Sexuality in Shakespeare | Stephen Orgel (essay date 1989)
Stephen Orgel (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?", in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 7-29.
[In the following essay, Orgel explores the cultural assumptions behind male and female sexual identity in Shakespeare's plays.]
My title is the last line of that most Renaissance of modern comedies, Some Like It Hot. Joe E. Brown re-acts to Jack Lemmon's desperate revelation that he is not the woman Brown thinks he has been wooing, but a man in drag. Instead of indignantly withdrawing his proposal of marriage, however, Brown responds with cheerful complacency, "Nobody's perfect." The moment provides an appropriate setting for my own scene.
I want to rethink some basic information about the English Renaissance theater. It is a commonplace to observe that the stage in Shakespeare's time was an exclusively male preserve, but theatrical historians...
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