Boy Actors on the Shakespearean Stage: Subliminal Or Subversive?

SEAN MULCAHY Boy Actors on the Shakespearean Stage: Subliminal or Subversive?

However responsible we undertake to be to our texts and their contexts, we can look only with our own eyes, and interpret only with our own minds, which have been formed by our own history. (Orgel 1996, 64) It was Shakespeare's great heroine Cleopatra who famously declared that she would rather die than "see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness" (5.2.219-220), though this is just how she and all of Shakespeare's heroines would have been first performed. That boy actors took female roles in English Renaissance theatre was an established convention,1 but whether boy actors in female roles were merely "taken for granted" by Renaissance audiences or whether the convention drew attention to itself is an unanswered question.2 Historians of English drama until the dusk of the 20th century considered a minor issue the fact that female roles were played by boys, but in the ensuing decades – particularly in the 1980s and 1990s – a branch of feminist, gay and new historicist scholars began to question the implications of cross- gender casting on the Renaissance stage and the effect of boy apprentices, typically aged between 12 to 21,3 playing women's roles. Thusly, later historians began to speculate on a new question – what was the impact of the convention of the boy actor on Renaissance audiences.4 It is remarkable to think that in this significant period in theatrical history there was an absence of women on stage, so in considering questions of the boy actor we cannot forget what the impact was on women, not only in terms of the effect upon those women watching but what impact it had on women socially. While Renaissance accounts indicate how convincing the boy actors were at playing women, other accounts indicate outrage at the use of boy actors on a moral level – that they encouraged homosexual lust – prompting a further question of whether there was some erotic nature to this theatrical cross-dressing. In this way, three questions can be posed – were boy actors merely taken for granted?; what was the impact on women?; and, was there some erotic nature to theatrical cross-dressing? – which this study shall endeavour to answer. The body of this study will be organised under three general debates drawn out of Shakespeare scholar Ann Thompson's work:

1 Stephen Orgel contends that "evidence does not support a blanket claim that women were excluded from the stages of Renaissance England, but it may certainly indicate that the culture, and the history that descends from it, had an interest in rendering them unnoticeable" (Orgel 1996, 8-9). For further discussion of the legal regulation of women in Renaissance theatre, see Mulcahy (2013), Mueller (2008), Shapiro (1999). 2 The phrase "taken for granted" is used both in Rosenberg (1954, 917) and Jardine (1983, 23) and will be elaborated upon in Part 1. 3 Boys of the ages 12 to 21 were typically contracted to theatrical troupes in apprenticeships and then, as they aged, went on to play men's roles. Puberty arrived later at the time due to low nutrition, sometimes as late as 18, so therefore adolescents could have the unbroken voice and lack of facial hair necessary to play women's roles. Despite modern assumptions that adolescents were incapable of playing certain female characters in Shakespeare, there is no evidence to suggest that more adult actors played com- plex female roles (cf. Kathman 2006). However, the exact age is disputed (Gurr 2007, 82-83). 4 For a summary of research in this area, see Thompson (1994, 5-7).

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 28.2 (September 2017): 87-111.

1. "whether the use of the boy actor was a completely neutral convention, invisible to audiences who just accepted the boy actors as the women they impersonated, or whether the convention drew attention to itself, leading to a knowing awareness of the fact of cross-dressing" (Thompson 1996, 107); 2. "whether the convention of the boy actor was in effect a subversive one, empowering women (or rather female characters) by allowing them to adopt freedoms denied them in a patriarchal culture [… or whether] the disguises serve only to reaffirm the sexual hierarchy" (Thompson 1996, 108); and 3. "did the convention [of boy actors taking female roles] simply incite homosexual desire for the boy actors […] or did it liberate desire by unfixing it from the simple binary oppositions of male and female, homosexuality and heterosexuality?" (Thompson 1996, 108). These three central questions are not just random, but pertaining to the very question of whether the boy actor was subliminal or subversive, either as a convention of theatrical practice, a symbol to feminism or an object of desire. The boy actor functions in a multiplicity of different ways and this study shall endeavour to elucidate his different meanings to the English Renaissance audience. This study, while borrowing from this bank of historical literary theories, will adopt a primarily New Historicist approach,5 examining a broad array of documents in order to understand the phenomenon of the boy actor on the Shakespearean stage, focusing more on these extra-textual materials rather than character-based readings of

Winter Journals play texts, though theatrical texts will inevitably feed into an understanding of the socio-historical nature of boy actors' performance, and an analysis of the theatre invariably involves engaging with dramatic texts. The total effect of this approach

will be to produce a theoretical, historically specific, and thickly describedPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) account of the Shakespearean boy actor. As flagged earlier, much of the seminal work on the boy actor occurred during the 1980s and 1990s as part of a movement toward a gay cultural poetics of Shakespeare's England, and these remain authoritative studies even for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution today. They constitute a reaction against the theory that the boy actor was merely an unremarkable convention, positing him instead as a site for sexual and gendered exploration, embracing theories of sexuality developed by philosopher Michel Foucault. This study shall survey tensions in the field and offer a new way through it grounded in the notion of the actor as a sign system that functions in a multiplicity of ways. At times, Shakespearean theatre encourages its Renaissance audiences to think of his female characters as women and invest emotionally in their journey and growth, then at others it seeks to destroy the illusion of womanhood and draw attention to the boy for comic or sexual relief. Understanding the boy actor requires an acceptance of his myriad effects on the watching audience. The opening quotation by Stephen Orgel, that we can only offer our own personal insight in absence of conclusive historical data when interpreting the boys' performance on the Renaissance stage and audience, is my humble apologia. It is our interpretation which is constantly going on, framed by our own knowledge and experience; so, I hope that my interpretation – guided as it is by a wide reading of the critical debate – may offer some insight into this question of whether boy actors were subliminal or subversive.

5 A New Historicist approach is concerned with "investigating both the social presence to the world of the literary text and the social presence of the world in the literary text" (Greenblatt 1980, 5). For an example of this approach in practice see Shapiro (1994).

1. "a role used" or "a role achieved:" The Boy Actor as a Subliminal Convention6 Like any convention in any art form, the use of boy actors in female roles was a practice that audiences accepted without confusion or feelings of sexual ambivalence. (Jensen 1975, 6) The taking of female parts by boy players [...] created considerable moral uneasiness, even among those who patronised and supported the theatres. (Jardine 1983, 9) Considering the tensions of the above statements, and to tackle the friction of the above views, I first want to address Jean Howard's question: "Was cross-dressing by male actors merely an unremarkable convention within Renaissance dramatic practice [or] was it a scandal?" (Howard 1988, 419). In endeavouring to answer this question, I shall consider the Renaissance conception of gender, and whether the notion of suspension of disbelief that would have audiences recognising the female character instead of the boy actor existed in Renaissance theatrical practice. This requires an examination of the signifiers of femininity in both the actor's performance and the dramatist's text. As we shall see, on the Shakespearean stage there is a constant play between the maintenance and destruction of the illusion of womanhood. The boy actor was a semiotic device of Renaissance theatre that functioned in a multiplicity of ways. Early Shakespearean commentators and theatre historians, Enjner Jensen for example, firmly assert that the use of boy actors was merely an unremarkable theatrical convention of the time. Under this theory, "the audiences forgot the 'boys' were male" (Rosenberg 1954, 917) because the drama presented a convincing illusion. As Jardine further articulates, "the willing suspension of disbelief does customarily extend, I think, to the taking of the female parts by boy actors [which was] taken for granted" (Jardine 1983, 23) by the Renaissance audience and "because the taking of female parts was universal and commonplace [...] it was accepted as 'verisimilitude' by the Elizabethan audience, who simply disregarded it" (9). This position clearly has a lot of common-sense support (McLuskie 1989, 101; Johnova 2004, 66; Howard 1988, 435). This first section shall examine the argument that the use of boy actors was merely a convention by focusing on three specific areas: the actors' dress and voice; the writer's text; and the audience's reaction to their acting style. As a feature of Renaissance theatre, "the ideological import of cross-dressing was mediated by all the conventions of dramatic narrative and dramatic production" (Howard 1994, 93-94) and the "superior imaginative faculty of adult Elizabethan or Jacobean playgoers" (Lee 1906, 18-19). Historical accounts attest to the Renaissance audience's imaginative faculty. As an actor-writer of the time, Thomas Heywood writes, "Who cannot distinguish them [the boy actors] by their names, assuredly knowing that they are but to represent such a lady at such a time appointed"? (qtd. in Orgel 1996, 31). The clearest indicators which could represent such a lady at such a time appointed or the "gender signs" which are manipulated "are five: voice, costume, make-up, hair, and gestures" (Bly 2000, 76). These indicators seem to have been sufficient by themselves, and not merely aids to the boy player's suitability for representing a woman. Firstly, the boy players had unbroken voices and, according to Davies, "the training of the boys in speech and song was of the utmost importance [...

