Stephen Orgel, Impersonations; The performance of gender in Shakespeare's England

Stephen Orgel, Impersonations; The performance of gender in Shakespeare’s England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996

For two of my four years at the Horace Mann School for Boys in New York in the late 1940s, transvestite theatre was an unproblematic reality. Like several other members of the Drama Club, I regularly played both male and female roles, with no sense that any stigma was attached to performing as a woman. This is how the Drama Club had always operated; but in my junior year, in 1948, the policy suddenly changed: for Our Town and The Man Who Came to Dinner we brought in actresses from a nearby girls’ school,… (Preface, xiii)

Had boys started to refuse to dress as women? Not at all, he assured me; nothing had happened: “I just didn’t think it was a good idea.” But why not? His first answer was clearly an evasion: the boys simply couldn’t do it convincingly. … the explanation I had, I suppose, been waiting to hear: “It was turning the boys into pansies.” … Five years earlier what the school would have considered dangerous to the morals of American adolescent boys was precisely the presence of women at close quarters, … (xiv)

Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women? … The matter has generally been disposed of by observing that the English were used to an all-male stage from generations of university productions and mystery plays, the latter performed by the all-male craft guilds, and that the appearance of women on stage was forbidden because it was felt in the Renaissance to compromise their modesty. …French, Spanish and Italian society was just as familiar with academic and guild performances, and quite as deeply concerned with female virtue as England was, and none banned actresses form the public stage. … The English equation of actresses with whores was also common in France and Italy, but this was not seen as an impediment to their performing in plays. Spain provides an even more striking parallel. Spanish morality was far more restrictive of [1] women’s behavior than English morality was; nevertheless, actresses appeared on Spanish stages with the explicit approval of both civil and ecclesiastical authorities—as did, moreover, transvestite boys. The problem of female chastity was sufficiently resolved, officially at least, in French and Spanish theatres merely by requiring that the actresses be married. (1-2)

There were, to be sure, countries besides England that proscribed women from the public stage—for example the Netherlands, and certain areas of Protestant Germany. But here it was theatre itself that was felt to be morally dangerous, … In these societies, the solution was to dispense with the public stage entirely—actors were no more tolerable than actresses. (2)

But to set the matter up as a question—why did the English stage take boys for women?—is in a sense to misrepresent it. The question conceals (and may, indeed, be a way of concealing) important prior and more basic issues. What is the relation between the construction of gender on the stage—any stage—and in society at large; why has the uniqueness of gender construction on the English stage never seemed problematic until now; and—perhaps even more substantive—what would qualify for us as an adequate explanation? (2)

Indeed, to set the matter up as a question at all presupposes that there is an answer; but to answer a question so narrowly conceived is to close it off, and thereby to trivialize it. (2)

There are many possible kinds of answers, but they all lead to more questions; and ultimately it is the openness of the question, and the ambiguities and ambivalences of the two cultural situations—Renaissance and [2] contemporary—generating it, that we must address. I am, then, not undertaking to answer a question but to raise one; to address an exfoliating cultural issue of which we can give many kinds of accounts, but none sufficient to settle the matter, for the matter is a process that is still going on. (2-3)

There were many polemical debates in England about the dangers to public morality of transvestite boy actors; but none that argued in favor of the introduction of women as an alternative. That part of the issue was not in question. (3)

…is it true that women never appeared on the English stages? The claim, to begin with, can relate only to the public theatre; women commonly appeared as dancers in court masques throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, … it is that the performer’s [3] amateur status made the whole differences: … there was no stigma whatever attached to women performing in plays, so long as they did not do it as a profession. (3-4)

Glynne Wickham cites the records of the London Lord Mayor’s Shows in which payments to several women who took roles in the entertainments of 1523 and 1534 are recorded—there were in London in the early sixteenth century professional women performers who were hired to appear in public entertainments. Wickham goes on to deduce what should be an important inference from these data: that “in the Middle Ages and in Tudor times women could and did perform both as amateurs and professionals… (4)

So until the 1530s, at least, women seem to have performed unproblematically in guild and civic theatrical productions. The evidence for actresses on the English stage is not, however, limited to pre-Elizabethan times. I myself found two women apparently routinely performing professionally as theatrical singers in 1632. [5] … are they basically anomalies or the tip of an iceberg? (5-6)

Sophie Tomlinson points out that the word “actress” as a term for a stage player was first used of Queen Henrietta Maria in her court plays; Tomlinson persuasively argues that it was through the continuing acrimonious debate over women on the Whitehall stage that the naturalization of the actress took place. When the theatres reopened in 1660, the introduction of women on the public stage was accomplished without objection. (6)

We know, for example, that Italian companies performed in Elizabethan England from time to time, and Italian companies always included women; (7)

…we are not justified in assuming, therefore, either that because Coryat did not see women on stage in England, he could not have done so, or that because Coryat did not see them, nobody did. (7)

It is clear, then, that foreign actresses were acceptable on the [7] English public stage, at least from time to time. (7-8)

…Moll Frith, the model for Middleton’s and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, gave a solo performance at the Fortune in 1611. I shall return to this; here, it is sufficient to point out that she did so at a major London theatre before an audience that bought tickets to see her, and without interference from the authorities. Nor was this a unique insistence: Richard Madox recorded that in 1583 he “went to the theatre to see a scurvie play set out al by one virgin”—the actress pleased him no better than the play, and he left before the end. How special are these cases? (8)

…Richard Vennar’s phantom England’s Joy. Vennar was a theatrical entrepreneur, clearly of considerable ingenuity. In 1602 he advertised a pageant play to be performed at the Swan celebrating English history and culminating in the reign of Queen Elizabeth… the major attraction of the production was that the roles to be “acte only by certain gentlemen and gentlewomen of account.” The promise of seeing both women and gentry on stage sold a large number of tickets; but when the time came, Vennar was found to have decamped with the receipts, and there was no play—and doubleness had been one. / If advertising women performers was an effective way of selling tickets, public opinion was obviously not averse to such a spectacle. (8)

Obviously our evidence does not support any blanket claim that women were [8] excluded from the stages of Renaissance England, but it may certainly indicate that the culture, and the history that descends from it, had an interest in rendering them unnoticeable. (9)

…the male public theatre represents a uniquely English solution to the universal European disapproval of actresses. (10)

The theatre was a place of unusual freedom for women in the period; foreign visitors comment on the fact that English women go to theatre unescorted and unmasked, and a large proportion of the audience consisted of women. The puzzle here would be why a culture that so severely regulated the lives of women in every other sphere suspended its restrictions in the case of theatre. (10)

…theatrical representations—whether of women or men or anything else—also depended for their success to a significant degree on the receptiveness of women. … we see dramatic depictions of women in Elizabethan drama that we consider degrading, … The depictions must at the very least represent cultural fantasies, and women are implicated in them as well as men. (11)

…Italian troupes, which were family affairs and always included women, visited England from time to time and performed not only at court but throughout the country. When such performances took place in conjunction with royal progresses, and therefore under the queen’s patronage, theatre became an extension of the court; … What they apparently did not see was English women on the professional stage: the distinction they maintained was not between men and women but between “us” and “them”—what was appropriate for foreigners was not appropriate for the English, and women on display became increasingly associated with Roman Catholicism. (11)

…there are lots of Others, and Others of many kinds, in this theatre; in fact, Elizabethan drama is often dependent on otherness. Comedies are Italian, French or provincial, tragedies Spanish or Scandinavian or ancient; pastorals programmatically take place Somewhere Else. Dekker, Jonson and Middleton, placing comedies in contemporary London, are recognized as doing something new. The Other, for this theatre, is as much foreign as female… (12)

…wooing scene in George Wilkins’ play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607). … Scar: Prithee tell me: are you not a woman? / Clare: I know not that neither, till I am better acquainted with a man. / Scar: And how would you be acquainted with a man? Clare: To distinguish betwixt himself and myself. / Scar: Why, I am a man. / Clare: That’s more than I know, sir. / Scar: To approve that I am no less, thus I kiss thee. / Clare: And by that proof I am a man too, for I have kissed you. ….women are defined in this culture by their relation to men, yet the distinctions of gender are fluid and unclear. (13)

Elizabethan children of both sexes were dressed in skirts until the age of seven or so; the “breeching: of boys was the formal move out of the common gender of childhood, which was both female in appearance and largely controlled by women, … This event was traditionally the occasion for a significant family ceremony. (15)

