its subversive resonances, present in the culture at large”; Portia remains “an exception that continues to provoke uneasiness”; and As You Like It “reveals the constructed nature of patriarchy’s representations of the feminine and shows a woman manipulating those representations in her own interest.”4 Howard reconstructs the range of gender politics of Shakespeare’s day and permits herself the critical flexibility to register variations of tone and attitude as texts play off and against the social context.

Howard’s differentiation among plays seems to me more useful than the generalizing tendencies of other critics, especially those who view the boy heroine/female page as an emblem of idealized androgyny. Phyllis Rackin sees such figures as Portia, Rosalind, and Viola as Shakespeare’s celebration in fantasy of a transcendent union of opposed genders.> Others regard the androgyny of the female page, whether or not the male actor is revealed at the end of the play or in the epilogue (as in As You Like It), as the invocation of an unattainable ideal that “counterbalances the play’s discovery of the polarity of the sexes.” Attributing wistful longing for idealized androgyny either to playwrights or to characters strikes me as an anachronistic reading of the play-boy/female page, for it derives more from a modern vision of complementary gender traits than from any historically plausible theatrical symbol. As William Slights has pointed out, although the androgyne could be a poetic or philosophical emblem of “unity, concord, and perpetuity” in Renaissance literature, on stage (especially when the female page was a play-boy) it tended to appear “as a mere grotesque, stripped of positive symbolic value.” Instead of abstract symbols of androgyny, the stage offered images of physical bisexuality, or hermaphroditism, which was generally regarded as monstrous.’ Jonathan Dollimore differentiates the woman who cross-dresses from the androgyne: “the transvestite represents subversive reinscription within, rather than a transcendence of, an existing order.”® On the stage, the female page was neither a grotesque hapiro, Michael. Gender In Play On the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. -book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.13834.

S E hybrid nor a static icon of androgyny, but a figure of unfused, discretely layered gender identities—play-boy, female character, male persona. Any one of them could be highlighted at a given moment because all of them were simultaneously present at some level in the spectators’ minds.

For Marjorie Garber, among others, this very fluidity of gender boundaries implied by the use of cross-gender disguise and cross-gender casting exposed the social constructedness of gender roles in the world beyond the playhouse. In her book on transvestism, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Garber argues that transvestism in general has this disruptive power, so that for her the cross-dressed heroine played by a boy actor was neither a layering nor a fusion of opposing genders, but a new category of its own in defiance of conventional categorization, and even in defiance of the very principle of binary opposition.” Garber’s argument may have important implications for epistemology but seems to me to be too abstract in its use of historical material. She makes no distinction between theatrical and social forms of cross-dressing in the period, nor does it matter to her which direction the cross-dressing takes, as crucial a difference for early modern England as for our own day.

Like Garber’s book, the work of several poststructuralists suggests that the “subversive reinscription,” or parodic effect of theatrical transvestism on conventional gender roles, undermined the stability of those roles. For Catherine Belsey, cross-dressed boy heroines italicize gender roles and so “disrupt...the system of differences on which sexual stereotyping depends,” presumably in order to expose the arbitrariness and limitations of that system. 1° Depending on a host of variables, different spectators would probably have held very different attitudes toward such disruption, ranging from hearty endorsement to guilt-edged delight to visceral horror. But Belsey’s approach disrupts not only gender distinctions but all indicators of individual identity and hence any sense that dramatic characters represent coherent illusions of individuals. Dramatic scripts thus melt into a single master play about the brittleness of all identities based on gender and status.

In contrast to Garber’s and Belsey’s view of the disruptive power of cross-gender play, Linda Woodbridge argues that the subversive potentialities of disguised-heroine plays were confined to the theater, contained there by a massive extratheatrical discourse comprising sermons, conduct manuals, moral treatises, pamphlets, and the like, all promulgating conventional understandings of the role and status of women.

hapiro, Michael. Gender In Play On the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. -book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.13834.

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Introduction 5

Woodbridge concludes that “transvestite disguise in Shakespeare does not blur the distinction between the sexes but heightens it,” presumably to reaffirm it and so to confine women in subordinate positions.'! She acknowledges that many female spectators would have challenged such orthodoxy and that plays often treated assertive women, whether or not in male disguise, with sympathy. But such treatment, she continues, represented a reaction against a dominant belief in distinct and essentialized gender roles. Whether or not these plays are direct expressions of what a patriarchal society feared and tried to suppress, Woodbridge assumes a difference between theatrical scripts and other forms of discourse. What Woodbridge and Belsey share is a sense that the dramatic heroine in male attire could stir up considerable anxiety, raise troubling questions about sexual identity and gender roles, and thus evoke lively engagement and divergent responses on the part of playgoers. But cross-dressed—heroine plays rarely provided any clear-cut answers, although the drive toward aesthetic closure, which demands undisguising and celebrates heterosexual union, often creates an impression of intellectual resolution even if little or none has been achieved.