6 Title from Hunter (1980, 38-39).

for] a well-trained voice would give precisely the effect of beauty and careful modulation which is required [... and] careful training will preserve almost any boy's voice unbroken for speaking" (Davies 1939, 34-35). As part of this training, the boy actor had to "tune his voice to feminine inflections" that were favoured by the Renaissance audiences (Richmond 2000, 485). The Renaissance audiences were fickle and "inadequate voice in the matter of female performance might well result in playgoers quitting the theatre, or [...] the actor being hissed from the stage" (Callaghan 2000, 71). Secondly, as Phyllis Rackin points out, "on a stage where female characters were always played by male actors, feminine gender was inevitably a matter of costume" (Rackin 1987, 29).7 Considerable trouble and expense went into providing appropriate costumes for those playing women's parts. Costumes from producer Philip Henslowe's inventory include "wemens gowns" such as an "orenge taney vellet gowe with sylver lace, for women" (qtd. in Foakes 2005, 292) and a "yelowe satten gowne ymbraded with sylk & gowld lace, for women" (qtd. in Foakes 2005, 323). Pictorial representations of scenes from Elizabethan drama, moreover, portrayed women characters as women without any hint of sexual ambiguity (cf. Foakes 1985, 88). The costumes must have been convincing, for the fact that the play quartos depict the female characters as women suggests that they were read so on the stage. Thirdly, make-up did much to "create the illusion of femininity" (Bulman 2008, 59). There are frequent condemnatory references to face painting in the Puritan writings, for example Philip Stubbes tells us that, "The Women of England, many of them, use to collour their faces with certaine Oyles, Liquors, Vnguents, & waters made to that end" (qtd. in Drew-Bear 1994, 21). Before Hamlet is to see Ophelia he will "let her paint an inch thick" (5.1.193) and doubtless the boy actors did the same, using white make-up (which was actually lead based and highly poisonous often leading to facial skin diseases and lead poisoning) and reddening the lips. The fourth element to signify femininity was the wearing of wigs. Wigs – or periwigs as they were called – were readily available as they were in fashion at the time. Finally, the boy actor would "have his gestures at his command [...] gestures for contempt, rage, pity, remorse, and all the other emotions, which the audience would quickly accept as symbols of them" (Davies 1939, 31-32), but would also be cautious to be not too demonstrative and full of the stylised gestures that caused Hamlet to exclaim "do not saw the air too much with your hand" (3.2.4).8 This "conventional movement and heightened delivery would be necessary to carry off the dramatic illusion" of femininity (Bradbrook 1932, 109). Stallybrass concludes that these elements would combine to affect Renaissance audiences' interpretations of the boy actors: "within the convention, we can imagine them fully as women" (Stallybrass 1992, 69). The signification of 'woman' is also contained within the text and playwrights' dramatic techniques. As Davies suggests, "the boy actor was simply a medium, well

7 Anti-theatricalists also saw costume as a sign of gender (cf. Levine 1994, 4). 8 There is a potential irony in the fact that Shakespeare could have played the player to which Hamlet directs this line. We know that he played the ghost of Hamlet's father and, as the ghost only figures in the first act, Shakespeare could have doubled roles to act the part of the player, and thus have the ironic situation of one of his characters telling him how to act. On the other hand, Hamlet may also be implicitly criticising his stepfather's acting style, as we know Polonius played Caesar (which itself is a curious situation of a character in a play having played a character in another play). Of course, both hypotheses are purely speculative.

schooled in certain techniques which allowed the playwright considerable freedom of conception. The audiences had no interest in morals, or, for that matter, in the boys' private lives or their personalities" and responded more to the text than to the actor (Davies 1939, 30). He further argues that "the tendency of Elizabethan dramatic technique, and particularly in the plays of Shakespeare, is to take great pains to present a boy actor as a woman and not to disturb the illusion when it has been established" (31). Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights were keen on maintaining the viability of the dramatic illusion because attention to the boy actor would have distracted the audience from becoming invested in the dramatic narratives of the plays. McLuskie argues that "the 'realishness' of the boy players' femininity was asserted [... by] self-enclosed visual and verbal indicators" - the discussions of femininity (McLuskie 1989, 104). The effect of Rosalind's frequent references in As You Like It to a "woman's heart" (1.3.106-112), for example, can be read to insist on the essential character of Rosalind's femininity (McLuskie 1989, 105). To return to the question established at the start, the third point relates to the audiences' reaction and, in particular, how the audiences received this constructed portrayal of costume, voice and text as womanhood. Examining the reactions of Renaissance audiences, Smith concludes that "the testimony of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playgoers [...] suggest that audiences simply accepted boys in women's clothes as a stage convention" (Smith 1991, 148) and that, quoting Davies, the "audiences accepted them as women without question or thought of incongruity" (Davies 1939, 34). Take, for example, George Sandys, an Englishman who traveled abroad and, returning home by ship from a trip to the Middle East in 1610, stopped at Messina in Sicily, and observed, "There have they their playhouses, where the parts of women are acted by women, and too naturally passionated" (qtd. in Smith 1992, 131). Sandys sees women's acting as too naturalistic and prefers boys' acting because of its emblematic and not overly passionate nature.9 George Hunter suggests that "the praise of the boys playing these parts must always have been praise for a role used rather than a role achieved [...] of the actor's capacity to invent new characteristics" (Hunter 1980, 38-39). The "greater tendency of the Elizabethan theatre was toward magnificence of appearance and gesture, and rapid, athletic speech" (Davies 1939, 30) and, in addition to the gestures discussed above, "the Elizabethan boy actor-actors had at their command a plentiful supply of superficial emotion of the type which so readily can be converted into the material of acting" (Davies 1939, 26). The notion of naturalism in acting is a 19th-century invention, heralded by Stanislavski, Ibsen, Chekhov, and the realism movement influenced by the birth of photography and film (Zarrilli et al. 2006, 287), but the tendency at the period was towards a heightened style of acting which the boy actors could deliver without leading to a knowing awareness of their hidden masculinity.10 Critics who exclaim that a boy actor could not have properly played a woman's part display a "privileging of naturalist aesthetics," but, as Davies contends, "Shakespeare's plays favour an emblematic aesthetic as opposed to a naturalist or expressivist aesthetic, especially for female characters" (Davies 1939, 31). Therefore, the boy actor could give a convincing

9 Sandys' review would seem to have some contemporary support: see, for example, the analysis of Brown (2001, 178-180). 10 Smith suggests that Sandys' "interest is not in the boy beneath the costume but in the female illusion the boy creates" (Smith 1991, 149). It would seem from Sandys' review that the boy actor creates a more appealing illusion.