…the translation of the inseparable friend into the dangerous rival, and of the chaste wife into a whore, is implicit in the fantasy, its worst-case scenario, so to speak, replicating the situation Shakespeare had imagined with such detailed intensity in the Dark Lady sonnets. This is the consequence of women entering the world of male friendship. And when Leontes retreats from it he is retreating not only from women and sex… (17)

Marriage is a dangerous condition in Shakespeare. We are always told that comedies end in marriages, and that this is normative. A few of Shakespeare’s do, but the much more characteristic Shakespearean conclusion comes just before the marriage, and sometimes, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Twelfth Night, with an entirely unexpected delay or postponement. Plays that continue beyond the point where comedy ends, with the old fogies defeated and a happy marriage successfully concluded, depict the condition as utterly disastrous: Romeo and Juliet, Othello. Perhaps this is really the Shakespearean norm. Most Shakespearean marriages of longer duration are equally disheartening, with shrewishness, jealousy and manipulativeness the norm in comedy, and real destructiveness in tragedy: [17] … This is the dark side of the culture’s institutionalization of marriage and patriarchy—what is striking is how little of the bright side Shakespeare includes. All the fun is in the wooing; what happens after marriage, between husbands and wives, parents and children, is a subject for tragedy. (17-18)
…a significant group of plays require the woman to become a man for the wooing to be effected. The dangers of women in erotic situations, whatever they may be, can be disarmed by having the women play men, just as in the theatre the dangers of women on the stage (whatever they may be) can be disarmed by having men play the women. The interchangeability of the sexes is, on both the fictive and the material level, an assumption of this theatre. (18)

…difference between the sexes? On Shakespeare’s stage it is a difference we would regard as utterly superficial, a matter of costumes and mannerisms; nevertheless, the superficies produce a difference that is absolute—gender disguises in this theatre are represented as all but impenetrable. (18)

Some Like It Hot… Ours is a theatre of named, known, and (most important for the purposes of this argument) gendered actors; to be seriously deceived by cross-gendered disguising is for us deeply disturbing, … The Crying Game… (19)

Sex for us the bottom line, the ultimate truth of gender. / Or so we claim. Nevertheless, a modern father who urges his timid son to “be a man” is perfectly comprehensible, despite the fact that this commonplace exhortation assumes that masculinity is achieved not through biology but through an effort of will. We are fully the heirs of the Renaissance in this: Early Modern moralists continually reminded their charges that manhood was not a natural condition but a quality to be striven for and maintained only through constant vigilance, and even them with the utmost difficulty. There has always been a crucial behavioral element to gender that has nothing to do with the organs of generation. (19)

Gynecological treatises offered widely variant accounts of etiology of gender, often concurrently and without any determination as to their [19] relative likelihood, but the most persistent line of medical and anatomical thought from the time of Galen had cited homologies in the genital structure of the sexes to show that male and female were versions of the same unitary species. In this view of sexuality, the female genitals were simply the male genitals inverted, and carried internally rather than externally. Sexual experience was conceived orgasm but ejaculate, … (20)

In this version of anatomical history, we all begin as female, and masculinity is a development out of and away from femininity. Logically, therefore, the medical literature from Roman times onward confirms the theory by recording numerous cases of women completing the physiological process and turning into men under the pressure of some great exertion or excitement. (20)

Helkiah Crooke, whose Mikrokosmographia (1615) was the most compendious English synthesis of Renaissance anatomical knowledge, provides a striking testimony to the ambiguities of the science of gender in the period. Writing for an audience of physicians, Crooke presents a detailed discussion of the homological sex thesis, which he accepts with minor reservations, and then follows it with an entirely contradictory thesis in which women are not inverted versions of men at all, but are genuinely different and have their own kind of perfection, providing the human animal with substance and nurture, as the male provides it with form. Both theories have a long history of authority behind them; both derive ultimately from Aristotle, though the homological argument was associated principally with Galen. Thus, in a chapter on the male genitals, Crooke explains women as in complete men: … ‘a woman is so much less perfect then a man by how much her heat is less and weaker then his; yet…is this imperfection turned unto perfection, because without the woman, mankind could not have been perfected by the perfecter sex.’ / But fifty pages farther on Crooke is flatly denying the homology of male and female organs. (21)

The ambiguity is in no way unusual in the period, nor is the fact that Crooke sees no need to reconcile the conflicting scientific arguments. He has, in effect, one theory when his attention is focused on men, another when it is focused on women; … the relevance of evidence is a function of the thesis being argued, not the other way round. … But Renaissance arguments rarely work in a way that seems to us neat and logical. Both theories are authoritative, each has its utility in explicating some part of the subject; each is produced not in the abstract, as part of a synthesis of gender theory, but at the appropriate moment in a discussion of physiology and behavior. (22)

In the same way Sir Thomas Browne, like Crooke a practicing physician, was on the one hand empirically persuaded of the absolute distinction between the sexes. …and this leads him to a plea to maintain the separation of the genders in [22] society: “transplace not their Proprieties and confound not their Distinctions. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica he asserts that his empirical knowledge of anatomy has convinced him that Galen was wrong about the male and female organs being inverted versions of each others, … Against this utter conviction of the integrity and immutability of the genders, however, we find the equally complete assurance of this passage from the same chapter of Pseudodoxia Epidemica: / ‘As for the mutation of sexes, or transition into one another, we cannot deny it in Hares, it being observable in Man. For hereof beside Empedocles or Tiresias, there are not a few examples: and through very few, or rather none which have emasculated or turned into women, yet very many who from an esteem or reality of being women have infallibly proved Men…’ Women are totally different from the men from before the moment of birth, even in the womb, and their genital organs “admit not of protrusion,” yet the possibility of their transformation into men goes without saying. The only sticking point is the question of whether the process can be reversed, and men turn into women; it is this that is judiciously declared to be, if not impossible, at least so rare as to be negligible (they are “very few, or rather none”). Those transformations that are attested to as scientific fact only work in one direction, from female to male, which is conceived to be upward, … (23)

As for the other part of Helkia Crooke’s convictions about gender, in which women are not versions of men develop in [23] their own way and are equally complete beings, it sounds like a blow for freedom, but for all its air of empiricism and modern good sense, it is no more advanced scientifically than the homological theory: both ultimately derive their authority from Aristotle, … In any case, the denial of female imperfection implied little that was beneficial to women within the structures of Renaissance authority; women were still, by nature, firmly ensconced below men in the hierarchy. Throughout the age, and despite the increasing evidence provided by the study of anatomy, outside the professional scientific community homology remained the predominant theory—as, for example, in The Roaring Girl the transvestite Moll Cutpurse is accounted for by explaining that “her birth began / Ere she was all made” : both her femininity and her desire to be male are functions of her incompleteness. (23-24)

Renaissance ideology had a vested interested in defining women in terms of men; the aim is thereby to establish the parameters of maleness, not of womanhood. This is why Crooke abandons the homological thesis when he turns to the specific of the female anatomy; to define the nature of women, it is not useful. (24)

Most of the scholastic opinion codified by Ian Maclean in The Renaissance Notion of Women assumes the correctness of the homological thesis, but nevertheless stresses the differences between men and women, not their similarities, and these are invariably prejudicial. (25)

The frightening part of the teleology for the Renaissance mind, however, is precisely the fantasy of its reversal, the “very few, or rather none” of Sir Thomas Browne: the conviction that men can turn into—or be turned into—women; (25)

…we all start as women, and the culture confirmed this by dressing all children in skirts until the age of seven or so, when the boy, as Leontes recalls, was “breeched,” … From this point on, for a man to associate with women was felt to be increasingly dangerous—not only for the woman, but even more for the man: lust effeminates, makes men incapable of manly pursuits; hence the pervasive antithesis of love and war. (25)

Robert Burton elucidates the matter with uncharacteristic directness: love is “full of fear, anxiety, doubt, care, peevishness, suspicion, it turns a man into a woman.” The fear of effeminization is a central element in all discussions of what constitutes a “real man” in the period, and the fantasy of the reversal of the natural transition from woman to man underlies it. It also, in a much more clearly pathological way, underlies the standard arguments against the stage in antitheatrical tracts from the time of the Church Fathers on. In this context, the very institution of theatre is a threat to manhood and the stability of the social hierarchy, as unescorted women and men without their wives social freely, and (it follows) flirt with each other and take each other off to bed: (26)

