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Redressing Cross-Dressed Shakespeare

Thomas L. Martin and Duke Pesta
ew historicists have been criticized for seeing through cultural representations to the circulations of power at work in institutions and other brokers of social power. Their historical method purports to bring to light machinations from behind closed doors, closed both to the understanding of contemporaries as well as to the backwards gaze of traditional historians. Besides discovering what is there but hidden, their method also seeks to reveal what is there but imperceptible. One of its most celebrated accomplishments, of course, is the ability to see invisible bullets.1 But all such arguments from silence, positing presence from absence, are excessively tricky and fraught with hazard. Whenever critics sidestep standard burdens of proof and overturn the obvious, they may destroy the value of what they seek to understand. Hoping to avoid that pitfall ourselves, we simply raise a question: in their rush to expose the hidden underbelly that supports and nourishes art, do some practitioners of the new historicism ultimately obscure the artistic value of what they see through? While new historicism may lack the cohesion it had in the early 1990s, many of its assumptions have been absorbed unquestioningly by gender critics concerned with sexuality and representation on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. These gender critics foreground the gender of the actor, usually a boy, behind the character portrayed, typically a woman. By looking through the costuming and acting, and over the longstanding stage convention of boys in those roles, they discover an erotic tension in the boy actor who dressed for a womans part. When they insist that the convention of cross-dressing does not function effectively as a convention, but instead becomes a main focus of audience attention as a spectacle of transvestism, they may indeed run the risk of distorting the purpose of the theater. In effect, these critics find themselves in the same predicament as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, whose intent focus on a theoretical sexuality blinds him to the one right before his eyes. Purporting to see all women as disloyal and sexually promiscuous, he misses Don Pedros humane defense of love and marriage. Missing also the reality of Beatrices truly admirable qualities, he persists in his confident chiding, boldly vowing he will never
Thomas L. Martin is professor of English at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, tmartin@fau.edu. Duke Pesta is an English professor at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, pestaj@okstate.edu. Please address correspondence to Academic Questions / NAS, 221 Witherspoon Street, Second Floor, Princeton, NJ 085423215; editor@nas.org.

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hang [his] bugle in an invisible baldrick (I.i.231).2 For a character so guarded against paper bullets of the brain (II.iii.236-37), he indulges his own dangerous illusions, preferring them to the evidence available to all, setting himself up at once for a comic fall. In this essay, we consider the issue of invisible baldricks and exceptional powers of seeing, of cross-dressed boys and men who played women, of sexual aesthetics and Renaissance stagecraft. In a word, we reevaluate specific gender critical claims regarding the nature of sexual representation on the English stage. Over the last fifteen years, Stephen Orgel, Phyllis Rackin, Lisa Jardine, and other critics3 have made much of what they call the transvestite stage in early modern England. Their key argument, crudely stated, is that the boy actors who dressed for womens roles created a homoerotic theater. In this theater the attraction of men to beautiful boyswhether those men be on the stage or in the audienceis unquestioned. The decision to dress boys as women was deliberate, claims Orgel, reasoning that Homosexuality in this culture appears to have been less threatening than heterosexuality (Nobodys 26). Jardine claims that boy actors playing the roles of women was necessarily homoerotic (9-36). Susan Zimmerman agrees, asserting that on the Renaissance stage, The artifice of actingthe pre-condition for any theatrewas underscored by transvestism (Disruptive 43). If this is true, to what ends did the English stage employ transvestism? According to Zimmerman, by directly violating the audiences presumed suspension of disbelief, Jacobean playwrights seemed to have deliberately and self-consciously privileged transvestism for purposes of erotic titillation. (39). If so, then much of what traditional scholars have said about Renaissance drama from that time till now is fundamentally wrong. These newer critics derive substantial support for their arguments from Puritan writings against the theater, but how representative were Puritan views of the culture at large and especially the theater-going public? As we sort through the issues, it is important from the outset to make clear that our focus is not the various sociological dimensions of homosexuality in Renaissance England.4 Nor will we recapitulate all the scholarship on crossdressing and Renaissance drama. Instead, we select a few leading critics whose arguments for the transvestite stage, largely unchallenged, have established the foundation on which so much subsequent work has been built. Revisiting some of the dramas basic assumptions, we examine the fitness of certain new ways of viewing the early modern stage. Along the way, we address not only the anti-theatrical polemicists, but also those who created and staunchly defended the theater. How specifically did the humanists defend the theater against the Puritan attacks on the stage, attacks often cast in much the same terms the gender critics use today? With these issues in mind, then, we approach our topic: the transvestite theater. And to that end, we assume a methodquerying the Renaissance.