performance of his woman's part through the use of such heightened or emblematic gestures without being read as a male. Consider another account, that of a Henry Jackson responding to a performance of Othello by the Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, at Oxford in 1610, in which he pays particular regard to the performance of the boy actor who played Desdemona: "Desdemona, killed by her husband, in her death moved us especially when, as she lay in her bed, her face alone implored the pity of the audience" (qtd. in Howe 1992, 20). As Rosenberg observes, "what most touched the observer was the power of the actor playing the heroine to convey emotion. We can gauge the completeness of the illusion from the fact that the 'boy actor' himself is not even mentioned" (Rosenberg 1954, 918). That a spectator could write of the acting of a woman's part without observing the male body that underlies this suggests the very completeness of the illusion, whereby the actor is read as female. For, "the boy actor here has disappeared; Desdemona as both actor and character is gendered female" (Orgel 1996, 32). Moreover, this may provide "evidence that the men who played women could act anything demanded of them, [sometimes] without the need to formalise or symbolise their actions to disguise their age or their sex" (Rosenberg 1954, 918). Another argument is that "modern notions of sexual difference originate later than the Renaissance and that in at least some Renaissance discourses there appears to be only one sex, women being but imperfectly formed or incomplete men" (Ferris 1993, 24). Where we are quite clear about which sex is which, in "the Renaissance the line between the sexes was blurred" (Orgel 1996, 13). Medical and anatomical treatises from the time drew from the ancient Greek physician Galen and "cited homologies in the genital structure of the sexes to show that male and female were versions of the same unitary species [...] the female genitals were simply the male genitals inverted, and carried externally rather than internally" (20). The interesting possibility raised by this "is that, in the Renaissance, gender differences may not always have been built upon a self-evident notion of biological sexual difference" (Ferris 1993, 24). Thus, Renaissance audiences with their different conception of sex may not have read the boy actors as boys by virtue of what a modern audience would see as their glaring anatomical difference, but as women by virtue of the literary indicators within their spoken words and their feminine manner of speech, behaviour and appearance. For, at the time, gender was a more social than physical construct. Because the Renaissance understood only one biological sex with gender being a variation of it, audiences would not have been affronted by males playing the parts of females – for the female was purely an extension of the male and the boy actor in his feminine guise stood somewhere along this continuum closer to the female (Greenblatt 1988, 66-93). McLuskie observes that "gender has never been coterminous with biological sex. When dramatists tried to complicate 'the woman's part,' they took on board the moral and social definitions" of femininity rather than trying to reconstruct the woman's body, and these were what shaped the audience's reactions (McLuskie 1989, 111). Thus, because the plays and the theatrical context made a point of constructing the boy actor as a woman, the audience saw the woman's part not the boy that belied it. In a time when sex identification was complicated, gender was primarily based on social identification, and so if a boy actor gave a social indication of femininity (in costume, voice, mannerisms), he was most likely read as female. The heated moral debates with objections invoking biblical authority in their injunction against cross-dressing suggest, however, that there were assumed sex roles

in Renaissance society and that the boy actors spawned anxieties within the arena of theatrical performance "precisely because of their tendency to trouble the borders of sexual difference" (Sikes 1987, 227). This undermines the Galenic one-sex model, as it was argued that the cross-dressed boy players threatened to unfix the distinction between male and female (Levine 1994); that such a distinction was argued for suggests that it was present in the minds of Renaissance audiences, and that they did not read the stage as one-gender. Though it may be argued that the Renaissance recognised only one sex because of their acceptance of the Galenic model of the inverted genitalia, they did in fact see the social distinction between male and female, and would have been able to recognise a stage boy playing the part of a female, thus the Renaissance audiences had a knowing awareness of the boy playing the woman's part. That the Puritans argued against the use of boy actors on the stage further asserts the visibility of this convention, both in the eyes of the Puritans who were audience to these plays and also the broader theatre audience. The gender ambiguity that the convention of boys playing women allowed was, on occasion, given literary and theatrical space. While the playgoer may "not keep constantly in his or her mind the cross-dressing implications of 'boys in women's parts' [...] it is nevertheless available to the dramatist as a reference point for dramatic irony, or more serious double entendre" (Jardine 1983, 12). Take Cleopatra's quip on having a "squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness" (5.2.220). For this joke to operate requires a knowing awareness amongst the audience that this was, in fact, a boy actor saying these lines. Even the character pays recognition to it. The joke would make no sense if the audience were blind to the boy actor underneath. But it is not purely a joke, it is a subversive moment that heralds the surfacing of the actor from behind the character and exposes gender as something that is or can be acted. Cleopatra significantly uses the term boy as a verb, suggesting the performativity of gender and that "gender is a performance" (Butler 1990, 178). The anti-theatricalist critiques of cross-dressing further suggest "that men are only men in the performance of their masculinity (or, put more frighteningly, that they are not men except in the performance, the constant re-enactment of their masculinity)" (Levine 1994, 7). Gender is thus not rigid but performed. This performance of gender also arises when Rosalind steps forward at the end of As You Like It to address the audience, "It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue" (5.4.198), and a little later, "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me" (5.4.214-216). The epilogue interchanges between referring to the female character and the boy actor in the space of lines.11 This passage and the constant changing of Rosalind's gender throughout the play may confuse modern readers. However, the Renaissance audience would not have been confused and both understood and recognised that this was a boy actor speaking this part (Belsey 1985, 185); it was made part of the comedy. Shakespeare and other playwrights clearly recognised that the audience did not undergo a full suspension of disbelief to the point of reading the female characters as women; otherwise these moments of double entendre would not have worked. While, according to the convention theory, this would make the audience unable to enjoy the fiction, self-referential moments did entertain the audiences; otherwise playwrights would not have included them.

11 This is similar to the final scene of Twelfth Night where Orsino in his marriage proposal to Viola refers to her both as herself and as the male page Cesario whom she dressed as (5.1.384-387).

That critics could argue that audiences must accept the boy actors as women in order to have "involvement with dramatic narratives premised on heterosexual love and masculine/feminine difference" (Howard 1988, 435) displays what Davies meant by a privileging of naturalist aesthetics through an importation of 19th-century notions of a suspension of disbelief into the minds of 16th- and 17th-century playgoers. The Renaissance audience could be involved in the dramatic narratives but maintain a meta-theatrical awareness of the acting and performance. They would have read the boy actor as a boy, but invested their attention in the female character's dramatic narrative or taken interest in the homosexual undercurrents of a man playing love against a boy. These two contentions, in my mind, offer a more plausible explanation than the convention theorists' argument of a suspension of disbelief, whereby the Shakespearean audience accepted the boy actor playing a woman's part as verisimilitude. It is debatable whether suspension of disbelief accurately describes an audience's perception of theatre, particularly that of Renaissance audiences who were accustomed to heightened gesture and vocal delivery that did not invite a suspension of disbelief, which the naturalistic modes of acting developed in the 19th century did. If audiences were to truly suspend disbelief in the theatre and accept its conventions as true, they would have a true-to-life set of reactions (Walton 1978, 5). For instance, audience members would cry out in panic when they witnessed an onstage murder. But they did not. Of course, audiences did react, but their reactions were to the theatrical spectacle – laughter, jeering, and cries – not because they considered what was on stage to be real. Suspension of disbelief, as we know it, did not exist in the Renaissance theatre. Itself, it was a term developed in the early 19th century in the context of literature, and only later spread as an essential component of live theatre in the 19th century together with the fourth wall due to the advent of theatrical realism (Zarrilli et al. 2006, 287- 291).12 Contemporary critics argue this 19th/20th-century theory that the audience accepted the boy actor as a woman without giving it any direct thought and enjoyed the fiction as if they were enjoying real events. But Shakespeare contradicts this very theory. His plays frequently feature asides delivered directly to the audience, and breaking the fourth wall is common, as in the aforementioned As You Like It, or in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Puck says to the audience that the entire production was only a dream (5.1.2275-2290). On occasion, Shakespeare does encourage a suspension of disbelief, as in the prologue to Henry V: "make imaginary puissance [...] 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings [...] turning the accomplishment of many years into an hourglass" (Prologue 1, 25-31). But even this is done through a direct address to the audience, and encourages an awareness that the audience is to suspend their disbelief, which undermines the very notion itself; it more invites the audience to imagine than to accept. My point is that while Renaissance audiences may have become emotionally involved when watching plays, to construe this involvement as dissociation from the theatrical is, I think, inaccurate. Ultimately, Renaissance audiences could see the boy actor beneath the clothes and did not fully accept his illusion of womanhood, but this does not mean that their involvement with dramatic narratives was minimal; their involvement was not contingent on the dramatic illusions that modern audiences enjoy nor on a suspension of disbelief.

