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Cross-Dressing in William Shakespeare's

Twelfth Night and As You Like It

by

Zoia Alexanian

Adviser: Lynda Bundtzen

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the

Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

'Villiamstown, MassachusettsTABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction 1

II. Gender and Identity in Twelfth Night 8

III. Gender and Desire in As You Like It 32

IV. Conclusion 56

V. Works Cited 60Zoia Alexanian

I

I. Cross-dressing in the Renaissance Theater: Pour (Secretly) in Kind cf Poison

To the anti-theatricalists in early modern England, nothing w~s more unseemly

than the boys playing women on the stage-nothing, perhaps, exceptjthe idea that v.'omen

should play women, which the Puritans never posit as an alternative. IWomen are

themselves dangerous, and a boy who looks like one, doubly so. In h~s letter against the

evils of the theater, the Puritan scholar John Rainolds asks, "Can youjaccuse yourself, or

any other, of any wanton thought stin-ed up in you by looking at a be~utiful woman? If

I

you can, then ought you beware of beautiful boys transformed into w~men by putting on

their r~iment, their features, looks and fashibns" (Rainolds, 176). The warning is a

curious one-a boy acting as a woman is in some way "transformed" into one, making

men helplessto resist him, and yet he does remain a "him," despite the transformation,

for men should "beware" any desire they feel towards this cross-dressed figure. As with

the other anti-theatricalists, Rainolds finds cross-dressing dangerous to both the actor and

spectator. But if f~minine attire is somehow enough to change a boy into a woman (as

Rainolds argues), then there should be nothing wrong with a man desiring "her"; if,

however, this desire can be nothingbut illicit (as Rainolds also argues), then the boy can

never beimything but ahoy. Implicit in Rainolds' faulty logic is an ambiguity over

surfaces-to what extent does someone's exterior define his/her interior, and vice versa?

. . .

Is a "true" woman one who looks like her, acts like her-in which case, a boy actor will

do just as weIl--or is there something innate and essential that makes her "her"-in

which case, whyall the fuss over costUrries?

Bodies, in early modern times, c'ould not be trusted. Clothes'were to validate not

only class but gender, as though witham the proper outfit, a maleshepherd could be as

1Zoia Alexanian

easily mistaken for a woman as for a nobleman. Lacking any clear, coherent narrative, a

body told two contradictory tales of its gendering. In one story, as passed down from

Galen, men and women were "versions of the same unitary species" (Orgel, 20), the sale

difference being whether the procreative organs (fundamentally identical) were internal

Sixteenth~centuf1J depiction of the vagina and uterus,

surface and cut-away views (Bartisch, 1595)

or external to the body. The other

story, meanwhile, presented men

and women as starting out

identically feminine, with men

possessing enough strength and

vigor to overcome this default

form. In both of these histolies,

the female body is

inconclusive--under the proper

conditions, irs interior organs could conceivably become externalized (making it male),

orit could amass the necessary force to break past its femininity (again, allowing it to

bec.ome masculine). And rumorsfrom th,ecoiltinent asserted just that, desclibing women

suddenly becoming men, andseairJessly joining the ranks of husbands and masters. That

a male body could as easily become female was hesitantly declared impossible by the

male physicianS,;brave enough to even consider this horrifying prospect (Orgel, 20-3).

Fear and~ncongruity: these are the two defining attributes of early modem

di8courseon gender, on which qualities characterized a man or ft. woman onhe proper

object" of clesfreof each. Sodomy was vehemently decried by the churches and in

religious' tracts, yet la\vmake"rs had difficulty delineating the·specifics of the practice.

2Zoia Alexanian

Appalled at the idea of sodomy (whatever it might actually be), men nonetheless

considered themselves infinitely more noble in mind and body than women, and thus

more worthy of each other's affection. Moralists were as liable to condemn men's love

for women as they were heretical sexual practices. And while the men preached their

superiority, the country was under the rule of a woman, one who staunchly refused to

marry and bear heirs and assume a suitable womanly role.

Properly heterosexual gender roles were thus simultaneously harshly imposed and

ultimately nebulous-open to interpretation, transgression, and transformation. Nowhere

was this more true than in the Renaissance theater, which women were allowed to attend

unescorted, and the male players permitted (if at times somewhat grudgingly) to

disregard both sumptuary laws and the passages of Deuteronomy prohibiting crossdressing. The theater in early modem England was full of inexplicable rules (other

European countries, if they permitted professional play-acting at all, allowed women to

perform femaJe rol(~s), as well as cultural conventions, and, of course, scripted behaviors,

but it was also a place in which liberties-of identity, of desire-were not only tolerable

but encouraged. Above all, the theater had the poWer to effect change--both its

proponents arid adversaries agreed on thatmuch. Regardless of which view various

debaters espoused, both positions held the same tacit belief that identity was neither

constant nor safe, and only the matter of whether theater could alter It for the better or

worse was up for discussion: In 1599, the same year that William Shakespeare penned As

You Like It, and one year before Tlvelftlt Night, Rainolds wrote of "the contagion of

theatrical sights" (Rainolds, 177), whife in 1612 Thomas Heywood talked ()f "sights to

3ZOl a Alexanian

make an Alexander" (Heywood, 221). An audience could be diseased by a play or

inspired to greatness, but it could not remain wholly unaffected.

To Rainolds, however, the actors were at even greater risk from theatrical

practices than the audiences. Male actors playing male roles were endangered by the

cross-dressed boys around them, who, "as certain spiders, if they but do touch men only

with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain and make them mad: so bttautiful boys

by kissing do sting and pour secretly in a kind of poison, the poison of incontinency"

(Rainolds, 174). Desire is not defined by identity, but is engendered through contact; it

can be transferred but never presupposed. The terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual"

are modern inventions, and when discussing Shakespearean texts modern critics use them

to describe actions rather than people. No good synonyms existed, despite the plethora of

adjectiv(~slike"btiggerer"or "Ganymede," for as Alan Bray shows in Homosexuality in

Renaissante England, a man quietly engaging in homosexual activities with his servant

would never thinkto identify himself as a sodomite, with all of the fire and bbmstone

that word entailed.

, As for the "beautiful boys" themselves, these were in danger of not only

manifesting improper desires,but of becoming irrevocably altered by their feminine

roles. Rainolds, to be fair, makes clear that while clothing can be treacherous, it takes a

bit more thah a dress to change a boy into a woman. The'real threat lies in all the hours

spent rehearsing 'and pretending to be feminine, as "by often repetition and representation

ofthe parts, shall as it were engrave the things in their mind with a pen of iron, or with

the point of a diamond" (Rainolds, 174). Repeated imitation leads to a pretense of a

"real" identity forming in the psyche. Four hundred years later, Judith Butler makes much