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Unlawful Business I Am About: The Debate Modern critical interest in the representations of gender on stage is anticipated in the polemical battles between the Puritans and the theatrical apologists.5 The Puritans accuse the stage of abuse, as in Philip Stubbess aptly titled Anatomy of Abuses and Stephen Gossons The School of Abuse. Most simply, when they allege abuse, they refer primarily to the moral abuse of portraying any manner of evil on stage. They object because those watching or performing might be incited to evil. However, the charge also refers to the representational abuse of boys dressed for womens roles, since adopting the clothes of the opposite sex transgresses the law of God. To the ideologically driven and literal-minded Puritans, the two forms of abuse are closely related: each violates Gods intended order for the world. Particularly in the case of boys dressed as women, spectators may become confused, stirring in them an unnatural and perverse sexual attraction that subverts Gods design. In 1599, John Rainolds complains that when boys adopt womens clothing, it kindles great sparkles of lust in the spectators; and Stubbes, perhaps the most famous Puritan opponent of the stage, fumes that Our apparel was given us as a sign distinctive to discern betwixt sex and sex, and therefore for one to wear the apparel of another sex is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the verity of his own kind. Stubbes is echoed by Gosson, and both echo the oft-cited text from Deuteronomy. Gosson asserts that the Law of God very straightly forbids men to put on womens garments; the players who don not only the apparell, but the gate, the gestures, the voyce, the passions of a woman are an abomination vnto the Lord. Attending to the literal rather than the literary, the real instead of the representational, the Puritans appear unwilling to acknowledge dramatic convention, missing the point of the theater altogether. The Puritan quarrel with the theater has long been documented by literary scholars.6 Those recent critics interested in gender, however, take Puritan statements to be an accurate guide to the cultures view of gender both in the theater and in society as a whole. Citing William Prynnes Histriomastix, Orgel observes, The implication is that the heterosexual titillation is a cover for the homosexual response beneath (Nobodys 16). And citing Rainoldss The Overthrow of Stage Plays, he draws this inference: Here the attraction of men to beautiful boys is treated as axiomatic; the assumption behind this hysterical (and very ambivalent) warning is that to try boys will be to prefer them to women (16). Orgel summarizes his findings from the Puritan tracts, findings that happen to harmonize with his own thesis: The assumption behind all these assertions is, first, that the basic form of response to theater is erotic; second, that erotically, theater is uncontrollably exciting; and third, that the basic, essential form of erotic excitement in men is homosexual that, indeed, women are only a cover for men (17). On the basis of Rainoldss statement that womens clothes may incite lust, Marjorie Garber concludes

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that this is a classic description of a fetishistic scenario, in which the woman who is remembered and imagined is the phallic mother . . . . But this mechanism of substitution, which is the trigger of transvestic fetishism, is also the very essence of theater (Vested 29). The assumption behind her statements is that the Puritans offer modern scholars insight into the fundamental nature of the theater: Rainolds, like his fellow antitheatricalists, despite or perhaps because of the hysterical nature of their objections, had intuited something fundamental about the way dramatic representation worksand about the power of the transvestite (29). Thus critics like Orgel and Garber find themselves in substantial agreement with the Puritans. But seen in context, Puritan objections against crossdressing make up only a small portion of their arguments against the stage. We find in their writings information on a range of topics, including politics, religion, economics, social mores, even medicine, and, of course, art. Witness the broad coverage in this statement by Anthony Munday: [plays] are publike enimies to virtue, & religion; allurements vnto sinne, corrupters of good manners; the cause of securitie and carelesnes; meere brothel houses of Bauderie; and bring both the Gospel into slander; the Sabboth into contempt; mens soules into danger; and finalie the whole Commonweale into disorder. William Crashawe (father of the poet) writes, The ungodly Playes and Enterludes so rife in this nation, what are they but a bastard of Babylon, a daughter of error and confusion, a hellish device (the devils own recreation to mock at holy things) by him delivered to the Heathen, from them to the Papists and from them to us. Prynne, one of the most extreme opponents of the stage,7 but whom Orgel relies upon above, informs his readers, Play-Poets and common Actors (the Divels chiefest Factors) rake earth and hell it selfe; . . . they travell over Sea and Land; over all Histories, poemes, countries, times and ages for unparalleld villanies, that so they may pollute the Theater. And Thomas White constructs this medical syllogism: the cause of plagues is sinne, if you look to it well: and the cause of sinne are playes: therefore the cause of plagues are playes. Puritan writings are not uniformly outrageous, of course, nor is the selective appropriation of them by the gender critics always apparent. Hence, when we read these critics opinions on the Puritans, we would do well to keep two points in mind: dramatic cross-dressing occupies relatively little of the protracted moral invective against the stage, and the Puritans would have been just as troubled at women playing womens roles as boys.8 Of all the gender critics we survey, Zimmerman most transparently appropriates the Puritans. She realizes Rainolds knows little about the theater, but that in no way prevents her from citing him as an authority: Since Rainolds was at best an infrequent theatre-goer, these descriptions are projections or fantasies of what the theatreparticularly a libertine, commercial theatremade possible (Disruptive 45). Not only does she disregard the polemical con-

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text and its incendiary rhetoric, but she also cites Rainolds as speaking for the broader culture and even the theater-goers themselves. She opines, In assailing the erotic appeal of the cross-dressed boy actor, he unwittingly served up an incisively sensitive account of the psycho-dynamics of male spectatorship (44). It Is Required That You Do Wake Your Faith: The Humanists Let us consider what incisive and sensitive accounts are available from those who produced and actually attended the theater, those, we dare say, who found a little more value in it than the Puritans. For many Elizabethans, a dramatic performance assumed a contract between playwright and audience, a point Shakespeare gives special emphasis in his familiar Prologue to Henry V. There the Chorus describes the contract in concrete terms: through the power of their own imagination, the audience must supply the swelling scene and create a kingdom for a stage (4, 3). It is not surprising that playwrights often felt the need to spell out the terms of the dramatic contract by way of a prologue, given the physical limitations of the Elizabethan theater, the publics demand for plays incorporating large-scale action and adventure, and the need to minimize possible misunderstandings on the part of the audience. The sheer scope of Shakespeares subject in Henry V may account for his heightened appeal to the imaginative sympathy of the audience, although such appeals appear in many plays of the period: Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? (11-14) Shakespeare answers the question with a charge to the audience, calling on them to exercise their imaginary powers to supply what the stage cannot provide. He enjoins them to transform the physical conventions of the theater into a fictional world as real as the one they just left. They must read aright the physical signs, however minimal they may be, in order to bring to life the plays fictional places, characters, and events. Shakespeare insists that the physical theater exists as a kind of marker by which the imagination is directed: O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million, And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. (15-18)

