‘Actors in Shakespeare must expect not only to play someone else, but to
play someone playing someone else again: they need to know how to portray
acting. This may well mean having to think about what it actually means to
act.’[1]
Starting from the
quotation of Sean McEvoy, a
surprising number of the plays written for the early English professional stage
featured cross-dressed characters. crossdressing was an everyday
practice in the Elizabethan theatre even if it was not a part of the plot, as
all the female roles were played by boys. Perhaps, then, cross-dressing on the
Elizabethan stage was in large part about theatricality.men portraying women pretending to be men.
The purpose of
this subsection is to see how feminine characters in Shakespeare’s comedies (Twelfth Night and As You Like It) construct and present their identity in relation
with other characters by switching gender roles. Many writers of the time
asserted women’s inferiority to men. Some blamed mankind’s fall on Eve,
considering women are weak. The woman is the reason why man was exiled from Paradise
and she causes only trouble. Some thought of a woman as an incomplete man,
lacking the faculty of reason and the ability to control emotions, less rational,
needing man protection.
In Plato’s Symposium the androgyne stands for the
original wholeness of the human being, a creature made up of both male and
female features, a balance between the masculine and the feminine principles.
Because the humans were split in two parts by the angry gods, they were
“cursed”, obliged to seek each other, in order to find themselves and get
married. The 16 th century emphasized this idea, and having as starting point
the belief that the man was the rational head and the woman was the irrational
body, the androgyny is encouraged through the disguise of the young heroines
into boys, started from actors who interpreted female parts.
The conventions
of Comedy usually include: disguise, often involving cross-dressing, thwarted
love, mistaken identity, romantic misunderstandings. Comic and deviant forms,
mistakes are used to break the social cohesion. Yet in Shakespeare’s comedies
we find different heroines and the audience applauded them, even though they
were nearly everything a woman should not be—dynamic, active, independent,
resourceful, which are the qualities associated rather with masculinity than
femininity.
In As You Like It, Celia and Rosalind
escape to Arden
but because of the thieves of the forest, Rosalind decides to disguise herself
as a boy, Ganymede. Thus weakly and foolishly protected, they leave the court’s
travesty of order and security, going ‘ in content / To liberty and not to
banishment’. In the comedies if a woman is crossdressed, she usually becomes a
boy of a lower status (Rosalind, the heiress to the throne, becomes a humble
owner of a herd of sheep; the noblewoman Viola becomes a pageboy).
When Celia
discovers the love poems written for Rosalind, she larks Rosalind, disguised as
Ganymede about the identity of the writer. Rosalind behaves as a curious woman
and her male costume doesn’t steal her femininity. That’s why I find relevant
her specification of being a woman in conversation with Celia: Do you not know
I am a woman? When I think, I must speak. (3.2.246-47) Actually, the name
Ganymede refers back to someone who is perhaps not feminine, but definitely
less than masculine.
The
transvestite, the “man-woman” reveals parts of the body that were hidden since
then and hides others that shouldn’t be hidden. For instance, Viola enters
freely Orsino’s private space, hears his thoughts, his beliefs. Rosalind also
has a different relation with Orlando .
Under the disguise of Ganymede she makes Orlando
court her and confess his love.
Viola’s disguise
coul be a method of punishing herself for the fact that she is still alive
while her brother is dead, a symbolic manner of showing her pain. Viola’s
disguise is a theatrical trick, it means entertainment and fun: (“Olivia: Are
you a comedian? Viola: No, and yet I swear I am not that I play. I.v. 76) This
scene could be found in As You Like It too,
when Rosalind suggests when she address to Phoebe that she is untrustworthy,
she is not a true man: “I pray you, do not fall in love with me,/ For I am
falser than vows made in wine”(III, v)
The reason of
Viola’s disguise differs from Rosalind’s.While Viola’s cross-dressing occurs as
the result of some fatality, Rosalind’s disguise is a reaction against freedom
restriction. For centuries, women’s clothing has been considered a sign of
confessed servitude, like a closed lock that does not permit freedom. Women
were trained from childhood to wear corsets, the iron cage of the corset in
order to idealize feminine beauty. So, in this case, Rosalind’s disguise
could be equivalent with freedom.
The costume
traditionally means protection. There are special clothes for different and
various activities. In this respect, to disguise means to lose your real identity
in order to obtain another one, because the way you are dressed defines you and
sometimes you can speak through your clothes. Anyway, the costume still
preserves the protecting role. Undercovered it makes possible for the human to
enter spaces that others do not have acces and the communication receives a
degree of freedom and openness in speech. Cross-dressing could be seen also as
a sign of democracy. Wearing the same clothes, women and man are the same at
least in one aspect. From this point of view, they are equally and because
there are no differences in physical appearance, women status and
their role may be as well negotiated.
William
Shakespeare attributed to his characters ideas, thoughts and attitudes of his
contemporaries. All he created had at least a grain of truth. In this respect,
queen Elizabeth
I must have influenced Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroines. She could be
considered the woman-man who combined masculinity and femininity and soon after
coronation, decided to remain single, while she could be both king and queen.
Not for nothing the sentence ‘I am married to England ’ was famous and emphasized
her male and female features at the same time.
The ending of
comedies usually brings the fictitious world back to balance, Shakespeare’s
heroines often leave their active days behind and gladly accept the authority
of the present men. Cross-dressing helped women characters to travel alone, to
act as men, to prove men are not superior and women managed to demonstrate
masculine qualities such as intelligence, wit, capability, courage. Shakespeare
saw men and women on the same level and his plays destroyed the mith of women
who are inferior to men.
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