The Representation of Gender and the Construction of the Female Self in Shakespeare´S Crossdressing Comedies

The Representation of Gender and the Construction of the Female Self in Shakespeare´s Crossdressing Comedies

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie

vorgelegt von

Christina Elisabeth Weichselbaumer

1311151

am Institut für: Anglistik

Betreuer: Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. phil. Martin Löschnigg

Graz, Dezember 2017

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First and foremost, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis advisor Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. phil. Martin Löschnigg, who has been supportive in so many ways since the moment I started writing the first page. He had a sympathetic ear for all my questions or concerns and his office door was always open for me to drop in and start discussing some aspects of my writing. – Thank you for your patience!

I would also like to thank the team of the Globe Library and Archive in London for granting me access to archive material and assisting me in my research. The costume bibles in particular proved to be very helpful.

I also would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Clare McManus who has initially fuelled my interest in gender studies and the conception of early modern femininity.

In addition, I would like to thank my former teachers Mag. Werner Pleschberger and Mag. Liselotte Keller for having stirred my enthusiasm and love for reading and literature.

Besides, I am deeply grateful for George Kiernan´s contribution of proof-reading my thesis so thoroughly and quickly.

Many other friends have read the manuscript, given me feedback and supported my work in important ways. I am indebted to all of you. Thank you!

Last but not least, special thanks go to my family, who have always loved and supported me – not only in the process of writing my thesis but throughout my years of study. This accomplishment would not have been possible without you!

STATEMENT OF AUTHENTICATION

I hereby declare that I have written this thesis independently, without assistance from external parties and without use of other resources than those indicated. The ideas taken directly or indirectly from external sources are duly acknowledged in the text.

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Graz, December 2017 TABLE OF CONTENT

1 Following the Feminine in Shakespeare´s Plays ...... 1

1.1 The Place of Women in the World of Shakespeare – Early Modern Femininity ...... 3

1.2 Shakespeare´s Theatre and Modern Reception ...... 4

2 The Genre of the Comedy and Shakespeare´s Theatrical Woman ...... 5

2.1 “Are You a Comedian?” – Metatheatricality and Discrepancy of Awareness ...... 7

2.2 “All the World´s a Stage” – Theatrical Crossdressing and Historical Realities ...... 8

2.3 Crossdressing and the Boy Actress Phenomenon ...... 10

3 Women in the Renaissance Theatre Audience ...... 12

4 Clothes Make the Woman – The Performance of Gender and the Role of Costume in Early Modern Plays ...... 13

5 Alternative Shakespeare – Costume and Clothing in Modern Productions ...... 15

6 “Do You Know I Am a Woman?” – Shakespeare´s Comic Heroines ...... 16

6.1 Portia and the Structure of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice ...... 17

6.2 Jessica and her Father´s Blood – The Dramatization of Gender in Cross-Cultural Encounters ...... 21

6.3 Viola – A Complex Love Triangle and the Nature of Stage Illusion in Twelfth Night 22

6.4 Threating the Gender System: Olivia and the Pattern of the Unruly Woman ...... 25

6.5 As You Like It, Rosalind – Duplications and Staged Intimacy ...... 26

7 Women and Marriage ...... 29

8 The Hermaphrodite ...... 32

9 Femininity Shaped through Experiences of Masculinity ...... 33

10 Fatherless Women on Stage ...... 34

11 “My Daughter! O my Ducats! O my Daughter!” – Connections between Women and Property ...... 36 12 Locus Amoneus or the Golden World in Shakespeare´s Comedy ...... 38

13 “If Music Be the Food of Love – Play On”: Love – Its Facets and Implications for the Construction of the Female Self ...... 39

13.1 Glimpsing at Lesbian Poetics and Homoerotic Desire ...... 41

13.2 Sexuality and Eroticism on the Early Modern Stage ...... 44

13.3 The Sexualized Female Body ...... 47

14 Shakespeare – An Early Modern “Feminist”? ...... 48

15 The Social Effectiveness of Stage Illusion ...... 50

16 Conclusion ...... 50

17 Bibliography ...... 53

18 List of Abbrevations ...... 59

1 FOLLOWING THE FEMININE IN SHAKESPEARE´S PLAYS

Strong-willed, assertive, intelligent, humane sometimes independent, often the centre of attention – women play dominate roles in Shakespeare´s worlds. When on stage, female characters interact with each other; they illustrate women falling in love, women struggling to survive or – in disguise – women engaged in a wooing game with each other. Most notably, women are presented as “single, solitary figures in a man´s world” (Dash 1997: 17), facing challenges of patriarchy and male hegemony. Through these multifaceted portraits of female characters as mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers and wives, Shakespeare´s plays raise questions about women´s lives in early modern times. His female characters transcend traditional labels and gender stereotypes in undercutting an established social order (cf. ibid.: 250). Contrary notions of gender identity create and finally resolve conflicts between mutuality and patriarchy – a “conflict between emotion and control” (Novy 1984: 4). The comedies in particular display, deplore and enforce traditional concepts of gender and the inherent power relations between the sexes.

The early modern theatre was an important site of gender fluidity, theatrical transvestism and cultural transformation (cf. Casey 1997: 122). Rackin (2006: 114) claims that out of 39 surviving plays that have been attributed to Shakespeare, one fifth involves recurring elements of mistaken identities, substitution and cross-dressing. In five Shakespearian plays, female heroines assume masculine clothing. In three of them, namely the Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and As You Like It, paradigms of female sexuality and changing gender definitions contribute to the complication and resolution of the comic plot (cf. ibid.).

The three crossdressing plays mentioned above will constitute the focus of my analysis. Although the voices of Shakespeare´s women have often been marginalized in research, the feminine is central to the significance of Shakespeare´s work. In this thesis, I will explore the roles of cross-dressed heroines and their construction of the female self as shaped by experiences of masculinity. Feminine wit and intelligence in the comedy often seems to provide juxtaposition to the strict male dominated world of patriarchy. In order to kindle the discussion about the position of women in the Elizabethan and Jacobean era, historical realities of early modern femininity will be considered as a framework for further analysis. The next chapters will be then be concerned with the genre of the comedy and

1 women´s assigned roles in the world of the play. In this context, theatrical conventions such as the boy actress phenomenon and its implications for the performance will be considered. How might the text, whose primary function was perceived as a script for performance, have been projected on stage? What did the early modern audience see when watching one of Shakespeare´s heroines on stage? – Those are some questions at the centre of my research. Furthermore, cross-dressing will be explored both as a dramatized theatrical device on the Elizabethan stage and as social practice. As crossdressing plays a decisive role in blurring the traditional limitations of gender it is also seems closely linked to aspects of costume and questions of performance. By means of costume, the female subject is made to choose a gender identity – either being feminine, masculine or both at the same time. Shakespeare´s female heroines offer different models and possibilities of what it means to be a woman (or at least to masquerade as one). On a meta-level it can be argued that theatre, especially in form of comedy, reveals the constructed nature of social and gendered identity in a humorous way.

Prior to the conclusion the last chapters are dedicated to a closer examination of gender as a theatrical construct and its social effectiveness. Moreover, I will consider the extent to which the performance of femininity shaped gender associations offstage and whether or not Shakespeare´s “theatrical woman” (McManus 2008: 437) mirrored social circumstances (or vice versa).

1.1 THE PLACE OF WOMEN IN THE WORLD OF SHAKESPEARE – EARLY MODERN FEMININITY

Social reality was strongly determined by the limits early modern society placed on women (cf. Novy 1984: 7). The Renaissance was a period full of contradictions – still influenced by medieval ideals of a patriarchal society and at the same time experiencing an advocacy of female rights by humanism. The immense prominence of high-ranking educated females – as can be seen in the example of Queen Elizabeth I. – made early modern society “sensitive to the whole area of femininity […] and to women´s nature [being] dependent on [their] upbringing” (Dusinberre 1975: 212). Elizabeth I. established herself as a model of women who gained access to education and political power during the Tudor reign. Notably, Shakespeare lived at a time when England and Scotland had female regents and France was ruled by Catherine de´ Medici (cf. Rackin 2005: 7). As opposed to other European countries such as Italy, aristocratic women experienced an early form of emancipation in the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century (cf. Dusinberre 1975: 2). They represent examples of females extending their authority beyond the limits of their families – a rarity and certainly not the prevailing social norm. Most historical evidence invariably describes women´s place in social hierarchy as limited to marriage and domestic domains (cf. Rackin 2005: 18-21). Women were regarded as inferior and dominated by male superiority (cf. Casey 1997: 125). According to Orgel (2011: 219), early modern medicine offered varied accounts on the aetiology of the two sexes: The most prominent and persistent thesis, descending from Galen, claimed that the “male and female were two versions of the same unitary species” (ibid.). This theory was based on the assumption that everything begins as female with the masculine being a development out of it. In other words, a woman was perceived as an “incomplete man” (Orgel 2011: 220). When Viola alias Cesario is threatened with a duel by Sir Andrew, she reflects on the biological difference between men and women: “A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man” (TN 3.4.295,296). From a cultural point of view, this anatomical concept implies a fluidity of gender in form of a hierarchical upwards movement. This is further complemented by a man´s fear of effeminization i.e. turning back into the state of being a woman: Indeed, love was perceived as a corruption of the masculine self, potentially turning a man into a woman through an overemphasis on emotions (cf. Orgel 2011: 220).

According to Butler (2007: 10), the “apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender” is based on sexual difference. Notably, sex refers to a biological concept whereas gender has socio-cultural origins (cf. Hartley 2002: 95-96). Howard (1993: 423) observes that gender had to be enforced through ideological interpellation in order to “provide a key element in its hierarchical view of social order” (ibid.). Traditionally, society has attempted to equate sex and gender, thereby constructing binary oppositions that relate to conventionalized active and passive roles for men and women respectively. Renaissance culture was strongly based on the idea of two different and separated gender roles, the feminine clearly being subordinate. Women were seen as passionate, less intelligent and less in control of themselves (cf. Orgel 2011: 222). Shakespeare´s women offer insights into roles that women were expected to “play” in the actual world, in which Shakespeare´s works were read, performed and reviewed. Paradoxically, his female characters also tend to reverse and occlude their own historicity, revealing that gender is “mutable, constructed and a matter of choice” (Orgel 1996: 57).

1.2 SHAKESPEARE´S THEATRE AND MODERN RECEPTION

Shakespeare wrote his comedies in the 1590s – a time in which the professional public theatre in London was flourishing (cf. Gay 2008: 6).1 During that period, playwrights established themselves as self-conscious artists (cf. Orgel 2011: 107). With the opening of public playhouses from 1576 onwards, “English drama expanded its boundaries” (ibid.). The audiences grew larger and expected more ambitious and longer entertainment, with a variety of stage effects and complex subplots (cf. ibid.). Shakespeare´s professional all- male company began as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and transformed with the accession of James I. into the King´s Men (cf. Gay 2008: 6). The entertainment they offered provided delight; at the same time it “was pathetic, mingling serious with comic elements” (Wells 2011: 107).

In order for this theatrical practice to work, the audience of Shakespeare´s day was expected to participate in certain stage conventions – not only that applause was a means of expressing pleasure, “but also other basic conventions such as boy actors playing female roles, commoners playing dukes, and the same stage serving as court and as forest” (Strout

1 Shakespeare´s plays were primarily performed at the Blackfriars and The Globe. The Blackfriars was constructed in 1596 as an indoor hall theatre, located on London´s North Bank and much more exclusive than public playhouses. The Globe was the successor of Burbage´s Theatre as a public playhouse, built in 1598 on the bankside (cf. Gurr 1999: 368-370). 4

2001: 278). The audience assumed an active role in assuring the effectiveness of theatrical illusion. Additionally, the theatre was (and still is) intrinsically based on the audience´s reconstruction of dramatic viewpoints. In other words, Shakespeare´s multifaceted characters and their complex motivations for human actions make his works open to a multiplicity of interpretations.2 Shakespeare´s audience was – as it is today – heterogeneous and so is their response to the performance as it unfolds on stage: Theatre is a mutual experience – between audience and play, spectator and actor. Therefore, readers, actors, producers and audiences in modern times continue to argue about “the plays´ meanings, the artist´s intention and how to best project the text on the stage” (ibid.). Novy (1984: 4) suggests that Shakespeare´s works are timeless in their themes, conflicts and human struggles, therefore still finding resonance in today´s society. Rackin (2005: 3) even goes further, arguing that our own interests, beliefs and anxieties about women shape our encounters with Shakespeare´s plays: “The plays – and the aspect of plays we have chosen to emphasize – tell us more about our own assumptions regarding women that about the beliefs that informed the response of Shakespeare´s first audiences”.

2 THE GENRE OF THE COMEDY AND SHAKESPEARE´S THEATRICAL WOMAN

Twelfth Night and As You Like It define what has become known as romantic comedies (cf. Gay 2008: 71). Both were assumingly written between 1599 and 1600. Hunter (1986: 41) accurately describes romance as a “comic form in which the complex of plot […] is primarily read in terms of character [...], space is given for ethical choice and the contemplation of values”. Twelfth Night and As You Like It are both based on “mysterious actions of fate” combined with “adventures in the world of emotions” (Gay 2008: 71). This emotional complexity is mingled with the standard form of comedy – its high spirit and happy ending in sanctioned heterosexual marriage. The comedies in their bright panorama are the territory of women. But why would female characters leap into prominence in the comedy? Except for The Tempest, in which Miranda is the only woman, all the comedies cover a wide range of types and classes: queens, countesses, ladies-in- waiting, servants or shepherdesses. One reason may be that Shakespeare was particularly fond of their (conventionalized) traditional female attributes of modesty, high-spiritness and charm, considering those as particularly suitable material for his comedies. In one way

2 Pfister (1977: 56) in the context of dramatic performance refers to the term “perspective structure” . 5 or the other, all his heroines display these characteristics in various blends and degrees (cf. Pitt 1982: 75). Furthermore, the Shakespearean comedy provides a place for entangled situations, complex actions and confusions. The tensions of gender ambiguity that derive from cross-dressing or other forms of substitution further exacerbate the complexity of action that is defused towards the end. In Twelfth Night, for example, the marvellously identical twins create various misunderstandings that are finally dissolved by splitting the unitary, androgynous Cesario into two sexualized bodies. In As You Like It, moral-realistic problems are simply dismissed with the play ending on a light-hearted note in singing and dancing (cf. Bamber 1982: 122). The Clown Feste in Twelfth Night contemplates about life´s difficulties and struggles but ends the comic plot on a vivacious note with the refusal of responsibility, putting an emphasis on the comedy´s primary aim of pleasure combined with entertainment:

A great while ago the world begun Hey, ho the wind and rain; But that´s all one, our play is done, And we´ll strive to please you every day. (TN 5.1.398-401)

The clown in the romantic comedies is the one character who is constantly mediating between the world of stage and the audience, relating aspects of performance to the reality of the playgoer. Towards the end of the play, conflicts are resolved and sorrow is overcome. Nonetheless, moral issues are not excluded. Notably, the Merchant of Venice slightly differs from the other late comedies, moving away from the moonlit, fairy-tale atmosphere in the woods of Arden and the enchanted golden, noble world of Illyria. The Merchant of Venice hardly fits into the typical conventional form of the comedy. Rather, it can be described as a comedy hovering on the brink of tragedy. As Dillon (2006: 6) argues, “tragedy and comedy were ingredients, not definitions” – ultimately open to reinterpretation and adaption.