To a certain extent play texts are a subclass of historical documents, but they also have special properties as particular kinds of material objects. They were often created by collaborating teams of writers, who derived them mainly from prose narratives and occasionally from Italian plays, a body of material that I survey in appendix A. As scripts, owned by the acting companies who paid the playwrights for them, they provided the raw material out of which the players created a theatrical production intended to provide pleasure for customers and employment for workers in a commercially oriented, mass entertainment industry. Like all such scripts, they were intended to be fleshed out in rehearsal and performance, but evidence of such realization is scanty, as is evidence of how scripts changed during long runs or after revival.

Some scripts may have taken clear-cut positions on topical matters, usually those involving controversial issues, persons, and factions under discussion outside the theater. But as recent scholarship has reminded us, politically committed plays are expressions of partisanship involving issues, persons, and factions important at the time, rather than concerns that are high on our own agendas and therefore projected back into the early modern period. '* Plays taking sides in topical controversies had the advantage of attracting like-minded spectators but must also have risked the possible loss of spectators holding different opinions. Other scripts hapiro, Michael. Gender In Play On the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. -book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.13834.

S E contain ambiguities and contradictions that may or may not have been ironed out in production, for popular mass entertainment is frequently more ideologically unstable than authentic popular culture or true coterie art. It frequently raises controversial topics in order to touch on live nerves, attract customers, provide excitement, and present itself to knowing patrons as equally au courant, but it may finally dodge or straddle the issues it raises, rather than articulate a position on them.

Although some dramatic texts were clearly polemical, the disguised-heroine plays, like most plays of the period in my view, usually acted as fields of play, that is, as arenas in which spectators could test or try on imaginary roles or respond to hypothetical situations without having to bear responsibility for their choices. It is worth remembering that such playfulness occurs in texts called plays, performed by men and boys called players in structures or spaces called playhouses, which were licensed for commercial entertainment. Located within liberties or suburbs beyond or exempt from municipal jurisdiction, the theaters of London in turn provided their own privileged minizones of licensed misrule. The boy heroine in male disguise was one of many counters used in these highly charged forms of play, in which all social roles could be exposed as inherently theatrical, nightmares and fantasies could be witnessed with impunity, and potentially disruptive energies could be safely agitated. 1? At the same time, choices made within fields of play could rehearse or help formulate attitudes to be used later in real situations, in a process Victor Turner calls the “human seriousness of play.”!*

If, as many scholars argue, ideas about sexual identity and gender roles were both highly unstable and hotly contested in early modern England, theatrical play with such figures as the cross-dressed heroine could evoke enormous anxiety and might be understood through the model of subversion and containment developed by Stephen Greenblatt.!> One of the most important tactics for containing the power of the cross-dressed heroine to excite and disturb involved self-referentiality, reminding the spectators that this female character who was assuming a false male identity was being played by a male performer. In all theatrical situations, especially on the English Renaissance stage, where nonillusionistic plays were peppered with reflexive moments, spectators’ consciousness is in flux rather than static. At any given moment, a performance of a disguised-heroine play could have emphasized any one of the three elements in the boy/girl/boy configuration without necessarily obliterating awareness of the other two. Because all coexisted hapiro, Michael. Gender In Play On the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. -book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.13834.

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Introduction 7 within the spectators’ consciousness, any one could have been played or merely flashed on the stage at a given moment.

Responses of actual spectators to these emphases must have involved highly subjective reactions, for, as our common film- and theatergoing experience tells us, different spectators respond differently to identical verbal and nonverbal cues. Nonetheless, I believe that virtually all spectators responded in some way to the layerings of gender identity, to the skillful and precise oscillations between them, and to the awareness, residual or activated, of the actor’s own identity, so that the play-boy, or rather the boy actor/female character/male disguise, conveyed an impression of depth. I call this effect theatrical vibrancy. I do not believe it is restricted to boy heroines donning male attire, but I maintain that it was encouraged by the combination of cross-gender disguise and crossgender casting and that it served to contain, by means of aestheticization, some of the potentially disruptive power of the cross-dressed heroine. In short, the strategy here was to use self-referentiality to create a sense of detachment, to use Maynard Mack’s terms, as a way of counterbalancing excessive engagement with the cross-dressed heroine. !®

What Mack’s model omits is that shifting one’s focus from the mimetic to the metatheatrical level can itself be profoundly or intensely engaging. As Robert Weimann has argued, the interplay between representational and presentational elements was itself the source of considerable theatrical vitality.!7 When audiences suddenly recalled or were reminded that the female character was played by a male performer, any aesthetic detachment was undermined by another potentially disruptive concern—that the dramatic heroine herself was being played by a cross-dressed male performer, the topic of anxious concern in antitheatrical writings of the period.