But in England, the sexuality feared is more subversive than even this suggests, precisely because of the transvestism of the stage. It is argued first that the boys who perform the roles of women will be transformed into their roles and play the part in reality. This claim has its basis in a Platonic argument, but in the Puritan tracts it merges with a general fear of blurred social and sexual boundaries, of roles and costumes adulterating the essences that God has given us. Jonas Barish, in his exhaustive and indispensable study of the antitheatrical material, relates the hostility to transvestite actors to the synchronous revival of medieval sumptuary laws, the attempts to [26] prevent members of one social class from appearing to be members of another … “Distinctions of dress,” Barish comments, “however external and theatrical they may seem to us, for Perkins virtually belong to our essence, and may no more be tampered with than that essence itself.” (26-27)

It is the fragility, the radical instability of our essence, that is assumed here, and the metaphoric quality of our sinful nature. The enormous popularity of Ovid in the age reflects both its desires and its deepest fears. (27)

Male spectators, it is argued, will be seduced by the impersonation, and losing their reason will become effeminate, which in this case means not only that they will lust after the woman in the drama, which is bad enough, but also after the youth beneath the woman’s costume, thereby playing the woman’s role themselves. This fear, which has been brilliantly anatomized by Laura Levine, is so pervasive in the tracts, and so unlike modern kinds of sexuality anxiety, that it is worth pausing over. / John Rainoldes says the adoption by men of women’s clothing incites a lust that is specifically homoerotic: [27] ... Scripture, he continues, condemns prostitution of both women and men, “detesting specially the male by terming him a dog,” and concludes by urging that we “control likewise the means and occasions whereby men are transformed into dogs, … The slippage here from effeminacy to bestiality is notable, and should remind us that in this culture femininity is not equated with docility—on the contrary, what is feared in women is their violent and uncontrollable appetites. (28)

Subsequently, citing the authority of Socrates, Rainoldes compares the homoerotic response engendered by transvestite boys to the sting of poisonous spiders: “if they do but touch men only with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain and make them mad: so beautiful boys by kissing do sting and pour secretly in a kind of poison.” Here the attraction of men to beautiful boys is treated as axiomatic. (28)

… ‘can wise men be persuaded that there is no wantonness in the players’ parts when experience showeth (as wise men have observed) that men are made adulterers and enemies of all chastity by coming to such plays? that senses are moved, affections are delighted, hearts though strong and constant are vanquished by such players? … (28)

William Prynne… in Histriomastix the transvestism of the stage is especially dangerous because female dress is an important stimulant specifically to homoeroticism: … Heterosexuality here only provides the fetish that enables the true homosexual response to emerge. It is significant that the transvestite is not the passive one in this relationship. (29)

Rainolds, Prynes and any number of other antitheatrical writers offer observations such as these as models for the theatrical experience. For such writers, the very fact that women are prohibited from the stage reveals the true etiology of theatre: what the spectator is “really” attracted to in plays is an undifferentiated sexuality, a sexuality that does not distinguish men from women and reduces men to women—the deepest fear in antitheatrical tracts, far deeper than the fear that women in the audience will becomes whores, is the fear of a universal effeminization. In this anxiety, the fact of transvestite boys is really only incidental; it is the whole concept of the mimetic art that is at issue, the art itself that effeminates. (29)

Prynne… ‘Yea, witness… M. Stubbes, his Anatomy of Abuses… where he affirms that players and play-houses in their secret conclaves play the sodomites; together with some modern examples of such, who have been desperately enamored with players’ boys thus clad in women’s apparel, so far as to solicit them by words, by letters, even actually to abuse them… This I have heard credibly reported of a scholar of Baillol College, and I doubt not but it may be verified of divers others.’ / The assumption here is first that the basic form of response to theatre is erotic, second that erotically, theatre is uncontrollably exciting, and third, that the basic, essential form of erotic excitement is men is homosexual—that indeed, women are only a cover for men. And though the assumption as Prynne articulates it is clearly pathological, a reducto ad absurdum of antitheatrical commonplaces, it is also clearly related both to all the generalized anxieties attendant upon the institutionalization of masculinity within the culture, and to the sanctioned homoeroticism that played so large a role in relationship between men. (30)

Peter Stallybrass… the transvestite stage,… “less a matter of indeterminacy than of the production of contrary fixations: the imagined body of a women, the staged body of a boy actor, the material presence of clothes.” Testimony from the period, sparse as it is, is contradictory in just the ways that Stallybrass suggests. … Wroth’s assumption (to which I shall return) is precisely the opposite of Rainoldes’ and Prynne’s: that the stage’s transvestitism works to insulate it from lustful feelings, not to arouse them. Thomas Heywood, in one of the very few English defenses of the stage, agrees that audiences are always aware they are not watching women: [31] … but the two past participles (“occisa,” “interfecta”) agree with a female Desdemona, not with the male actor. The boy here has disappeared; Desdemona as both actor and character is gendered female. [32] … when Pepys went to see Edward Kynaston, the last of the great male heroines, the gender rules were still in force” “one Kynaston, a boy, acted the Duke’s sister but made the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life—only her voice not very good.” (33)

Perhaps the most striking example of the dependence of gender on costume, and not on sexuality, is found in the romance that lies behind the cross-dressing of Twelfth Night, Barnabe Riche’s tale of Apolonius and Silla. Silla, the Viola character, in her male disguise under the name of her twin brother Silvio, is accused of impregnating Julina, the Olivia figure, and is ordered by the duke to marry her or face death. The real culprit, of course, is her twin, who passing through the town on his travels was entertained by Julina, spend the night with her, and in conventional masculine fashion decamped the next day. Silla/Silvio, put to the final test of her gender, considers her (or in the circumstances, his) plight: / ‘hearing an othe sworne so divinely that he had gotten a women with childe, was like to believe it had bin true in very deede; but remembryng his owne impediment, thought it impossible that he should committe suche an acte.’ / The degree of consideration Silla gives to Julina’s accusation here is notable. She determines that a revelation of the truth is her only recourse: / ‘And here with all loosing his garments doune to his stomacke, and shewed Julina his breasts and pretie teates, surmounting farre the whiteness of snow itself.’ / [33] Silla’s gender is determined by Silla’s garments, even in removing them. (33-34)

The notion that the transvestite stage is an enabling mechanism for homosexual activity is central to the extended confrontation between Rainoldes and William Gager over the performance of plays by Oxford undergraduates, arguably the most searching discussion of the subject in the age. Most of this has to do with interpretations of the relevant passage from Deuteronomy proscribing cross-dressing. (34)

Why, after all, should women’s garments and men be considered a temptation to homosexuality? Dresses are concealing; … Rainoldes … a womens garment being put on a man doeth vehemently touch and move him with the remembrance and imagination of a woman; and the imagination of a thing desirable [34] doth stir up the desire.” There is no desire for men imagined here; what is elicited by travesty, the great danger, is heterosexual desire. (34-35)

Ironically, Rainoldes’ and Prynne’s fears point ahead to the time when actresses finally become normative on the English stage, and transvestite plots burgeoned, as they had done in Spain and France for sixty years. Cross-dressing provided much of the substance of drama for those society that did not have transvestite theatres—men paid to see women in breeches and hose. (35)

Why, then, if boys in women’s dress are so threatening, did the English maintain a transvestite theatre? It is necessary to remember that antitheatrical tracts are pathological. They share assumptions with the culture, as a whole, but their conclusions are eccentric. (35)

Stephen Greenblatt, in a brilliant essay, relates the development of the transvestite stage precisely to the cultural tropes of the boy as they are anatomized in the medical and gynecological theories of the age, and he concludes that “a conception of gender that is teleologically male and insists upon a verifiable sign to confirm nature’s final cuase finds its supreme literary expression in a transvestite theatre.” This is an exciting and attractive thesis, but the problem with it is that the medical theorists are for the most part French and Italian, and France and Italy did not develop transvestite theatres. (35)
Why did only the English public theatre resist the introduction of women on the stage? As I have indicated, any attempt to answer this question by simply producing an explanation, whether social, religious or political, will only close off the ramifications of the question. (35)

Despite the anxiety expressed in the antitheatrical literature, despite the institutionalization of marriage and patriarchy, English Renaissance culture, to judge from the surviving evidence, did not display a morbid fear of homoeroticism as such; … As Alan Bray demonstrates, … the line between the homosocial and the sodomitical was a firm but exceedingly fine one, and lay in the most profound sense in the eye of the beholder. Anxiety about the fidelity of women, on the other hand, does seem to have been strikingly prevalent; … The fear of losing control of women’s chastity, a very valuable possession that guaranteed the legitimacy of one’s heirs, and especially valuable for fathers as a piece of disposable property, is a logical consequence of a patriarchal structure… theatre served as a means of managing specifically sexual anxieties: Maus notes that the incidence of cuckoldry plots seems to be much higher in the drama than in the other imaginative genres of the period. (36)