The Merchant of Venice is more than any other of the comedies intrigued by questions of moral rectitude. As the play progresses, the characters are anxious and painfully involved in a sharp contrast between spiritual matter, material wealth, and the nature of justice (cf. Pitt 1984: 76). Eventually, Portia orchestrates the victory of mercy over revenge in the court scene, leading the problem comedy to its happy ending in the final act. Generally speaking, the narrative focus of the comedies tends to be on the heroine, who shifts in the

6 perception of the theatre audience “between the pathos- inducing heroine of romance and the self-aware, self-delighting performer” (Gay 2008: 97).

Another reason for the strong presence of female heroines in Shakespeare´s comedies might be Shakespeare´s unconscious awareness of the hierarchy of the different genres: The seriousness of the tragedy is an “unsatisfactory setting for all but a very few women […], who have their destinies inescapably intertwined with those of the tragic heroes” (Pitt 1981: 75). Shakespeare´s cross-dressing comedy, in contrast, allows for a lighter tone and a plot full of complications, twists and turns (cf. ibid.). The characters are “capricious, willing to compromise, and although they may well have faults, these do not inspire fear in the audience, as would have been the case in tragedy” (ibid.: 76). Women have leading roles in the comedies due to their attributes of modesty and intuition. They seem to be the agents of happiness, resolving conflicts and restoring the original social order in the end.

2.1 “ARE YOU A COMEDIAN?”3 – METATHEATRICALITY AND DISCREPANCY OF AWARENESS

In the first act Olivia addresses the young Cesario: “Are you a comedian?” (TN 1.5.177). Viola, in the disguise of Cesario, then replies “No my profound heart. And yet by the very fangs of malice, I swear I am not that I play” (TN 1.5.179-180). This quote hints towards a persistent theme in Shakespeare´s comedy: its “metatheatrical consciousness” (Gay 2008: 9). It can be described as an awareness that prevents the audience from losing themselves on the intradiegetic level of the characters and serves as a reminder of the story´s theatricality (cf. ibid.). In a soliloquy, Viola under her male disguise can safely address the audience who knows about her true persona: “What will become of this? As I am a man,/ My state is desperate for my master´s love;/ As I am woman – now alas the day! –/ What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?” (TN 2.2.36-39). Similarly, Portia – dressed as a doctor of law – reminds the audience of her primary female identity during the court scene, when Bassanio offers his life to spare Antonio´s: “Your wife would give you little thanks for that/ If she were by, to hear you make the offer” (MoV 4.1.284,285). The audience´s awareness of the heroines´ doubleness and the disparity between appearance and reality create a comic effect. Gay (2008: 9) states that this discrepant awareness adds to the audience´s pleasure, turning them into “a privileged assistant to the actor´s job of story- telling”.

3 TN 1.5.166 7

As a result, the comedy may be perceived as a product of staged dramaturgy and the audience´s awareness of theatricality. Gay (2009: 11) refers to the terms locus and platea – dramaturgy and the audience´s perception. Locus is the level of the story whereas platea refers to the extradiegetic level of the audience – “the comedic characters perform for and comment knowingly to the audience” (ibid.). Comedy – as Gay puts it – has a tendency to inhabit a “liminal space […] between locus and audience” (ibid.). Therefore, the most interesting characters in the plays are those who move with certain flexibility between those two levels of stage performance, taking the awareness of their audience with them: With regard to cross-dressing comedies, Hayward (2001: 164,165) argues: “We derive pleasure from knowing/not-knowing: We know it is a masquerade but we do not know if or how it will be found out.”

2.2 “ALL THE WORLD´S A STAGE”4 – THEATRICAL CROSSDRESSING AND HISTORICAL REALITIES

According to the OED, crossdressing within the context of theatrical practice might be defined as “androgynous clothing that [challenges] fixed concepts of femininity and masculinity” (OED online). In Shakespeare´s plays, theatrical cross-dressing challenged cultural boundaries that marked “the sexual ambivalence, androgyny and muted eroticism linking actors, dramatists and playgoers in a sexually charged subculture of transgression” (Cressy 1996: 440). The common denominator of Shakespeare´s later comedies is female cross-dressing marking a turning point in the plot. – The heroines only seem able to express their intelligence and eloquence when on an equal playing field with men.

Women masking in men´s clothing became a fixed trope on the Elizabethan stage. Cressy (1996: 451) emphasizes that the early modern period merged as a “golden age of crossdressing”. But to what degree was this transvestite movement grounded in contemporary reality? Linda Woodbridge (1984: 141) was the first to identify several records of cross-dressing, suggesting that it existed as a social practice. Females cross- dressing was not only a remarkable dramatic device but cultural and social reality: Women in limited social settings would have dressed as young men to “shock, to allure, and to stretch the limits of permissible fashion” (Cressy 1996: 459). Prostitutes adopted masculine clothes in order to attract customers – their male disguise being a sign of their “enforced sexual availability” (Howard 1988: 421). Records of Dorothy Clayton from 1575, a

4 AYLIT 2.6.140 8 prostitute in London, suggest that she would have assumed male attire and walked around the city to advert her trade (cf. ibid.: 420). The Alderman Court records a report declaring “contrary to all honesty and womanhood [Dorothy Clayton] commonly goes about the City apparelled in man´s attire” (Aldermen´s Court 1575 qtd. in Howard 1988: 420). In this context, cross-dressing was perceived as a display of amorality – marking a turn to prostitution in the sense of vulnerability.

On the other hand, women of higher social classes dressed as men “for pleasure, fun or idle amusement” (Cressy 1996: 459). Howard (1988: 421) speculates that citizen wives might have demonstrated their independence by assuming male attire. In addition, crossdressing was determined by women´s socioeconomic status: Many of them “passed as males out of economic and social necessity because of limited public roles for women” (Casey 1997: 126). Research into gender hierarchies has found that women wore mannish gear in order to gain protection in travelling, serve in the army and obtain privileges of the opposite sex (cf. Howard 1988: 421; Cressy 1996: 459). Another Elizabethan woman, Johanna Goodmann, is recorded to have been sent to prison in 1569 for assuming the clothes of a soldier in order to accompany her husband to war (Aldermen´s Court 1569 qtd. in Howard 1988: 421). This example shows that women in male attire were severely punished by the magistratus in London as they seemed to violate social norms on behalf of extending their freedom and mobility in public (cf. Rackin 2006: 8,9).

From a social point of view, cross-dressing was highly controversial: Allowing women to disguise themselves as men was a way of undercutting an established patriarchal social order. Cross-dressing in early modern England caused controversy to such an extent that in 1620 James I. ordered the clergymen of London to “inveigh vehemently and bitterly in their sermons against the insolency of our women, and their wearing of broad-brimmed hat, pointed doublet, their hair cut short […] and such other trinkets of moments” (Letter of John Chamberlain rpt. in McClure 1939: 289).5 Another pamphlet called Hic Mulier or The Man-Woman published in the same year attacked practices of cross-dressing as “deformities” (Hic Mulier rpt. in Henderson/McManus 1985: 268), arguing that “since the days of Adam women were never so masculine […] – most masculine, most mankind and most monstrous” (ibid.: 265).6

5 The quote of James I. can be found in the Letters of John Chamberlain, republished by N.E.McClure in 1939. 6 Hic Mulier and Haec Vir have been reprinted in abridged form in 1985 by Henderson and McManus. 9

However, despite the criticism and concerns of social conservatives, cross-dressing was a common social practice that allowed women to temporarily escape from everyday reality.

2.3 CROSSDRESSING AND THE BOY ACTRESS PHENOMENON

Paradigms of sexuality and female cross-dressing need to be examined within the context of Elizabethan theatrical history and stage traditions. Orgel (1996: 10) has problematized the convention of a predominantly “male theatre” – i.e. the disapproval of female actors on the Elizabethan stage. No contemporary universal theatres in Europe would have excluded women from the stage at that time (cf. Orgel 1996: 10). But why did the English stage use boys instead of actresses and how can the relation between this phenomenon and society at large be explained? First, it has to be noted that the Renaissance theatre had not always been “exclusively male” (Orgel 1996: 4): Until the mid-16th century, records prove that “women would have performed unproblematically in guilds and civic theatrical productions” (ibid.: 5). Furthermore, there are contemporary accounts of French and Italian troops that demonstrably included female actors (cf. ibid.: 11). In fact, Elizabethan audiences assumingly would have – from time to time – seen female professional actors. However, what they were not used to was English women on the professional stage during Shakespeare´s time. (cf. ibid.). The reason for this phenomenon has never been satisfactorily explained. Some scholars argue that the display of women in public would have been considered as degrading and became associated with Roman Catholicism (cf. ibid.). Greenblatt (1988: 88) on the other hand claims that all-male acting troops can be considered as a reflection of a culture in which the self was predominantly male.

Whatever might have been the reason for this convention, the English Renaissance stage has become a particular interest of gender studies as all female roles were primarily played by boy actors (cf. Rackin 2003: 116,117; Shapiro 2000: 1). Starting at the age of 9 to 11, boy actors would have become apprenticed to older actors who were members of a guild. Malvolio describes Viola in the disguise of Cesario as “not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy; as a squash is before ´tis a peascode, or a codling when ´tis almost an apple; ´tis with him in standing water, between a boy and a man” (TN 1.5.152-154). At that time professional companies such as the Lord Chamberlain´s Men all used boy actors for women´s parts (cf. Rackin 2003: 116, 117), taking advantage of their clarity in voice and feminine appearance. Hamlet, for example, directly addresses the boy actor playing the Queen and draws attention to the high voice associated with women: “Pray God your 10 voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring.” (HAM 2.2.434,435). Some of the finest female heroines in Shakespeare were actually still schoolboys. For the dramatist this was a means of “creat[ing] women when they only had men” (Dusinberre 1975: 252). Boy actors used to play female parts until their voice was broken – then they presumably proceeded to play adult roles (cf. ibid.). Packer (2015: 170) even speculates about Shakespeare having been a boy actor himself. Although this assumption can neither be verified nor denied by modern research, it would offer an explanation for the variety and depth of gender diversity in Shakespeare´s plays.

In Renaissance England, boys and women were seen as linked together. This idea is highlighted by Rosalind in the clothes of Ganymede, telling Orlando that she can be “for every passion something and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour” (AYLIT 3.2.385-397). Women and boys were both associated with passion and sensitivity – as opposed to male bravery (cf. Novy 1984: 198, 199). This sexual ambiguity of a boy heroine, crossdressing as a man, caused a collapse of polarities on which gender was based. The female character of Shakespeare´s plays was a product of “role playing and costume, not only in the theatrical representation but also within the fiction presented on stage” (Rackin 1987: 29). Some scholars even argue that boy actors were a source of homoerotic attraction for the male audience, presenting “an unthreatened version of female erotic power” (Casey 1997: 126). Rosalind in As You Like It is playing with this convention of boy actors mincing women´s parts and thereby saucily provoking the male audience with their ambiguous sexuality (cf. Jardine 1989: 20):

If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that please 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. (AYLIT Epilogue 16-21)

The boy heroine in Shakespeare comically draws attention to “her” own duplicitous identity (cf. Jardine 1989: 20). The disguised male persona – a third layer of identity – often merged with the boy actor himself (cf. Shapiro 2000: 49): The boy actor had to establish a constructed version of femininity “with unmistakable clarity” (ibid.) to “distinguish the female character from either her assumed male disguise or [the actor´s] male identity” (ibid.). In theatrical practice, actors project different images of identity, relying on the audience to remember the layer currently not shown (cf. ibid.) – and thereby creating coherence between complex layers of gender identity.

3 WOMEN IN THE RENAISSANCE THEATRE AUDIENCE

As McLuskie (1985: 92) has pointed out, Shakespeare´s women have been regarded as products of an entertainment industry, in which there was no space for female actors, producers or writers. The inclusion of females in the theatre audience provides a sharp contrast to the exclusion of women on the stage: Although women were not presented in the production of the play itself, Levin (1989: 165) certainly has a point when arguing that they probably had an influence on the nature of Shakespeare´s female characters. There was one crucial group in determining whether a play was successful or not: the costumers. Despite the difficulty of estimating the exact number of women in the Renaissance theatre audience, Gurr (1996: 65) concludes that there was a “high proportion of women at the playhouses”. Many of them were illiterate, as only a limited number of women during that time received thorough education (cf. ibid.). Nonetheless, women constituted a visible presence all over the city of London – especially in the theatre. The female spectators came from every section of society – noblewomen as well as civic wives and prostitutes (cf. Levin 1989: 165). It is especially interesting to look closely at those areas of public life in which all those women were in fact participating – “whether we believe they were legally empowered to do so or not” (Orgel 1996: 74). Howard (1988: 440) has summarized the situation in the public theatres of London:

To go to the theatre was, in short, to be positioned at the crossroads of cultural change and contradiction – and this seems to be me particularly true for the middle-class female playgoer, who by her practice was calling into question the place of women, perhaps more radically than did Shakespeare´s fiction of cross-dressing.