In the three chapters that constitute part 1, I explore the extradramatic sources of the theatrical excitement surrounding the disguised heroine. In chapter 1, I examine female cross-dressing in early modern England from legal, social, and literary points of view in order to understand what associations, assumptions, and attitudes theater audiences might have brought with them when they came to see a play in which a female character adopted male clothing and identity. New documentary evidence of actual cases of cross-dressing (reprinted in appendix C) reveal that women in male apparel were severely punished by London magistrates, probably because the freedom of movement afforded by cross-gender disguise allowed women to violate patriarchal norms of hapiro, Michael. Gender In Play On the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. -book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.13834.

fe female behavior. In chapter 2, I investigate the phenomenon of male cross-dressing, with special emphasis on the theatrical practice of crossgender casting. This practice was evidently acceptable to playgoers even though surrounded by controversy, for Puritans regarded it as an example of the biblically forbidden practice of transvestism, while others alleged pederasty between adult male actors and their young apprentices. In chapter 3, I look at cross-gender disguise and cross-gender casting in combination, a combination embodied in the figure of the play-boy portraying a female character who adopts male disguise. An awareness of this effect can enrich our reading of these plays, as in Middleton’s More Dissemblers Besides Women, the only play of the period to feature a pregnant female page. In this work, the heroine’s male persona kindles homoerotic desire in a buffoonish adult male character, even as her power as a cross-dressed woman is undercut by a farcical treatment of her pregnancy and the onset of labor.

Even if we accept plays like More Dissemblers as arenas for serious play, rules for particular games differed from theater to theater and changed over time. Plays featuring heroines in male disguise occur in eighty-one plays (listed in appendix B) performed during the seven decades in which commercial theater flourished in London. Playwrights and audiences could not help but respond to changing social and cultural forces over so long a time, changes that include debates over women and the triumph of smaller, indoor “private” theaters over the larger, openroofed “public” theaters. Commercial rivalry within the theater industry surely encouraged artistic competition, so that plays by different dramatists and companies may have been competing for spectators and hence responding to each other’s work in ways intended to be noticed by cognescenti in the audiences. !* This interplay of sophisticated spectators with a tradition of theatrical reflexivity demands a more complex model of play-going experience than has previously been deployed in studies of disguised-heroine plays.

In part 2, I move from the social resonances of cross-dressed heroines and from metatheatrical responses to play-boys to focus on the dramaturgical treatment of the female page. The very popularity of the motif is evidence of the power of boy heroines and female pages to generate theatrical excitement. To keep such power under control, dramatists made their audiences complicit in another game—a game depending on spectators’ ability to savor artistic innovation within a well-established tradition.

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Introduction 9

These chapters make no attempt to map the overall chronological development of this convention from the 1580s to the closing of the theaters, because the eighty-one plays by nearly forty dramatists refuse, at least at my bidding, to fall neatly into temporal patterns. Dates of performance of many plays are uncertain because some plays remained in repertory or were revived long after their original productions. It may not be clear whether a printed text reflects the original script or a revised version, as is the case with the Wars of Cyrus, probably acted between 1576 and 1580, but not published until 1594, with Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsden, first acted around 1604 but not published until 1638, and with several plays by Middleton. Even when smaller gaps exist between performance and publication of plays, questions of priority and influence remain clouded. For example, was Cymbeline, which did not appear in print until the publication of the Folio in 1623, performed before or after Philaster around 1608 or 1609? In short, uncertainties of exact performance dates preclude confident assertions about the precise evolution of the motif of the boy heroine in male disguise.

Evolutionary theories also founder because the tradition of the cross-dressed heroine is itself multiple rather than unitary and because its various strands developed in spiral rather than linear fashion. This pattern results from Shakespeare’s influence: in each of his five plays involving a cross-dressed heroine, he tried something different. He varied or complicated the motif with increasing ingenuity, and each of those experiments in turn spawned a series of imitations and extensions. Each chapter of part 2 is therefore an analysis of one of Shakespeare’s five disguised-heroine plays. I sometimes contrast the play with its sources, testing the patience of readers already familiar with those texts, in order to focus with some precision on Shakespeare’s innovative handling of the cross-dressed female characters. I also frame each of Shakespeare’s plays with a discussion of similar plays he might have known and of plays by other dramatists that complicate or develop his variations.

