The Merchant of Venice (Vol. 40) | Michael Shapiro (essay date 1996)
Michael Shapiro (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: "Doubling Cross-Gender Disguise: The Merchant of Venice" in Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage, The University of Michigan Press, 1996, pp. 93-118.
[In the following essay, Shapiro explores the varying purposes and effects of the three instances of cross gender disguise (Portia, Nerissa, and Jessica) in The Merchant of Venice.]
Although Shakespeare gave three different types of male identity to the three heroines in his second play to use the motif of a boy heroine in male disguise, none of them became the Lylian page of Two Gentlemen. 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 more 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...
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