Rackin (2005: 46) suggests that this aspect of female recipients in Shakespeare´s audience is also reflected in the plays themselves: Apparently, some epilogues and prologues explicitly address the female playgoer. The epilogue of As You Like It, for instance, is spoken by Rosalind: As she claims, “it is not the fashion to see the lady in the Epilogue, but it is not more unhandsome than to the see the lord in the Prologue” (AYLIT Epilogue 1- 3). Rosalind, presumably still wearing her wedding gown after having been married to Orlando, refers to herself as “the lady”. An abrupt change in gender is then indicated by the following lines beginning with “if I were a woman” (AYLIT Epilogue 16), presumably accompanied by “a physical gesture such as the removal of a wig or some article of female attire” (Shapiro 2000: 132). Along these lines, Rosalind´s gender ambiguity is associated

12 with the relation between “the dramatic representation and the reality it imitates” (Rackin 1987: 36). The role that the boy actor has assumed is refracted in front of the spectators´ eyes.

Many epilogues act on a meta-level as a bridge between reality and the world of stage illusion, reminding the playgoers of what they already knew: The character´s multiple identities need to be dissolved by the end of the play as they are all roles assumed by the performer. The epilogue in As You Like It goes further, explicitly addressing the female playgoers in an unconventional, indecorous final speech: “I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you” (AYLIT Epilogue 13). This quote allows for the assumption that the “You” in the title also hints towards the female audience. Women clearly had to endure inequalities and hardships in early modern England, but the “collective economic power they possessed as paying customers in the playhouse meant that none of Shakespeare´s plays could have been successful in his own time if it failed to please them” (Rackin 2005: 47). As Howard (1994: 91) has observed, both men and women are addressed in the epilogue as spectacles and spectators – constituting themselves as desiring subjects in and outside the theatre walls. Indeed, Rosalind´s final epilogue is suggestive of a sexual transaction between the male and female playgoers: “O men, for the love you bear to women (as I perceive by your simp´ring, none of you hates them), that between you and the women the play may please” (AYLIT Epilogue 13-16). Cross-dressed protagonists seem to mobilize both male and female desires. The epilogue in As You Like It can be seen as an “attempt to place the world of the play in some relation to the world of the playhouse” (Shapiro 2000: 133). The epilogue reflects upon the audience´s reaction to the play, possibly mirroring their anxieties and fantasies. Therefore early modern plays might “constitute some of the best evidence we have about the desires and interests that women brought with them when they went to the playhouse in Shakespeare´s England” (Rackin 2005: 47).

4 CLOTHES MAKE THE WOMAN – THE PERFORMANCE OF GENDER AND THE ROLE OF COSTUME IN EARLY MODERN PLAYS

Shakespeare´s plays were written to be performed – already hinting towards questions of stage presentation. Costumes are central to the performance of a play – contributing towards its authenticity and enunciating its style. As Barton (1976: 355) suggests, an actor´s costume would have dictated his movement, his gestures and voicing. What the 13 characters say is complemented by visual analogies in order to guarantee a certain unity of the play. Discussions of garments within the play are a major source of information about what the characters might have looked like on stage. When Rosalind and Celia flee the oppressive, male dominated world of the court, they “make significant decisions about their costumes, and thus about their public identities” (Gay 2009: 85). Rosalind contemplates the possibility of assuming masculine clothing: “Were it not better/ Because that I am more than common tall/ That I did suit me all points like a man.” (AYLIT 1. 3.111-113)

The audience´s perception of Rosalind alias Ganymede assumingly was one of a youth, dressed in contemporary, everyday clothes. Theatres used garments available at that time: As far as costume was concerned, the spectators and the actors on stage were indistinguishable. Generally, clothes have long been indicators of one´s social status and degree (cf. Howard 188: 421; Rackin 2006: 45). The state regulated codes governing dress, especially in urban settings in order to keep people in determined social places (cf. ibid.). Cross-dressing, such as other violations of the Renaissance semiotics of clothing, created tensions between the strict social order and a supposed reality, in which disguises were assumed to misrepresent one´s social status and sexual kind (cf. Howard 1988: 421). One might further argue that dress constituted as “primary site where a struggle over the mutability of social order was conducted” (ibid.: 422). Social mobility in the form of clothing threatened a social order that was primarily based on deference and hierarchy (cf. ibid.). Transvestism in clothing is seen as theatrical device to foreground the artifice of gendered reality (cf. Callaghan 2000: 35). Cross-dressing threatens fixed notions of gender as dress was seen as part of a cultural apparatus marking gender difference (cf. Howard 1988: 423). As Hayward (2006: 164) has remarked: “Change your clothes and you change your sex.” Clothing as performance creates tensions between the “outer-clothed self (gendered clothing)” and the “self underneath (the gendered body)” (ibid.). The final recognition scene revolves around the dramatization of costume, when Orsino addresses Viola in male clothing:

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. (TN 5.1.378-381)

Along these lines, the precondition for the marriage between Viola and Orsino is her change of costume (cf. Rackin 1987: 38). The heroine only seems to regain her femininity by putting on a theatrical costume (cf. ibid.). As Orgel (1996: 104) concludes: “Clothes make the woman, clothes make the man: the costume is of essence.” Viola, for instance, can only become a woman when she is dressed as one.

5 ALTERNATIVE SHAKESPEARE – COSTUME AND CLOTHING IN MODERN PRODUCTIONS

The perspectives of contemporary actors on Shakespeare´s women are anything but uniform. Contemporary British theatre often tends to narrow the gap between the female character and the actress (cf. Shapiro 2000: 130). Viola in Twelfth Night represents a form of the female self in absence. – In modern productions the different layers of gender identity are often simplified with Viola and the female actress being merged together. There is a strong tendency in contemporary productions that female characters are hardly portrayed by men. Rackin (2006: 120) suggests that puns – about the boy actor´s beard in the epilogue of As You Like It for instance – might presumably be lost on today´s audience, just as “the implications of all those ´ifs´ are less apparent in modern performances where a female actor plays the part of Rosalind and the cross-dressing represented on stage no longer gestures towards the crossdressing involved in the theatrical performance itself.” An interesting exception are original practice productions such as Twelfth Night in a Tim Caroll Production, first staged in 2002, featuring an all-male cast (cf. Shakespeare´s Globe 2017).

Fiona Shaw, for example, was one of the first female actors to impersonate the most frequently reclaimed of Shakespeare´s crossdressing women: Rosalind. In the 1989 Albery production of As You Like It, the actress “embodies a contradiction: a strong person for whom a single gender cannot be read into either costume or gesture” (Goodmann 1993: 211). Shaw played both the male and female character – thereby breaking down gender limitations (cf. ibid.). The primary layer of identity is transformed from male to female: As Goodmann summarizes: “She [Fiona Shaw] appears not as a woman dressed as a man but as herself” (cf. ibid.: 212). Shaw´s performance is a presentation of androgyny, liberating the performer to create alternative versions of early modern plays that seem to be authentic to today´s audience. This approach of female actors playing the parts of cross-dressed

15 heroines was strongly criticised by the famous actor and former Royal Shakespeare Company member Tilda Swinton:

Some of the most interesting roles for women in Shakespeare, for instance, involve dressing up as boys. Rosalind, Viola, Portia […] but actually I don´t think that those roles should be played by women at all. I don´t think those plays work today; the point is that the play was written for boys to play the woman´s parts. […] Plays really work as they were originally intended to work, and Shakespeare´s plays were intended for men and boys. They weren´t written for women. (Swinton qtd. in Goodmann 1993: 212)

Although Swinton´s statement clearly is provocative, it hints towards the theatrical possibilities (and limitations) of alternative, modern Shakespeare productions. The female characters we encounter in modern productions are different to those that appeared in original performances in Shakespeare´s time. When a woman, or in that case an actress, reacts to the limitation of an acting tradition, she creates meaning in discourse, shedding light on changing perceptions of femininity that are the “end result of over four hundred years of modernization to redefine their roles in terms of new conceptions of women´s nature and women´s roles in the world” (Rackin 2005: 112). What has to be taken into consideration is the historical contextualization of early modern texts that are reproduced within a modern framework, but nevertheless claiming to aim at “historical accuracy”. The term “historical accuracy” itself is highly problematic: Notably, a modern audience´s experience of visual aspects of Shakespeare´s plays can never be completely adequate as the concept of early modernism is reimagined in every performance. The past is reinterpreted and reimagined from a present perspective. As Shapiro (2000: 5) summarizes, it is often “our own agendas […] [that] are projected back into the early modern period”.

6 “DO YOU KNOW I AM A WOMAN?”7 – SHAKESPEARE´S COMIC HEROINES

As opposed to the tragedies, women in the comedies seem to be as clever and adventurous as men. While Shakespeare´s great tragedies are primarily men´s territory, women seem to control the game in the comedies (cf. Novy 1984: 7). The following chapters will be concerned with a detailed analysis of the central heroines in Shakespeare´s crossdressing comedies. Shakespeare´s women all aim at establishing their own identity – socially,

7 AYLIT 3.2.242 16 sexually, politically and economically (cf. Dash 1997: 24). All female characters find new selves in their male disguise – “facets […] they then use to forward the story and their relationships” (Packer 2015: 179). Portia reveals her intellect in the courtroom, Jessica challenges her blood lineage, Rosalind explores the reversibility of gender roles and Viola finds herself caught in a complex love triangle.

6.1 PORTIA AND THE STRUCTURE OF EXCHANGE IN THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

One of Shakespeare´s most prominent cross-dressing heroines is Portia: “In Belmont, a lady richly left/ And she is fair, and, fairer than that word, of wondrous virtues” (MoV 1.1. 163-164). Portia is first – in absentia – introduced to the audience as an exotic, fairy-like princess (cf. Rackin 1987: 33). The first lines she speaks remind the audience of the discrepancy between stage illusion and the reality inhabited by the modern English audience. When Portia instructs her waiting woman, “you will come into the court and swear I have poor pennyworth in the English (MoV 1.2.66,67)”, she speaks the words in English on an English stage, but at the same time she is reminding the audience that she wants to be perceived as an Italian lady (cf. Racki 1987: 33). Shakespearean stage illusion invites the audience to engage in a dramatic fantasy – creating a “reality” inside the theatre, in which Portia, played by a powerless English boy actor, poses as a rich, powerful heiress in Belmont (cf. ibid.). As Rackin (1987: 33) summarizes, “in Belmont the boy actor takes on a false gender that belies his true sex to depict the truth about the character in the play”. Portia only reveals her true gender in the fantastic world of Belmont. Bound to her father´s will to marry any suitor who passes the casket test, she explicitly laments her fate “O me, the word ´choose´! I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curb´d by the will of a dead father. Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I can´t” (MoV 1.2.21-25). Portia is forced to obtain a husband in her father´s will. As Shapiro (2000: 101) claims, Portia has no control, with “the casket scenes themselves stress[ing] Portia´s helplessness”. However, one could also argue that despite Portia´s determination to live by her father´s will, she simultaneously tries to rebel by manipulating the events to achieve the desired outcome. As Seidl et al (1995: 855) emphasize, “Portia is a brilliant director and actor”. With the help of music she gives Bassanio subtle clues to make him choose the right casket. The song´s rhyme – “bred, head, fed” (MoV 3.2.63-71) already points to the right casket, which is – of course – lead (cf. deSousa 2002: 80). It is

17 the lead casket that promises Bassanio Portia´s hand in marriage (cf. Olson 2003/2004: 299). Portia then offers her love in form of a ring. This gesture is accompanied by an address to her husband illustrating the Elizabethan gender system:

You see me Lord Bassanio where I stand […] Happiest of all, is that her gentle spirit Commits itself to yours to be directed, As from her lord, her governor, her king, Myself, and what is mine, to you and yours Is now converted. But now I as the lord Of this fair mansion, master of my servants, Queen o´er myself: and even now, but now, This house, these servants and this same myself Are yours, my lord´s” – I give them with this ring. (MoV 3.2. 149; 163-169)

Newman (1987: 25) concludes that “the passives are striking – [Portia] casts herself grammatically in the role of the object ´to be directed´”. The play is characterized by a transition of erotic and economic power relations (cf. ibid.). Portia emphasizes her prior role as “master”, transferring her privileges to her husband´s sovereignty. The central question of gender identity in this play is concerned with structures of exchange: Is Portia turned into an object of exchange in a male dominated society? Or is female knowledge transforming her into a rebel – a woman who “steps outside her role and function as subservient” (ibid.)?

The ring Portia gives to Bassanio epitomizes her acceptance of Elizabethan marriage. Both Portia and Nerissa vow “to enter into properly subordinate social and sexual relationships with their husbands” (Jardine 1987: 13). However, the ring – initially a symbol of male possession assumes a new meaning in the multiplicity of exchanges undermining its original signification (cf. Newmann 1987: 28). In Venice – a world of commodity and trade – Portia exchanges her role as a beautiful, dependant heiress for the one of a doctor of law – Balthazar (cf. Rackin 1987: 34). When the ring moves from Portia to Bassanio and is then given to the young doctor of law, it “becomes a sign of hierarchy subverted by establishing contiguities in which the constituent parts have shifting sexual and syntactic positions” (ibid.). Portia tells Nerissa that their husbands shall encounter them “but in such a habit,/ That they shall think we are accomplished/ With that we lack” (MoV 3.4.60-62).

Remarkably, Portia is the only heroine in Shakespeare´s crossdressing comedies who is not forced by outside events to adopt male clothing, but motivated by her own choice and the given circumstances (cf. Shapiro 2000: 100). Jardine discusses Portia´s role as an unruly woman, who steps outside the role that society imposes on her and who dares – under male disguise – to argue the law (cf. Jardine 1987: 14).