12 Zarrilli et al. suggest that the rise of theatrical realism is also related to the removal of stage seating (222) and the advent of dimming house lights during performances (332), which are both post- Shakespearean.

Whilst some may argue that "the convention of the boy actor meant that the physical body of the boy was subsumed by the conventions of femininity signified by costume and gesture," some plays demand "a display of the naked body, and in particular the naked breast" and many others drew attention to it (Stallybrass 1992, 70). In Antony and Cleopatra, for example, Cleopatra says, "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast that sucks the nurse asleep" (5.2.308-309); in Macbeth, Lady Macbeth speaks of an imaginary child whom she "would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains out" (1.7.56-58); in Cymbeline, Iachimo fetishes on a mole on the sleeping Imogen's breast (2.2.37-38). In those instances where the characters draw attention to their breasts, the audiences would have looked to the chest of these young boys and found not a bust with nipple but the flat chest, and Shakespeare seemed interested in encouraging this through deliberately altering his source texts to insert references to the female character's body parts (Stallybrass 1992, 70-71). If Shakespeare was truly interested in maintaining an illusion of femininity, he likely would not draw attention to the central element that undermined this – the boy actor's body. Nor would he go out of his way to change the source text to do this. I therefore contend that, in these moments, Shakespeare was actually interested in destroying the illusion of womanhood and drawing attention to the boy. He was not interested in maintaining a naturalistic illusion of womanhood, or even naturalism in general. In the prologue to Henry V, when he asks for the audience to make imaginary puissance, he implicitly recognises that the audiences need to use their imagination to create the illusions of space and time, that neither the text itself nor the acting is capable of doing so. As previously argued, while the audience may utilise their imaginative powers, they are not completely dissociated from the theatrical, nor do Shakespeare and his theatre ask them to be. Shakespeare constantly invites speculation on the boy actor within his plays, and while these excerpts could be read as attempts to maintain the illusion of womanhood, they are more likely attempts to undermine it. There appear to be three currents of debate in response to the opening question on the remarkability of boy actors playing female roles: that the Renaissance audience saw only the female character and "forgot the 'boys' were male" (Rosenberg 1954, 917); that a Renaissance audience member had a metatheatrical awareness of the boy actor underneath the female character that she or he did "not keep constantly in his or her mind [... but] is nevertheless available to the dramatist as a reference point for dramatic irony, or more serious double entendre" (Jardine 1983, 12); or, that the Renaissance audiences saw only the boy actor who was dressed in female clothes as something of a "visual pun" (Bly 2000, 23). While I am reluctant to accept the first view, it is possible that the audiences could have a mixture of these reactions. Modern theatre semioticians Elaine Aston and George Savona regard the "actor as a sign" constituted in three ways: "the actor as a public person, as the conveyer of the text, and as the site of interconnecting sign-systems" (Aston and Savona 1991, 102). Their analysis could well apply to the boy actor and his reception by Renaissance audiences: the audiences could see the actor as the public personality that is behind the character; as a speaker of the text, or character; or as a sign or symbol. Indeed, Shakespeare may have been practicing this very intention in his writing, as James Calderwood notes, "Shakespeare, capable as we all know of adopting multiple perspectives toward anything, could hardly help thinking of, say, a character both as a realistic person in a realistic world and as a device fashioned by himself to insert into

an artificial environment" (Calderwood 1971, 11); the boy actor was a device that could be used by the dramatist to his own whims. For the Renaissance audiences, the perception of the boy actor and his female role would have been varied, and modern studies on their reactions are purely speculative. To conclude these speculations, I recall Bruce Smith, who offers a sobering but honest verdict: "We can never know, of course, what went on inside the heads of people who have been dead for four hundred years, or even if everyone thought and felt the same" (Smith 1991, 149). However, as Orgel says, we have our own ability to see this through our own eyes, and that's all that we can do.

2. "women/'women:'" The Boy Actor as a Subversive Tool of Feminism13 Shakespeare's girls and mature women are individualised, realised, fully enjoyed as human beings. His respect for women is evident in all his plays. (Park 1983, 101) There are no women in Shakespeare, simply boys travestying the woman's part. (Goldberg 1992, 112-113) If we are to accept that the boy actor was not a completely neutral convention, but rather a visible one, the second question this study shall address is whether the convention of the boy actor was subversive in that it empowered women or whether it simply reaffirmed the patriarchal hierarchy. In addressing this question, it is first important to understand the social position of women at the time. As Phyllis Rackin surmises: Although different writers, examining similar evidence, come to opposite conclusions, the preponderance of evidence suggests that in most ways the position of women declined during the Renaissance. The reasons for that decline are complicated and still somewhat obscure, its course is uneven and difficult to chart, but a variety of indicators suggest a loss of status and opportunity for women in virtually every area of English life. By the end of Elizabeth's reign, the humanist tradition of female learning was already fading, the learned woman a subject for ridicule. During the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, English women were increasingly excluded from work they had earlier performed; removed from participation in economic, political, and cultural life; relegated to a marginal and dependent economic status; excluded from the public arenas of political power and cultural authority; and confined within the rising barriers that marked off the house as a separate, private sphere. (Rackin 1987, 32)14 By contrast, "the theatre was a place of unusual freedom for women in the period," for English women could go to the theatre unescorted and unmasked, and a large proportion of the audience consisted of women (Orgel 1996, 10). As Orgel suggests, "the fact of the large female audience must have had important consequences for the development of English popular drama. It meant that the success of any play was significantly dependent on the receptiveness of women; and this in turn meant that theatrical representations – whether of women or men or anything else – also depended on their success to a significant degree on the receptiveness of women" (Orgel 1996, 10-11). To these critics, boy actors' performance reflects both the part of women in society and as audience to Shakespeare's stage. In this part, I shall debate the Renaissance notion of gender, how cross-dressing could be read both as female

13 Title from Thompson (1996). 14 See also Neely (1985, 20-21).

empowerment and disempowerment, and the dissociation of the female character from the boy actor. Renaissance society was invested in maintaining "gender boundaries" (Howard 1988, 420). Catherine Belsey led the charge of late 20th-century feminist scholars to argue the view that "Shakespearean comedy can be read as disrupting sexual difference, calling in question that set of relations between terms which proposes as inevitable an antithesis between masculine and feminine, male and female" (Belsey 1985, 167) for "a close reading of the texts can generate a more radical challenge to patriarchal values by disrupting sexual difference itself" (Belsey 1985, 180). If one can give some credence to the idea, as discussed above, that the Renaissance view of gender or sexual difference is blurred and primarily bound by social identifications, the convention of the boy actor could further advance that, by bringing into question the very notion of identity, for "there can be no specifically feminine identity if identity itself does not exist" (Belsey 1985, 188). What this means is that the convention of the boy actor creates "the fragmentation of sexual identity in favour of this fluidity, this plurality [...] a plurality of places, of possible beings, for each person in the margins of sexual difference, those margins which a metaphysical sexual polarity obliterates" (Belsey 1985, 188-189). Instead of affirming "fixed identities" of male and female, the boy actor "undermines fixity" and, in doing so, questions the very notion of gender difference (Belsey 1985, 189). The use of the boy actor on the Shakespeare's stage "momentarily unfixes the existing system of differences and [...] disrupts the system of differences on which sexual stereotyping depends" (Belsey 1985, 190). For the stereotyping of women depends upon positioning them as different, but the boy actor playing a woman fundamentally challenges this. It was through the public stage that this was played out, for "the theatre provided an arena where changing gender definitions could be displayed, deplored, or enforced and where anxieties about them could be expressed by playwrights and incited or repressed among their audiences" (Rackin 1987, 29). In the period of Shakespeare's playwriting there was "an explosion in the interest in Amazons, female warriors, roaring girls and women disguised as pages" and this is reflected in the fact that female cross-dressing appears in eighty-one Renaissance plays and in five of Shakespearean comedies (Belsey 1985, 178).15 The idea of women dressing in men's clothes must have captivated the popular attention of the Renaissance theatregoers, most especially the female audience members who may have identified with these female heroines, as is explained by Catherine Belsey: In the first place, of course, it throws into relief the patriarchal assumptions of the period [...] that women are vulnerable is seen as obvious and natural [which explains why women dress as men, to escape their vulnerability]. It [women's vulnerability] is not, on the other hand, seen as essential or inevitable, but as a matter of appearance [...] Not all men are equally courageous, but they are all less vulnerable than women because they look as if they can defend themselves [...] Even while it reaffirms patriarchy, the tradition of female transvestism challenges it precisely by unsettling the categories which legitimate it. (Belsey 1985, 179-180) The male disguise of female heroines was a popular plotline of Renaissance drama that "allows for plenty of dramatic ironies and double meanings, and thus offers the audience the pleasures of a knowingness which depends on a knowledge of sexual