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For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as for Aristotle and the Greek dramatists, stage representation and spectacle were subordinate to the imaginative engagement of the spectators. In the passage above, the success of the play depends upon the forces of imagination transforming several actors into a standing army of soldiers, themselves imaginary forces. Shakespeare calls his acting company ciphers, a key term in the passage and a word that carried a number of suggestive meanings in Elizabethan England. Most recognizably, a cipher is a zero, literally an O. Shakespeare asserts that the company of actors is nothing in themselveslike Lear, they are an O without a figure (I.iv.189-90). On one level, the audience adds a figure to the cipher, enduing it with value through the power of imagination. Of course, on another level, the playwright also adds a figure to the cipher, animating it by providing the poetic turn of phrase, or figurative language. From either perspective, Shakespeares description of the physical stage as a wooden O achieves special salience: the stage is the unworthy scaffold whose value or meaning can only come from the outside. Cipher in Shakespeares time also meant a code, a message sent by a code, or the key by which a code is deciphered. The significant point here is that the dramatic performance entails a semiotics of substitution, where the audience will Into a thousand parts divide one man, / And make imaginary puissance (24-25). As part of the dramatic contract, the theater-goer must make the necessary substitutions in this semiotic exchange, i.e., decipher the code: For tis your thoughts that must now deck our kings, Carry them here and there; jumping oer times, Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hourglass.... (28-31) The time and space of the dramatic world, we see, are not the same as the time and space of the stage. And given Puritan objections to costuming as a deliberate falsehood, it is interesting that Shakespeare specifically includes the issue of stage-dress as part of the semiotic exchange. In urging his audience to deck our kings, he encourages them to substitute an actors stage costume for the very regalia of King Henry. In other words, stage-dress is provisional to the dramatic experience, merely a marker or sign-post pointing to the realities of the dramatic or fictional world. Moreover, dramatic markers may be either visual or verbal: an example of the latter is when the audience is enjoined to Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i th receiving earth (26-27). Calling for the audiences willing suspension of disbelief, all such dramatic markers serve as gateways to the fictional events of the drama. Talk as we might about freefloating signifiers and the ultimately indeterminate nature of language, the drama is predicated upon understanding a code.

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So understood was the contract to translate the dramatic code that those who broke it were often treated as tragic figures or mercilessly lampooned. It is Lears lack of imagination and insistence that nothing will come of nothing (I.i.90) that lead to his nihilistic tragedy. An O without a figure, Lear lacks the imagination needed to add value to his suffering after he divides his kingdom and sets in motion the drama that ensues. In the words of the fool, he is nothing (I.iv.192). But the inability to enter into the dramatic contract more often elicited ridicule than pity, as Shakespeares treatment of the rustics in A Midsummer Nights Dream makes clear. Providing a rich source of amusement, characters slow to accept theatric conventions quickly became common objects of sympathetic condescension or outright scorn. Nowhere is this theme given fuller or more raucous treatment than in Beaumont and Fletchers The Knight of the Burning Pestle. In this play, the grocer and his wife, ostensible audience members, interrupt the play continually, redirecting the actors according to their own whims and fancies, even inserting their apprentice as an entirely new character. These boorish theater-goers destroy the dramatic illusion, but of course the effect is comic. The grocers wife admits from the outset that she was neer at one of these plays (Induction 53-55), which may account for her gross misreading. Awkwardly aware of the persons beneath the costumes, she and her husband address the actors sometimes in character and sometimes out. This fatuous pair see their apprentice Rafe beneath the knight, shouting crude stage directions at him; moments later, they only see the knight and are frightened for his perils. Their refusal to separate Rafe from his role as Knight ruins the play, but provides in its place a comic treatment of those who fail to understand what happens in the theater. At the plays outset, they prevent the Prologue from speaking, and in so doing perhaps miss an opportunity to be instructed on the terms of the dramatic contract. Like Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher exploit the comic possibilities of characters who fail to accept theatrical illusion. Not surprisingly, Ben Jonson is at the fore of Elizabethan playwrights who take the defense of theatrical illusion upon themselves. While Shakespeare provides a stirringly artistic prologue to Henry V that inspires the audience to enter the dramatic contract, and Beaumont and Fletcher offer a thwarted prologue to The Knight of the Burning Pestle that might have inducted the audience into the dramatic contract, Jonson presents a realistic prologue to Bartholmew Fair that legally binds the audience to the dramatic contract. For almost a hundred lines, the audience hears the Articles of Agreement binding them as willing participants in the fiction. The legal language of the document is striking, including clauses guaranteeing that the audience remain in their seats for the duration of the play and that they exercise their own judgments, instead of parroting the critics, in assessing the merits of the play. But most importantly, however, is the care Jonson takes to fit the