Portia´s legal expertise is borrowed from her cousin, Bellario, as the audience is reminded at the beginning of the court scene. Nevertheless, her “learning, the greatness whereof I cannot enough commend” (MoV 4.1.155,156) – as Bellario puts it – is her own. For Bassanio, Antonio and Lorenzo – all of whom are portrayed as socially and financially inferior – Portia proves to be an instrument of good fortune. Eventually, Portia acts in the service of a Christian value system and according to Jardine (1987: 16), the “legal knowledge she deploys to save Antonio modulates Portia´s obedient conformity with the patriarchal demands on her […] as female into something close to unruliness” (ibid.) The lesson she teaches is a difficult one. Olson (1993: 306) describes Portia in all her nobility – a disguised woman who brings Christian “justice” to a cultural foreigner: “The quality of mercy is not strain´d/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ Upon the place beneath […] For as thou urgest justice be assur´d/ Thou shalt have justice more than thou desir´st” (MoV 4.1.180-182; 311,312).

On the other hand, Seidl and Allen (1995: 846) harshly criticize the role of Portia for being a vehicle of xenophobia, posing as the “play´s wittiest detester of Moors, Negroes and Jews”. I would argue that Seidl and Allen (1995: 846) tend to misinterpret Portia´s motivation for her actions. Rather than humiliating Shylock, her aim is to save her husband´s friend. After defeating the Jew, Portia ultimately recognizes the parallels between Shylock´s plight and her own (cf. Oldrieve 1993: 95). They both belong to a marginalized group – women and foreigners. Ultimately, Portia´s claim “I stand for sacrifice” (MoV 3.2.57) shows strong similarity to the Jew´s plight “I stand for judgment” (MoV 4.1.101). It is none other than Portia who turns to Antonio in the end asking for his demonstration of Christian mercy to Shylock, expecting his mercy to exceed the Duke´s: “What mercy can you render him, Antonio?” (MoV 4.1.374). Shapiro (2000: 179) examines that Portia “reveals herself as more learned, more skilful and ultimately more forgiving than any of the men do”. Equally, Portia´s acting raises questions about the structure of justice in the play and the secondary status of society´s marginalized groups.

In the court scene, Portia´s female wit and intelligence are no longer perceived as a compensation for her helplessness but as an instrument for solving conflicts in the male domain of the law (cf. Shapiro 2000: 104). Portia successfully impersonates the lawyer´s part, constituting an exception to assumptions of a patriarchal culture. Undoubtedly, her role was highly controversial and she, like other powerful women at that time (such as Elizabeth I.), “continued to provoke uneasiness” (Howard 1988: 434).

The topos of the unruly woman empowers Portia, and even after removing her male disguise, she still remains “on top” of the play. It seems as if cross-dressing has dissolved former notions of passiveness and has turned her into an active performer. Portia restores the social order and “retains her power as a woman and wife until the close of the play” (Oldrieve 1993: 100). After the conclusion of the legal proceedings, she tests Bassanio by asking for the ring (cf. Oldrieve 1993: 99), reminding him of his contractual obligation in marriage:

This house, these servants, and this same myself Are yours, – my lord´s” – I give them with this ring, Which when you part from, lose, or give away Let it presage the ruin of your love And be my vantage to exclaim on you. (MoV 3.2.170-174).

The ring trick makes Bassanio face the consequences of parting with the token that symbolizes love and marriage: The loss of the ring is not only interpreted in contractual means that would entitle Portia to default on their property agreement but also dramatically enacted as sexual misdemeanour (cf. Jardine 1987: 14). The husbands are then threatened with sexual infidelity:

Bassanio: By heaven [the ring] is the same I gave the doctor! Portia: I had it of him: pardon me Bassanio For, by this ring, the doctor lay with me. (MoV 5.1.257-259)

Ironically, the conflict of doubled identity is resolved in the end as Portia – in the clothes of Balthazar – has foreshadowed in the last speech of the court scene, wittily hinting towards her hidden female nature: “And if your wife be not a mad woman/ And know how well I have deserv´d this ring./ She would not hold out enemy for ever/ For giving it to me” (MoV 4.1.441-444). Through her cross-dressing, Portia gains control over her sexuality and is enabled to set the terms of her marriage (cf. Howard 1988: 433). When the men 20 learn that they actually gave the rings to their wives, the final scene derives its humour from explicit illusions to the heroines´ multiple layers of gender identity: Bassanio in jests addresses Portia, her male identity still strongly present in the mind of the audience: “Sweet doctor, you shall be my bedfellow/ When I am absent, then lie with my wife” (MoV 5.1.284-185).

6.2 JESSICA AND HER FATHER´S BLOOD – THE DRAMATIZATION OF GENDER IN CROSS-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS

Jessica´s cross-dressing as a page seems to contrast Portia´s disguise and her status as a powerful and highly educated man of the law (cf. Shapiro 2000: 97). Jessica´s fate provides another mini narrative within the play. Jessica´s cross-dressing has romantic quality as her male attire is a means of being reunited with her lover. Nonetheless, she momentarily hesitates at the thought of assuming masculine clothing, considering that she would risk her good reputation for love:

Jessica: What must I hold a candle to my shames? They in themselves, good sooth, are too too light Why, ´tis an office of discovery, love, And I should be obscur´d. Lorenzo: So are you sweet, Even in the lovely garnish of a boy. (MoV 2.6.41- 46)

Lorenzo assures Jessica that her disguise is impenetrable enough to protect her from discovery. Crossdressing allows Jessica to meet Lorenzo at Bassanio´s feast, undetected by her Jew-father Shylock. The dilemma Jessica has to face is one to decide either to honour the bond to her father or to free herself from his restraints (cf. Hinely 1980: 222). As opposed to other female heroines such as Portia or Viola, she seems to be ashamed of her family and cultural background. As Jessica claims: I am “ashamed to be my father´s child!/ But though I am a daughter to his blood,/ I am not a daughter to his manners” (MoV 2.3. 17-19). Jessica dissociates herself from her father and his religion. However, her double status as a woman and cultural outsider makes her dependent on male support, which Lorenzo is very willing to provide: “most beautiful pagan, most sweet Jew! – if a Christian do not play the knave and get thee, I am much deceived” (MoV 2.3.10-12). Jessica becomes eligible for conversion in terms of marriage. Kaplan (2007: 18) remarks on the

21 connection between gender and the possibility of Christian conversion for a Jewish woman: “I would argue that women are seen as more authentic in their conversions, not despite their gender, but because of it.” According to her, Christian identity is primarily connoted as male and gender assumptions about female inferiority would allow for a conversion of women rather than men. Notably, Jessica is unable to accomplish a conversion herself – rather, her husband has the power to make her Christian: “O Lorenzo,/ If thou keep promise I shall end this strife,/ Become a Christian and thy loving wife” (MoV 2.3.19-21).

With Portia, the reader is instructed that daughters should know their place with regard to their father´s authority. Jessica, however, provides juxtaposition as she illustrates that a daughter who rebels ultimately fares better than the one who submits. Jessica´s actions – her escape in male clothing and her stealing Shylock´s fortune – are justified and her bravery is rewarded towards the end. As Adelman (1999: 5) suggests: “Though her escape from her father´s house to her lover fits conveniently into the conventions of a romantic plot, these are not the love-longings of typical romance.” Instead, Lorenzo not primarily poses as the target of Jessica´s love but rather is invoked “as the solution to the problem of her father´s blood” (ibid.).

6.3 VIOLA – A COMPLEX LOVE TRIANGLE AND THE NATURE OF STAGE ILLUSION IN TWELFTH NIGHT

Viola assumes masculine clothing for economic reasons: As a shipwrecked woman she adopts the role of a man as a “practical means of survival in an alien environment” (Howard 1988: 430). Interestingly, Viola refers to her transvestite identity as that she will play not a man but a castrate: “I´ll serve this duke/ Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him” (TN 1.2.52,53). The name Viola choses – Cesario – etymologically illustrates what a eunuch is: a man who is cut and therefore sexless (cf. Jin Ko 1997: 397). Although no further reference is made to this eunuch allusion in the course of the play, Viola seems not only to conceal her femininity “but also her assumed masculinity […] ensuring a double barrier of chastity against potential sexual dangers in the world of Orsino´s court” (Elam 1996: 2).

Viola, having been introduced as a eunuch, soon considers her disguise as a “wickedness” (TN 2.2.27) and feels trapped in a multidimensional love triangle. As she undertakes the

22 role of a messenger to recite Orsino´s love letters to Olivia, she reflects about her affection to the count: “Whoe´er I woo, myself would be his wife” (TN 1.4.42). As opposed to Portia for instance, Viola´s disguise is not used as a “vehicle for assuming power” (Howard 1988: 433). Rather, it can be seen as a means of adopting her rightful position as a wife on the side of Orsino.

In addition, Viola frequently seems to be torn between the necessity of upholding her role as a page and the urge of giving in to her female desires. In her unnatural sexual status of depicting male and female features she has stirred both the desires of Orsino and Olivia “by incorporating the polarities of sexual and gender difference into unity” (Casey 1997: 133). Casey (1997: 127) further argues, with Viola and other cross-dressed heroines, the dualism of gender has collapsed into a single subject. As a consequence, Viola is perceived as an object of desire – for both male and female suitors. Olivia repeatedly presses Cesario alias Viola to reveal his true identity by asking one of the central questions of the play: “What are you?” (TN 1.5.206). Viola – still disguised as a man – answers cryptically: “What I am and what I would are as secret as maidenhead” (TN 1.5. 209,210). Viola´s secret is not only her virginity, but the mystery of her primary female identity. At the same time, “Viola is also alluding to Sebastian´s virginity he will admit in the final act when he tells Olivia she will marry a ´man and a maid´“(Casey 1996: 130). A third layer of identity is implied in the following lines, when Cesario hints towards the play´s theatricality. Cesario replies to questions about his origins: “I can say little more than I have studied and that question´s out of my part” (TN 1.5.173,174). This scene refers to the characters´ “staginess” (Casey 1996: 130) and functions as a reminder for audience that in actuality, it is a boy actor memorizing his part.

Olivia answers the question of who Cesario truly is with her own imagination. Casey (1996: 135) has highlighted the irony of this substitution: “Olivia´s amorous thinking reshapes this male into a gentleman of her dreams, while in fact this gentleman is a woman.” Indeed, Cesario is a gentleman, in so far as Viola was born as a lady of good fortune (cf. Winter 1986/87: 352). Disguised as a page, Viola is involved as inferior in clearly asymmetrical relations respectively (nobleman – servant and countess – messenger), marked by the use of “the you/ thou” dialectic” (Elam 2008: 81). Viola temporally hides her identity as a noble lady out of economic necessity, but will return to it in the end.

While in male clothing, Viola is involved in a complex love triangle. Orsino desires Olivia. Olivia fancies Viola and Viola loves Orsino.” Moreover, Viola finds herself torn between her love for the duke and her attempt to uphold her male disguise, leading to an identity crisis of the self: “I am all the daughters of my father´s house / And all the brothers too – and yet I know not.” (TN 2.4.120,121). Unbeknownst to Viola, her statement is not true as her brother is still alive. Viola´s twin brother Sebastian symbolizes the “reality principle” (Rackin 1987: 37) and is therefore vital for a resolution of the comic plot.

In the end, it turns out that all complications of the plot have been caused by mere illusions: Twelfth Night “resolves this trouble by playing on the concept of identity in so far as it means sameness as opposed to individuality” (Casey 1996: 139). Rackin (1987: 38) justifies those illusions as necessary for the unfolding of the plot: “Without the illusion […], the right characters would not have fallen in love; without the reality, they could not have married.” Olivia mistakes Sebastian for Cesario alias Viola and proposes to him. The reunion of Viola and Sebastian takes place immediately afterwards. Seeing the twins side by side Orsino exclaims: “one face, one voice, one habit, and two persons/ A natural perspective that is, and is not!” (TN 5.1.211,12). To all the other characters the twins seem interchangeable. Antonio further elaborates on their sameness: “An apple cleft in two is not more twin/ Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?” (TN 5.1.119-220). And Sebastian is the first to recognize his sister: “Say/ Thrice welcome, drowned Viola!” (TN 5.1.237). In this scene, Viola is called by her real name for the first time (cf. Gay 2008: 99). Orsino then – surprisingly quickly – accepts the restoration of Viola´s female sexual identity. In the close of the play with Viola still in male disguise, Orsino speaks the final words:

But when in other habits you are seen, Orsino´s mistress and his fancy´s queen. (TN 5.1.380,381)

Viola has to re-establish her female identity by recollecting her “maiden weeds” (TN 5.1. 251) that she has left with the captain in the beginning. The play ends with reference to the consummation of marriage between Viola and Orsino in near future. The heterosexual union that is suggested in the final lines of the play might be interpreted as ambiguity. Greenblatt (1988: 93) certainly has a point in stating that the “delicious confusions of Twelfth Night depend on the mobility of desire […] [and] Orsino does in a sense get his Cesario.” In actuality, the given stage condition of the boy actor´s maleness undermines the final heterosexual union (cf. Jin Ko 1997: 404). 24

6.4 THREATING THE GENDER SYSTEM: OLIVIA AND THE PATTERN OF THE UNRULY WOMAN

Howard (1998: 433) argues that the primary threat to the sex-gender system within the play is not solely a collapse of polarities on which biological differences are based – represented by the cross-dressed Viola. Even more so, it is “the failure of other characters to assume culturally sanctioned positions of dominance and subordination assigned the two genders” (ibid.). Orsino first rejects his role as an active wooer and seems to be drowning in narcissist self-love. In the course of the play, he undergoes a significant change and finally assumes his rightful position as the duke of Illyria. Similarly, Oliva poses an apparent threat to the conventional Elizabethan gender hierarchy. The heiress – a woman of property and considerable social power – has decided to live without men, showing “classic marks of unruliness” (ibid.). While on the one hand, cross-dressing plays “embody a fairly oppressive fable of containment of gender and class insurgency” (ibid.) in its valorisation of the good wife in the end, the female characters are also applauded for not aspiring to the position they would have been traditionally assigned with. Without any male guardians – except for her foolish uncle – Olivia remains in full control of her fortune and refuses her role in the marriage market. Her suitors create an image of her as a Petrarchan Lady – beautiful, rich and unattainable (cf. Casey 1996: 138). Olivia´s independence is legitimated through her social position, turning her into a Duchess of Malfi8 (cf. ibid.): a strong, independent woman of high social rank that is disciplined in the end. Olivia´s role finds ample precedent in real life: The Virgin Queen – Elizabeth I. – was a model of such a career – female independence lived to the fullest. The Queen “resisted decades of anxious male attempts to see her married” (Greenblatt 1988: 69) – a situation that would not have been tolerated in any woman of lower social standing. Elizabeth´s refusal to marry was caused by her fear that a marital relationship would diminish her power. She cleverly responded to Parliament´s attempts to find a suitable prospect in that she did not need to get married as she was already married to her country (cf. Dash 1997: 10).