…until 1604 the legal age of consent was twelve for women (fourteen for men), which meant that daughters over the age of twelve were also legally entitled to arrange their own marriages. They might make themselves paupers by doing so, but they could not be stopped. The horror stories of enforced marriages—there are many in the period—relate primarily to upper-class matches, where political alliances and large sums of money were at stake. In such cases what the age of consent meant in practice was merely that a woman could not be forced to consent to a marriage arranged for her before she reached the age of twelve. (37)

Middle- and lower-class arrangement, however, would have been much less constrained, as there was much less at stake. Indeed, middle-class London was a place of unusual liberty for women, and this certainly bears on both the population of the London theatre with women, and their relative freedom to enjoy it: (37)

Public theatre is regularly associated, moreover, not only with loose women but with homosexual prostitution; the latter charge is found not only in Puritan polemicists but in the playwrights themselves. Yet the attitude implied in the charge tends to be, surprisingly, liberal and permissive. [37] … The crime of sodomy is inveighed against repeatedly and energetically in legal and theological contexts; but, as Bray and Bruce Smith demonstrate, it was scarcely ever prosecuted. When cases of homosexual behavior reach the courts, they are dealt with on the whole with surprising moderation—admonitions, exhortations to abstain. (38)

In one extraordinary case discussed by Bray, a laborer named Meredith Davy was brought before the magistrate on what certainly could have been a charge of sodomy. Davy slept in the same bed with a twelve-year-old apprentice, and a third man slept in the same room. On a number of occasions the third man heard activity in the other bed, and heard the boy protest and cry out in pain. It took about a month for the witness to realize what was happening, and he finally reported it to the mistress of the house, who referred the case to the magistrate. The defendant appeared baffled by the charge, and clearly had no conception that what he was doing was related to the abominable crime of sodomy. This, surprisingly, seemed sufficient mitigation to the magistrate, and the household as a whole; Davy was sent home with an admonishment to leave the boy alone, “since which time,” the court report concludes, “he hath lain quietly with him.” The two, that is, were allowed to continue to sleep together; and of course it is conceivable that things quieted down not because Davy stopped [38] making advances but because the boy stopped objecting—it was not, after all, the boy who made the complaint. / Bray argues that such a story does not testify to any remarkable tolerance on the part of the English, but rather to a selective blindness: sodomy was something that, despite a number of explicit charges and well-known prosecution—the cases of Nicholas Udall, Francis Bacon, the Castlehaven scandal—the English associate on the whole only with foreigners, not with themselves. Travelers observing it in the relatively tolerant climates of Italy, Turkey, North Africa and Russia use it as an index to the viciousness of Roman Catholic, Muslim or barbaric societies. And yet when, at the opening of Epicoene, Clerimont is shown with a page boy who is described as “his ingle,” the fact serves as nothing more than one of a number of indications of the easy and pleasant life of a London playboy. (39)

Charges of sodomy always occur in relation to other kinds of subversion; the activity has little independent existence in the Renaissance mind, just as there is not yet a separate category of the homosexual. It becomes visible in Elizabethan society only when it intersects with some other behavior that is recognized as dangerous and anti-social; it is invariably an aspect of atheism, Papistry, sedition, witchcraft, malfeasance… [40] In the same way, the Puritan charge that theatre promotes homosexuality appears because to the Puritan mind theatre is felt to be dangerous, not the other way round; sodomy becomes the visible sign of its subversiveness. (40-41)

…I have already cited Alan Bray’s observation that the rhetoric of patronage, gratitude and male friendship in the period is precisely the language of love, render all such relationships literally ambiguous. He goes on to argue that the relationships implied are therefore not to be read as homosexual in the modern sense, that is, that they do not imply a sexual relationship; but… Jonathan Goldberg points out… The love between man was open and public, … How far beyond beneficence and gratitude that love went is imponderable, and there is nothing in the language of love that will reveal it to us—it is a language that implies everything and nothing. (42)

…it is also a commonplace to find generalized misogyny in the work of the period, especially in its idealization of chaste and beautiful women who are also cold and untouchable. What is less often observed is that… erotic homosexual relationships also figure in the literature of the period, in a context that is often, if not invariably, positive, and registers again, even when the underlying attitude is disapproving, surprisingly little anxiety about the matter. (42)

Consider the fact that Rosalind disguised as a boy can play a wooing scene with another man under the name Ganymede. …there is no indication whatever that Shakespeare is doing something sexually daring there, skating on thin ice. Counterexamples in which homoerotic behavior leads to disaster are exceedingly rare. The only clear-cut theatrical one is in Marlowe’s Edward II… (43)

The young shepherd Colin in The Shepherd’s Calendar rejects the advances of the older shepherd Hobbinol, … Colin is identified in the book as Spenser, and Hobbinol as Gabriel Harvey, … Spenser clearly does not consider this libelous, and judging from their continued association, neither did Harvey; but it makes the volume’s editor E. K. nervous, and in glossing the passage he duly cites the relevant classical precedents of Socrates and Alcibiades. These lead him to the conclusion that “paederistike [is] much to be preferred before generastike, that is the love which enflameth men with lust toward womankind.” He adds only at this point that he is not thereby condoning… the “execrable and horrible sins of forbidden and unlawful fleshiness” celebrated by Lucian and Peitro Aretino. [43] … E. K. wants to insist on the privileged status of homosexuality, not as an aspect of poetry, but of the highest moral philosophy—Socrates authorized it. To do this it is only necessary to deflect the prohibited aspects of homosexual behavior onto women on the other hand, and Italian on the other. It is important to observe that despite Colin’s interest in Rosalind, there is no argument here in favor of the love of women, and that homosexual love is defined in opposition to heterosexuality, which is equated with lust. (43-44)

Leander, …attracts the attentions of Neptune, who mistakes him for Ganymede, and is described in an extraordinarily explicit passage making passes [44] as Leander as he swims naked to Sestos. The episode is notable for the total lack of anxiety is projects. It is passionate, comic, and enthusiastic. (44-45)

To my knowledge the only dramatic instance of a homoerotic relationship being presented in the terms in which the culture formally conceived it—as antisocial, seditious, ultimately disastrous—is in Marlowe’s Edward II. It would certainly be possible to account for its perspective, if not for its uniqueness, by viewing it in the context of Eve Sedgwick’s thesis about Renaissance homosexuality: that it was not viewed as threatening because it was not defined in opposition to, or as an impediment to, heterosexuality and marriage. Edward’s love for Gaveston therefore is destrutive because it is presented as anitheterosexual; it renders him an unfit husband, as his passion render him an unfit king. I am unhappy with this explanation not because there is anything wrong with it, but because it is too straightforward to account for what seem to me a very devious and genuinely subversive play. Both politically and morally, the power-hungry nobles and the queen’s adultery with Mortimer are as destabilizing as anything in Edward’s relationship with his favorite. … Marlowe makes Gaveston an upstart, raised to the nobility by the king’s infatuation with him, and the social inappropriateness of the love is a central element in the presentation of Edward as a sodomite. (46)

And in important respects ours: modern performances always, and critics nearly always, construe the murder scene as an anal rape with a hot spit or poker. Bu this is “correcting” Marlowe by reference to Holinshed: [47] … Gregory Bredbeck’s excellent chapter on the play unintentionally provides an epitome of modern revisionism: “The murder of Edward by raping him with a red-hot poker—quite literally branding him with sodomy—can be seen as an attempt to ‘write’ onto him the homoeroticism constantly ascribed to him.” It can indeed: we want the murder to be precisely what Marlowe refuses to make it, a condign punishments, the mirror of Edward’s unspeakable vice. (47-48)

..it was probably safer to represent the power structure in that way than it would have been to play it, so to speak, straight. Had Richard II been presented as a sodomite, would the authorities have found it necessary to censor the deposition scene? Maybe Edward’s sexuality is a way of protecting the play, a way of keeping what it says about power intact. [48] … Had it been possible for a Jacobean audience to acknowledge sodomy as an English vice, the play, and the allusion, would certainly have been treasonable. (48-49)