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audiences imagination to the dramatic presentation. Anticipating the jeers of those fickle patrons who will deride the comedy because it is not a tragedy, nor a juggling act for that matter, Jonson includes the following proviso: It is further covenanted, concluded, and agreed that how great soever the expectation be, no person here is to expect more than he knows, or better ware than a Fair will afford (Induction 109-11). Jonson serves his audience a definitive, prosaic guide for their imagination. Having learned from his tragedies not to overestimate their tastes, Jonson admonishes the spectators to understand that in his play they can expect to see a Justice of the Peace . . . instead of a juggler with an ape (119-20), and that with him they must be content. Thus, Jonsons Induction repudiates the potential misreadings of the audience and, as we shall see, those of the characters in his own play. Indeed, in Bartholmew Fair Jonson anticipates the many ways of misreading available to a Jacobean audience, although perhaps not to our own.9 In the Induction, the play before the play, Jonson provides a makeshift guide for accessing the dramatic contract; in the puppet play, the play at the end of the play, Jonson excoriates characters who breach that contract. These two metadramas framing the main drama are liminal: they provide a threshold both in and out of the dramatic world. These metadramatic bookends support even as they contain the fictional world of Bartholmew Fair, itself a metaphor for artistic creations that can exist only through the cooperation of the audience. In a sense, the two metadramatic set pieces are the supports without which the artistic world of the play cannot stand. They are also among the clearest expressions of Jonsons view of dramatic art, expressions that often go unnoticed in the general critical clamor that surrounds the play. We have seen Jonson construct a defense of the dramatic contract in the Induction to Bartholmew Fair; what remains to be seen is how he dismantles the violators of that contract in the famous puppet drama at the plays end. What makes the puppet play so unique is Jonsons ability to encapsulate decades of theatrical debate and add to it his own definitive statement. After rehearsing many of the standard arguments, Jonson locates the crux of the issue in stage-dress. We know that the question of counterfeiting of sexes by apparel was important enough to him to hire the antiquarian John Selden to research the literal sense and historical of the holy text most often used against the players in this regard, namely, Deuteronomy 22:5: The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a womans garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God. Although Jonson never wrote a formal exposition of his views on theatrical cross-dressing, it is surprising how many recent critics miss his definitive statement in this play. Devoting an entire chapter to the puppet scene, Levine only sees Jonson indulging himself in Derridean doubtsthe puppet play

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represent[ing] the destruction of referentiality itselfand gender obsessionsan uneasy analogy between his own [Jonsons] sterility and the antitheatricalists he so viciously attacks (5, 106).10 Rackin, whose entire thesis depends upon the dangerous duplicity between sex and gender embodied in the figure of the boy actress (36), taxes Jonson for avoiding that which, in reality, he directly addresses. And Orgels book, comprehensively subtitled The Performance of Gender in Shakespeares England, inexplicably neglects the play altogether. What makes Jonsons puppet scene such a weighty entry in this debate? The culmination of Bartholmew Fair comes in Act V when all the characters are brought together at the puppet show. The puppet play exposes to ridicule those who misunderstand or seek to misrepresent the fundamental nature of dramatic art. The foppish Bartholmew Cokes, for instance, abuses theatrical convention by conflating the world of the puppets with the world he inhabits. Cokes requests an audience with the puppet-actors, and when Leatherhead brings forth the lifeless dolls, Cokes exclaims, What, do they live in baskets? (iii.64). In Cokess mind there is, on the one hand, no distinction between wooden puppet and flesh-and-blood actor, nor, on the other, a distinction between his own world and the fictional world of the puppet show. With comic seriousness, Cokes esteems the puppets as worthy gentlemen: Well, they are a civil company, I like em for that. They offer not to fleer, nor jeer, nor break jests, as the great players do. Are they never flustered? (83-87). So taken with the puppets good manners, Cokes solicits their friendship: I am in love with the actors already, and Ill be allied to them presently (116-17). A comic inversion of Shakespeares Snug the Joiner, a character who frustrates dramatic illusion by insistently and absurdly foregrounding himself as the actor behind the lions costume, Cokes is an obvious parody of those who fail to observe the proprieties of dramatic illusion. Those capable of observing these proprieties, like the nobles in A Midsummer Nights Dream, duly mock the witless transgressors. Observing Cokess ridiculous interaction with the puppets, Winwife wryly remarks, Look, yonders your Cokes gotten in among his playfellows; I thought we could not miss him at such a spectacle (iv.1-2). Cokes, whose name suggests simpleton or one easily taken in, cannot distinguish between what happens on stage and what happens in real life; he blurs the boundaries between the world of the play and the world of actuality. Cokess suspension of disbelief is not the problem. Rather, it is breaking the spell the theater casts over him that proves so difficult. While Cokess good-natured ignorance affects no one but himself, Zealof-the-Land Busys rejection of theatrical illusion threatens to undermine the theater altogether. The Puritan Busy embodies the standard Puritan attacks on the theater sketched above, literal-minded attacks designed to efface the distinctions between the physical realities of the theater and its

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imaginative purposes. Busys confrontation with Littlewit, the playwright and puppet-master who presents his play, is at the heart of the debate between the theatricalists and the anti-theatricalists. It will be recalled that Littlewit stages his puppet drama Hero and Leander before an audience of fair-goers, but this is not the Hero and Leander of classical mythology nor of Marlowes popular poem. Fearful that his audience will be unable to make the imaginative leap necessary to fulfill the dramatic contract, Littlewit modernizes the tale to such an extent that Hero becomes a wench o the Bankside and Leander a dyers son; the Hellespont is transformed into the Thames, and Cupid is metamorphosed into a drawer (V.iii.105-15). In a word, Littlewit understands the audiences lack of literary imagination and makes the fulfillment of the dramatic contract as easy as possible. Unlike the stately and serious prologue to Henry V, where Shakespeare calls upon the audience to swell the scene, Jonson creates yet another carnivalesque inversion: Littlewit shrinks the scene to fit the limited minds of his patrons. Shortly after the puppet-play begins, Busy interrupts the drama and attacks the puppets with a fervent rehearsal of commonplace arguments against the players. In a wonderfully ironic moment, Jonson shows his contempt for the entire controversy by creating a showdown between a self-righteous hypocrite and a wise-cracking puppet dressed as the Greek god Dionysius. Busy begins his diatribe by condemning Dionysius as the pagan idol Dagon. Although absent in the traditional tale, Dionysius is a calculated insertion by Jonson: Dionysius is the god associated with the birth of drama in ancient Greece. Furthermore, as a god of license and orgiastic frenzy, Dionysius symbolizes the carnival atmosphere of the fair and is the antithesis of the professed Puritan asceticism of the gluttonous Busy. Ancient celebrations of the cult of Dionysius included ecstatic rituals where the god possessed and spoke through his followers.11 These dramatic origins inform the relationship between Littlewit and the puppets, as Littlewit claims to be the mouth of em all (iii.68). Like a doubting and intractable Pentheus, Busy rails at the puppet with all the zeal he can muster, condemning stage plays as promoting idol worship, vanity, and indolence. But even the simple-minded spectators at the puppet play recognize that Busys attack is predicated on a glaring and fundamental misunderstanding. Angered that Busy has disrupted the performance, Winwife demands, What a desperate, profane wretch is this! Is there any ignorance or impudence like this? To call his zeal to fill him against a puppet? (V.v.43). To the glee of the fair-goers, the puppet more than holds his own against the Puritan, forcing Busy to play what he considers to be his trump-card: Yes, and my main argument against you is that you are an abomination; for the male among you putteth on the apparel of the female, the female of the male (V.v.87-89). Busy refuses to accept the dramatic contract even as he argues with a puppet as if it were a real person. Thus, de-