15 See also Shepherd (1981).

difference. But it can also be read as undermining that knowledge from time to time, calling it in question" (Belsey 1985, 184). As she steps forward at the end of As You Like It, Rosalind says to the audience, "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me" (5.4.214-216). The feminine disguise is altogether dropped and a male actor is speaking but is simultaneously visually identifiable as a woman and dressed so. Here, where one of the characters addresses the audience and resumes the role of the actor, the uncertainty about gender is made part of stage action, part of the comedy (Belsey 1985, 171). But there is a deeper impact of this action: it complicates the "relations between the male actor and the female character he portrays, the dramatic representation and the reality it imitates, the play and the audience that watches it" (Belsey 1985, 186). It challenges the audience to accept the notion that "a male actor and a female character is speaking" (181). This notion draws upon the earlier feminist – and, as I will argue, somewhat problematic – scholarship of Juliet Dusinberre who argued that "Shakespeare separates his women from the boy actors who play them: at their most boyish they are still women watching their own performances as boys" and that "the woman is audience to the boy" actor (Dusinberre 1975, 249). Dusinberre argues that "the woman character acquires independence from the boy who acts her" and that the construction of "her independence lies in her detachment from the role of femininity. The woman is aware of herself as actress not in the theatre, but in a social setting" (247). Dusinberre establishes that the female character therefore is worthy of analysis adjunct from considerations of the boy's performance because, to Dusinberre, it is irrelevant that a boy plays a woman as he is merely a vehicle for the woman character, who has a life of her own.16 She goes further to claim that the use of boy actors and the subsequent exclusion of women actresses were actually good for women: The boy actor gave the dramatist more freedom to imagine what women were like without having to accommodate their imagined likeness to the whims and preconceptions not only of a woman actress, but of the audience, about what it was proper for a woman to say whoever she might be acting […] The more impersonal the actor, the more dissociated he is in the audience's mind [...], the greater the freedom of the dramatist to explore and take risks. (1975, 270) In particular, the use of female cross-dressing in Shakespearean plays "makes a woman not a man but a more developed woman;" it is their adopted "masculine spirit [that] can liberate women from the constraints of traditional femininity" (Dusinberre 1975, 271). That masculine spirit is something that comes from within, as Berggren claims that the cross-dressed female character "simply activates the masculine resources within the normal feminine personality without negating her essential femininity" and that "the central element in Shakespeare's treatment of women is always their sex, not as a focus for cultural observation or social criticism (though these may be discerned), but primarily as a mythic source of power" (Berggren 1983, 18). Shakespeare, through cross-dressing his female characters, allows them to unleash their mythic power and challenge the patriarchal notions of gendered qualities.

16 Dusinberre argues that "the actual biological male body of the boy is erased by the performative energy of the theatrical experience" (1996, 57). Marianne Novy also suggests that the practice of boys playing women's roles "results from Shakespeare's ability to see through the limitations of conventional gender expectations" (1984, 200).

Those that argue the alternative view, that the boy actor was a convention that reaffirmed the patriarchal hierarchy, are critical of Dusinberre, Berggren and "the feminist literary approach which, confined to the textual, makes claims for the positive representation of women [... and] fails to consider what a so-called 'strong' female role might have looked like when played by a male performer" (Aston 1995, 21). Accordingly, the feminist literary approach is a literary analysis of Shakespeare's works that fails to acknowledge that, for a Renaissance audience, these women were performed by – and thus visually identifiable as – boys. As Sue-Ellen Case observes: The scholars in question keep primarily to the earlier feminist critical practice of reading the images of women within the text, ignoring the exclusion of women actors to represent them [...] Reading within the text rather than within the practice, most of these works [...concentrate] on the images of independent women in the comedies [...and] though several of these works include small sections on the boy actor, few really read the implications of cross-gender casting into the text. (1988, 25) Case's point is highly persuasive: "These feminist critics do not deconstruct the powerful misogyny found in the image of a man playing" a woman (1988, 25). While there is endless debate about whether Shakespeare's portrayals of women were good or bad, subversive or not, the fundamental point is: on Shakespeare's stage there were no women (Case 1988, 27).17 The fact that women were absent from Shakespeare's stage repudiates the very idea that the boy actor empowered women for, according to Dympna Callaghan, "transvestism is an aspect based on the material practice of excluding women from the Renaissance stage" (Callaghan 2000, 31). While the Viola of Shakespeare in Love "would stay asleep my whole life, if I could dream myself into a company of players" (Madden 1998), this aspirational dream was never realised for any Renaissance woman.18 In her study of women in Shakespearean theatre, Jardine persuasively argues that we cannot analyse the character as separate from the actor (1983; cf. Free 1986). The character does not exist as a separate entity. Those writers who focus on the female characters within Shakespeare's plays by only analysing the playscript are ignoring the performance of these characters and so fail to acknowledge that the female character is not a separate entity (even on the script's pages) but an embodied state by the boy actor, and cannot be separated from him. Whilst Dusinberre argues Shakespeare created independent women, she separates out the boy that plays the woman's role from the role itself, when in fact the two are inextricably intertwined and the woman actually comes from the man and, as the first part of this study explained, Renaissance audiences probably did not suspend disbelief to such an extent as to see the boy actor as a woman. A fictional character is not capable of acquiring independence. To the eyes of the Renaissance audience, there is a boy speaking the words, acting the gestures and adding his own idiosyncrasies to the woman's part. Therefore, Shakespeare's women's parts were not subversive because they were not women; they were roles for men to play. In attempting to reconcile the two very different views as to the feminism of Shakespeare's female roles (and the place of the boy actor who played them) – that Shakespeare's female characters empowered the watching women or that they could

17 There were also very few women offstage in playwriting roles (Rackin 1987, 32). 18 Some have suggested that it was Shakespeare's dream to see women play his roles, though of course there is no evidence to suggest this (Gregory 2012, 110). This imputed dream stems from a feeling amongst certain critiques that boy actors could not do the woman's role justice, a critique with which others disagree (Brown 1990, 259, n. 2).

not because they were played by men – I am again drawn to the theory of Aston and Savona of the actor as a sign. The actor could function in a variety of different ways to each individual in the audience. Some could see the character on stage and relate the character's experience to her own, become engrossed in the fantasy, and leave feeling empowered herself by what that character achieves. Others could see the boy playing the character and, as the Viola of Shakespeare in Love does, dream of being in a company of actors, only to find that dream unachievable, and leave feeling disempowered by what she cannot have.

