Crossdressing in Elizabethan stage/Transvestism

The Renaissance culture was male dominated and patriarchal where women were theoretically treated Formatted: Tab stops: 1.67", Left
under the rule of men and the idea of a woman was confined under these four virtues: obedience,
chastity, silence and piety. To the society, a woman dressed as a man was altogether unacceptable and
at the same time thought to be very demeaning for the latter. As a consequence, no woman actors were
allowed on the stage to take part in a play, but woman roles were still needed to be performed. This
necessity on the stage brought forth an idea of playing boy actors in the role of a woman character.
These boys were below their adolescence, innocent and effeminate. Dressed as a woman these young
actors would play the role of Lady Macbeth in MACBETH or both the characters of a man and a woman,
in an on-stage disguise, like Rosalind and Ganymede in AS YOU LIKE IT, Cordelia and Fool in KING LEAR,
Viola and Cesario in TWELFTH NIGHT.

Unlike today where everything could be dramatized on the stage, Shakespeare had
to keep certain actors and conventions in mind and playing a boy actor in a female role was such.
Shakespeare, a quintessential dramatist that he was, had a solution to this problem.in MACBETH, Lady
Macbeth is seen with a masculine charm and even goes further to say “unsex me” helps the boy actor to
play her role, and at the end when she is effeminate she is reduced to a ”brief candle. The fool and
Cordelia act like each other’s doubles. It is curious to note that the Fool does not appear at any point in
the play when Cordelia is present and disappears mysteriously as soon as Lear has been discovered and
reconciled with Cordelia. Many scholars are of the opinion that a young adolescent player played the
role of Fool and Cordelia and that is why he couldn’t be placed in both places.

Disguise is a fraught issue in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and it is both

connected to stage convention as well as the thematic demands of a play. Used more often than not in
comic actions disguise can be justified by the Elizabethan stage of not allowing women to play their
parts on public stage. Hence, it was imperative that a pre-adolescent boy and one whose voice has not
been broken could perform the role of a woman even as Volputuous as Cleopatra .This is the reason
why the boy actor assumes the disguise of a boy within a play and reverts to his role as a woman at the
end of the five acts .The part of Rosalind which is enacted by a boy would feel comfortable if Rosalind
disguised herself as a boy Ganymede as a part of the comic action of AS YOU LIKE IT.

Disguise is a convention that is borrowed from Roman new comedy and especially
that of Plautus and Terence. Greek mythology also encodes God’s disguising themselves as lower
mortals or a swan to conquer the maiden that he desires. This convention of roman comedy also
influenced Shakespeare and he made disguise a significant feature of his comedies. The disguise is also
interestingly used in Shakespearean plays as it is the young woman who disguised themselves as young
men. So, originally the boy actor had to play a role of a young man which made the task easy for him.
One of the reasons as Viola suggests in Twelfth Night before assuming the persona of Cesario in his
practical efficacy. Viola will not be able to operate or survive as a young woman in the kingdom of Illyria
and neither will Portia be allowed to fight the case for Antonio or even enter the court of Venice unless
she is disguised. In other words, the female is debarred from any kind of profession or any kind of
mobility and therefore the female protagonists of Shakespearean comedies must assume the effective
male persona in order to imitate the action, complicate the plot and bring it to its desired resolution.

In Renaissance England, dress was the code of one’s identity, symbolizing one’s
gender and social class. The stability of the social order depended much on maintaining absolute
distinctions between male and female. If a woman put on men’s clothes, she transgressed the gender
boundary, and encroached on the privileges of the advanced sex. Renaissance gender stereotypes
required women to wear women’s clothes, to be submissive, passive, silent, closed off, and immured
within home. However, in his plays, Shakespeare dresses his heroines with men’s clothes, indirectly
encroaching on the privileges of men, and deconstructs the gender stereotypes.

Thus, to quote Juliet Dusinberre in SHAKESPEARE AND THE NATURE OF WOMEN “To
talk about Shakespeare’s women is to talk about his men, because he refused to separate their worlds
physically, intellectually, or spiritually”.