Spectrums of Shakespearean Crossdressing

The Art of Performing Women

Courtney Bailey Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367333416
• eBook ISBN: 9781000735581
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro shakespeariano

Since young male players were the norm during the English Renaissance, were all cross-dressed performances of female characters played with the same degree of seriousness? Probably not. Spectrums of Representation in Shakespearean Crossdressing examines these varied types of female characters in English Renaissance drama, drawing from a range of play texts themselves in order to investigate if evidence exists for varying performance practices for male-to-female crossdressing. This book argues for a reading of the representation of female characters on the English Renaissance stage that not only suggests categorizing crossdressing along a spectrum of theatrical artifice, but also explores how this range of artifice enriches our understanding of the plays. The scholarship surrounding cross-dressing rarely makes this distinction, since in our study of early modern plays we tend to accept as a matter of course that all crossdressing was essentially the same. The basis of Spectrums of Representation in Shakespearean Crossdressing is that it was not.

1 The Disguised Heroine and Castiglione’s Shadow in Shakespeare’s Cross-Dressed Comedies

As captivating as Shakespeare’s disguised heroines are for twenty-first-century audiences (and also for actresses vying to play star vehicles like Viola or Rosalind), our historical awareness might make us wonder if it was easier for all-male companies during the English Renaissance to perform plays with breeches roles, particularly if a company wanted to feature an especially talented boy actor.¹ And when we consider that these first performances of plays like Twelfth Night, Or What You Will, or As You Like It allowed the disguised heroine to perform in the most accurate “costume” the company had on hand (an actual young man), we would do well to ask whether this momentary rejection of onstage artifice purposefully accentuates the playwright’s thematic agenda. Jeffrey Hatcher’s 1999 play of the Restoration stage, Compleat Female Stage Beauty, offers a surprising acknowledgment of this realistic sentiment.² Set in 1660s England, after Charles II has lifted the long-standing ban on English actresses and announced, “No He shall ere again upon an English stage play She,” the actor Edward Kynaston comes to terms with the realization that his long career of playing female characters is at a depressing end.³ In a conversation with Kynaston, the diarist Samuel Pepys acknowledges his own love of watching Kynaston play “britches” roles:

PEPYS: You know, Mr. K., the performance of yours I always like best? Well, as much as I adored your Desdemona and your Juliet, I always loved best the “britches” parts. Rosalind, f’rinstance. And not just because of the woman stuff, but also because of the man sections. Your performance of the man stuff seemed so right, so true, that I suppose I felt it was the most real in the play.

KYNASTON: You know why the man stuff seems real? Because I’m pretending. You see a man through the mirror of a woman through the mirror of a man; take one of those reflecting glasses away and it doesn’t work; the man only works because you see him in contrast to the woman he is; if you saw him without the her he lives inside, he wouldn’t seem a man at all.

PEPYS: (Blinks at that.) You have obviously thought longer on this question than I. Well. (Stands.) Must home to my wife. Pleasure to see you, Mr. K.⁴

The pragmatism of Pepys’ comment is convicting, despite the fact that it is a fiction composed by a twentieth-century playwright. For it raises this question: Is it possible to overtheorize crossdressing on the Renaissance stage, as Kynaston seems to do? On a practical level, this quote reminds us that breeches roles were perhaps pragmatic for companies to use in their productions, since they gave the troupe the opportunity to both cut down on onstage artifice (and all the costuming that goes with it) and feature an especially talented young male actor. But the appearance of the revealed male player in breeches roles also introduces a thematic dimension to the cross-dressed comedies, one that both satisfies a craving for realistic representation and introduces thematic considerations that would not be present if it were not for the presence of the disguised heroine. Specifically, other than defer the comic resolution, what thematic implications could be behind the choice of Shakespeare’s comic heroines to disguise themselves as men, and thus to appear onstage in the most convincing costume available to English Renaissance players?⁵

