Sex Theatre Women
Sex is the cinema's most powerful commodity and has always had a strong part to play on the stage. It must seem, therefore, particularly strange that the British theatre reached its most flourishing and exciting period with no help at all from women. They may have provided inspiration for the poets and often patronage for the players. However, during a century of intense dramatic creativity they never actually set foot on the stage. Still, it is not as if women were ignored or even downplayed by the vigorous young dramatists of the 16th and 17th centuries. In their scripts virtually every female type was portrayed: queens, whores, virgins, housewives, witches and fairies swept across the open stages. But underneath the velvet and lace were the sturdy limbs of growing boys and the lines were spoken in their clear, choirboy tones. Shakespeare created a gallery of unforgettable women and praised them in purest poetry; he gave them gaiety, tenderness, wit, pride and power. Yet, he never saw Cleopatra projected by a warm, vibrant woman, or Perdita played by a shining girl. Audiences didn't know what they were missing.
The Elizabethan theatre was a rough and ready place. It was open to the sky, noisy with smelly, jostling crowds and in hot weather, a notorious plague trap. The theatres were frequently closed as the ever present plague increased in virulence. In sheer physical terms it was no place for a girl. Nor was the stage a place for a woman in moral terms. If a woman had ventured there, she would have been abused and derided as an outrage against public decency, an insult to the accepted patterns of life. In England, it was not until the beginning of this century that the stage was regarded as a respectable occupation even for men. In ancient China, actresses were officailly classed as coutesans. When a French troupe that included actresses did once venture onto the London stage in 1632, the women were jeered and pelted with apples.
So the female impersonators were completely accepted. There were no sly remarks or lecherous sneers, no passing moments of distate or laughter when a comely boy recited a feminine protestation of love. The boys and young men were accepted as representatives of the female sex. This paper will aim to discuss why and indeed, if, these young boys were indeed accepted as representatives of the female sex. I will look at the possibility of the aspect of homosexuality in Renaissance England, positionings on gender roles both on and off the stage, and finally the fear of ‘effeminisation' found within anti-theatrical tracts of the period.
The Boy Actor and Gender Bending in the Renaissance
The question of gender formation and the blurring of gender lines within the theatre is certainly one of the most persistently seductive aspects of theatrical performance. Nowhere is this more imperative and extensively explored than during the Renaissance period of drama, literature and art. Indeed, it is a subject which is very often politicised by critics, most notably from a feminist point of view. Judith Butler in her book ‘Gender Trouble' asks if ‘the sexed body' itself is ‘shaped by political forces' or is it a firm foundation on which gender and sexuality operate? The Renaissance, with its conventions and approach to theatre as a strictly ‘woman free zone' arguably provides the most direct, compelling representations of gender. Playwrights, actors and directors very often deliberately set out to call into question how we, the audience, see gender, and what limitations this restricted view may present. By the time the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights were working, there was no question of employing women in the acting companies then being formed for the first time with professional status.
Many critics have either implied, or outwardly stated, that Elizabethan playwrights were severely handicapped by the lack of actresses. I will argue that this could not have been the case, simply because they were unaware of the alternative. The idea was as foreign to them as the concepts of revolving stages, curtains and lighting effects. Boy actors played a very significant part in the experience of English theatre, for boy actors played the roles of women and girls onstage, including major roles like Lady MacBethh, Ophelia, and Cleopatra. Much as they did in classical Athens, ‘women' emerged onstage, in Renaissance London only as a side effect of masculine attitudes and performances. How the boy players of the Renaissance behaved can only be conjectured, indeed, it is not certain that all women's parts were played by young boys with unbroken voices. It is highly likely that some of these youngsters graduated to become adult - but still female impersonating - actors of maturity and standing. Yet, in general, critics seem to be unable to imagine grown men in drag and certainly, if they can imagine it, boggle at taking them seriously. However, this is understandable. The vast output of books on Shakespeare and the Elizabethans contains an overwhelming majority written apparently by men who, in modern times, see the female impersonator as a comedian, a purveyor of smut and grotesque withal.
With this in mind there is little wonder that these academic critics cannot conceive of a male Lady Macbeth. There are some exceptions, however, notably Kennth Tynan, who suggests that Lady Macbeth, for one, is basically a man's role. In Tynan on Theatre, he put forward the thought that it is probably a mistake to cast a woman in the role at all. It is a widely made misconception which has resulted in the continuing failure to understand Elizabethan cross-dressing. Not only was this practice completely accepted by the audience, it was a specific art.
The actors were formed into companies, each under the patronage of a wealthy member of the aristocracy. Boys were apprenticed to a leading actor from whom they learned their art. Towards the end of the Sixteenth Century it was regarded just as respectable for a young boy to be apprenticed in the theatre as to be a bricklayer or a baker. These youngsters would play female roles as well as many other, smaller male parts.
The female parts demanded certain special techniques. It seems that from records dating from the end of the Seventeenth Century that the boys developed special voices and a feminine way of walking. It was an intensive training and there seems no reason why a boy should not have continued to play women after puberty.