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spite his literalist rejection of theatrical illusion, Busy unwittingly participates in the world of the drama most vigorously when he denies it most strenuously. The puppets response to Busys accusation is also Jonsons savagely comic refutation of those who insist on seeing through the conventions of the theater, privileging the physical constitution of the dramatic vehicle over the character it conveys. Dionysius responds, You lie, you lie, you lie abominably . . . . It is your old stale argument against the players, but it will not hold against the puppets, for we have neither male nor female amongst us. And that thou mayst see, if thou wilt, like a malicious purblind zeal as thou art! (V.v.90, 92-95) At this moment, according to the stage direction, The puppet takes up his garment, revealing neither a penis nor a vagina, nor indeed anything at all. Dionysiuss gesture powerfully underscores the subordination of the raw materials of stagecraft, be they a boy in womans clothing or a block of wood dressed as a Greek god, to the entire imaginative world created by the drama. Finally made to see the folly of looking through the contract rather than observing it, Busy concedes at this critical point in Jonsons play: I am confuted, the cause hath failed me (V.v.102). Unexpectedly, Busy acquiesces to the puppets arguments and even consents to the continuation of the performance: Let it go on. For I am changed, and will become a beholder with you (V.v.105). Unlike the transgressions of Cokes, or of the grocer and his wife in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Busys willful and Puritanical misunderstanding of the theater meets with severe reproach. Why? For Jonson, indeed for Jacobean audiences in general, those who entirely lose themselves in the dramatic world deserve our sympathetic laughter, but those who ignorantly deny or condemn the dramatic world, even as they seek to withhold it from others, deserve our harshest censure. When arguing with the puppet-god of drama, Dionysius, Busy sanctions his position by claiming that his vocation is of the spirit while simultaneously condemning theater as of the flesh. Anti-theatricalists since at least the time of the anonymous A Treatise Against Miracle Plays (late fourteenth century) employ this distinction: acting, because it is of the flesh, and never commanded by God, should never be applied to the marvelous works of God, since they are of the spirit (402). The particular irony of this argument for Busy is that his understanding of the theater is fleshly, not spiritual at all. Where other fair-goers see the story of Hero and Leander, Busy sees only the physical realities paraded on the stage. Oblivious to any imaginative significance or artistic value in the play, Busys understanding of the performance begins and ends with the puppets on stage.12 He is only concerned

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with what underlies the costumes, and his zealous quest to expose licentiousness belies his own carnal preoccupations. It will be recalled that throughout Bartholmew Fair, Busy makes a fool of himself following his appetite for roast pigthe thing he condemns being the thing he most desires. In effect, Busy represents two distinct and equally destructive approaches to the theater: an anti-theatrical literalism that unduly attends to the stage rather than to what the stage portends, and a puritanical fixation that causes one to see everywhere that which he or she most suspects. No Settled Senses of the World: Modern Theory Orgel, Rackin, and like-minded critics minimize the distinction between stage and fiction or otherwise conflate the two realms. When Rackin speaks of boy actresses, or worse, boy heroines, or worse still, the marriages of . . . boy heroines (passim), she is guilty of a modal fallacy. It is not the boy actor who marries, but the character Rosalind, or Portia, or Viola. When Rackin claims, In Belmont the boy actor takes on a false gender (33), we see how problematic her argument becomes. We also see how, once employed, the modal distinction solves the problem: the boy actor is not in Belmont, but on a stage, in England; Portia, of course, is the woman character, the one who lives in Belmont, in the Italy of Shakespeares story. We see that the distinction is neither spurious nor arbitrary, but indispensable if we are to make any sense of this theater whatsoever. Rackins confusion derives, in part, from grounding her thesis in a notion of theatrical mimesis that has little to do with either Renaissance or classical mimesis, but more resembles a kind of simple realism: literary theory increasingly subordinated art to nature: nature became the object of artistic imitation and the standard by which art was to be judged (29).13 Elizabethan theater is anything but mimetic in the sense she prescribes. If we are to assign any weight to Shakespeares and Jonsons statements, nature is subordinated to the dramatists art and not the other way around. Critics who insist on forcing what they see behind the costuming into the dramatic spectacle seem more informed by modern cinematic realism than Renaissance mimesis. In modern cinematic realism, audiences tolerate no violation of illusion, and special effects fulfill every demand of the realist imperative, displacing imaginative extension entirely. Because they employ a faulty methodology and a flawed understanding of dramatic representation, these critics draw dubious conclusions. Reading their account of cross-dressing and Renaissance drama, one gets the impression that transvestism was widespread and accepted in Elizabethan society. The word transvestite, though etymologically sound in this context (simply meaning cross-dressing), can be completely misleading to a modern audience, whose understanding of the word cannot be easily dissociated from the representations of its own context. And it is not just modern audiences who may be misled by the term, but critics themselves may even become