In the examples we have considered, the love of men for men in this culture appears less threatening than the love of men for women: it had fewer consequences, it was easier to de-sexualize, it figured and reinforced the patronage system. But beneath these practical considerations was a deep layer of anxiety. (49)

…women, on whom the culture projects a natural tendency towards promiscuity of all kinds, and for which theatre is being seen as a release mechanism. Behind the outrage of public modesty is a real fear of women’s sexuality, and more specifically, of its power to evoke men’s sexuality; … It is a fear that denies the claim s of the gynecology of inverted, incomplete masculinity, a fear grounded in a recognition not of sameness but of difference, … (49)

Stephen Greenblatt has related… Portia, Rosalind and Viola, … Such figures, in this reading, “pass through the state of being men in order to become women. Shakespearean women are in this sense the projected mirror images of masculine self-differentiation.” But even this clearly has its anxieties: Shakespeare shows on occasion an unwillingness to allow them to return to being women. In an ending that has been almost totally ignored, if not positively misrepresented by the critical tradition, Viola announced in the final moments of Twelfth Night that she cannot become a woman and the wife of Orsino until her woman’s clothes have been recovered… (50)

…Twelfth Night includes the only overtly homosexual couple in Shakespeare except for Achilles and Patroclus. (51)

Handsome boys were praised in Renaissance England by saying that they looked like women—“a woman’s face, by Nature’s own hand painted/ Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion.” (51)

We ought therefore to confront the implications of Viola’s conceiving herself as not simply a youth in disguise, but as surgically neutered in addition. She seems to be proposing a sexlessness that is an aspect of her mourning, that will effectively remove her, as Olivia has removed herself, from the world of love and wooing. [54] … Viola has with a single word created for herself a character in whom frustrated sexual desire is of the essence … peculiar overtone as well: being a eunuch, a sexually incapacitated male, is conceived as an equivalent, or an alternative, to being a [54] woman. This fantasy is a very old one: Chaucer, expressing his doubts about the Pardoner’s sexuality, describes him as “a geldying or a mare.” …classic Freudian fantasy, whereby gender difference is a function of castration. Twelfth Night makes the fantasy all but explicit in its puns on “cut” and “cunt.” If a eunuch is an alternative to a woman, and either is the opposite of a man, then the assumptions behind Viola’s disguise desexualize women too. / Or do they? A brief look at the history of castrati complicates the question. [55] … The Vatican castrati quickly started playing secular roles as well as religious ones: like the boys on the [55] English stage, they played the romantic women’s parts in entertainments for the exclusively male society of the Catholic hierarchy. In this respect the boys were not at all desexualized; on the contrary, they enabled the introduction of overt sexuality, simultaneously heterosexual and homosexual, into the world of ecclesiastical celibacy. / Viola as eunuch, then, both closes down options for herself and implies a world of possibilities for others—possibilities that were, to a post-Reformation Protestant society, particularly (perhaps temptingly) illicit. (55-56)

If we look at Twelfth Night in this context, Orsino and Olivia have fallen in love with the same young man, Cesario; only the costume, the chosen role, distinguishes Cesario from Viola and Viola from the Sebastian who is effortlessly substituted for her in Olivia’s affections. The gender of these figures is mutable, constructed, a matter of choice. (57)

If Viola the eunuch equivocates her sexuality, Rosalind as Ganymede in As You Like It makes the equation between women and boys not only explicit, but explicitly sexual. And here the idea of the boy displacing the woman appears in its most potentially threatening form, the catamite for whom Jove himself abandons his marriage bed. (57)

…(homosexuality is generally, though not exclusively, conceived to be pederastic in the period)… (58)

The abominable crime of sodomy was fervently condemned throughout the age, but the legal definition of sodomy was in fact exceedingly narrow. According to the Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, the sex had to be nonconsensual… the prosecution had to be able to prove that there had been both anal penetration and an ejaculation… the courts required a witness—and there were strict rules about who could serve as a witness in such cases. … The legal situation does not at all coincide with popular attitudes, of course, in which the term sodomy covered a multitude of horrendous sins, not all of them by any means involving homosexuality; but precisely for this reason it is to the point that sodomy was legally construed in such a way that it could hardly ever be prosecuted. Coke’s definition was developed in Jacobean times (and the third part of the Institutes, in which the definition finally [58] appears, was not published until 1644), … Bruce Smith’s study of the Assize courts in the Home Countries reveals a total of only six sodomy trials in the entire reign of Elizabeth; all involved the rape of a minor, and five of the six resulted in acquittals. (59)

Sodomy, then, does not mean what we mean by homosexuality. As proliferating studies in the history of sexuality have show, the binary division of sexual appetites into the normative heterosexual and the deviant homosexual is a very recent invention; neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality existed as categories for the Renaissance mind. Indeed, the very idea that sexual preferences constitutes categories—that people can be identified according to what kinds of sex they enjoy—and moreover that such categories are exclusive ones—that an interest in men necessarily precludes or conflicts with an interest in women—is largely a piece of post-Enlightenment taxonomy. (59)

Indeed, overt imputations of sodomy in the drama rarely treat it as an exclusive taste, and are, as I have suggested, more often a subject [59] for comedy than for moral outrage. … The displacement of the desire onto the French and Italians is sufficient to render it comic. (59-60)

English satire had identified foreign Papist priests as sodomites since the Reformation, … (61)

In Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1697), we can see that the paradigm has at last changed: homoeroticism is both unqualified and domesticated in the person of the lecherous Coupler—this is the first character I know of who would be recognizable as gay in the modern sense. [61] … unabashed overtness and singlemindedness of Coupler’s sexual appetite, unmitigated by foreignness or Roman Catholicism, … [but] To use the terms of homosexual and heterosexual to describe the pre-Enlightenment situation, therefore, is anachronistic [62] and misleading. (61-62)

In a society that has an investment in seeming women as imperfect men, the ganger points will be those at which women reveal that they have an independent essence, .. In romance plots, this point is reached when the wooing starts, when the woman’s separateness becomes essential, and her sexual nature has to be taken into account. This is the moment in Twelfth Night and As You Like It when Viola and Rosalind start to feel trapped by their disguises rather than protected by them. … Even after the wooing has been successfully accomplished, the play insists that the wife is really a boy—and this too, of course, may be a way of [63] offering Orlando (or any number of spectators of either sex) what he “really” wants. (63-64)

All historical claims, even the most tactful and unpoliticized, are ultimately concerned to make the past comprehensible, usable and relevant to our own interests—to make it, that is, present. (64)

Standard theatrical history holds that the boys of the company were its apprentices, that they got their training playing woman’s roles and, when their voices changed, they progressed to playing adult males. …boys were apprenticed, but not to the actors… only members of guilds could have apprentices, and there was no actor’s guild. [64] … The boys of the troupe were thus technically not apprenticed actors but apprentice grocers, goldsmiths, drapers, shoemakers, joiners, and so forth, and when they completed their apprenticeships they were (or were entitled to be) full members of whatever guild they had been apprenticed in. …Jonson, despite his notorious distaste for the craft, renewed his membership in the bricklayers’ guild in 1599, long after he became an actor… female roles could thenceforth be played by an apprentice bricklayers. (64-65)

There is one exception to the generalization that boys could not be apprentice actors, and it is an instructive one. Under a royal patent, the children’s companies were granted the right to impress boys into service—the logic of this was that the boys were to be trained as choristers, providing music for the royal chapel; … the patent actually authorized the choirs to practice what amounted to legalized kidnapping, and in a remarkable suit in 1601, a gentlemen named Henry Clifton brought an action in the Star Chamber against the director of the Blackfriars, Henry Evans, charging that Evans had removed his son and seven other boys from their grammar school to be forcibly apprenticed as actors. [66] … The rules finally changed in 1606, when a new royal patent was issued specifically prohibiting the Blackfriars from using any impressed boys in plays. (66-67)

The persistent complaint of London commercial interests, that theatres are subversive, that the existence of theatres interferes with business, particularly that theatre seduces apprentices away from their craft, must have included a sense that the theatrical companies were in effect operating as unlicensed guilds, … Belonging to a London guild conferred both privilege and protection. It meant that one had the freedom of the city—that one was a citizen with full rights to engage in business, trade or craft (in London, it conferred the right to engage in any trade, not simply the one in which one had been apprenticed). [67] … I think it is most likely that the initial impulse of acting troupes toward the guild system came from this, its promise of respectability within the city structure, rather than from its utility as an enabling mechanism for theatrical apprentices. (67-68)