Some of the boy actors became familiar to the audience as individual stars, but never as much as the leading male actors. Nathaniel Field, perhaps one of the most famous and celebrated boy actors of Shakespeare's day was reportedly playing the female leads well into his twenties. Another popular player was Dickie Robinson. Ben Jonson mentions him in one of his plays and recounts an incident when Robinson attended a gathering of women dressed as one himself. He was also described in the same play as dressing ‘better than forty women'.
When the German poet Goethe visited a production which featured cross-dressed boys throughout, he observed:
I reflected on the reasons why these actors pleased me so much, and I think I have found it. In these representations, the concept of imitation and of art was invariably more strongly felt, and through their able performance a sort of conscious illusion was produced. Thus a double pleasure is given, in that these persons are not women, but only represent women. The young men have studied the properties of the female sex in its being and behaviour; they know them thoroughly and reproduce them like an artist; they represent not themselves, but a nature absolutely foreign to them
In 1579, the critic Stephen Gossan noted that theatre ‘effeminates the mind'. Four years later, Phillip Stubbes made plain what Gossan had implied; that boy actors who wore women's clothing could literally ‘adulterate' male gender. Fifty years on, William Pyrne described a man whom women's clothing had literally caused him to ‘degenerate' into a woman. In the vast amount of anti-theatrical tracts throughout these years, the elusive sense that theatre could in one way or another ‘soften' the responses of the audience, had been substituted by the anxiety - expressed almost in biological terms - that theatre could structurally transform man into woman.
Indeed, the issue of gender instability and the blurring of gender boundaries was of ongoing importance both on and off the stage, and more importantly, has as much credence during the Renaissance as it does in modern society.
In his book ‘The Changing Room; Sex, Drag and Theatre', Laurence Senelick studies in detail the example of Shakespeare's ‘Antony and Cleopatra', and what possible obstacles the convention of cross dressing would present to the Elizabethan actor:
Shakespeare's Cleopatra has been the stumbling block for many scholars in imagining the efficacy of the boy player. She is a highly sexed, mercurial woman who lavishes physical endearments on her lover, and at the plays climatic moment describes the asp as a “baby at her breast that sucks the nurse asleep”, thereby drawing the audience's attention to the boys flat chest.
Here, Shakespeare thrusts forward his own awareness of the convention of the boy player. In predicting her posthumous fate, Cleopatra deplores her enactment in a Roman triumph by some ‘squeaking boy'. ‘Such disparities between the spoken text and the physical spectacle hazard the audience's acceptance of illusion and bring it back to reality with a thud', according to many critics. Phyllis Rackin has answered these quibbles by inferring that ‘his squeaking boy can evoke a greatness that defies the expectations of reason and the possibilities of realistic representation only because we share those expectations and understand the limits of those possibilities....'.
Because the boy cannot fully represent Cleopatra's greatness, he has to draw our attention to his inadequacies, and only then are we, the audience, freed to ‘transcend the trammels of reason, and conceive of Cleopatra as she would appear to the Egyptian imagination'.
Indeed, it is fair to say that it is possible that theatrical convention can indeed release the imagination, but in this particular case, it seems more likely that the reference to the ‘squealing boy', was, in fact, a jibe at Shakespeare's competition, the children's companies, and implies in some way that the Globe actor of Cleopatra had a well-modulated speaking voice. It is frequently held that the actor Robert Gough was the first Juliet, and also the first Cleopatra. If this were true, there are around seven years between these two plays and if Gough did play these two roles, he must have been an adult when Cleopatra fell to him. If young Gough spent half a dozen years specialising in female roles he must have brought his standard of ‘impersonation' to considerable heights, enough perhaps, to persuade Shakespeare that his most womanly creation would be safe in his hands.
CASE STUDY - in a modern context, experimental post graduate study.
‘It would be very interesting', says Meg Twycross, ‘to see a boy playing a female part which depends for its effect on sexual appeal. I suspect that he would convey a very strong sensuality, but not a particular female sexuality'. A graduate student in the Tufts Drama Department, Gary Gerard tried this experiment, contrasting the same scene played twice, once with a female, once with a male Cleopatra.
The scene chosen was that in Antony and Cleopatra when the messenger bears ill-tidings of Antony's marriage to the Queen of Egypt. It was a shrewd choice, as the complicating issue of a boy dressed as a girl dressed as a boy found in the comedies such as Twelfth Night, is absent. Yet the central female character runs a gamut of moods, from coyness to rage. The ‘come-on' to the messenger is full of sexual teasing, while Cleopatra's description of how she decked out the drunken Antony in her ‘tires and mantles', “whilst I wore his sword Phillippan”, draws attention to lucid cross-dressing. Not only does this particular scene draw outward attention to the particular stage practice of boy actors wearing women's clothing, but also, it alludes to the point in which one might think Renaissance drama would imagine itself most vulnerable; for six decades, three before and three after Antony and Cleopatra, the charge that theatre effeminised boy actors who played women's parts by dressing them in women's costume was the hallmark of Renaissance anti-theatricality. Cleopatra happily rhapsodising about dressing the passive, drunken Antony in her women's clothing presents, in distilled form, everything that would have horrified those who attacked the stage. Why would a dramatist invoke such a moment? Not merely ‘invoke', but embody, and heighten precisely the attack launched against his own craft?