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confused, as in the case of Clark and Sponsler, who label transvestite the act of men dressing as other men.14 But the fact remains that cross-dressing was against the law in Elizabethan England and prosecuted as such.15 We are left, then, with a dilemma: since on the stage boys did dress for womens roles, either a different law applied to those people on the street than those on the stage, or a different circumstance presumed a different understanding. Reaching further back in the historical record, we find that Greece and Rome employed all male acting troupes, Medieval Europe employed all male acting troupes, and women as actors were virtually nonexistent in Europe until the 1560s.16 In other words, Western drama was performed for centuries by male actors playing both mens and womens parts. Moreover, when English audiences were finally exposed to Italian actresses, they found the women more startling and less believable than the boys who traditionally had played those roles.17 The reason that boys played womens roles appears to be more aesthetic than gender critics allow.18 So there are, after all, important distinctions to preserve regarding what Renaissance audiences witnessed on stage, not the least of which is the difference between what occurred there and what occurs on the modern stage. Surprisingly, we find ourselves in complete agreement with the gender critics on this point. Zimmerman affirms that the erotic dynamic of the Jacobean stage was linked to a theory of sexuality at a great remove from ours (Disruptive 56). What makes the theory so difficult to comprehend? Her answer: our own alien gaze (56). But it is precisely these disingenuous acknowledgments of our own historical limitations, punctuated liberally throughout the arguments of most of these critics, that allow them to shrug their shoulders and wander further and further away from what we actually do know about the Renaissance stage. No one, for example, would fault the sensible caution in this statement by Bruce Smith: If homosexual desire is so difficult to fix in fictionand in only one medium of fiction-making, at thatwe should be wary indeed of saying anything about the desires of historical subjects who have been dead for 400 years (145). But in the very next sentence, he abandons caution and issues this sweeping proposal: It is suggestive, none the less, that tragedy and satiric comedy both seem calculated to engage homosexual desire, only to deny it in the end (145-46). With their deficient view of dramatic mimesis, their disregard for distinctions basic to the drama, and their taking for real what is theatrical illusion and illusory what is real, these critics ultimately reveal little about Renaissance theater. Rather, the admitted polemics of such critics may blind them to the Puritan polemics on which they so heavily rely. What perplexes us is why these critics would privilege officious Puritan judgments about cross-dressing and what they deem sexual misrepresentation on the stage, and essentially ignore the very humanist arguments

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that both created and sustained one of the worlds most accomplished dramatic traditions. One might do better learning the science of blood transfusion from Jehovahs Witnesses or the art of wine-making from Prohibitionists. The Pleasure of that Madness: In Praise of Folly We conclude, then, with a glance at another humanist, Erasmus, who also spoke to this issue. Addressing the illusion upon which the theater utterly depends and toward which the dramatic contract always leads, he entertains for a moment a very postmodern thought. He blurs the modal distinction and wonders what effect that change would have on the theater: If someone should unmask the actors in the middle of a scene on the stage and show their real faces to the audience, would he not spoil the whole play? And would not everyone think he deserved to be driven out of the theater with brickbats as a crazy man? For at once a new order of things would suddenly arise. He who played the woman is now seen to be a man; the juvenile is revealed to be old; he who a little before was a king is suddenly a slave; and he who was a god now appears a little man. Truly, to destroy the illusion is to upset the whole play.19(66) In retrospect, Erasmuss remarks could not have been more prescient nor history more ironic. It was in fact the antitheatricalists who instituted a new order when they closed the theaters in 1642. Returning to our own time, the arguments of Erasmus and other humanists apply with surprising relevance, and his brickbats retain a special force against certain critics preoccupied with gender and representation on the stage. It is not a little astonishing to see these critics who insist on reading against theatrical illusion adopt a position so like that of the Puritansstrange bedfellows indeed. We have considered how Renaissance humanists dispute all such Puritan arguments, arguments that seek to impose anti-theatrical values on the Elizabethan theater. In their defense of the theater, Shakespeare, Jonson, Sidney, and other humanists not only repudiate the Puritans who would eventually shut down the theaters, but also those critics whose overly theoretical and postmodern cast of mind insists on seeing through theatrical conventions, not observing them. As compelling as that defense was, however, we must not forget that it was powerless to prevent the polemicists from destroying the theater. The outcome in our own time remains to be seen. Notes
1. Readers of Academic Questions may be unfamiliar with Stephen Greenblatts Invisible Bullets, the most famous essay in his influential collection Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). Among other things, the essay argues that all power and authority, especially religious power and authority, are in effect cynical ruses employed

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2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