Equally, Olivia rules her household and most importantly controls access to her person. She keeps refusing Orsino and other suitors’ advances towards her. This is also comically mimicked in the person of Malvolio. The steward pursues his poetic admiration of Olivia

8 The Duchess of Malfi is a Renaissance tragedy written by the English dramatist John Webster and first performed at the Blackfriars in 1614. The play centres around a widow, who defies her brothers´ plans of marriage for her and gains independence in deciding her own affair. She is however disciplined and punished for her unruliness in the end. (cf. NAEL 2012: 1571,1572). 25 from the distance and is then tricked by Olivia´s witty waiting-woman, Maria, into believing that his lady is in love with him. Thereupon, he ridiculously tries to impress her, dressed in yellow stockings and crossed garters – ultimately making Olivia believe that he has fallen mad. Malvolio performs another kind of cross-dressing, namely crossing social rank. Whereas Malvolio is humiliated and accused of madness, Viola´s crossdressing ends in comic relief.

Olivia seems to provide an antithetical mirror image of Viola – her alter ego. Olivia maintains proper gender subjectivity that Viola lacks. Wikander (1986/87: 352) has discovered that their names are anagrams – Viola and Olivia – probably hinting towards a deeper connection between the two characters. Both female protagonists are of high social rank and both obtain a marginal position in society – Olivia in her self-imposed encloisterment and Viola in her unhappy role as a hermaphrodite. In the recognition scene, the unruly heroines are disciplined and reintegrated into patriarchal mechanisms. Olivia, who initially falls in love with a woman, is immediately reformed when Viola´s true identity is revealed. What follows is Olivia´s reintegration into the patriarchal marriage market. In the end, both Olivia and Viola come to represent the same type of woman: a gentlewoman who secures her position as a dutiful wife alongside her husband.

6.5 AS YOU LIKE IT, ROSALIND – DUPLICATIONS AND STAGED INTIMACY

With Rosalind, “her outward appearance as a man gives her both confidence and courage” (Pitt 1981: 114). She easily adopts the male role, and appears as a comforter for Celia when they are tired and exhausted on their way to the Forest of Arden: “Double and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat: therefore courage good Aliena9.” (AYLIT 2.4. 6-8). Indeed, Celia has shown courage in refusing to play the obedient daughter and running away with Rosalind. In the course of the play, Celia functions “in the role of the conventional feminine and genteel young woman who attempts to rein in the excesses of Rosalind´s cross-dressed indecorum” (Gay 2008: 84). Celia frequently tries to prevent Rosalind from giving away her true identity. In the play-within-the-play courtship scenes, the female heroine, dressed as Ganymede, offers to pretend to be Orlando´s beloved “Rosalind” and she deliberately gives her identity away to Orlando: “And I am your Rosalind” (AYLIT 4.1.59). The audience is very aware of the fact that these words a true

9 Aliena is the name Celia assumes when fleeing with Rosalind from Duke´s Frederick´s court. 26 beyond the flippant role playing initiated to cure Orlando from his lovesickness. Celia hastily adds: “It pleases him to call you so, but he hath a/ Rosalind of a better leer than you” (AYLIT 4.1.60, 61). The fear that Celia voices here, namely that Rosalind might reveal her true gender to Orlando, articulates the presence of multiple layers of identity constructed and juggled by the boy actor (cf. Shapiro 2000: 128). The performer impersonating Rosalind can activate the audience´s knowledge of other gender identities and shift from Ganymede to Rosalind by turning to Celia in an aside. Celia, besides the clown Touchstone, is the only one who knows about the true identity of her “brother” and Shakespeare uses her character to “accentuate Rosalind´s presence beneath her disguise as Ganymede” (Shapiro 2000: 128). In various scenes, Celia and Rosalind engage in a dialogue before being joined by other characters, causing them to turn into Aliena and her brother. On a meta-theatrical level, As You Like It frequently destabilizes what the audience has been shown and forces us “to experience theatre in the making” (Ronk 2001: 255).

In the world within the play, Rosalind appears as both the feminine Ganymede and as a conventionalized female portrait inspired by Orlando´s imagination (cf. Ronk 2001: 264). Rosalind poses as Orlando´s object of affection without Orlando being aware of her immediate presence. Greenblatt (1988: 93) has dramatized this idea, stating that “men love women precisely as representations”. Orlando captures a portrait of his beloved in poetry and carved on a tree: “Hang there my verse in witness of my love” (AYLIT 3.2.1). He continues his soliloquy, addressing himself from a third person perspective: “Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree/ The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she” (AYLIT 3.2.9,10). Orlando struggles to capture his love in verse. Ganymede alias Rosalind then enters the scene, reading out the lines of the poem in which her female self is inscribed:

From the east to western Ind, No jewel is like Rosalind. Her worth being mounted on the wind, Through all the world bears Rosalind. All the pictures fairest lin´d Are but black to Rosalind. Let no face be kept in mind. But the fair of Rosalind. (TN 3.2.86-93)

The words are spoken by a female character – impersonated by a boy actor and disguised as a male page. The female portrayal is “so codified and conventional as to be comic” (Ronk 2001: 264). Orlando is playing with Petrarchan conventions of the “fair” and unattainable lady, thereby creating a comic effect. As Ronk (2001: 265) has argued, the poem hints towards a gap between the idealized female self in verse and the cross-dressed Ganymede on the stage – “between the various pictures words and eyes create [respectively].” Ronk (2001: 266) further claims that the numerous duplications implicitly question what it means to be Rosalind – a character, a name or a metaphoric jewel? What the audience certainly does see is the complexity of her character. The boy actor is impersonating Rosalind, Rosalind is pretending to be the male page Ganymede and Ganymede offers to pretend being Rosalind, so that Orlando might practice wooing her (cf. Packer 2015: 186). In the course of the play, Rosalind “metamorphoses from the stilted, love-lorn, and adored lady to the verbally agile and nimble boy” (ibid.).

In addition, cross-dressing liberates Rosalind into eloquent speech and she recognises that “her unfeminine energy […] can be put to good use in a world where – at least temporarily – patriarchal power doesn´t entirely rule” (Gay 2009: 91). At the sight of the man she loves the woman in her seems to be stuck dumb (cf. Packer 2015: 186). As Ganymede, on the contrary, she adopts the role of a “saucy lackey [to] under that habit play the knave on [Orlando]” (AYLIT 3.2.287-289). Disguised as Ganymede she pretends to be “Rosalind”: “Why, how now, Orlando, where have you been all this while? You a lover?” (AYLIT 4.1. 35,36). Rosalind reverses the roles of traditional courtship: Under male disguise, she is actively wooing Orlando and indirectly persuading him to marry her (cf. Packer 2015: 189). During this play acting, Orlando suspects that Ganymede is indeed closer to Rosalind as he has thought. Rosalind – as Packer (2015: 198) puts it – “the person he has come to know is far deeper and far more complicated and has little to do with the imaginary person of his poems.”

Finally though, it is up to Rosalind in her primary female persona to bring the play to an end: She does so with the assistance of what she refers to as “magic” – of which the audience knows to be theatricality (cf. Gay 2008: 91). It is the revelation of truth only Rosalind can bring about (cf. ibid.), talking about herself in the voice of Ganymede: “I know into what straits of fortune she is driven, and it is not impossible to me, if it appears to you, to set her before your eyes tomorrow, human as she is” (AYLIT 5.2.63-66).

In the end, Rosalind frees Orlando from his lovesickness, who pretends he can “no longer live by thinking” (AYLIT 5.2.49). She confidently declares: “For if you will be married tomorrow, you shall; and to Rosalind you will.” (AYLIT 5.2.70,71). As You Like It is the only comedy to have an alternate title “What You Will”, hinting towards subjectivity in interpretation and the characters´ overall attitude of crossing traditional social boundaries. Calling in mind the end of the play however, comedy “while delighting in the events of a briefly topsy-turvy world, is ultimately conservative” (Gay 2008: 91). It seems to revitalize social norms by means of “reincorporating the ´outlandish´ through the institution of marriage” (ibid.). Rosalind disposes herself of her male disguise and returns as the duke´s daughter. Her social position in society is restored by her father´s rightful claim to power. In the last scene, Hymen – the god of marriage – is called up to “bar confusion” and “to make conclusion” (AYLIT 5.4.123,124) by uniting the four couples: Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver, Audrey and Touchstone as well as Silvius and Phoebe. Individually, their marriage can be interpreted differently – as “a merely social convention in a patriarchal society, as a public expression of mutual feelings of love, or as an appropriate outlet for […] mutual sexual desire” (Strout 2001: 283).

7 WOMEN AND MARRIAGE

“All women are understood to marry or be married” (The Lawe´s Resolution of Women´s Rights qtd. in Rackin 1987: 30)

As Pitt (1981: 14) notes, unmarried women theoretically had the same rights as men. In practice, however, “it was virtually impossible for a woman (unless she was Queen of England) to remain unmarried and independent” (ibid.). Renaissance English women used to be defined in terms of their marital status (cf. Howard 2003: 413). The social system classified women as maids (preparing to marry), wives (who have already achieved married state) or widows (whose husbands have died). The only category of women outside the marriage status was the one of the whore (cf. ibid.). The primary motivation of Shakespeare’s comedies is to position their maiden heroines to perform a successful transition to faithful and loving wives. The underlying imperative of the crossdressing comedies is to get Portia, Rosalind, Viola and Olivia to the altar by overcoming obstacles that would hinder a union with their predestined partners.

In addition, women at the time of Shakespeare were often subjected to marriage as a form of “business” which can be traced back to the concept of arranged marriages in early modern times. Especially daughters posed as chess figures in the political, social manoeuvres of their families, particularly of their fathers. Those networks of patriarchs – fathers, kings, dukes or husbands – shape the plays´ dramatic structure (cf. Drakakis 2010: 65). Marriages were seen as contracts, often settled in last wills –“an economic transaction based on the exchange of gifts – women, cash […] or land (ibid.).”

The contractual, property-owning side of marriage is also reflected in the Taming of the Shrew, for example, when Katherine voices the “ideal” attitudes of a good wife:

Such duty as the subject owes the prince, Even such, a woman oweth to her husband; And when she is forward, peevish, sullen, sour, And not obedient to his honest will, What is she but a foul contending rebel, And graceless traitor to her loving lord. (TTOTS 5.2.153-158)

What is described here is marriage as a system that produces and reproduces historically specific social relations: This quote points towards the ideal position of a woman in marriage: obedient, silent and inferior to “her loving lord”. The woman is allotted secondary status. Ironically, Portia in The Merchant of Venice disrupts those structures of exchange and submission that marriage imposes on her – structures that would insure hierarchical gender relations in the microcosm of marriage. In fact, Portia´s declared obedience is no more than a conventional act of courtesy (cf. Dusinberre 1975: 85). In reality, she maintains total independence. In the close of the play, Portia commands: “Let us go in” (MoV 5.1.297). Her unruliness is also mirrored in language – the imperative she uses linguistically includes her husband. Instead of being directed by her husband as her lord, Portia successfully insures her own sovereignty by bridging the gap between both power and intimacy.

Furthermore, Phoebe and Rosalind´s roles in arranging their own marriages found ample precedents in contemporary reality: Many parents had died before their daughters reached a marriageable age. Research into this field also shows that even with both parents still alive, a considerable number of young women would live outside their parents´ houses – “supporting themselves and negotiating their own marriages” (Rackin 2005: 20.). Apart

30 from that, early modern Englishwomen often played active roles in initiating relationships for their daughters, granddaughters or other female relatives (cf. ibid.). Especially in the upper levels of society, women had more control and influence on the marriage process.

In As You Like It, marriage is reflected on from a woman´s point of view. Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, explicitly voices her fears about her changing relationship as soon as she is married: “Men are April when they woo, December when they wed” (AYLIT 4.1.16-38). Rosalind contemplates the possibility of being abandoned by her husband as soon as she agrees to marry him. At the same time, the attitude of her towards her lover could possibly be altered: “Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives” (AYLIT 4.1.138,139). Rosalind´s contemplation about marriage could also have been interpreted as a warning for the female audience to carefully choose their future husbands.

As You Like It shows that – whether in real life-marriage or in theatre – “conventions are meaningful only if the parties involved mutually accept them” (Strout 2001: 286). Orlando voicing the lines of a typical marriage vow (“I take thee, Rosalind, for wife” AYLIT 4.1.137) will not result in marriage without his beloved mimicking his action (cf. ibid.): “I do take thee, Orlando, for my husband” (AYLIT 4.1.127,128). Rosalind speaks these lines in male disguise, still posing as Ganymede. Ronk (2001: 266) interprets this scene as mirroring the end of the play: Rosalind and Orlando in their comic courtship scenes prepare each other for marriage. Ultimately, Rosalind educates her lover “on how he should woo and how he should love a woman” (Howard 2003: 414).

Although Shakespeare´s comedies certainly did not celebrate companionate marriage, women are shown as their future husbands´ confidantes, companions or even agents of their good fortunes. The different shapes women assume in and outside of marriage “offer a revealing window into our own history” (Rackin 2005: 137). The comedies show different models of marriage and marital bliss – the comedy typically ending in a union of the couples. The marriage plot seems to reaffirm and re-establish patriarchal authority. In some of the cross-dressing comedies however, the act of marriage towards the end feels artificial and too abrupt. Especially in Twelfth Night the ending in marriage comes unexpected and in the Merchant of Venice the final reunion may not fully distract from Shylock´s fate that contributes to the overall sombre tone of the play.