What I intend to explore in this chapter is the potential effect of visually pairing the disguised heroine with her romantic counterpart on the Renaissance stage. Here, I argue that by encountering the presence of the revealed young male player in Twelfth Night and As You Like It, we recognize how the paired characters of Cesario/Orsino and Ganymede/Orlando might complement one another in terms of a vision of Renaissance courtesy.⁶ In other words, the appearance of the disguised heroine (and, thus, the young male player as himself) helps us more clearly perceive how a female character’s enactment of courtesy, a la Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, might adjudicate and correct any apparent lack of courtesy in her male counterpart.⁷ The ultimate effect of this visual pairing is arguably this: the literal, onstage presence of the young male actors masquerading as Cesario and Ganymede accentuates the fact that Orsino and Orlando would have never accepted such instruction had their young friends not appeared so convincingly as men. Moreover, Castiglione is an appropriate lens for these two plays because Viola-as-Cesario and Rosalind-as-Ganymede both serve as types of courtiers to their male counterparts and thus act as complements: Cesario is literally a courtier in Count Orsino’s household, and Ganymede is a gentle, quick-witted young man, whose friendship with Orlando is built upon Ganymede offering advice to his friend about love.

While we cannot literally witness an original production of these plays in order to understand how young male actors would have performed the disguised heroine, we can use the cultural milieu of the Renaissance to speculate about the theatrical effects of this dramatic choice. I have structured this chapter in a way that privileges close reading of the play texts in light of that milieu as a means for exploring the disguised heroine as one point on the spectrum of female artifice. For when we begin to view Cesario and Ganymede as young male courtiers, whose actions and advice help improve their lords, we see that there is a substantial benefit to letting the young male player appear “as a young man” in these scenes. In particular, the heroine’s cross-dressed disguise is not only convincing to the lord she serves but also, perhaps more importantly, an extremely convincing disguise for the audience to perceive. Like I highlighted in the introduction to this book, the trope of the disguised heroine is especially vulnerable to a critical tradition deeply concerned with the erotic undertones of English theatrical crossdressing, and certainly homoeroticism hovers in the background of any discussion of Viola and Rosalind. And, indeed, with respect to the disguised heroine motif in early modern drama, these critical interpretations reveal that any discussion about these female characters and their male counterparts will be hard-pressed to skirt the discussion of sexuality. The fact that both Viola and Rosalind must disguise themselves as young men further invites a confrontation with the visual reality of these plays in their original contexts. In the present chapter, however, my focus is on the thematic implications that arise when we consider the character representations alongside the historical reality of male-to-female crossdressing, not necessarily the erotic substrate to the relationships between these characters.

Shakespeare and Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier

Although Sir Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (first published in Italian in 1528) is a significant text for understanding English Renaissance literature generally, the portions of The Courtier that appear in literature anthologies are usually limited to the brief description of sprezzatura in Book One and Peter Bembo’s “Ladder of Love” speech in Book Four.⁸ These are absolutely important segments of Castiglione’s book, but this choice of excerpts somewhat dilutes The Courtier’s structural and stylistic qualities. Presented as a transcription of conversations at the Court of Urbino between 1504 and 1508, Castiglione’s structure imitates the nonchalance, or grazia, that the text itself advocates. We do not learn about the qualities of the courtier through the form of a traditional conduct manual; instead, we come to understand these qualities while eavesdropping on a court’s conversation about the topic.

The qualities of the courtier are wide-ranging (the courtier should have a sense of “artlessness” or sprezzatura in his presentation, unaffected speech and behavior, physical litheness, an appreciation for music and art, the ability to read Latin and Greek, martial prowess, an interest in composing verse, etc.), but the undergirding goal is for the courtier himself to be a human manifestation of Aristotle’s Golden Mean, or the appropriate median between the extremes of “excess” and “deficiency.” J. R. Woodhouse, in his own commentary on The Book of the Courtier, describes the Mean in this way: “Between the peak of gracious excellence and clumsy ineptitude is a Mean (il mezzo) to which the less gifted may, with studious application, attain, by correcting in large part their natural defects.”⁹ The effect of representing the Aristotelian Mean in one’s behavior (and I must stress that Castiglione is speaking only to men, save for a limited discourse on “gentlewomanly behavior” in Book III) is that the courtier will be an ideal purveyor of truth and guidance to the lord he serves.¹⁰ There is a relatively subversive quality to the courtier. For in embodying the Mean and modeling it for his master, he teaches his lord how to rule. Lord Octavian, one of the discussants at the Court of Urbino, notes that the courtier’s attention to “the meane of the qualities whiche these Lordes have given [the courtier]” enables him to serve as an advisor to the courtier’s lord:

The ende therfore of a perfect Courtier (wherof hitherto nothinge hath bine spoken) I beleave is to purchase him, by the meane of the qualities whiche these Lordes have given him, in such wise the good will and favour of the Prince he is in service withal, that he may breake his minde to him, and always enfourme hym franklye of the trueth of everie matter meete for him to understande, without feare or peril to displease him. And whan he knoweth his minde is bent to commit any thinge unseemlie for him, to be bould to stande with him in it, and to take courage after an honest sort at the favour which he hath gotten him throughe his good qualities, to disswade him from everie ill pourpose, and to set him in the waye of vertue.¹¹

We cannot know for sure whether Shakespeare read every page of Hoby’s translation of Castiglione, yet we have good reason to believe that he understood the central image of the courtier.¹² The word “courtier” and its variations (“courtiers,” “courtier’s”) appear roughly forty-five times in Shakespeare’s body of work. This is a much smaller number than the several hundred appearances of the closely related “gentleman” and “gentle,” but the sizable recurrence of “courtier” is nonetheless significant. Of all potential courtiers, Prince Hal from Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 is perhaps the clearest vision of Castiglione’s courtier in Shakespeare’s works. In Shakespeare’s History Plays, E. M. W. Tillyard claims that Shakespeare makes Hal “the cortegiano, the fully developed man,” and contrasts him with Hotspur, who is “the provincial, engaging in some ways, but with a one-track mind.”¹³

Truly, the connection between Shakespeare’s characters and The Book of the Courtier is no new vein in studies of English Renaissance drama. In one of the earliest articles on Shakespeare and Castiglione’s The Courtier, Mary Augusta Scott identifies Castiglione’s book as a potential source text for the verbal sparring between Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing.¹⁴ Since the publication of Scott’s essay in 1901, several other scholars have found connections between The Courtier and Shakespeare, but the criticism has shifted from hunting source texts to thematic readings.¹⁵ Peter Burke suggests that there is a “danger of seeing Castiglione everywhere,” and yet, as Phillip D. Collington asserts, “Castiglione is ‘everywhere’” in some of the texts of this period.¹⁶ Collington, in his excellent study of The Book of the Courtier in Much Ado about Nothing (in many ways, a reassessment of Scott’s original inquiry using a more nuanced methodology), claims that “a reading of Much Ado alongside The Courtier evinces the English dramatist’s skeptical examination of the source’s courtier-ideal, presented in an accessible dramatic form.”¹⁷ This skepticism also appears at work in the cross-dressed comedies, although I make no claims that The Courtier is a direct source for Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Rather, like Collington, I am more interested in reading the ideal of Castiglione’s courtier alongside the cross-dressed heroines in Twelfth Night and As You Like It, with the ultimate objective of demonstrating how both Viola and Rosalind, as female characters, offer their own nuances to a traditional definition of courtesy.¹⁸

Viola and, to a lesser degree, Rosalind’s literal self-fashioning as a young courtier likewise accentuates that both are mediating forces in their comedies.¹⁹ (Rosalind, of course, appears in a rougher situation in the Forest of Arden, but Orlando nonetheless detects a gentle accent in Rosalind/Ganymede’s speech.) The ability of a young courtier to direct his lord not only toward virtue but also toward a Mean is of special interest in The Courtier, and that instruction appears p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Spectrums of Theatrical Representation in Male-to-Female Crossdressing
• 1 The Disguised Heroine and Castiglione’s Shadow in Shakespeare’s Cross-Dressed Comedies
• 2 An Amazon in the City: The Roaring Girl’s Theatrical Memorialization of Mary Frith
• 3 Representing the Tragic Noblewoman in The Duchess of Malfi, Romeo and Juliet, and Titus Andronicus
• 4 Crossdressing for Comic Effect: The Remnants of Francis Flute’s Pitiful Thisby in the New Globe Theatre’s 2012 Twelfth Night
• 5 Female Falstaffs: Identifying the Man-Woman in English Renaissance Drama
• Coda
• References
• Index