by the empowered to marginalize and oppress the credible Other. Because of its tremendous influence, the essay marks a terminus a quo for the dominance of new historicist ideology, an ideology that in one form or another underlies most modern literary criticism. A much earlier version of the present essay, delivered as a conference paper, was published in Renaissance Papers 2001 (Rochester: Camden House, 4556). We gratefully acknowledge permission to use some of these materials here. A baldrick is a strap or sheath that supports or houses a horn, and thus Benedick jokes about the constraints and regrets a married man feels once he places his bugle (penis) into a baldrick (vagina), and he wittily suggests a fate of cuckoldry for all married men, as cuckolds were known by the horns they wore unsuspectingly. The point for our purposes is that Benedick, like many gender critics, fixates on invisible baldricks, foregrounding an imagined sexuality at the expense of the obvious one that stands before him. While the body of criticism on this topic is growing rapidly, the focus here is on the work of Orgel, Rackin, Jardine, Gardner, Levine, Stallybrass, and Zimmerman. Of course, the term itself is not uncontroversial. See Bray, Goldberg, DiGangi, and Smith. The opposition of humanist and Puritan is not meant to indicate two completely homogeneous movements that were ideologically consistent throughout the Tudor/ early Stuart era. The distinction as employed here is merely functional and not categorical. Among any number of exceptions to which one might point, John Rainolds was a Puritan and set against the stage, yet he was a classical scholar at Oxford. Stephen Gosson himself was well versed in Greek and Roman literature. Among the humanists, Thomas Heywood was a Presbyterian. Some more notable examples include Thompson, Hillebrand, Ward and Waller, Ringler, Chambers, Wickham, Binns, Barish, Bentley, and Shapiro. Prynnes Histriomastix (literally, the actor scourged) is 1100 pages of pure vitriol against the stage. We believe that anyone coming to the antitheatrical literature after reading the gender critics will be surprised to find that cross-dressing occupies relatively little of the debate. As for women who played women, a student of William Perkins at Cambridge wrote this of French actresses: Either Women are brought upon the stage to represent wantonnes with impudency (who ought even in the Church to keepe silence) . . . or men for to please, put on Womens apparell face, and gesture; which is repugnant to the word of God (Book V, Chapter 39). As evidenced by the Prologue, the problem of topical reading (identifying plot elements and characters with real events and historical figures) clearly concerned Jonson. Such misreadings caused him trouble on at least two previous occasions, the controversies surrounding The Isle of Dogs and Sejanus. While the interest in gender is pervasive in the literature, Derridean and Lacanian motifs are not as uncommon as one might think. They also appear, for example, in Garber: transvestism and theater are interrelated, not merely historically or culturally, but psychoanalytically, through the unconscious and through language. Transvestite theater is the Symbolic on the stage. In other words, the phenomenon of cross-dressing within theatrical representation . . . may be . . . a return to the problem of representation that underlies theater itself (Vested 40). Clearly, when the devotee of the god becomes possessed, the person ceases to matter. Jonson provides yet another picture of how stagecraft becomes subsumed to the dramatic story enacted through it. Accordingly, we need not make a similar mistake in our theory and interpret Jonsons answer too literally, as Harbage does, thinking that actors contribute nothing to the dramatic evocations of the theater, but act simply as the mouthpiece of the poet. For a reply to Harbage, see Rosenberg. Her simple statement of theatrical mimesis leaves no room for Mazzonis distinction between icastic and fantastic, or for Sidneys distinction between the brazen world and the golden. Any cursory look at Renaissance literary theory shows that Renaissance poetics oscillates between what Hathaway conveniently styles marvels and commonplaces. Rather than inform her view of theatrical mimesis, Sidneys distinction between brazen and

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

golden simply reinforces Rackins thesis of the theatrical androgyne: The poet, inspired with the force of a divine breath . . . bringeth things forth far surpassing [Natures] doings to depict images of the perfection that disappeared from the world with that first accursed fall of Adam . . . . The androgyne, also associated in Neoplatonic tradition with an ideal perfection lost at the time of the Fall, is exactly the sort of subject Sidney envisions here (34). Citing what they call documents recording the transvestism of Henry VIII, Clark and Sponsler recount the following anecdote told by Edward Hall. Hall relates an episode occurring in 1509, when the Earls of Essex, Wilshire, and other noble menne . . . came sodainly in a mornyng, into the Quenes Chambre, all appareled in shorte cotes, of Kintishe Kendal, with hodes on their heddes, and hosen of thesame, euery one of theim, his bowe and arrowes, and a sworde and a bucklar, like out lawes, or Rokyn [sic] Hodes men, wherof the Quene, the Ladies, and al other, there were abashed, as well for the straunge sight, as also for their sodain commyng, and after certayn daunces, and pastime made, thei departed. Instead of regarding this episode as a fit of youthful high-spiritedness in a young monarch, Clark and Sponsler argue that [s]exual desire is coupled in Henrys act of crossdressing with transgression of status lines in a way that suggests not only the appeal of inversionary symbolism, . . . but also a strong desire to appropriate otherness (322; emphasis added). Inextricably wedded to their thesis and taking for granted the ubiquity of transvestism, Clark and Sponsler seem unaware of the patent absurdity of applying the term transvestite to men dressed as other men, despite Halls insistence that the king and his nobles were outfitted as Robin Hood and his merry men, and wearing such obviously masculine trappings as swords, bucklers, bows, and arrows. After an exhaustive look at the primary materials, Shapiro concludes: the London courts labeled all female cross-dressers as whores, itself a form of punishment, and sentenced them as they did those truly guilty of sexual misdemeanors (20). See Appendix C of his volume for a documentary overview of the legal cases prosecuting cross-dressing from the 1550s to the early 1600s. Again, Shapiro: Acting was an all-male activity in ancient Greece and Rome. The same was true in medieval Europe, when theatrical activity was far less organized, although there is some evidence of performances in nunneries and of limited participation by girls or young women in craft cycles. In the early modern period, women did not act in plays performed by professional theater companies until Italian popular companies, the commedia dellarte, introduced actresses in the 1560s, the first record of which is the appearance in a troupe list of 1564 of a certain Lucrese Senese (31-32). Bentley explains the difficulty modern audiences have understanding boys in womens roles: The convention of the Shakespearean theater most difficult for moderns to accept is that of the boy players. These children and adolescents were assigned all female roles in the productions of the adult companies and most of the roles of any sort in the performances of the boy companies. Since comparatively few moderns have ever seen professionally trained juvenile actors performing any roles except those corresponding to their own age and sex, many are baffled by the imaginative feat of picturing an adolescent boy enthralling a sophisticated audience with his performance of Rosalind, Lady Macbeth, Websters Duchess, or Fords Annabella. Yet those subjects of the early Stuart kings who had opportunities to see both boys and women in female roles were not impressed by the superiority of the actresses (113-14). On one occasion as late as 1629, when Queen Henrietta presented French actresses in a play at Blackfriars, an eyewitness reports that the audience hissed, hooted, and pippen-pelted [them] from the stage, so as I do not thinke they will soone be ready to trie the same againe (Collier, II, 23-24; 66). On the credibility and general acceptance of boy actors in the early modern period, see Jamieson, Nove, and Dusinberre (esp. chapter 4). Besides the aesthetic reason, another may be the moralwe emphasize maythough gender critics would be disinclined to acknowledge either category. Shapiro argues that a practical reason for boy actors may have been the fear of illegitimate births and mothers who would abandon their children to the local parishes (see 31ff and especially footnote 11). Whatever understanding we finally adopt, we should not forget that Gentili, one of

