Crossdressing in Shakespeare: The Performance of Gender
“All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts” arguably one of William Shakespeare’s most famous lines and one that continues to ring true (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII). People play different parts depending on who they’re with, what they want and where they are, and one of the most challenging parts to be played is gender — both on the stage and off. Shakespeare’s stage was composed of boy-actors cross-dressed as women and women characters cross-dressed as boys; a fascinating function of these two figures was the way they were used to question and explore the sex-gender system being established in the 16th and 17th centuries. Shakespeare uses cross-dressed women characters and the boy actors who portrayed them to explore concepts of gender, sexual difference and desirability and the performative nature of all three.
The all-male professional acting company was unique to England and so the boy-actor as an object of desire was a source of anxiety that the English struggled with in their literature. Shakespeare does not shy away from addressing the existence of his boy-actors and their desirability in his plays. In Act V of Antony and Cleopatra he writes “I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’th’posture of a whore” tempting his audience to look more closely at the “squeaking Cleopatra boy” that would have been acting on the London stage. While the line “I’th’posture of a whore” is primarily critiquing tales that reduce Cleopatra to a whore, it also suggests that the boy-actor, by taking on her likeness, has himself become an object of desire for the playgoer. [Lines like these served as a way to bring attention to the actors’ skill and Shakespeare’s own.] The boy-actor, while an object of desire himself, was meant to stand in for the “natural” object of desire, the woman character. And in the epilogue of As You Like It the boy who plays Rosalind says, “If I were a woman I / would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased / me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I / defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good / beards or good faces or sweet breaths will, for my / kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell” which is interesting exchange between actor and audience; equating the honor due to a lady with a boy only playing at being a lady. Very simply, it suggests that the constructed appearance of the lady is enough to ‘be’ a lady. The question is, what makes the boy a “desirable” stand in for woman? Gorman suggests that what boys and women have in common that makes them objects of desire for men is their androgynous and transitive states within the Galeanic concept of human sexuality (30). Essentially, the female body was “imperfectly” prolonged and seen as an “in-between” state that would culminate in the male body; because of this transitional state, the woman’s body was seen as most similar to the adolescent male who also was seen to exist in an “in-between” state, that between child and man (30). With this outlook, the use of the boy-actor to portray the woman character is an oddly appropriate act, further capturing this idea of the perpetual transition state. While it is admittedly an interesting concept, it had no bearing on the exclusion of women from the English theater.
The sudden exclusion of women from acting companies in England has no universally accepted reason. All across Europe women had performed as musicians, acrobats, and actresses, and their skills in these professions were widely celebrated until, suddenly, that was no longer true in England. In the chapter “Shakespeare’s Crossdressing Comedies” Phyllis Rackin posits that the exclusion of women from acting companies in England was motivated by the desire to gain professional status and escape the “taint” of effeminacy that had come to be associated with traveling performers due to the rising acceptance of sexual difference as fact (Dutton, Howard 115). This exclusion was restricted to the professional stage, as women continued to perform in a variety of social settings, such as Guild plays, May games, and Court masques (Rackin). Knowing this, it may not be quite as surprising to see that women in a number of other trades and professions were also being ushered back into their homes and into “proper” motherly roles during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. This arbitrary gendering of professions lends another nuance to the construction and performance of gender revealed through cross-dressing. So long as women were able to “pass” as men and engage in established “masculine” behaviors they could continue to participate in these professions. Legal records suggest that women and men were equally condemned for the act of cross-dressing, but there are fewer accounts of men cross-dressing (Gorman 9). While cross-dressing was not originally labeled as a crime, those caught were still punished — women, in particular, were often accused of being prostitutes or leading a “loose” life. Interestingly, they “were forced to stand of the pillory in man’s apparel” and while it served as a warning against committing this social offense, “a kind of theatricality is also prevalent in this system of punishment” (Gorman 10, 11). A more serious account of punishment was that of Johanna Goodman who was publicly whipped and sent to Bridewell prison in 1569 for dressing as a male servant in an attempt to accompany her husband to war (Howard 421). On the theatrical side of things, cross-dressing is rarely portrayed as “criminal” to the extent that it would be condemned in real life. While Shakespeare’s plays do not particularly condemn cross-dressing, a number of critics during that time did and for a variety of reasons. One of the contemporary criticisms of cross-dressing within plays was put forth by Stephen Gosson in 1582 in his pamphlet “Plays Confuted in Five Actions” which states:
“In Stage Playes for a boy to put on the attyre, the gesture, the passions of a woman; for a meane person to take upon him the title of a Prince with conterfeit porte, and traine, is by outwarde signes to shewe them selves otherwise then they are, and so within the compass of a lye” (Chambers 1923: 217).
