When, in 1566, Elizabeth vetoed a petition that she marry, she implied that her right to remain single ultimately depended on her willingness to resist not only political pressure but physical force: 'Though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage, answerable to my place, as ever my father had. I am your annointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything.' When she addressed her troops at Tilbury twenty-two years later, she presented herself as the leader of warriors, implying that of the queen's two bodies, the immortal body politic was appropriately male: 'I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too [The Public Speaking of Queen Elizabeth, ed. George Rice, 1951].

Like her oratory, Elizabeth's revels and entertainments sometimes reflect a politics of androgyny in representations of women warriors. On progress, the queen travels over highways and through forests to castles and marketplaces; she transforms public places into theatrical arenas where she may display her control of the Tudor culture of violence. In a pageant for Elizabeth's reception at Norwich in 1578, [recorded in The Public Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. John Nichols, 1823] speakers impersonating Deborah, Judith, Esther, and Martia, 'sometime Queene of England', addressed Elizabeth, recounting their martial feats and exhorting Elizabeth to do likewise. Deborah counsels Elizabeth to continue as she has begun, and, as God 'did deliver Sisera into a Woman's hande', Elizabeth too will 'weede out the wicket route' to win lasting fame. Judith recalls the slaying of Holofernes and adds, 'If Widowes hand could vanquish such a Foe: / Then to a Prince of thy surpassing might, / What Tirant lives but thou mayest overthrow?' (Vol. II, p. 147). In the 1592 Sudeley entertainment, Elizabeth's presence transformed an ancient tale of rape, subverting a traditional glorification of male violence. Apollo, 'who calleth himselfe a God (a title among men, when they will commit injuries tearme themselves Gods)', has changed the unwilling Daphne into a laurel, but 'the tree rived, and Daphne issued out … running to her Majestie': 'I stay, for whither should Chastety fly for succour, but to the Queene of Chastety' (vol. III, p. 139).

Elizabeth's politics of androgyny entered the theatrical traditions of the public playhouse. Like the queen, who cultivated an androgynous persona to diminish the stigma of female vulnerability, Shakespearian heroines disguise themselves as young boys in order to travel safely through mysterious forests and exotic dukedoms. Yet the public world of their androgynous activities is the inverted world of carnival, a saturnalia distanced from the world of contemporary sexual politics. When their cross-dressing places them temporarily on top, they find themselves in situations which reveal their irreducibly feminine essence. This essence is cowardice, an intrinsically female inability to stand and fight. Rosalind admits that no 'gallant curtle-spear upon [her] thigh' nor 'boar-spear in [her] hand' will overcome her 'hidden woman's fear' [William Shakespeare, As You Like It, I, iii, 117-18]. She does not, as she remarks later, 'have a doublet and hose in [her] disposition' (III, ii, 195-6). Viola too must acknowledge her natural timidity. Threatened with a duel against the supposedly ferocious Sir Andrew Aguecheek, she confesses, 'A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man' (Twelfth Night, III, iv, 302-3). Unlike Elizabeth, who 'would never by by violence constrained to do anything', Rosalind and Viola conspicuously lack the kind of courage Elizabeth takes as the Queen's prerogative. They must, at carnival's end, withdraw from the world of public action. They must accept a husband's protection, for they remain demonstrably vulnerable. Male violence is the bastion of patriarchal power which no Shakespearian heroine can scale.

When James succeeded to the throne in 1603, a new politics of androgyny emerged. The martial-spirited virgin prince ceded her authority to a misogynistic pacifist who described himself as the 'loving nourish-father' of his male favorites. The saying Rex fuit Elizabeth. Nunc est Jacobus Regina [The king was Elizabeth. Now is James the Queen] reflects a contemporary response to James's succession. The theatrical practices of the court also reflect it. Elizabeth, who exempted herself from the restrictions against women's activities, travelled from the court into the countryside on progress; James, who undermined the militarism in Tudor definitions of masculinity, withdrew into Whitehall, where he was enthroned as the chief spectator at the new perspective settings Inigo Jones began to devise for the royal masques. When plays were presented at Elizabeth's court, the queen sat upon the stage. When she received the golden apple in The Arraignment of Paris or resolved the contentions of Every Man Out of His Humour, Stephen Orgel surmises, she may have done so 'from the stage and as part of the action'. The Elizabethan revels celebrate the theatrical engagement of the monarch. But the perspective settings of Jacobean masques take the source of theatrical energy from the stage to the seated monarch. The Stuart masque celebrates the political power of an apparently passive royal spectator.

The new politics of androgyny did not enfranchise the ladies of the court. While James's pacifism tended to blur the rigid gender distinctions of 'the culture of violence', his misogyny strengthened the barriers against women's liberty. James celebrated haec vir [the feminine man], but he censured hic mulier [the masculine woman], and especially those fashionable women in men's clothing, who dared to appropriate the 'stilletaes or poinards' which manifested male power. In the court of King James, androgyny became a male prerogative; the image of the Amazonian queen regnant soon dwindled into a wife.

Jonson's and Jones's The Masque of Queens, written at Queen Anne's request and produced at Whitehall on 2 February 1609, articulates the Jacobean politics of androgyny in the theatrical language of the Stuart masque. The Masque of Queens opens with an anti-masque of witches. These witches, performed by professional players, are routed when a sudden 'sound of loud music' signals the appearance of Fame and Virtue, allegorical figures accompanying the queen and her ladies, who are costumed as Bel-anna and such 'wise and warlike' heroines as Penthesileia, Camilla, and Tomyris. Their appearance, enthroned in the House of Fame, magically transforms chaos into cosmos: 'At Fame's loud sound and Virtue's sight / all dark and envious witchcraft fly the light' (lines 367-8).