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19.

the best known university defenders of the theater against the Puritan attack, argued for boy actors on moral grounds: I do not wish women to set foot on our stage, or to mingle with the companies of men. And I believe that in the more respectable times of antiquity it was for honorable reasons that men in masks played the parts of women, rather than that women themselves should play female parts (as happened later, and as often happens today in public acting). For a woman to do this does indeed involve a greater abuse (De Actoribus). Were someone to object that since Lady Folly speaks she is therefore not to be trusted, we simply reply that a meaningful difference separates the commonplace fool from the literary. An obvious example is the fool in Lear, perhaps the wisest character in the play. We have argued throughout the essay for the difference separating the commonplace from the literary, the actor from the character, the stage from the play.

References
Ames, William. Conscience, with the Power and Cases Thereof. 1643. Anonymous. A Treatise Against Miracle Plays. Barish, Jonas A. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Bentley, Gerald Eades, ed. The Seventeenth-Century Stage: A Collection of Critical Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. . The Profession of Player in Shakespeares Time: 1590-1642. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Binns, J. W. Women or Transvestites on the Elizabethan Stage? An Oxford Controversy. The Sixteenth Century Journal 5.2 (1974): 95-120. Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Mens Press, 1982. Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923. Clark, Robert L. A., and Claire M. Sponsler. Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval Drama. New Literary History 28.2 (1997): 31944. Collier, John Payne. The History of English Dramatic Poetry to the Time of Shakespeare and Annals of the Stage to the Restoration. London: J. Murray, 1831. DiGangi, Mario. The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Dusinberre, Juliet. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. London: Macmillan. 1975. Erasmus, Desiderius. The Praise of Folly, By Desiderius Erasmus: A New Translation, with Introduction and Notes. Trans. Leonard F. Dean. Chicago: Packard, 1946. Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gentili, Alberico. De Actoribus et Spectatoribus Fabularum Non Notandis Disputatio. 1599. Goldberg, Jonathan. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Gosson, Stephen. The School of Abuse. 1579. . Plays Confuted in Five Actions. 1582. Hathaway, Baxter. Marvels and Commonplaces: Renaissance Literary Criticism. New York, Random House, 1968. Hillebrand, H. N. The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History. University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 11. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1926. Holden, William P. Anti-Puritan Satire, 1572-1642. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. Jamieson, Michael. Shakespeares Celibate Stage. In Bentley. 7093. Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. . Twins and Travesties: Artifice and Indeterminacy in Jacobean Comedy. In Zimmerman Erotic. 2738. Jonson, Ben. Bartholmew Fair. Ed. G. R. Hibbard. New Mermaids. London: Ernest Benn, 1977. Levine, Laura. Men in Womens Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579-1642. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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Munday, Anthony. A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters. 1580. Myers, Aaron M. Representation and Misrepresentation of the Puritan in Elizabethan Drama. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931. Nove, Marianne. Shakespeares Female Characters as Actors and Audience. The Womans Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. 25670. OConnell, Michael. The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England. New York, Oxford University Press, 2000. Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeares England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. . Nobodys Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women? South Atlantic Quarterly 88:1 (1989): 729. Owen, Charles. Conduct of the Stage Considerd. 1718. Prynne, William. Histriomastix. 1633. Rackin, Phyllis. Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage. PMLA 102:1 (1987): 2941. Rainolds, John. The Overthrow of Stage Plays. 1599. Ringler, William. The First Phase of the Elizabethan Attack on the Stage, 1558-1579. Huntington Library Quarterly (1942): 391418. . Stephen Gosson, A Biographical and Critical Study. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942. Rosenberg, Marvin. Elizabethan Actors: Men or Marionettes? In Bentley. 94109. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. New York: Longman, 1997. Shapiro, Michael. Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press P, 1994. Smith, Bruce R. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeares England: A Cultural Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. . Making a Difference: Male/Male Desire in Tragedy, Comedy, and Tragi-comedy. In Zimmerman Erotic. 127150. Stallybrass, Peter. Transvestism and the Body Beneath: Speculating on the Boy Actor. In Zimmerman Erotic. 6483. Stubbes, Philip. Anatomy of Abuses. 1583. Thompson, Elbert N. S. The Controversy Between the Puritans and the Stage. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966. Ward, A. W., and A. R. Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature. Vol VI. New York: Macmillan, 1933. Wickham, Glynne. Early English Stages, 1300 to 1660. Zimmerman, Susan. Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage. New York: Routledge, 1992. . Disruptive Desire: Artifice and Indeterminacy in Jacobean Comedy. In Zimmerman. 39-63.

From the internet comes word of a new scholarly release from the University of Chicago Press titled Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880-1950. One Jens Rydstrom is the author. Rydstrom explores the history of homosexuality and bestiality in Sweden during its development from an agrarian society into a modern welfare state to consider why these sexual practices have been so closely linked in virtually all Western societies. He limns sharply the distinctive experience of rural life, showing that to regularly witness farm animals stirred passions and sparked ideas, especially among young farmhands.