3. "a choice between macho and mincing:" The Boy Actor as a Subliminal or Subversive Object of Desire19 Men's putting on of woman's raiment is a temptation, an inducement not only to adultery, but to the beastly sin of sodomy. (Prynne qtd. in Loughlin 2014, 41) The erotics [… of Shakespeare's plays] are diffuse, non-localised and inclusive […] tactile, contiguous, plural. (Traub 1992, 142) The anti-theatrical pamphleteers' attacks on the boy actor were based on two central arguments. The first argument is to the danger that lay in the boy actor's role to represent a woman and the fear that he endangered his manhood by playing women. This was based on the belief in the homology between male and female genitals – that human beings begin their biological existence as female and could thus turn back into female. The second argument is based on the fear that the young male body covered in women's clothes would arouse desire in the (male) audience who knew that woman's clothes hid a boy's body, and the boy's capacity to arouse this homosexual desire in male spectators. Advancing upon these anti-theatrical pamphlets, Jardine contends that the boy actors' femininity is attractive to the male spectator, although – or, rather, because – he knows what is hidden under the women's clothes. According to Orgel, this rests on an assumption that "the basic form of response to theatre is erotic [... and] the basic, essential form of [erotic] excitement in men is homosexual (Orgel 1996, 20). Traub argues against this, suggesting instead that the convention of the boy actor could liberate desire by unfixing it from the simple binary oppositions of male and female, heterosexuality and homosexuality (Traub 1992). In the last of the three examinations into the function of the boy actor I will address both points of view: that the convention of the boy actor incited homosexual desire, or unfixed desire from oppositions of sexuality. In doing so, I shall examine the anti-theatricalist attacks, the position of sexuality in the Renaissance and the idea of unfixing desire. As the first part suggested, the boy actor spawned anxieties within the arena of theatrical performance, and the all-male performances staged by professional acting troupes frequently drew fire from Puritan critics precisely because of their tendency to trouble the borders of sexual difference. Jardine therefore concludes that the female characters of Renaissance theatre were viewed as boys "and that the plays encourage the audience to view them as such. The audience is invited to remark on the 'pretty folly,' the blush, the downcast shameful glance of the boy player whose 'woman's part' requires that he portray feminine qualities, but in male dress" and that, to the male audience members, the boy actors were "sexually enticing qua travestied boys"

19 Title from Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 23 February 2009 (Julia Gillard).

(Jardine 1983, 29). By Jardine's analysis, the construct of the play encourages the audience to view a cross-dressed lady as a man. Moreover, Jardine finds that this act of theatrical cross-dressing aroused homosexual desire in male spectators. Another critic succinctly pointed this to mean "that watching the boy play Viola as Cesario allowed men who perhaps liked looking at young men to feel they were really attracted to a woman, even though they knew they were actually fancying a boy" (McEvoy 2000, 92). Jardine contends that the boy actors' femininity is attractive to the male spectator and examines the feminine performance techniques of the boy that invited this attraction – his woman's dress, unbroken voice, gestures and manner.20 Indeed, Shakespeare constantly invites speculation on the boy actor within his plays, and constantly makes the audience ponder the male body. For example, in Cymbeline, when Cloten contemplates his own body in comparison to Posthumus', "the lines of my body are as well drawn as his" (4.1.9), or when Imogen observes the dead body of Cloten, "I know the shape of his leg. This his hand, his foot mercurial, his martial thigh, the brawns of Hercules" (4.3.309-311). As Phyllis Rackin argues, much of Shakespearean cross-dressing is explicitly designed to call attention to the male body (Rackin 2005, 74). It also provides a sense of titillation in the audience, both humouristic and homoerotic (Zimmerman 1992). DiGangi suggests that Shakespeare is, in a sophisticated sense, "figuring homoeroticism as play, a dramatic device" (DiGangi 1997, 61). That the young male body covered by women's clothes would arouse desire in the male spectators is an argument that the anti-theatrical pamphleteers use in their pamphlets. John Rainoldes says the adoption by men of women's clothing incites a lust that is specifically homoerotic: "What sparkles of lust to that vice the putting of women's attire on men may kindle in unclean affections, as Nero showed in Sporus" (qtd. in Orgel 1996, 28). According to Suetonius, the Roman emperor Nero "castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him home attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife [...] This Sporus, decked out with the finery of the empresses and riding in a litter, he took with him to the courts and marts of Greece, and later at Rome through the Street of the Images, fondly kissing him from time to time" (qtd. in Rolfe 1913, 22). King James was also known to have taken boys as lovers (Hyde 1970, 43),21 though slightly less extravagantly. Subsequently Rainoldes compares the homoerotic response engendered by transvestite boys to the sting of poisonous spiders who "if they do but touch men only with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain and make them mad: so beautiful boys by kissing do sting

20 It should be noted, however, in talking of the actor's blush, that Jardine "assumes certain acting strategies that may not have appeared on an early modern stage (the blush is unlikely, given the likelihood of heavy stage makeup)," as discussed above (Bly 2000, 27). 21 Interestingly, Hyde was a former Ulster Unionist MP, an affiliate of the Conservative Party, who lost his seat in the House of Commons as a result of campaigning for homosexual law reform. Hyde lost his seat and the law decriminalising homosexuality was only passed a decade after the report was passed in 1957. During the Renaissance, the Buggery Act 1533 (reenacted in 1558) criminalised anal sex, though it was rarely prosecuted (as discussed below). It is also interesting to consider that, against King James, and Emperors Nero and Sporo, there has been few openly gay heads of government in the modern era. This can be attributed to a prevailing homophobia in the post-Victorian period built on a modern equation of homosexuality with effeminisation. Take, for example, the comments by Julia Gillard, former Australian Prime Minister, which opened this part, suggesting that feminine qualities in men are a signifier of homosexuality and are to be less valorized than masculine qualities.

and pour secretly in a kind of poison" (qtd. in Orgel 1996, 28). Men's "ocular and other sensations [...] brought about the subjection of their bodies" at the hands of a boy player who exerted power over their senses through his performance (King 2004, 134), thus men were in a position of danger from the boy actor. But Rainolds' words are tempered by lighter adjectives – beautiful boys induce a wonderful pain and sparkles of lust. This pleasant dialogue continues: "An effeminate stage-player, when he faineth love, imprinteth wounds of love" (qtd. in Orgel 1996, 28). It is an attraction that Rainoldes even describes as love. To other pamphleteers, the cross-dressing of the boy actors induces the male audience to a more aggressive lust, as William Prynne explains: Men's putting on of woman's raiment is a temptation, an inducement not only to adultery, but to the beastly sin of Sodomy, which [...] is most properly called adultery, because it is unnaturall [...] This putting on of woman's array (especially to act lascivious, amorous, whorish, Love-sick Plays upon the Stage), must needs be sinful, yea abominable, because it not only excites many adulterous, filthy lusts, both in the Actors and Spectators; and draws them on both to contemplative and actual lewdness, (as the marginal Authors testify) which is evil, but likewise instigates them to self- pollution, (a sin for which Onan was destroyed) and to that unnaturall Sodomiticall sinne of uncleanesse. (qtd. in Orgel 1996, 29) To the pamphleteers, the transvestism of the stage is especially dangerous because female dress acts as a stimulant to homoeroticism; what the spectator is really attracted to in plays is the boy actor beneath the clothes. The deepest fear in the anti- theatrical tracts is the fear of a universal homoeroticism and that the transvestism of the stage not only excites lust in the audience, but also draws the audience on to commit acts of lewdness. The fear is that the lascivious acts of the stage will encourage the audience to act likewise at home. Phillip Stubbes gives a particularly clear statement of this anxiety: "These goodly pageants being ended, every mate sorts to his mate, every one brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves, covertly, they play the sodomites, or worse" (qtd. in King 2004, 132). Prynne cites this passage as a proof of the specifically homoerotic character of the stage, stating that it "affirms that players and play-hunters in their secret conclaves play the sodomites; together with some modern examples of such, who have been desperately enamoured with players' boys thus clad in woman's apparel, so far as to solicit them by words, by letters, even actually to abuse them" (qtd. in Loughlin 2014, 40). This paints a vivid picture of the male audience member watching the young boy's feminine posturing and slowly becoming overcome by lust as he takes in the blush and downcast shameful glance of the boy, a lust that feeds him to approach the boy after the show, perhaps in one of the post-show jigs, and lead the boy with perhaps a company of friends through the grimy streets of London to his home where they sodomise one another, and then afterwards on visits to the theatre day by day to solicit the boy by words, poetry and even more sexual acts. Whether this picture is inaccurate or not, there is certainly a pervasive fear of the potential homoerotic lust that the boy actor engenders in the male audience.22 Orgel's assessment of the anti-theatrical tracts is that they rest on the assumption "first that the basic form of response to theatre is erotic, second that erotically, theatre