Here, the condemnation is not directly about gender but about the nature of performance itself, about claiming social standing one has no legitimate right to own. The worry present in this condemnation is that cross-dressing in plays would set an example for the society to follow; and if that example was followed the established divides between class and gender would collapse, because clothing would no longer make one’s social status readily apparent.
The cross-dresser, both on stage and in society, was an object of fascination and a source of opposition. In “The Theatricality of Transformation” it is suggested that “the cross-dresser was an object of fascination for the early modern viewer for the same reasons the virgin and the young boy were equally spectacles…they were arrested in a state of potentiality” (Gorman, abstract). In plays it is the act of changing that is shown as an object of fascination because it creates a “performativity of in-betweenness” (Gorman 14). According to Rackin, “the cross-dressed boy…became the living embodiment of the mystery of theatrical impersonation” (Dutton; Howard 117).
According to Rackin, cross-dressing in the Elizabethan and Jacobean era addressed,
“a sex-gender system beginning to undergo the radical renegotiation that would finally produce an ideological regime based on the assumptions about the essential, biologically grounded differences between men and women that came, until very recently, to be taken for granted” (Dutton; Howard 121).
The place of the boy-actor cross-dressing as a woman and that of the woman character cross-dressing as a boy served to explore the new meanings and expectations being assigned to gender and sexual difference.
The play Twelfth Night conducts a particularly interesting exploration of the “inherent” sexual differences between men and women through the experiences of the identical twins Viola and Sebastian. When shipwrecked and separated on the island of Illyria, Viola takes on her brother’s masculine image and calls herself “Cesario” to navigate safely through an unfamiliar place. The play places particular emphasis on the clothing as the main marker of gender identity, rather than sex; this is seen most clearly at the end of the play when “Cesario” is revealed to be Viola, but because she is still wearing her male disguise the others continue to address her as “Cesario” despite knowing her true identity. The exact lines are these, said by Orsino: “Cesario, come — /For so you shall be while you are a man; / But when in other habits you are seen, / Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen” (Act V Scene I). As a later Shakespearean comedy, Twelfth Night no longer portrays women’s cross-dressing as a threat to the social order in the same way that his earlier plays did. Instead, it is cross-dressing across social class that is portrayed as the real threat. Malvolio, the steward who tries to court Olivia and dresses in yellow stockings and garters, clothing far above his station, is the one punished most severely by the play.
While Twelfth Night explores inherent sexual differences, Merchant of Venice explores accepted gender roles. What is most interesting about the Merchant of Venice is that it is one of the few plays in which married women are the ones engaged in the act of cross-dressing. In the traditional narrative of the Shakespearean comedy, the act of cross-dressing serves as a disguise enabling unmarried women to navigate strict patriarchal norms as males so as to pursue husbands or to hide, and always they are shown to be weaker than the actual men. Portia and Nerissa’s cross-dressing serves neither purpose, instead they disguise themselves as men, act as men, and are on equal footing with “real” men. Their reason for cross-dressing is to save Antonio, Portia’s husband’s friend, from a debt he owes to the plays ‘villain’ Shylock. Portia does defeat Shylock in court and, by her defeat of him, is even a better man than her husband and Antonio since neither could hope to defeat him themselves.
Towards the end of Shakespeare’s life and career, cross-dressing became a much larger source of cultural anxiety.Between 1580-1620 heavy religious attacks were made against the act, and in 1620 King James I actually called for preachers to condemn London women for dressing “mannishly” (Howard 420). The condemnation of the fashionable wives of the city was brought about because it was believed that their cross-dressing overstepped established class and gender boundaries and that “by wearing ever more ornate clothing, they encroached on the privileges of aristocratic women; by wearing men’s clothes they encroached on the privileges of the advantaged sex” (420). Therefore, it was the potential power the cross-dressed state granted women that was the source of fear, since it acted as a destabilizing force that could shatter the constructed patriarchal authority.