In chapter 4, I look at Shakespeare’s use of the cheeky page of Lylian comedy as a male persona for Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, his solution to the problem of adapting narrative sources to available theatrical models. In chapter 5, I focus on the multiplication of cross-dressed heroines in The Merchant of Venice, while in chapter 6, I study the addition of another layer of cross-gender identity, if not full disguise, when “Ganymed” pretends to be “Rosalind” in As You Like It. In chapter 7, I discuss Twelfth Night as an experiment with intimate duet scenes behapiro, Michael. Gender In Play On the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. -book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.13834.

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IO Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage tween the female page and the man “she” loves, as well as between the female page and the woman who loves “him.” (And from here on I will dispense with the quotation marks around names and pronouns, trusting the reader to follow rapid shifts of gender identity as keenly as Shakespearean spectators did). These duet scenes, innovative and subsequently imitated, enabled Shakespeare to evoke and control the audience’s anxieties over the presentation or suggestion of heterosexual intimacy by an all-male troupe. Finally, in chapter 8, I turn to Cymbeline, which Shakespeare probably wrote at least seven years after Twelfth Night. A radical departure from his previous work, Cymbeline is derived more directly from the genre of romance, where the heroine in male disguise is usually not so much a cheeky page as a frail and helpless waif.

Although I discuss Shakespeare’s five plays in the generally accepted order of composition, I try to place each of them in a chronological framework of similar plays written earlier and later. Invariably, there are precursors for each one of Shakespeare’s experiments, but I think it will become clear that he developed those ideas with even greater artistry. Similarly, most of the other dramatists I discuss were in fact elaborating or varying dramaturgical ideas that had originated or crystallized earlier in one of his plays. My purpose is not so much to argue for Shakespeare’s originality or uniqueness, but rather to accentuate his ability to follow leads suggested by other playwrights and to do so in ways that stimulated fellow dramatists. Some of these playwrights, such as Chapman and Middleton, display considerable skill and ingenuity in developing Shakespeare’s ideas, and I have no wish to sacrifice the best of their work on the altar of bardolatry.

By organizing part 2 around dramaturgical technique rather than strict chronology, I hope to clarify these intertextual links and to demonstrate how English Renaissance dramatists, like writers in many periods, rang changes on ideas they borrowed from fellow craftsmen. Each playwright doubtless took into account the company and theater he wrote for, and while I indicate the troupe that performed each play (when known), as well as its (approximate) date, it is beyond the scope of this study to compare and contrast the treatment of cross-dressed heroines in different repertories.

I hope the reader will understand and indulge two kinds of rhetorical shorthand I sometimes employ: (1) I use the language of authorial intent from time to time because I believe that demonstrable effects and probable responses were usually intended, especially by experienced hapiro, Michael. Gender In Play On the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. -book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.13834.

Introduction II commercial playwrights closely connected with professional acting companies; (2) if I also seem to ascribe full human psyches to roles that are constructed out of words, it is the result of a conviction based on modest but valued experience that the medium of theater is not words but actors. Having read those words and pondered them, the actors then use them, as well as silence and movement, to convey. illusions (however stylized) of human beings, some of whom may even be “actors” attempting to create plays-within-plays or even subtler illusions within the world of the play. At the same time, the actors were physically present in the world of the playhouse and that presence was, then as now, a part of the audience’s consciousness. This interplay between the actor as character (in or out of disguise) and the actor as actor, sometimes taking place on the stage and sometimes in the spectators’ minds, seems to me a crucial if elusive dimension of English Renaissance drama. !?

In offering imaginative reconstructions of the playboys’ performances and of audience responses to those performances, I claim no certainty but hope rather to offer plausible models of how things might have been in the past, when theatrical practices and cultural attitudes were different from what they are today. I invite readers to modify those models as they see fit in accordance with their own understandings of the theatrical history and dramatic literature of early modern England.

Part 1

Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England

Chapter 1

On June 3, 1611, Arabella Stuart escaped from “house arrest” to run off to the continent with William Seymour, the man she had secretly married against King James’s wishes nearly a year before. To evade detection she donned male attire, “disguising her selfe by drawing a pair of great French-fashioned Hose over her Petticotes, putting on a Man’s Doublet, a man-lyke Perruque with long Locks over her Hair, a blacke Hat, black Cloake, russet Bootes with red Tops, and a Rapier by her Syde.”! She was able to get aboard a French ship and was halfway across the Channel before she was overtaken by a pursuing English vessel. She was recaptured and lodged in the Tower of London.

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Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage

About this book

Front matter

Part 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Introduction

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Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage

About this book

Front matter

Part 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Introduction

Chapter 1

The end

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