In his experiment, Gerard cast a black sixteen year old male, and a twenty-two year old undergraduate. In her version of the scene, the actress was extremely mercurial, playing up to Cleopatra's sexiness, using women's ‘wiles'. The effect in the comic moments was often ‘kittenish', in the moments of anger, shrewish. She also depended a good deal on body language, employing physical techniques to underscore emotional reactions and throw the sensuality into high relief.
In the male version, the minute the youth stepped onstage, wearing the same white gown and diadem as the actress, the audience ‘caught its breath'. The amazement was anachronistic, since presumably Shakespeare's audience would take the cross-dressing for granted; but even the Elizabethans must have graded the degrees of plausibility in theatrical transvestism. The male Cleopatra was not only stunning to look at, but had instant authority as a male among males. The actress had played at being a woman, but her effort and artificiality vitiated the character. The youth in the role made no effort to be seductive or especially feminine in gesture, posture or voice. Yet owing to his stage presence, and chiefly his masculine self-confidence, he was more convincing as a regal personage, and as a focus of desire. He played the lines, rather than laying on complex psychology or method behaviourism.
This experiment for the audience clarified one thing; Shakespeare could write women's roles as multi-dimensional as Cleopatra not simply because the boy actor was a master of his craft, but because his maleness automatically provided solidarity of presence on which the rest might be predicated. The debates over the formality versus naturalness of the Elizabethan acting style have so far omitted to consider the authority communicated from the stage, when the acting company is composed wholly of males.
The Cross Dressed Heroine and Self Awareness
‘Multiplying the cross dressed heroine in a single work called attention to its artificiality as a literary convention and a theatrical construction and probably made spectators aware of something they ‘always knew' - the female characters they accepted as mimetic illusions in the world of the play were constructed by male performers in the world of the playhouse'. The illusion of ‘femaleness' would almost completely vanish in a scene where the boy actor played a female cross-dressed. In many commentaries, this is quite coolly dismissed as Shakespeare's way of helping the boy-girls along with their difficult task of impersonation. In fact, quite the reverse was the case.
The heroine in ‘doublet and hose' raises a number of complex problems for a male actor and involves the whole ethic of disguise, with all its dramatic, as well as sexual implications. It is enough to point out that, far from making things easier for the boy actors, such a transformation makes their task infinitely more difficult. A girl dressed as a boy is often seen on the stage, in vaudeville, pantomime and opera. Belief is suspended. In modern productions of Shakespeare's plays we see women playing Viola, Rosalind, Portia and Juliet - and it could be said that the same pantomime feeling intrudes, oddly jarring against the obviously serious intent of the basic play. If the acting is excellent, and production serious minded enough, the love dialogues between Viola and Orsino, Rosalind and Orlando can, at first, inspire a slight frisson of distaste. But eventually, our own acceptance barrier is broken down by the prevailing thought that Rosalind is really a woman, and since we can clearly tell this, so can Orlando. But, with boys playing these heroines, the effect would be quite unnerving, lending a completely new dimension to the drama.
Jan Kott has argued that this triple ambiguity is exactly what Shakespeare was aiming at. This must be conjectural, but it seems evident that the boy-actresses could be convincing even when dressed in boy's clothes. .
In Marlowe's Edward II there is a description of a court masque which affords us a clear insight into the accepted patterns of the day - at least on the courtly, aristocratic level:
Like Sylcan nymphs my pages shall be clad
Sometime, a lovely boy in Diane's shape
With hair that gilds the water as it glided
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms
And in his sportful hands an olive tree
To hide those pearls which men delight to see.
It is ambiguous exactly who's pearls the men ‘delight to see'. The tone reveals the lengths to which female impersonation was accepted as inevitable.
There are other, practical things we know about these boy actors. Says the Duke Orsino to Viola, disguised as Cesario:
Diana's Lip
Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe
Is as the maiden's organ, shrill of sound
And all is semblative a woman's part.
Hamlet greets one of the boys in Elsinore's troupe; ‘Pray God, your voice, like a piece of incurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring.' In Cymbeline, Arviragus remarks that the voices of himself and his brother Guiderius ‘have got the mannish crack'. And it is clear that the subsequent song ‘Fear no more the heat o'the sun' could have been spoken rather than actually sung, ‘I cannot sing, I'll weep and word it with you', says Guiderius. Shakespeare was more sensitive than his contemporaries to music, and he was equally conscious of the sound of voices. The ‘squeaking Cleopatra' and those ‘sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh' of Hamlet are typical of many direct and implicit references.
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