8 THE HERMAPHRODITE

Casey (1996: 126) defines a hermaphrodite as “strictly speaking a person who possesses both male and female sexual organs, but more broadly defined as an androgynous subject with male and female characteristics.” Shakespeare´s comedies seem to play with the concept of hermaphroditism – perceived as a bizarre anomaly violating inherent natural categories (cf. Greenblatt 1988: 77). This hermaphroditic capacity becomes visible in Shakespeare´s crossdressing comedies on two levels. First, an element of this “denaturalization” is part of the Renaissance stage convention, with all-male actors performing both the male and female part. Secondly, hermaphroditism is explicitly thematised on the level of the characters.

Phillip Stubbes in his Puritan pamphlet Anatomie of Abuses claims that a man who wears female clothing (or vice versa, a woman in male disguise) – would pervert god´s natural hierarchy by turning them into something close to a hermaphrodite: “Men and women who wear each other´s costume may […] be called Hermaphroditi, that is, Monsters of both kindes, half women, half men.” (Anatomie of Abuses 1583).” Stubbes describes monstrous as something that has no underlying essential nature (cf. Levin 1994: 19). Disruptions of gender binaries by men and women are interpreted in different ways. For a man, assuming female attire undermined the authority of the superior sex and could have been regarded as a source of shame (cf. Howard 1988: 424). In Stubbes´ (1583) words, it made men “weake, tender and infirme”. Sir Edward Coke, a renowned Renaissance English jurist, refers to the possibility of a “third sex” in his Commentaries: “Every heir is either a male, or female, or a hermaphrodite that is both male and female.” (Coke qtd. in Trumbach 1994: 119). The English jurist continues to reflect on the nature of this “man-woman” (ibid.) and urges the hermaphrodite to choose a gender – either being male or female. Coke thereby already refers to the Renaissance prevailing norm of reducing gender to the binaries of the two biological sexes (cf. ibid.).

The androgynous performance of the heroines in the cross-dressing comedies similarly points towards their hermaphroditic position in collapsing the dualism of gendered identity into a single subject (cf. Casey 1996: 127). Viola, for example experiences her costume as a “wickedness” (TN 2.2.27) and she positions herself in the role of a poor hermaphrodic monster: “And I, poor monster, fond as much of him [Orsino]/ And she [Olivia], mistaken, seems to dote on me./ What will become of this?” (TN 2.2.34-36). In her unnatural status as a man-woman, Viola becomes an object of desire for both Olivia and Orsino. Simultaneously,

32 she also voices her fear about forever being trapped in male disguise without the possibility of return to womanhood.

9 FEMININITY SHAPED THROUGH EXPERIENCES OF MASCULINITY

Cross-dressed heroines such as Rosalind in As You Like It, Portia in the Merchant of Venice or Viola in Twelfth Night remain – despite their male clothing – biologically female and physically weak. They all still hold typical conventionalized female features such as affection, tenderness and sensitivity. In some scenes, the stereotypical feminine qualities of the heroines, unchanged by their assumed male identity, are emphasized. This primary female subjectivity is illustrated in Rosalind´s dialogue with Celia: “I could find in my heart to disgrace men´s apparel and to cry like a woman” (AYLIT 2.4.4,5). Casey (1996: 124) subsumes that “women are feminine in actuality; but I would call them masculine in potentiality.” In that moment, Rosalind finds herself drawn between her assumed male gender and her biological sex. The heroines repeatedly come close to giving their disguises away and Feste reminds the audience when looking at the identical twins Sebastian and Viola: “Nothing that is so, is so” (TN 4.1.8). The complication of the comic plot can be traced back to a discrepancy between appearance and reality – between masculinity and femininity.

Moreover, it could also be argued that the heroines´ experiences of masculinity shape notions of their femininity. It appears that womanliness is a result of the heroines´ temporary states as men. Portia, for example, successfully assumes the role of a powerful male and retains her active role until the end of the play. With Viola, Twelfth Night on the other hand calls attention to the heroine´s struggles and failure to perform the role signified by her male dress (cf. Howard 1988: 43). As Annette Kuhn (1985: 55) has initially examined, cross-dressing sometimes is intensifying rather than blurring the lines of biological, sexual differences. When Viola under the disguise of Cesario is threatened with a duel by Sir Andrew, she exclaims “Pray God defend me!” (TN 3.4.295) and reflects on how much she “lack[s] of a man” (TN 3.4.296). Hence, despite the primary reference to the male genitalia, Viola might as well consider her lack of bravery or physical weakness within these lines. Rackin (2006: 124) describes this episode as a “test of manhood”, that is somehow evaded by Sebastian´s intervention.

Ultimately, Viola seems to be rather relieved to finally return back to her female identity. As opposed to Portia for example, Viola feels trapped by her male disguised, viewing it no longer as protection but rather as a threat: “No profound heart; and yet by the very fangs of malice, I swear I am not that I play” (TN 1.5.178,179) – a metatheatrical reference that is as true for the boy actor as for the character of Viola herself.

Greenblatt (1988: 5) states that Shakespeare´s heroines have to “pass through the state of being a man in order to become women.” Portia, Olivia, Viola, Jessica and Rosalind all are reintegrated as wives into patriarchal mechanisms. What appears like a happy end in marriage equally restricts – in some plays more in some less – their freedom as active female heroines. But what did a potential female audience find attractive about plays whose ending we consider as rather misogynist from today´s point of view? Orgel (1996: 74) has posed exactly this question in his work Impersonations, finding that “plays about love matches are especially powerful fantasies of freedom in a patriarchal society”. Under male disguise, women discover their sexuality is under their own control – attractive, powerful and sometimes even threating to their potential husbands (cf. ibid.).

10 FATHERLESS WOMEN ON STAGE

Mysteriously, the fathers of nearly all major heroines are absent in the course of the plays. The exception here is the minor character of Jessica and her Jew-father Shylock. 10 She is the only woman, whose marriage becomes possible in betraying her father. Shylock and Jessica are not the only representatives of the father-daughter theme in the play, but according to Bamber (1982: 116) they are the ones “appropriate to Venice, to realism, to the world of hard choices.” Portia and her father present another version of this theme when the heiress is left bound to her father´s will that seems to require a choice between family loyalty and love (cf. ibid.). In contrast to Jessica, who is forced to make choices, Portia is spared from showing disobedience to her dead father: “Her will happens to coincide with the terms of her father´s will.” (ibid.: 117). Bamber´s emphasis can be considered as irony, as Portia cleverly manipulates the outcomes of the casket plot. The absence of a primary patriarchal power allows the women to take control over their lives.

10 Implications of their relationship have also been discussed in chapter 6.2 "Jessica and her Father´s Blood – The Dramatization of Gender in Cross-Cultural Encounters”. 34

Rosalind is the only high-class heroine whose father – the rightful ruler of Illyria – is still alive. The play opens with Rosalind in grievance for her father, Duke Senior, who has been banished by his own brother. When Rosalind then encounters her father in the Forest of Arden, she is not willing to reveal her true identity behind her male clothes: “He asked me of what parentage I was. I told him, of a good one; so he laughed and let me go” (AYLIT 3.4.31-34). Rosalind seems to enjoy the freedom that comes with her male disguise and she maintains that independence and distance from her father until the end of the play (cf. Novy 1985: 14).

With Olivia, the loss of her father and brother empowers her and leaves her uncontrolled by male restraints. Olivia´s empowerment in social status might be linked directly to her “fatherlessness”. Whereas in the tragedies, fathers clearly show their authority and tend to oppose their daughters´ marriages, such as in Romeo and Juliet for instance, the comedies allow for more freedom in the most intimate domains of a heroine´s life, such as love or marriage. The absence of a father enables Olivia, legitimated by her social position, to challenge male authority. This seems particularly remarkable in times of a system, in which male authority was strengthened by the church and the state was actively reinforcing patriarchal dominance (cf. Lenker 2002: 17). Nevertheless, Lenker (2002: 17) emphasizes that the tone of patriarchy strongly varied between the reigns of Elizabeth I. and James I.: “If patriarchy had been more than a ´burgeoning concept, the theory and practice of male domination would have placed the courts of female rulers in an awkward position.” However, with the accession of James, patriarchy turned into a dominant force again (cf. ibid.).

In Twelfth Night, the death of Viola´s father makes her brother a substitute for male power. After having lost both her family members, Viola is forced to gain economic independence by turning herself into the man she has lost. Viola assumes the role of her brother´s mirror image that is projected back in the recognition scene when the twins finally meet – both still in the belief that the other one has died on sea. In assuming masculine attire, Viola imitates her brother (cf. Rackin 1987: 37) – just as art in the Renaissance was meant to imitate natural life (cf. ibid.). In this final scene Sebastian and Viola´s common memory of their father helps to assure each other of their family bond – that they are brother and sister in actuality:

Viola: My father had a mole upon his brow. Sebastian: And so had mine. Viola: And died that day when Viola from her birth Had numb´red thirteen years. […] Viola: If nothing lets to make us happy But this my masculine usurp´d attire, […] place, time and fortune do cohere […] That I am Viola. (TN 4.1.234-240)

Viola even mentions her father´s name: “Of Messaline; Sebastian was my father. Such a Sebastian was my brother too” (TN 4.1. 224,225). According to Greenblatt (1988: 72) we learn through “the magical name of the father […] that the threat to the social order and the threat to the sexual order were equally illusory.”

11 “O MY DAUGHTER! O MY DUCATS! O MY DAUGHTER!”11 – CONNECTIONS BETWEEN WOMEN AND PROPERTY

Women´s power and authority in all cross-dressing comedies are closely linked to property. Early modern women were often turned into personal property – an object to male pride and superiority. In the first half of the Merchant of Venice, for example, Portia poses as her father´s property – he obtains the right to make legal and moral decisions about the most intimate concerns of his daughter´s life. Portia´s first appearance onstage shows her inner struggle between the patriarchal demands of society and her own desires: “I may not choose who I would, nor refuse who I like.” (MoV 1.2.22-24). These lines could possibly be interpreted as a hint towards the early modern marriage market and the inherent right of parents in finding suitable partners for their daughters (cf. Rackin 2005: 20). Newmann (1987: 22) takes this assumption one step further, arguing that “it was always the bride, and never the groom, who [was] an object of exchange among family groups and the means by which social relations [were] reproduced.” This trafficking and objectification of women in marriage is also referred to by Rosalind: “To you I give myself, for I am yours” (AYLIT 5.4. 110,111). Notably, the object and the agent of this exchange is Rosalind, offering herself as a kind of “gift” to her future husband.

11 MoV 2.8.15 36

On the contrary, women in the Renaissance themselves possessed certain economic powers, either “through inheritance […] but also by virtue of their own gainful employment” (Rackin 2005: 21). In Shakespeare´s crossdressing comedies, we encounter both kinds of women. Rosalind and Phoebe’s female household they establish in the fantastic world of Arden could hint towards their economic independence. Indeed, especially women of lower social rank would have earned a living – “not only as servants but in a variety of trades” (Rackin 2005: 20) and other professions outside the household. Phoebe, for example, is described as a shepherdess in the pastoral world of Arden. Olivia, on the contrary, is a woman of property and high social rank in Illyria. Taking into account historical realities, it is worth nothing that women in early modern England were legally entitled to inherit their fathers´, brothers´ or husbands´ fortunes and were often named executrixes in their male relatives´ will (cf. ibid.: 21). In case of the intestate death of her husband, for example, the widow was legally named administer of the estate (cf. ibid.). Olivia lacks discernible male relatives and becomes “the sole ruler of her fortune” (Greenblatt 1988: 68). Similar to Portia, marrying her is also serving her future husband´s social elevation.

In the Merchant of Venice, money in is a major factor of assuring the play´s progress: A marriage to the wealthy heiress of Belmont is enacted as a way for Bassanio to clear himself of indebtedness to his friend (cf. Shapiro 2000: 102). Bassanio´s desire for Portia mirrors his desire for money: Indeed, the erotic potential is inherent in the formalized discourse of power and wealth (cf. Drakakis 2010: 54). Antonio´s willingness to sacrifice his life for Bassanio in exchange for money constitutes a challenge to Portia: As Shapiro (2000: 102) concludes, “only by saving Antonio´s life can [Portia] prevent that drain on her husband´s emotional capital”.

With Jessica, her attitude towards property is a different one. Lorenzo offers the audience his memory of the fateful night when Jessica is fleeing Shylock´s house (cf. Metzger 1998: 60): “In such a night/ Did Jessica steal from a wealthy Jew,/ And with an unthrift love did run from Venice/ As far as Belmont” (MoV 5.1.14-17). Shylock´s reaction is presented as following: “O my daughter, o my ducats, o my daughter […]/ And jewels […] stolen by my daughter/ find the girl,/ She hath the stones upon her and the ducats.” (MoV 2.8.15,20 - 22). Contemplating Shylock´s words, one might deduce that the Jew is more concerned with the loss of his property than with the escape and betrayal of his daughter. However, Jessica finally is not punished but rewarded for her crime in that Lorenzo and herself are

37 considered in the final verdict to Shylock, turning them into the legal heirs of his fortune: “The other, that he [Shylock] do record a gift / Here in the court of all he dies possess´d/ Unto his son Lorenzo and his daughter” (MoV 4.1.384-386).

12 LOCUS AMONEUS OR THE GOLDEN WORLD IN SHAKESPEARE´S COMEDY

The plays´ use of symbolic geography calls attention to the idea of a “green world – in the sense of an enchanted, golden world” (Rackin 2006: 33), in which love triumphs over drama and misunderstandings are resolved. The female heroines all find happiness and structure in a golden world – a world in which the feminine is characterized as real. Packer (2015: 185) describes the motive of the journey as classic – the idea of leaving the old world behind and being challenged by a new conception of one´s self. The inhabitants of those symbolic places are no longer “realistic contemporary portraits, [but] images of ideal types” (Rackin 1987: 34). Similarly, Ronk (2011: 268) argues that the pastoral is a “world presented [as] patently and conventionally artificial” – with the audience being aware of its dissonances and fissures. Substitutions and cross-dressing are performed within this green world or “saturnalia” (Casey 1996: 128), meaning that its “social and political utility might be mitigated” (ibid.).

The discontinuity between illusion and reality is enacted in terms of setting. Illyria, Belmont and the Forest of Arden are places in which gender definitions are open to interpretation and redefinition. Those places are also presented as settings, where “wealth comes through inheritance and social status through kinship” (Rackin 1987: 34).