Apprenticeship … benefited both the boys and their masters. The apprentice lived in his master’s household, and was fed and clothed by him; in return, all wages due for the boy’s services, with the exception of a small stipulated percentage, belonged to the master. (68)

Sue-Ellen Case, … notes that there are significant ways in which the relation of master and apprentice parallels that of husband and wife in a patriarchal society: the analogy between boy sand women… (68)

It is always assumed that this was the model for the theatre as well, that the boys got their training playing women, but graduated to adult male roles. This sounds logical and may well be correct, but it is worth remarking how few documented instances there are of adult actors in the period who began by playing women: …we should at least consider the possibility that what we are dealing with is not simply a company organized according to categories of age, adults and adolescents, but two different classes of actors as well. Did boys who played women go on to play men? Some did, certainly, but what about the rest? Viewed in this light, it is less significant that the acting companies were all male than that they consisted of men and boys, masters and indentured servants, two asymmetrical classes of performers. … though it is almost invariably assumed to be: boys do not look any more like women than men do. It is important to bear in mind how time-bound the notion of what “women” look like is: boys have no facial hair, like women, but they are also slim-hipped and without breasts. There are also, needless to say, women with facial hair, or small breasts or slim hips, or with all of these (just as there are buxom men [69] with large hips); but to judge from the evidence of portraits, the Elizabethan ideal, at least of aristocratic womanhood, was what we would call boyish and they called womanly: slim-hipped and flat-chested. Whether boys are thought to look like women or not it is in our interests to view boys as versions of men, but the Renaissance equally clearly sought the similitude in boys and women. (69-70)

…after the Restoration, when Edward Kynaston was playing female roles, he was declared by John Downes to be more convincingly female than any of this female colleagues. For both these observers, realism was clearly not the major factor; the assumption is that the best actor makes the best woman. … Why then did only boys play women? (70)

The boy player was apparently as much an object of erotic attraction for women as for men: (71)

Standard history hold that the guilds were all-male preserve, and that women could not be apprentices or guild members. This would be an especially useful fact if it were true, … although female apprenticeship is documented from the fifteenth century onward, and was relatively commonplace in the early seventeenth century, most historians absolutely deny its existence… (72)

…records survive of women in fifteenth-century London as full apprentices [72] and guild members in the silk trade; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the statues of the masons’ and carpenters’ guilds are addressed to “systeren and bretheren”; until late in the seventeenth century women, in one place or another, were admitted into practically every English trade or guild. Women did not, moreover, limit their efforts to ladylike pursuits: in Chester, in 1575, there was five women blacksmiths. … a common modern way of ignoring the presence of women in the Renaissance workforce is to claim that they were there only as emanations of absent or dead husbands: this is not the case. … In Southampton, for example, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, 48 percent—almost half—the apprentices were women. (The fact that the presence of women in the guild system declined markedly (it dropped, in Southampton, during the course of the seventeenth century to 9 percent) was, like the fact that there were no English actresses on the Elizabethan and early Stuart stage, a matter of social convention, not statute. [73] … But the situation in both the guilds and there theatre confirms Joan Kelly’s thesis that medieval women enjoyed more rights and had considerably more mobility than their Renaissance descendents—rights that, in the guilds, persisted much longer than they did in other areas of English society. (72-74)

…Patricia Crawford stunned the members of a recent conference of Early Modern history by pointing out that a study of the voting registers shows that in certain parts of the country, women had been regularly voting in parliamentary elections during the seventeenth century into the 1650s at least, despite the fact that, according to Lord Chief Justice Coke, women were not legally entitled to vote. This being the case, it becomes especially important not simply to assume that women were excluded from all areas of public life, and to look closely at those endeavors in which they did in fact participate, whether we believe they were legally empowered to do so or not. (74)

What did women enjoy about a theatre we find misogynistic? I have already suggested certain kinds of answers: plays about love matches are especially powerful fantasies of freedom in a patriarchal society, and for women even more than for men; and the positive side of [74] cuckoldry plots from the woman’s perspective is the conviction that her sexuality is powerful and attractive, threatening to husbands, and under her own control: … (74-75)

Merchant of Venice, … the women feign outrage, accuse the men of faithlessness… (75)

If we resist the impulse simply to dismiss this as a pointless joke the women play on the men, with no larger implications, but focus instead on the anxieties it expresses, as criticism has begun to do, it is part of a fantasy of female sexual power that is difficult to read as humane or benevolent. It sets the demands of marriage not only [76] against those of friendship, but, more dangerously, against those of gratitude, and in a culture of clientage, as this is, ingratitude is the primal sin—as it sill is in Milton’s version of the Fall, … (76-77)

But we need to look further than interpretation, beyond the plots: asking what Renaissance women would have like about such a play is certainly to ask the wrong question. There are many reasons for going to theatre, and very few of them have anything to do with the texts of the plays. (77)

A better starting point seems to me Lisa Jardine’s contention that “playing the woman’s part—male effeminacy—is an act for a male audience’s appreciation.” There is ample evidence, from the Jonson of Epicoene to Dame Edna Everedge that this is true; but is there anything in the act for a female audience as well? Renaissance literature is in fact rich in plots involving male transvestism in which women are deeply implicated, not only as the cause, but sometimes directly as the instigators. Cleopatra, for example, amuses herself by dressing the drunken Antony in her garments: (78)

Sidney’s Arcadia … [78] Pyrocles, in order to gain access to Philocleia, disguises hisemlf as an Amazon warrior. Musidorus comes upon him in the forest, and is appalled at the transformation he sees. He urges Pyrocles to give up the disguise, effeminate and unworthy of a soldier. But Pryocels defends himself with some surprisingly forceful Platonic logic. He says that it is in the nature of love to imitate the beloved; that since women are virtuous, imitating them cannot be vicious; and that no human being’s virtue is complete unless it encompasses the virtue of women as well as men. Pyrocles is, in short, realizing Aristophanes’ fable in Plato’s Symposium in which humankind as originally created was a double creature, subsequently separated by the gods in envy of its perfect happiness. (78-79)

…the readership of romances was overwhelmingly female—Sidney’s title, after all, is The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia… (80)

Peter Stallybrass remarks that here “the threat to replace women with boy actors is not imagined as a general loss but as a loss to the male spectator alone. The female spectator, on the contrary, is imagined as running wild after the ‘Youth in Petticoats.’ The boy actor is thus depicted as particularly alluring to women.” (81)

For a female audience, in a culture as patriarchally stratified as that of Renaissance England, to see the youth in skirts might be to disarm and socialize him in ways that were specifically female, to see him as a possessor or master, but as companionable and pliable and one of them—as everything, in fact, that the socialized Renaissance woman herself is supposed to be. It strikes me that Twelfth Night provides just such a model in Olivia, in love with the boy/girl/eunuch Cesario/Sebastian, … (81)

One thing such moments certainly suggest, even for us, is the degree to which both gender and sexual desire, in any era, are socially and culturally constructed. This is true for both sexes; and women profit from these representations and are empowered by them precisely thought that recognition. It is, after all, Omphale who dresses Hercules in her garments, Cleopatra who puts Antony into her tires and mantles. These are represented not as male stratagems, but as transformations that give women power and pleasure. (82)

The other side of male effeminacy was female masculinity, and the identification of socially offensive behavior in women as “masculine” constitutes one of the most commonplace pf Renaissance slippages… In social contexts, the complaints focused particularly on fashions in clothing, which were construed as instances of cross-dressing. The locus classicus here is King James’s well-known admonition to the London clergy, requiring them “to inveigh vehemently and bitterly in their sermons against the insolency of our women, and their wearing of broad-brimmed hats, pointed doublets, their hair cut short or shorn, and some of them stilettos or poniards…adding withal that if pulpit admonitions will not reform them he would proceed by another course.” [83] … Is the real object of King James’s outburst, then, his wife’s taste in fashion? The possibility is not inconceivable; husband and wife had few tastes in common, and by 1617 were maintaining both different households and different religions—indeed, Queen Anne’s conversion to Roman Catholicism had been a problem for the king for two decades, even threatening to compromise his accession to the English throne. Man-like and unseemly clothes in this case would be an index to a much more dangerous kind of independence. And if every Englishman was a king in his own household, was every Englishwoman by the same token a version of the unmanageable queen? (83-84)