22 Academic psychiatrist Thomas Szasz links the religious condemnation of homosexuality during the Renaissance to the pathologisation of homosexuals during the Victorian era and 20th century (Szasz 1973, 190-209).

is uncontrollably exciting, and third, that the basic, essential form of excitement in men is homosexual – that indeed, women are only a cover for men" (Orgel 1996, 30). Orgel contends, like Jardine, that homosexuality was the dominant form of eroticism in Renaissance culture.23 He further argues that "despite the anxiety expressed in the antitheatrical literature, despite the institutionalisation of marriage and patriarchy, English Renaissance culture, to judge from the surviving evidence, did not display a morbid fear of homoeroticism" (Orgel 1996, 35-36); in fact, "there is ample evidence that homoerotic pederasty was a strong element in the erotic life of Renaissance England" (Orgel 1996, 103). The public theatre was associated with homosexual prostitution, but the theatres were not therefore avoided or closed (Bray 1982, 54-55). The crime of sodomy was inveighed against in legal and theological contexts, but was scarcely ever prosecuted (Smith 1991, 41-53). When cases of homosexual behaviour reached the courts, they were dealt with on the whole with moderation. An illustration of this is Davy's Case (1630), which concerned the prosecution of a labourer, Meredith Davy, who, according to the evidence, had been in the habit of having sexual relations with his apprentice, a boy aged twelve years or thereabouts called John Vicary with whom he shared a bed on a Sunday and holiday nights after he had been drinking. Throughout the whole time this was happening there was a witness, Richard Bryant, a servant who slept in the same room with them, to whom the creaking of the bed and the groans and cries of the boy were quite audible. He eventually took the matter to the mistress of the household, and Davy ended up before court. But, upon the decision of the Justices, "not only was he not locked up: he was not even removed from the boy's bed" (Bray 1982, 77). The case may testify to a remarkable tolerance on the part of the court or a selective blindness. But the legal definition of sodomy at the time was very narrow, and "said nothing about sex between consenting male partners, about sex between men other than anal sex, about homosexual activity of any kind performed in private: none of these legally constituted sodomy" (Orgel 1996, 58). The Renaissance law clearly had a lax view towards sodomitical behaviour. Because "it had fewer consequences and was easier to desexualize" (Orgel 1996, 49), there was "rarely anything in homosexuality worth bothering about" (Orgel 1996, 38), whereas heterosexuality could lead to childbirth, the effeminisation of men,24 and the sexual corruption of women. One of the central reasons for the prohibition of women from the stage was that their chastity would be compromised, leading to heterosexual fornication, resulting in illegitimate births, which increased the poor rolls. Behind this argument is "a real fear of women's sexuality, and more specifically of its power to evoke men's sexuality" (Orgel 1996, 49).25 What Davy's Case also demonstrates is the nature of homosexuality, whereby "homosexuality is generally, though not exclusively, conceived to be pederastic in the

23 The shock that may come with such a statement is, in part, attributable to "the Western canonisation of heterosexuality at the expense of homosexuality throughout the past four centuries" (Porter 1989, 127). Wells discusses how critics from the Restoration onwards have desperately tried to re-read homosexual allusions in Shakespeare as merely homosocial, when in actuality the presence of the boy actor invites a re-reading of assumed heterosexuality in Shakespeare (Wells 2004, 13, 60-61). For more on the homonormativity of Renaissance culture see Shannon (2000). On the blurred line between male homosociality and homosexuality see Sedgwick (1985, 1-5). 24 In the Renaissance, it was "thought that excessive heterosexual activity made a man effeminate" (Zimbardo 1998, 104). Levine also argues that cross-dressing led to accusations of effeminacy (1994). 25 The male fear of female sexuality could also manifest as a male fear that women are averse to sex, and thus reassert the bonds of homosociality (Hopkins 1998, 12-15).

period" (Orgel 1996, 58), for "boys were, like women – but unlike men – acknowledged objects of sexual attraction for men" (Orgel 1996, 70).26 Of all the sodomy trials in the entire reign of Elizabeth, all involved the rape of the minor (Smith 1991, 48-49), which, as Smith puts it, positions "the forcible rape of an underage boy as the only kind of [sodomitical] act in which the law takes an interest" (Smith 1991, 51). This could be seen as a denunciation of pederasty, but as the evidence suggests, there were only six prosecutions in Elizabeth's reign and five of the six resulted in acquittals, which in turn suggests an acceptance of pederasty. That it was the only form of homosexuality arising in the courts suggests its very importance to Renaissance culture. As Smith writes, "homosexuality was one of the many symbolic ways in which males could enact and affirm the patriarchal power that dominated the entire culture" (Smith 1991, 75) and the boy became "a medium of exchange in the patriarchal structure" of sexual relationships (Orgel 1996, 103).27 Pederastic homosexual relationships were built on a power structure of the man having power over the boy, just as patriarchy was concerned with the man having power over the woman. Though the Puritans feared that the boy actor became an object of homosexual pederastic attraction for the male audience, it was an attraction that was condoned by legal regulators because it affirmed the patriarchal idea of male power; the subservient position of the boy is interchangeable for that of the woman. The likeness of the boy to the woman is reflected in Orgel's contention that "the Renaissance equally clearly sought the similitude in boys and women" (Orgel 1996, 71). His most interesting point is that "the subtext of homoeroticism is really heterosexual" and that the man watching is "attracted to him [the boy] not by his masculinity, but precisely by the femininity of his features" (Orgel 1996, 61). What I take this to mean is that homoeroticism in the English Renaissance was built upon a power relationship of the powerful man being attracted to (or, looking down upon) the submissive boy, in the same manner as the heterosexual power relationship of the man and the woman. Jardine's construction of the boy actor as an object of feminine interest to the watching audience makes greater sense when considered against this idea of the boy being in the position of a woman, and his likeness to a woman being what attracts the looking male. Jardine and Orgel both see the male audience as attracted to the femininity or womanhood of the boy actor. However, Smith cautions against "such gender-marked terms [...] that some contemporary scholars would like to read homosexuality in early modern England" in; while some critics would see the effeminacy of the boy actor as a display of womanhood, Smith believes "'effeminate' has much more force as a metaphor for wanton behaviour than it does as a label for sociopsychic identity" or womanhood (Smith 1991, 196). In fact, the English Renaissance does "not equate homosexuality and effeminacy" (Smith 1991, 215).28 As Valerie Traub observes, Renaissance "male homoerotic desire [appears] as phallic" in Shakespeare's work:

26 Pederastic homosexuality has its genesis in the Greco-Roman period, as discussed above: see also Brown (1990, 246-247). See further discussion of prosecutions of pederastic sodomy in Stewart (2005). 27 Greene discusses homosexual power and the hierarchical structure of same-sex relationships in the case of patronage, including theatrical troupes (Greene 1994). There is also the instance of the male master Orsino being attracted to his male page Cesario in Twelfth Night, though the play resolves itself in Cesario being exposed as Viola. 28 It should be noted that those engaging in sodomitical acts, especially those of a pederastic nature, may not identify themselves as homosexual (Bray 1982, 67-70).