Remarkably, this dualism in setting is implemented in all cross-dressing comedies. In the Merchant of Venice, the eponymous city emerged in the Elizabethan imagination as exotic, with its imperial maritime power serving as the driving force of the play (cf. Drakakis 2010: 6). Venice is portrayed as a world of stock exchange, commodity and trade – a world which presents itself inhospitable to women and is portrayed as primary male sphere. Belmont, on the other hand, is depicted as an enchanted world of (female) beauty and wealth, singing and dancing.

The remote setting of Arden presents itself as equally compelling for Shakespeare´s heroines. Dusinberre (2008: 4) traces the image of this pure natural environment back to the literary pastory – “an artistic mode deriving from the classics” – in its longing to escape 38 from city life. Rosalind and Celia flee from Duke Frederick´s court, which is representative of rivalry and intrigue, into a place that anticipates the biblical Garden of Eden (cf. ibid.). Dusinberre (2008: 90) emphasizes Rosalind´s role in the realm of the Golden Age12: “She becomes by the end of the play – as the queen herself did for her subjects – the focal point for a new golden world of amity, justice, compassion and content”. In his Apology for Poetry Sidney refers to the golden world as following: “The world [of nature] is brazen; the poet delivers the golden” (Sidney qtd. in Dusinberre 2008: 94).

This world allows for women to access eloquence in speech and poetry. In Illyria, for instance, Viola is praised by the Duke for her outstanding intelligence and valued by Oliva for her (female) sensitivity in art and poetry. Illyria is a world inhabited by the nobility – not so much a golden world than a locus amoneus in which the performativity of gender is constructed and resolved towards the end. It is a place in which the characters learn about the boundaries of their world, test their strengths and experience love (cf. Dash 1997: 254).

13 “IF MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE – PLAY ON”: LOVE - ITS FACETS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE FEMALE SELF

Journeys end in lovers´ meeting, Every wise man´s son doth know. (TN 3.2.41,41)

Observing different and complex relationships in the Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and As You Like It, love appears disguised, just as the heroines themselves. Love in the comedies takes various forms: It is performed and enacted on stage as homosexual desire, as conventional experience of heterosexual marriage, as life-threatening obstacle or pure eroticism.

For the characters in As You Like It, love is idealized as spiritual commitment in the pastoral world of romance. All characters experience – regardless of their social position – “the grip of amatory passion” (Scragg 2003: 386). Celia and Oliver´s romantic relationship begins as love at first sight and remains untested until the end. Rosalind and Orlando help each other to understand the nature of love and Silvius expresses his affection for Phoebe in complex poetic forms:

So holy and so perfect is my love,

12 In Ovid´s Metamorphoses the Golden Age is depicted as everlasting spring – a place “with no laws, no punishments, no judges, no fear, no soldiers and peace everywhere” (Dusinberre 2008: 90). 39

And I in such a poverty of grace, That I shall think it a most plenteous crop, [….] Loose now and then A scattered smile, and that I´ll live upon. (AYLIT 3.5.100-105)

Silvius voices his devotion to the shepherdess and his willingness to “subsist on the slightest indication of her favour” (Scragg 2003: 386).

By contrast, the clown Touchstone represents another dimension of amatory experience, namely the physicality of sexual attraction. Touchstone´s use of down-to-earth language signifies the physical motives of his suit towards the rustic Audrey (cf. ibid.). By adding Touchstone and Audrey to the wide spectrum of love relations in the play, Shakespeare points towards affection being perceived as animistic, physical desire, which is explicitly referred to in an exchange of Touchstone with Jacques. In this passage love is depicted as ephemeral, ultimately contradicting the positive notions of idyllic pastoral love.

Jacques: Will you be married motley? Touchstone: As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath is desires […] [The priest] is not likely to marry me well, and not being well married, it will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife.

Twelfth Night introduces another, more complex image of love. In the first lines of the play, love is described as something that befalls people and cannot be avoided:

If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die. That strain again, it had a dying fall. […] O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe´er, But falls into abatement and low price Even in a minute! So full of shape is fancy That it alone is high fantastical. (TN 1.1. 1-15)

Orsino is willing to receive an “overdose” of love so that he will no longer care about the extent of his desire. He presents love as unrequited and painful. Furthermore, Orsino

40 complicates his perception of love by contemplating about the relation between romance and “fancy”. In the first scene, Orsino seems to anticipate the nature of love in the play – it is affection based on illusion. Orsino claims that that a strong feeling of desire might constitute itself as “fantastical”, leaving the lover unable to distinguish between the reality of the person one admires and one´s own imagination. Casey (1996: 124) suggests that the characters transform their beloved into “something more than they are, thereby disrupting the boundaries of compulsory heterosexuality and class consciousness through the performance of these imaginary fantasies.” The object of affection is created in a shape that pleases the lover. Olivia turns Cesario alias Viola into a young vigil and sensible man. Orlando remains unable to distinguish between the imaginary Rosalind he produces in the poems and the original one who hides under the disguise of Ganymede. Sebastian is idolized by Antonio and Portia´s suitors fall for projections. Love functions, in various shapes, as illusionary dream. Hence, lovers that remain unable to distinguish between appearance and reality are destined to fail.

In addition, cross-dressing plays in particular explore shapes of misguided or misinterpreted love. Affection therefore is described as a result of the dizzying confusion of identities. Rosalind highlights this idea in an address to Phoebe, hinting towards forms of misdirected love in the play: “I pray do not fall in love with me,/ For I am falser than vows made in wine” (AYLIT 3.5.81,82). The love displayed here is false – merely an illusionary dream.

13.1 GLIMPSING AT LESBIAN POETICS AND HOMOEROTIC DESIRE

Scholars such as Crawford (2006), Ake (2003) or Rohy (2011) have considered homoerotic moments as a result of crossdressing. Crawford (2006: 142) describes such same-sex desire as temporary, dynamic, comic, sometimes dangerous and “inevitably subsumed to heterosexual closure”. In Shakespeare´s cross-dressing comedies, many relationships are informed by homoerotic desire. The mutability of gender enables the “queer potential” (Rohy 2011: 55) in the plays. The OED refers to “queer” as “denoting or relating to a sexual or gender identity that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality and gender” (OED online).

The name Ganymede already hints towards homosexual desire and was probably easily decoded by an early modern audience: Ganymede was known to be the young, homosexual

41 lover of the Roman god Jove, “and slang for homosexual toy boy in Elizabethan English” (Gay 2008: 859). As mentioned earlier, transvestite performance might have been a source of homoerotic attraction triggered by the male performer masquerading as female. The audience would have watched two male actors kissing each other, dismantling traditional classifications and assumingly eliciting homosexual desire. Cross-dressing comedies depict strong relationships between men, such as the one between Bassanio and Antonio in the Merchant of Venice or Sebastian and Antonio in Twelfth Night – relationships that might be interpreted as extending beyond friendship. Homosexual love in either play is neither consummated nor condemned (cf. Rackin 2006: 122). Portia describes her husband´s friend as “the bosom love of [her] lord” (MoV 3.4.17). Shapiro (2000: 102) similarly portrays Antonio as a jealous homosexual lover, whose attraction remains unacknowledged. The intensity of Antonio´s affection for his friend – “”he loves the world only for him” (MoV 2.8.50) – has been considered as homosexual orientation (cf. Wells (2011: 113). This form of friendship competes with Bassanio´s love for Portia. His wife recognizes this homoerotic potential and forces Bassanio to set the right priorities:

First go with me to church and call me wife, And then away to Venice to your friend. (MoV 3.2.302-303; emphasis added)

In the same manner, Orsino finds himself drawn to the mysterious Cesario, although discrepant awareness informs us that Orsino´s hidden affection actually is for a maid: “For they shall yet belie thy happy years/ That say thou art a man” (TN 1.4.29,30). Orsino appears highly irritated by Cesario´s exterior, describing him having “Diana´s lips […] smooth and rubious” (TN 1.4.32,33) and his “maiden´s organ [being] shrill and sound” (TN 1.4.31,32). Orsino finds himself falling in love with the sensible and feminine Cesario. As Wikander (1986/87: 349) has observed, the duke is “unconsciously responding to the sexual [female] potentiality represented to us”.

Additional focus needs to be given to notions of lesbian poetics in disrupting heterosexual binaries – with regard to Twelfth Night in particular. Arguably, the relationship between Olivia and Viola appears as the most complicated and time consuming in the play. Ake (2003: 375) suggests that “female eroticism begins to assume discursive shape and currency on the early modern stage.” Viola and Olivia engage in a wooing game with each other: Viola decides to deviate from Orsino´s assigned script, which allows her to disrupt the Petrarchan discourse of courtship. Orsino´s words seem to “expose the inadequacies of Petrarchan language […] as poetry voicing and eliciting female desire.” On the contrary, 42 the person of Cesario stirs Olivia´s interest and she begins to find delight in the page himself rather than in Orsino´s banal, predictable message. Ake (2003: 378) has noted that Viola “frees Olivia from her scripted role as inaccessible sonnet mistress” and inspires her passion. Ironically, Viola´s performance as a male wooer has outmanned any other suitor. Viola´s femininity in masculine disguise makes her desirable for women. Ultimately, Olivia finds herself falling in love with a mere illusion of masculinity. Unconsciously she acknowledges the contagious nature of her love: “Even so quickly may one catch the plague?” (TN 1.5.287)

Olivia is fully aware of her desires and sends after Cesario with a ring. In the Merchant of Venice – as has already been hinted at – the exchange of the rings “emblematizes a kind of yet-to-be consummated marital union in which the ring itself is metonymically representative of the woman´s sexualized body” (Ake 2003: 386). In Twelfth Night however, the ring symbolizes Olivia´s self-motivated action and is signalling her rejection of her initially assumed “widow-like abstinence” (ibid.). Olivia explicitly voices her female desire: “Methinks I feel this youth´s perfections/ With invisible and subtle stealth/ To creep in at my eyes” (TN 1.5.288-2989).

In her famous soliloquy in act two, Viola abruptly comes to realize: “I am the man: if it be so, as ´tis/ Poor lady, she were better love a dream” (TN 2.2.23,24). Olivia then finds herself hopelessly falling in love with this illusion (cf. ibid.). Viola blames “her disguise and the frail nature of women for this instigation of bi-gendered passion” (Casey 1996: 134).

Viola steps out of her part and admits that she is not what she is, attempting to convince Olivia that their love cannot be real:

Viola: That you do think you are not what you are Olivia: If you think so, I think the same of you Viola: Then you are right; I am not what I am Olivia: I would you were as I would have you be Viola: Would it be better, madam than I am? I wish it might, or now I am your fool. (TN 3.1.136-142)

Similarly, Phoebe voices her admiration for Ganymede alias Rosalind in a speech:

There was a pretty redness in his lip,

A little riper and more lusty red Than that mixed in his cheek; ´twas just the difference Betwixt the constant red and mingled damask. (AYLIT 3.5.121-124)

Phoebe´s as well as Olivia´s desire for a feminine page (who is in actuality a woman) is rejected. Female homoeroticism is one of the many disruptions that cross-dressing and shifting gender identities explore. The history of lesbian love in early modern Europe however, appears even more hidden than male homosexuality (cf. Casey 1996: 131). Casey (1996: 132) refers to lesbian history as a “blank”, which scholars only recently have come to reconstruct.

In 1598, the Spanish romance La Diana by Jorge de Montemayor, was translated to English and could be regarded as analogous to Shakespeare´s Twelfth Night in representing erotic relations between women. Felismena assumes a similar role as Viola in courting a woman named Celia on behalf of the man she has fallen in love with (cf. ibid.). Montemayor however, does not create a “clone” to meet the conventions of romantic comedy, as Shakespeare does. Rather, La Diana ends tragically for Celia, who dies from a broken heart when finding out that her female lover´s affection for her master is stronger than her lesbian desire (cf. ibid.) In all those works, same sex-love between women is explored – but never finds fulfilment.

To conclude, complex homosexual affections contribute to the complication of the plot in Twelfth Night. However, the nature of same sex love is destined to end in disappointment. In actuality, Olivia´s love for Viola is gratified in the final recognition scene when the gender identity of the opposite-sex twins, Viola and Sebastian, is revealed. As Rackin (2006: 122) summarizes, Shakespeare is “in effect splitting the doubly gendered Cesario into two conveniently sexed bodies.” Despite the ambiguity of gender relations, involving lesbian love and homosexual desire, offered in the play, the conclusion of Twelfth Night imposes “natural” heterosexuality (cf. Casey 1996: 139).

13.2 SEXUALITY AND EROTICISM ON THE EARLY MODERN STAGE

The Renaissance stage, especially in transvestite performance, points towards erotic possibilities – primarily through imaginative projection (cf. Forker 1990: 4): Sexual attitudes are hard enough to document in our own time” (ibid.: 3) – let alone in the early

44 modern period. Insights into the erotic potential of Renaissance performances therefore have to be drawn from the texts themselves – in reading between the lines.

Forker (1990: 3) reminds us that the “sensory celebration of the human body in the period was confined in England chiefly to literature”. Eroticism often remained restricted to language and poetic imagery. Shakespeare´s period was a time in which the visual arts of Italian humanism have not been fully extended to sixteenth-century England:

By the time Shakespeare was glorifying Cleopatra as a kind of sex goddess on her barge, the nation had produced no equivalent of Botticelli or Titian or Michelangelo, no naked Venus rising from the sea, no urgently seductive images of sacred and profane love, no gloriously three-dimensional David. (ibid.: 4)

Theatre was the medium that was close to visual art in eroticizing and performing human desires – “within the acceptable limits of public occasion” (ibid.: 5). What was acceptable in public domains was strongly defined by Puritanism, whose members were strongly opposed to theatrical practices and constantly tried to close down public playhouses (ibid.). One character in Twelfth Night, Malvolio, the prudish steward, is aimed at caricaturing the Puritan values of duty, hard work and the rejection of any kind of pleasure. Ironically, Malvolio is humiliated and thrown into a dark chamber to cure him from his assumed “madness”.