Here is the same issue in reverse. Barnabe Riche, in his Farewell to the Military Profession, indicates as one of the major changes driving him from his calling the effeminization of the military: [84] … I net one who came riding towards me…appareled in a French ruff, a French cloak, Frence hose, and in his hand a great fan of feathers, bearing them up very womanly against the side of his face. [85] … Riche’s diagnosis of the new social disease places its etiology securely in heterosexuality, observing that the fashion is adopted “to please gentlewomen.” … Riche’s version of heterosexuality is literally homoerotic. (84-87)

…the most widely circulated portrait of King Jame’s elder son Prince Henry, who saw himself as a military hero. He is presented as manly and athletic, practicing at the lance. Plate 8, on the other hand, is his investiture portrait as Prince of Wales, painted only a year earlier—the lace collar, the luxuriantly feathered hat… [87] It is clear that these two representations of the heir to the throne do not contradict each other. (87-94)

Both Francois I and his son Henri II made exemplary use of the virtues of double gender by having themselves depicted in dresses (plates 11 and 12). Francois’ image is accompanied by an explanatory motto: the king is a Mars in war, a Minerva or Diana in peace. (94)

For all the pulpit rhetoric about the evils of cross-dressing, sumptuary legislation said nothing about the [page 96] wearing of sexually inappropriate garments. It was concerned with violations of the sartorial badges of class, not those of gender. … Insofar as sumptuary legislation in the period generalizes about [98] women, it insists on just the distinctions the king refuses to make: it declares that all women are not the same; what is proper dress for ladies is not proper for women of the middle class—indeed, it says the same of men, and thereby declines to distinguish the sexes. King James did not have much use for women, but perhaps the point of his reproach in really the same as the point of van Somer’s painting: that the queen sets her own style; and that what is appropriate for the [99] queen is not appropriate for other women. The royal outrage would be, in this reading, against presuming to imitate the style of royalty, and thereby encroaching on the prerogatives of the crown—a danger the king throughout his reign saw as ubiquitous. / This may well be giving the king too much credit. (96-100)

Theatre was under aristocratic and ultimately royal patronage, but it constituted both an obvious violation of the sumptuary laws—it presented middle-class actors and working-class apprentices dressed as aristocrats… (100)

If costume was essential to theatre, the wrong costume was quintessential. (102)

In the England of Elizabeth , the most highly charged misrepresentation were those of class, hence the legislation against wearing clothes that admitted one to an undeserved place in the hierarchy, and hence also the endemic flouting of the legislation. On the stage, however, the egregious misrepresentations are those of gender, … Bu this practice too was, as we have seen, just as thoroughly naturalized in Renaissance England as the violation of [102] the semiotics of class: the only people who found it reprehensible were those for whom theatre itself was reprehensible. (102-103)

That the analogy between boys and women was naturalized does not imply that boys are substitutes for women; it implies just the opposite: both are treated as a medium of exchange within the patriarchal structure, and both are (perhaps in consequence) constructed as objects of erotic attraction for adult men. Boys and women are not in competition in this system; … (103)

The flummery at the conclusion of Twelfth Night about the impossibility of proceeding with the marriage of Orsino and Viola (and therefore the impossibility of concluding the plot) until Viola’s clothes have been found declares in the clearest possible way that, whatever Viola says about the erotic realities of her inner life, she is not a woman unless she is dressed as one. Even here, it is a particular costume that matters, her own dress that was left with the sea captain: this is the dress that is Viola. (104)

…one way of viewing the transvestite actor of Shakespeare’s stage is as a response to a large cultural anxiety, a manifestation of the audience’s, and ultimately of the culture’s, desire for a disarmed woman. Alternatively, we have seen it as just the opposite, a performative construction that both reveals the malleability of the masculine and empowers the feminine, enabling the potential masculinity of women to be realized and acknowledged, if safely contained within the theatre’s walls. …this account… does not, for example, explain why English theatres differed from those on the Continent in this respect; but perhaps it does not need to: it might be sufficient to observe that different societies have different ways of responding to common cultural anxieties. Italy executed sodomites while England on the whole ignored them. (106)

…women in drag. The most famous instance in the period is Mary Frith (the model for [106] Middleton’s and Dekker’s Roaring Girl), a woman who presented herself, defined her identity, as a transvestite, and was accepted as such—accepted, that is, as a transvestite, not as a man. The disguise here is no disguise, but at most an open secret. (106-107)

Why then do women want to present themselves as mannish in a culture that seems to reprehend such behavior, and why, if the behavior is really seen as reprehensible, does it remain legal, and thereby, in some significant sense—the literal sense must be significant—legitimate? (107)

The fears of a patriarchal society about the power of women, localized in sexual power, … (107)

Sir Thomas Elyot in 1531… ‘A man in his natural perfection is fierce, hardy, strong in opinion, covetous of glory, desirous of knowledge, appetiting by generation to bring forth his semblable [i.e. eager for offspring]. The good nature of a woman is to be mild, timorous, tractable, benign, of sure remembrance, and shamefast. (107)

But the danger of treating Renaissance misogyny as a cultural constant is the tendency to naturalize it. Whose interest did misogynist discourse serve? (108)

Indeed, the oxymoron by which the most successful English acting company chose to identify itself after 1603, “Gentlemen the King’s Servants,” seems designed to insist precisely on the socially transgressive nature of theatre itself, the medium in which class boundaries are systematically violated and sumptuary laws flouted, as lower-class actors wearing aristocratic clothing and mime greatness. But as the long history of royal and noble patronage of the stage indicates, the transgressiveness is generally more serviceable than threatening to those in power, not least, paradoxically, in the theatre’s ability to imagine and rewrite the nature of power, or masculinity, or the very notion of subjectivity itself. … The transvestite actor… available to interrogate, unsettle, reinterpret the norms, which were always conceived to be unstable—the interrogation, indeed, was an essential part of the never-ending attempt at stabilization. (108)

Beyond the theatre, transvestism was far more obviously a potent issue, highly charged but so hopelessly nonspecific… slippage between sumptuary display the gender transgression … modern critics regularly do the same conflation when they assume that Elizabethan sumptuary laws regulated cross-dressing. …It is to the point that in England, French and Italian fashionable male style was considered effeminate: transvestism is, to a large degree, in the eye of the beholder. (109)

We have seen that the cross-dressing that does not represent but is represented in so much Renaissance drama, the transvestism of Viola, Rosalind, Portia and Nerissa, expresses a wide a variety of patriarchal anxieties, and that these have more to do with the authority of the father within the family structure, with issues relating to inheritance, the transfer of property and the contracting of alliances, than with gender or sexuality. (109)

Women and children (and the society has an investment in representing women as perpetual children) become the cultural metonyms for the working classes generally—all those elements that must be controlled if the patriarchy is to survive. (109)

Witches, though epitomizing what was conceived as a specifically female propensity to wickedness, were also regularly accused to being either unfeminine or androgynous, … Ben Jonson employed a coven of witches to provide the antimasque for The Masque of Queens, his celebration of female heroism and virtue. So conceived, witches and queens are two sides of single coin; the fearsome and the admirable share the same attributes of masculine vigor, strength and independence. (110)

…in a Jacobean context the most striking aspect of Mary Frith was probably not her successful manipulation of the gender codes, but her ability to manipulate them from within her lower-middle-class status. (112)

It has become clear, however, that female transvestism was a fairly widespread practice, especially among lower-class women, as opportunities for work in the seventeenth century were increasingly limited to men. Research has uncovered a significant number of documented cases of women who served as men, in the army and in other traditionally male occupations, and in some cases even took wives. (112)

Transvestism here is not a romantic fiction but a real anitpatriarchal strategy. The question is not how generally feasible such as strategy may have been—obviously there were very few such cases—but how threatening the model they offered—of the woman who appropriated the prerogatives of men—was felt to be. To begin with, we have seen that neither Elizabethan nor Jacobean society finds the most visible symbol of female masculinity, the transvestite woman, sufficiently threatening to enact any law enjoining her behavior. (115)

Bigamy was a crime under canon law, but the punishment was merely that the bigamous marriage was declared void. It only became a felony in 1604—the year before Dudely and Southwell eloped. The change in the law had less to do with the sanctity of matrimony than with parliament’s attempt to limit and control the authority of the ecclesiastical courts over marriage, (115)