The unfailing correspondence of adult homoeroticism and "effeminacy" is a later cultural development, and is imported into Shakespeare's texts by critics responding to a different cultural milieu [...] "Appropriate" male desire is phallic, whether homoerotic or heterosexual; without that phallic force, men in Shakespearean drama are usually rendered asexual or nominally heterosexual. (Traub 1992, 136) It is heterosexual love that engenders fears of 'effeminacy'; just as Romeo complains that Juliet's "beauty hath made me effeminate" (3.1.114), he and other men are "effeminised by their heterosexual relation to desire" (Traub 1992, 136). Conversely, extreme virility, manifested often in military exploits, characterises men's erotic desire for other men, as when Aufidius says to Coriolanus, "Let me twine my arms about that body, whereagainst my grained ash an hundred times hath broke" and goes on to compare the joy he feels at seeing Coriolanus as being greater than that which he felt "when I first my wedded mistress saw bestride my threshold" (4.5.106-123).29 As Traub surmises, "throughout the canon, Shakespeare associates 'effeminacy' in men with the fawning superciliousness of the perfumed courtier, and with the 'womanish' tears of men no longer in control [...] There is little in the canon to suggest that Shakespeare linked 'effeminacy' to homoeroticism" (1992, 135-136). Aufidius' desire for Coriolanus is much more representative of homosexual desire at the time, for as Smith further points out, "homosexuality is a matter of men desiring other men" (1991, 171). The linking of homosexuality with effeminacy is an 18th-century act (Trumbach 1989; Goldberg 1992), and the relation of homosexuality to heteroeroticism, which Jardine and Orgel portend, is a misinterpretation of Renaissance homosexual desire. As Traub says of Jardine's analysis of the sexual interaction between the male audience and the boy actor: "[Jardine] argues that the specific erotic charge of the boy actor lies in his ability to mimic the attractions of 'femininity'. She thus unwittingly dilutes the specificity of gender involved in male homoeroticism [... and] reconstitutes this interaction as implicitly hetero-erotic" despite there being "little evidence that [pederasty ...] structured the majority of early modern heterosexual encounters" (1992, 94), and while pederasty may have been the model for aristocrats, "there are more recorded instances of sex between working- class males of roughly the same age, usually adolescents or young adults" (Saslow 1989, 93). Valerie Traub does not see homosexual desire in the Renaissance, the kind that the male audiences would have for the boy actors, as bound by pederasty or effeminacy (1992, 94). To Traub, "transvestism does not correlate in a simple fashion with any particular erotic mode;" the transvestism of the stage has the "ability to transcend binary oppositions" and, "by interrupting the arbitrary binarism [...], is incommensurate with a rigidification of sexuality," instead leading to "erotic plurality" (1992, 122-123). In undertaking an analysis of the cross-dressing comedy As You Like It, Traub speculates on the epilogue in which the boy actor playing Rosalind leaps the frame of the play in order to address the audience, describing it as: [a] renewed attack on the pretensions of erotic certitude [...] The effect of this statement is to highlight the constructedness of gender and the flexibility of erotic attraction at precisely the point when the formal impulse of comedy would be to essentialise and fix both gender and eroticism [...] Consistently, the text seems less interested in the threat of a particular mode of desire (hetero/homo) than in the dangers desire as such poses

29 Though, like Romeo, Coriolanus is also effeminised by a woman, his mother (Kahn 1981, 155-172).

[...] As You Like It registers its lack of commitment to the binary logic that dominates the organisation of desire. (1992, 128-130) A 'binary logic' is based upon a system in which things either are or are not (Wright 1986). Traub argues against binary logic or sexual – indeed, gender – categorisation, "against fixing upon and reifying any one mode of desire" (1992, 129). Instead she argues that Shakespeare's plays possess plural erotics of the kind discussed in the opening quotation to this part. The best manner to describe Traub's theory is that the boy actor does not excite a particular homoerotic or heteroerotic, male or female desire, but his sexualised presentation instead leads to the "free play of eros" (Rose 1997, 62). Traub argues against a strictly hetero/homo-erotic conception of desire, but does not offer any insight into what her fluid notion of desire or plural erotics means for the watching audience, leading one critic to describe her work as full of "comprehension-crushing clusters of abstractions" (Lindley 1997, 208). Just how this free play of love and sexual attraction affected Renaissance audiences may be somewhat explained by the conclusion that Shakespeare's play(er)s were pansexual (Watson 1992, 309) or, indeed, non-binary/androgynous (Rackin 1987). To conclude, I am again drawn to Aston and Savona's views on the multiplicity of the actor and his meaning to the audience. The boy actor could engender a variety of erotic responses in the audience. However, the whole construction of the play encourages the audience to view the cross-dressed boy as a boy, at least in moments. The theatrical illusion of cross-dressing could never successfully hide his masculinity and instead invited a reflection upon his boyish body; the overwhelming masculine nature of the stage where men wrote, produced and acted in all drama created an overwhelmingly homosocial (if not homosexual) theatrical environment. While Traub cautions that the boy actor does not represent "paradisiacal erotic economy" or "a polymorphously perverse body" (1992, 129-130), one also cannot divorce her utopian ideal of erotic plurality from the context in which it is argued that it operated – the Renaissance theatre. I believe that the context of the Renaissance theatre could not have allowed for this erotic plurality to take place, dominated as it was by one particular sex. As James Fisher argues, Renaissance theatrical cross-dressing "did little to inspire serious dramatic explorations of the obvious, and not so obvious, issues of gender difference" (2007, 333), and was thus likely unconcerned with interrupting arbitrary gender binaries or other such radical notions. Conversely, the theatre creates a culture of male-male interactions both on stage and amongst the audience, for "in the public theatre [...] dramatised romance sets men talking to each other, face to face, man to man, about their mutual experience of sexual desire" (Smith 1991, 157), which, while it could be just homosocial, could lead to homosexuality. The theatre was dominated by men and their desires, a place of men going to see other men (or boys, rather) perform in drag, sometimes alluding to their body in a provocatively sexual nature.30 While I do not mean to exclude women's experience as audience, their presence does not exclude the homoerotic nature of the boy actor. Indeed, female audiences could have read the boy in an entirely different manner to male audiences. The culture of Renaissance theatre, however, does not accord with the ideals of an unfixing of desire, and thus I am drawn more to the idea that the boy actor carried explicitly homosexual connotations.

30 It is interesting to consider that contemporary drag performances often take place in gay clubs, which are overtly homosexual environments.

Conclusion The English Renaissance came to an end with the closure of the theatres in 1642. In their re-opening, in 1660, women were suddenly taking to the stage, and the convention of the boy actor was all but forgotten. There are only a few recorded instances of boy actors taking to the stage in the English Restoration. The practice of having women actresses play female parts thus became the convention and continues to this day.31 When the reconstructed Globe was built centuries later, there was a deadlock on whether the plays should employ all-male casting (Purcell 2017), suggesting that even Shakespearean scholars are divided on the importance of this convention to Shakespearean theatre and its contemporary audiences.32 Thus, the English Renaissance serves as a curious part of our theatrical history, where the boy took to the stage without protest and played the parts of Cleopatra, Desdemona, and Lady Macbeth to acclaim. The boy actor had a myriad of effects on the watching audience, from being seen as a woman to an object of homosexual desire. Yet with the paucity of first-hand evidence of English Renaissance audiences, a contemporary critic can only offer their insight framed, as Orgel says, by our own eyes and our own mind. Certainly the level of debate that the boy actor evokes, both amongst Renaissance Puritan critics and contemporary critics, attests to his power to command the stage of the English Renaissance and command our imaginations some four hundred years later.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge Dr Felix Nobis and Dr Sue Tweg for their support in the drafting of this paper, and Professor Gary Watt and Dr Fiona Gregory for their invaluable feedback.

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