In the mind of Puritans in London, theatre was a “sink of sexual deprivation” (ibid.). The Puritan line of thought strongly criticized the inherent transvestism in the plays, causing a status of effeminacy by men´s appropriation of the weaker and inferior sex (cf. ibid.).

Philipp Stubbes – a Puritan pamphleteer – rails against “Stage Playes and Enterludes, with their wickedness” in his Anatomie of Abuses (Stubbes 1583). Orgel (1996: 29) has outlined the Puritan attitude against theatre:

The growth of desire through the experience of theatre is a sinister progression: the play excites the spectator and sends him home to “perform” himself; the result is sexual abandon with one´s wife, or more often with any available woman (all women at the playhouse being considerable available) or worst of all […] the spectators begin lusting after a female character and end by having sex with the man she ´really´ is.

The assumption implied here is that the audience´s primary response to the play is erotic (cf. Orgel 1996: 30). Secondly, it is suggested that cross-dressing plays were erotically exciting – and thirdly, primarily in a homosexual manner. Scholars such as Forker (1996: 45

2) have been considering a homosexual subculture in the predominantly heterosexual Renaissance, also referring to polemical debates questioning the public morality of transvestite actors. In Elizabethan and Jacobean times, draconian penalties were set out for sodomy (cf. ibid.). Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning that very few actual punishments have taken place during Shakespearean time (cf. ibid.). However, Puritans such as Stubbe take this one step further, emphasizing the homoerotic character of the stage and arguing that the “theatrical woman” (McManus 2008: 437) only functions as a cover for the love between men. However, this way of argumentation does not take into consideration theatrical conventions and contributes to what Orgel (1996: 30) calls “a reduction ad absurdum of antitheatrical commonplaces.”

Furthermore, a multiplicity of concrete erotic situations can be found in Shakespeare´s cross-dressing comedies: Sexual humour often invades the comedy in form of bawdy jokes or puns (cf. Forker 1990: 6). Theatres such as the Globe or the Blackfriars – as a rule – were forbidden to present full nudity (cf. ibid.: 4). As a result, sexuality and eroticism were not explicitly shown on stage, but rather alluded to. Ronk (2001: 256) in her essay “Locating the Visual in ´As You Like It´“ suggests the Shakespeare´s comedies make use of ekphrases – pictures in words – to refer to sexual dimensions of complex love structures.

This can be observed in a dialogue of As You Like It, in which Rosalind discusses her desires with more or less explicit reference to male and female sexuality:

Celia: You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate. We must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest. Rosalind: […] Thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded. My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal Celia: Or rather bottomless, that as fast you pour affection in, it runs out. (AYLIT 4.1.189-196)

The reference to male and female genitalia and sexual intercourse can hardly be missed. The avoidance of physical display makes the dialogue not less shocking or revealing (cf. Ronk 2001: 262), but even more emblematic. Intimacy is not staged but constantly referred to in strongly sexualized mental images.

Similarly, Rosalind creates prolific new images by explicitly voicing her desires: “I will be […] more giddy in my desires than a monkey.” (AYLIT 4.1.142,143). This image

46 emphasizes the dimension of low, bawdy and animistic sexual desire. Orsino in Twelfth Night is equally concerned with the sexual dimension of his love to Olivia. Greenblatt (1988: 70) notes that in the line “to pay this debt of love” (TN 1.1.33), Orsino refers to a common theological term for marital intercourse, interpreting Olivia´s mourning not as an impediment but as “an erotic promissory note” and at the same time playing with sexual allusions:

O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame, To pay this debt of love but to her brother How will she love when the rich golden shaft Hath kill´d the flock of all affections else That live in her. (TN 1.1. 32-36)

Moreover, Renaissance dramatists tend to suggest erotic attitudes on the Renaissance stage are inspired by psychology rather than by biological gender. Forker (1990: 17) further elaborates on what he defines as “sexual universalism” – erotic desires that are not restricted by gender difference but rather informed by “androgynous inclusiveness” (ibid.). It can further be argued that the erotic on stage descended traditional limitations of the period as in form of homosexuality and transvestism. This claim makes forms of sexuality and eroticism in Shakespeare´s crossdressing comedies open to present categories of discourse. Rohy (2011: 54) and others have remarked on the erotic hybridity, temporality and diversity of sexual desire in Shakespeare´s work.

13.3 THE SEXUALIZED FEMALE BODY

As Callaghan (2000: 30) has suggested, the female body is problematized on various levels in the plays. First, it constitutes an obvious “problem” for the heroines as they have to hide their bodies by assuming the role of a eunuch or page. Female corporality is excluded on the stage – transvestism on the other hand functions as a device to foreground the artificiality of theatre (ibid.: 34). The female body presented on stage is actually the one of a boy actor in masquerade. The actor impersonating Olivia therefore can be seen as a “hyper simulation of a woman” (ibid.: 39) because contrary to all theatrical allusions there is no female body underneath. Nevertheless, Olivia on the level of the play tries to give the illusion that she has sovereignty over her body:

I will give out diverse schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labelled to my will: two lips indifferent red, two grey eyes with lids to them, item, one neck, one chin and so forth. Were you sent hither to praise me? (TN 1.5. 236-241)

Olivia´s inventoried body is represented as property – the individual parts having been explicitly labelled. This representation of Olivia´s body is part of her will. Olivia puts emphasis on the materiality of her body, thereby turning it into a site of resistance to the subtle capitalist patriarchy. The woman´s body in the comedy – “culturally marked as a source of female oppression” (ibid.: 30) – seems to question biological existentialism at first but then is ultimately serving its ends by revealing the constructed nature of the theatrical female body. Callaghan (2000: 38) has an important point when noting that “commands over one´s body consist of commands over its representations.” Elizabeth I. similarly controlled the use of her images stringently in order to preserve and enforce her authority (cf. ibid.). In actuality, the female sexualized body represented on stage could be imagined as a form of “absent presence” (McManus 2008: 437). In the middle of the 17th century however, theatre moved away from the “anomalous staged body” and allowed for female actresses (and female bodies) to take over the stage (cf. ibid.).

14 SHAKESPEARE – AN EARLY MODERN “FEMINIST”?

Shakespeare´s crossdressing heroines appeared enormously attractive to feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, “[mobilizing] Shakespeare´s authority in the service of women´s political goals” (Rackin 2005: 11). Feminist criticism in literature started as a political agenda – primarily in the USA – and was seen to gradually enter the mainstream of academic discourse. The aim of feminist history is to question established categories – primarily gender but also the intersectionality between race, gender, class and ethnicity. As Lenz et al (1983: 3) argue, feminism is “more a matter of perspective than of subject matter or gender”. To begin with, scholars often struggle to define feminist criticism and feminism itself. Rackin (2005: 19) describes the role of feminism in historical research as follows:

Feminist scholars are challenging the patriarchal narrative itself, recovering the materials for alternative narratives and emphasizing that repressive prescriptions should not be regarded as descriptions of actual behaviour.

The achievement of feminist criticism was and still is to enhance the visibility of issues concerning sex and gender and to deviate from a predominantly male academic perspective. Feminist critics have primarily been concerned with examining the role women played and still play in literary and cultural discourses. Rackin (2005: 16) claims that “the way we read Shakespeare´s plays matters because the cultural prestige of Shakespeare makes his plays a model for contemporary values and a privileged site where past history is reconstructed.”

Historical feminist research in the 1980s has been preoccupied with “men´s anxiety in the face of female power, […] women´s disempowerment, and […] outright misogyny” (Rackin 2005: 9). McLuskie (1985: 97) is critical of this tendency, arguing that “feminist criticism is often restricted to exposing its own exclusion from the text.” It is certainly undeniable that there is historical evidence for the suppression of women and a history of misogyny in early modern times, but for feminists there are obvious dangers in interpreting the past with a ready-made mindset of pointing towards possibilities of women´s liberation. Early feminist scholars such as Dusinberre (1975: 5) in her pioneering study Shakespeare and the Nature of Women notes: “The drama from 1590s to 1625 is feminist in sympathy.” It is true that Shakespeare´s plays seem to have always appealed to women. Women might have identified with the characters or their predicaments. All those enthusiastic responses to Shakespeare from feminist critics are certainly valid, however they have also been called into question by “arguments that mobilize the authority of history to insist that the original production of Shakespeare´s plays […] expressed an overwhelming masculine point of view” (Rackin 2005: 72). Rackin (2005: 73) discredits the possibility of assuming that Shakespeare´s female characters function as realistic representations of actual women as his works were not meant to be perceived as propaganda of female empowerment. Shakespeare´s heroines often have been “recruited […] in the service of recognizably modern gender ideology.” However, using the term “feminist” for a writer at a time in which the self in literature was predominantly male, might be problematic. The term feminist, I would argue, clearly is the preserve of political aims of women in the 20th century.

What is important to bear in mind is that a historical narrative is not only informed by research, but also conditioned by dominant views of women´s history in our time. According to Rackin (2005: 72) we need to be thoroughly aware of the social locations in which original texts were written while at the same time considering who has put a text

49 back into circulation and why. As Rackin (2005: 5) observes: In historical and literary research, “you are likely to find what you are looking for”. As a result, questions about Shakespeare´s “intention” are highly problematic. Virginia Woolf comments on the dramatist´s unobtrusiveness in her novel a Room of One´s Own:

One goes back to Shakespeare´s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man- womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women. (Room of One´s Own 1929/2005: 624)

She then reflects on the relation between women and fiction.

But that as it may, I could not help thinking, as I looked at the works of Shakespeare on the shelf, that the bishop was right at least; it would have been impossible, completely and entirely for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare. (Room of One´s Own 1929/2005: 529)

Woolf here contemplates about implications of authorship and suggests that if a female writer would have produced the same work, it would not have been as successful. The process of literature and writing in Shakespeare´s time was strongly dependent on the perspective of the male gaze. Nonetheless, the female self Shakespeare constructs in his comedies is not a direct projection of an external, male dominated world outside the theatre walls. Theatre operates on its own, both enforcing and challenging restrictions of the reality outside. In his cross-dressing comedies, Shakespeare shows the fluidity of gender that is open to adaption and resignification – the nature of the female self in early modern plays is not a fixed parameter. Rather, the feminine nature seems to change as the audience looks at it through the prisms of different temporal, social and cultural approaches.

15 THE SOCIAL EFFECTIVENESS OF STAGE ILLUSION

Howard (1993: 419) poses the question of whether the blurring of gender limitations on stage was actually “successful in challenging patriarchal domination, or […] serving its ends.” Dramatic heroines in male attire could have stirred up anxieties, raised questions about social hierarchy and gender roles or evoked engagement on the part of the playgoer. In other words, the final question that arises from a detailed analysis of the plays is whether stage illusion was effective in shaping the early modern female self – the women sitting in the audience.

Theatre allows us to glimpse at alternative possibilities to the reality we live in. Sexual identity is a construction – just as theatre itself. The common question of gender research seems to be: Does art mirror life or life mirror art? The answer could be a mutual dependence between the stage and off-stage reality. Shakespeare´s plays observe in their characters different possibilities of how femininity can be enacted in forms of theatrical dramatization. Among the most important techniques to empower the female heroine on stage are the discrepancy of awareness that lies with the audience, excitement and distortion of self-referentiality as well as allowing the playgoers to glimpse at the nature of theatrical illusion. The audience is repeatedly reminded of the actor´s primary male identity – therefore any aestheticization of womanhood seems to be deconstructed and questioned on a meta-level.

Phyllis Rackin (1987: 38) notes that “stage illusion radically subverted the gender divisions of the Elizabethan world.” Casey (1996: 128) describes theatre as a stage of licensed misrule. One could further emphasize the mutuality between theatre and offstage associations: “The Elizabethan theatre was a creator as well as a creation of its culture.” Social changes might therefore be seen” as a result of both religious and political devices as well as traced back to mechanisms of cultural appropriation” (ibid.). Vast social changes intensified the pressure on women while at the same time producing “sites of resistance and possibilities of new powers for women” (Howard 1988: 427). The boy heroine in male clothing shows that potentially disruptive fantasies, changes of identities and the blurring of social roles could be safely agitated in the world of the play. The theatres of London provided the audience with an illusion of “misrule” – cross-dressing being one form of it. If we follow the assumption that culture is recreated, contested and reformed through social struggles, then calling (artistic) attention to those struggles and contradictions in a culture may as well be seen as a starting point of social change. The invention of printing slowly increased women´s literacy but it was the theatre that functioned as an impulse for rethinking women´s position within society.

16 CONCLUSION

The Renaissance performance certainly had that potential of shaking gender binaries and traditional patriarchal hierarchies in a more subtle way. Shakespeare succeeded in incorporating incredibly new age ideas into his works, even by our modern standards, without forsaking the traditions of his time. The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and As You Like It present a “social world upside down” (Howard 2003: 414), in which women are allotted power and influence not usually granted to them in Renaissance England. With female heroines successfully performing traditionally masculine parts, they challenge and expand assumptions about what women can do or not do within society. As Howard (2003: 414) has argued: “Even though at the end of most comedies the hierarchical gender system is typically restored […], for a time the plays offer a holiday world of expanded possibility.” Renaissance theatre culturally functions not only as a means of reproducing gender structures but points towards possibilities of altering inherent cultural values and beliefs (cf. ibid.).

Shakespeare´s plays are neither political nor polemical, but they do raise questions about the female status in the society they are performed in. Shakespeare even allows his women to explicitly criticize the restrictions society enforces on them. However, as Dash (1997: 27) has put it: “Raising questions does not necessarily means providing answers.” What Shakespeare´s cross-dressing comedies show is that gender identities are fluid, suggesting a certain openness to adaption and resignification. Depending on our own experiences and images of women´s nature and their roles in society, we tend to see the “theatrical woman” (McManus 2008: 437) that is represented on stage by the range of possibilities we can imagine for ourselves – defined by social and cultural circumstance of our own time and place.

17 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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18 LIST OF ABBREVATIONS

AYLIT As You Like It

HAM Hamlet

MoV Merchant of Venice

OED Oxford English Dictionary

NAEL Norton Anthology of English Literature

TOTTS The Taming of the Shrew

TN Twelfth Night