Anxieties about bigamy unquestionably have patriarchal roots, but in this case they are not, for once, anxieties about the power of women. The bigamist is almost invariably a man. Of women who violated the marriage bond, for example, by adultery, the law took little notice, both before and after 1604: adultery was a spiritual matter, which remained in the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, and was not prosecutable under the common law. Under canon law it constituted, at most, grounds upon which a husband could repudiate his wife and obtain a legal separation; it was not grounds for what in modern terms would be called divorce; the parties were not free to remarry, and the husband remained liable for the wife’s support. The law here did not favor the man: there was no particular advantage to the husband in this situation, and the statutes provided no relief for the universal figure of fun, the cuckold. Indeed, the children of a legally married woman by an adulterous liaison, even if they were disavowed by her husband, were considered legitimate and took the husband’s name… (116)

The laws relating to marriage, then, were not on the whole concerned with infractions. Instead, the law helped both to define the place of women and to keep them in it by guaranteeing but also limiting their property rights, regulating their rights to contract alliances, and on a lower level, by providing the ducking stool for scolds. …despite the extensive literature addressing the problem of harridans, shrews, and the like, except in the rare cases where the “unfeminine” woman could be defined as a witch, English Renaissance culture on the whole tolerates her. / Perhaps, however, it does more than that: perhaps there is a sense in which it positively wants her around. Within the cultural norms, as Karen Newman observes, “in the daily life of the household, village, and town, women… though always ideologically subject, often had authority over men—over their servants and children, over the less wealthy or wellborn.” We have seen how the image of Queen Elizabeth in full armor, as a later account put it “like some Amazonian empress,” rallying her troops at Tilbury when the attack of the Armada was imminent, served as a potent argument against Caroline effeminacy, and indicates the degree to which the masculine woman could serve as an ideal. (117)

The earliest depiction of her in armor at Tilbury is the Caroline engraving in plate 14, a document in the politics of nostalgia. Elizabeth’s ubiquitously cited speech to her troops on the occasion is also a later confection; it survives in a variety of versions, but the earliest dates from shortly after the event and was intended for publication. It is a characteristic performance, consciously plaing against traditional gender roles. “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king…Rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.” This is not the rhetoric of an Amazon; Amazons do not present themselves as weak and feeble women. It combines the discourse Othello employs when he calls Desdemona his fair warrior with the Petrachan, and more specifically Spenserian, ideology in which masculine heroism consists of service to a noble lady, and its rewards are not the spoils of war but the favor she dispenses. (118)

Transvestism is for us male to female. For the Renaissance it was—normatively, so to [118] speak—female to male, and it took forms that ranged from the personal style exemplified by Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, … to those fashionable accessories of which King James complained to the Bishop of London, and on to outright gender crossing, where the transvestism is intended to deceive… (119)

…pamphlets published in 1620, Hic Mulier, an attack on women in male dress, … That the anxiety has to do with how much more sexually exciting the new fashion renders women is clear from the costume as it is described. … what is construed as “masculine” here is precisely the aggressive sexual display, the flaunting of desire. Masculine dress is conceived as empowering and liberating; it frees its wearers, however, not to be like men—to be soldiers, merchants, artisans, heads of households—but to be sexually active women, harlots. [119] … being masculine in this case means having constant and promiscuous sex: this is what it is to “act” like a man; but the deeper implication is that sexual desire, and the authority to satisfy it, are male prerogatives. [120] … carnal lust, which in woman is insatiable.” (119-121)

Contradictions may be of the essence of a system; and if they are, then to undertake to resolve them will misrepresent the system. This is surely the case with that various and conflicted set of ideologies we call Renaissance patriarchy. …it is also always threatened—this is an essential elements in the way any patriarchy conceives itself. …Authority exists only when it is exerted, and it must be exterted over someone—it must, that is, constantly create or identify its subjects. (123)

Comedies about the management of shrews and tragedies about daughters who disobey their fathers and make disastrous marriages are obviously implicated in it. Those who see in Romeo and Juliet and Othello attacks on patriarchy misunderstand the nature, and more specifically the representation, of the ideology of the age. (123-124)

…the patriarchy of fathers impinged on that of husbands, both were at odds with the patriarchy of the crown, and even the crown could be charged with usurping the prerogatives of God the Father. In short, everyone in this culture was in some respects a woman, feminized in relation to someone. (124)

In short, the ideology of a culture does not describe its operation, only the ideals and assumption, often refracted and unacknowledged, of its ruling elite. …To define Renaissance culture simply as a patriarchy, whatever the term is taken to imply, is then to limit one’s view to the view the dominant culture took of itself; to assert that within it women were domestic creatures and a medium of exchange is to take Renaissance ideology at its word, and thereby to elide and suppress the large number of women who operated outside the family system, and the explicit social and legal structures that enabled them, in this patriarchy, to do so. / In this respect, even the most powerful feminist analyses are often in collusion with precisely the patriarchal assumptions they undertake to displace. (125)

Perhaps the Early Modern conception of male and female did not in fact preclude women from operating in the public world; perhaps it only meant that when they did, they were thought of as “masculine.” (127)

…they are cases that indicate that both the complexities and contradictions in patriarchal attitudes, and the radical inconsistency of the constructions of the feminine. (129)

Adultery and fornication, then, were no bar to preferment in this instance. What was perceived as threatening to the patriarchy, and [132] resulted in social ostracism, was the attempt to move back within its norms, the claim of respectability. (132-133)

…Countess of Shrewsbury—the famous Bess of Hardwick. …Edmund Lodge, in 1791, summed up more than two centuries of hostile criticism when he described her as “a woman of masculine understanding and conduct; proud, furious, selfish and unfeeling.” Doubtless, had her “masculine…conduct” been the work of a man, it would have been found admirable, but her story also illustrates the ways in which the patriarchal system could be made to work for and by women. [133] … married at the age of fifteen to thirteen-year-old Robert Barlow. …marriage was part of a complex scheme to preserve the Barlow property from …custody of the Court of Wards… Her husband died a year and a half later—there were no children, since the marriage, as was common in such youthful matches, had been unconsummated. … In 1547, at the age of twenty, she married Sir William Cavendish, a prosperous civil servant twenty-two years older than she, … Cavendish was shrewd, practical, and exceptionally able; and though his second wife [134] brought him no property, he found a true soulmate in her. Within a few years she was not only managing their several households, but keeping all the accounts. … Cavendish’s embezzlement of funds from his office in the treasury. … Cavendish died, leaving Bess a widow with an immense debt to the crown. / What made the debt manageable was the death of Queen Mary in the following year. The Cavendishes had supported Princess Elizabeth when it was unfashionable and even dangerous to do so—this, indeed, may have been one of the things that Mary distrusted in them—and the new queen rewarded Bess by bringing her to court as lady-in-waiting. She quickly found a third husband there, Sir William St. Loe, … he adored her. The queen eventually remitted all but (lb) 1,000 of the debt; the money was [135] paid by St. Loe. When he died eight years later, in 1565, her own property was unencumbered, and since they had had no children, she was the sole heir to his considerable property, a rich widow with absolute control over her fortune. / So far, Bess had beaten the system by a combination of good luck, good management, and what must have been extraordinary charm. … At this point Bess could have retired to Chatsworth and lived comfortably on her now large income. That she chose not to do so is an index to her ambition both for herself and her children. …she married the wealthiest man at court, the recently widowed George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. This was advantageous for both of them; [136] … To begin with, the marriage seems to have been a success; but from 1569 the earl and countess were totally occupied with the care of Mary Queen of Scots, who had been put into their keeping by Elizabeth. That they should have been chosen fro this complex and dangerous office indicates the depth of the queen’s trust in them, … Bess was equal to the challenge; her husband was not. … irreconcilable quarrels between him and his wife. [137] … Bess survived Mary’s attempts to implicate her in treasonable plots; she also survived extended hostilities and lawsuits on the part of her increasingly estranged husband. Though Elizabethan law was, as a whole, certainly biased in favor of men, … the courts consistently supported the countess against the two earls. In her last years she ran a large financial empire, … Maybe the only ting anomalous about it is the way our history has recorded it. (133-138)

Theatre here holds the mirror up to nature—or more precisely, to culture: this is a world in which masculinity is always in question. In the discourses of patriarchy, gender is the least certain of boundaries. Acting like a man is the most successful, the most compelling way of acting like a woman. The Roaring Girl enacts the dangerous possibility that is articulated in innumerable ways throughout this society, from gynecological theory to sartorial style, from the fear of effeminacy to the stage’s translation of boys into women and women into boys: that women might be not objects but subjects, not the other but the self. (153)