Virtue, whom the stage directions further describe as Perseus, or 'Heroic and Masculine Virtue' (line 365) descends from the building to speak. When he does, he claims full credit for the transformation, discounting Fame's auxiliary role: 'I was her parent, and I am her strength' (line 380). Perseus, as Jonathan Goldberg observes, [in James I], 'acts as a kind of male mother … The full appropriation of generative powers to the father makes him father and mother at once … Belanna's creativity and activity are continually subordinated to the poetic conceit and political situation.'

The 'poetic conceit and political situation' invert the theatrical dynamic of the Elizabethan image of the Amazonian queen. Elizabeth's role in the entertainments devised for her underscored her political position theatrically: she alone was entitled to improvise. While Deborah, Judith, Daphne, and Paris spoke scripted lines, Elizabeth's response remained the queen's prerogative. Anne's patronage conferred no such privileges. Her Amazons, unlike Shakespeare's Hippolyta, need not be wooed with swords, for they are deracinated and have forgotten their martial origins. In designing his splendid costumes, Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong note [in Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court], Jones 'strangely' neglected his usual handbook, Vecellio's Habiti Antichi et Moderni, ignoring his heroines' national characteristics and mythological attributes. Instead, he selected feminizing shades of pink, peach, crimson, and morrey for bodices, petticoats, and sleeves; he constructed elegant but encumbering crowns for each masquer. Splendidly costumed and silent, Queen Anne and her martial attendants are the objects of the spectators' gaze, as they return to their chariots after the revels:

The first four were drawn with eagles … their four torchbearers attending on the chariot sides, and four of the hags bound before them. Then followed the second, drawn by griffins, with their torchbearers and four other hags. Then the last, which was drawn by lions, and more eminent, wherein her majesty was, and had six torchbearers more, peculiar to her, with the like number of hags.

The warrior Queens vanquish the witches; the mythologized ladies of the court rebuke the rowdy, ragged players. The Amazons within the aristocracy, who might have challenged patriarchal authority, have been transformed into phallic women who protect the court from hags and vagabonds.

This Jacobean politics of androgyny also resonates with the theatrical convention of cross-dressing in commercial theatre. Yet the convention varies with the different theatrical venues of Jacobean London. The conservative public playhouses recall the cross-dressed Elizabethan heroine in Moll, the title character of Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl, performed at the Fortune in 1610 or 1611, and Bess Bridges, the title character of Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West, performed at the Red Bull probably at about the same time. Yet Moll and Bess wear their doublet and hose with a difference. In their exuberance, their resource-fulness, and their wit, they resemble the cross-dressed comic heroines of the 1590s. Yet they are not adventuring aristocrats. Bess in an enterprising tavern wench and Moll, based on the historical figure of Mary Frith, is the notorious 'roaring girl' of the London underworld. These characters are nostalgic reminiscences of Good Queen Bess in a new, plebeian guise; they reformulate the Elizabethan myth of the virgin prince for the popular audiences of the Fortune and the Red Bull. But unlike Shakespearian heroines, Moll and Bess are warriors. Bess beats the braggart Roughman in a fight and engages in hand-to-hand combat with pirates; Moll duels with her would-be seducer Laxton and forces him to beg for his life. Both characters exercise their skills for the good of simple people. In the process, these Jacobean androgynes expand the territory of the cross-dressed Elizabethan heroine, for Moll and Bess are capable of resisting male violence with equal force.

Heywood's Bess Bridges retains more conventional characteristics than Middleton and Dekker's Moll Cutpurse. Bess, like a romantic Shakespearian heroine, ventures through exotic lands and, after her valor and virtue have been fully tested, ends happily married to her Captain Spencer. Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl places the convention of the cross-dressed heroine in the new context of Jacobean city comedy. City comedy narrows the arena in which the theatrical action takes place, and in narrowing it, sharpens its focus. Instead of mythical Illyria or the fabulous forest of Arden, the scene is contemporary London. The social disorder on which comic plots depend is no longer cordoned off in a world of holiday adventure, but invades Fleet Street, Holburn, Smithfield, and Grey's Inn Fields.

When the map of London displaces an exotic landscape, the playwright can no longer inscribe ubi leones [i.e., wildness] on unexplored territories; the familiar settings of city comedy demand finer discriminations, as Middleton observes in the preface to the 1611 edition:

The fashion of play-making I can properly compare to nothing so naturally as the alteration in apparel: for in the time of the great crop-doublet, your huge bombasted plays, quilted with mighty words to lean purpose, was only then in fashion. And as the doublet fell, neater inventions began to set up. Now in the time of spruceness, our plays follow the niceness of our garments, single plots, quaint conceits, lecherous jests, dressed up in hanging sleeves.

The Roaring Girl refines on its 'huge bombasted' predecessors by contrasting two cross-dressed female characters. Mary Fitz-allard is the ingenue of the comedy. She appears, like a Shakespearian heroine, romantically disguised in a page boy's costume. This disguise gives Mary safe passage through the troubled seas of a comedy courtship. It does not, however, give her masculine powers or privileges. Whether attired as a gentlewoman or a page boy, Mary rarely speaks and never dissents. The androgynous 'Captain Moll', on the other hand, is a roaring girl of the streets and taverns, who strides about London with a sword and a tobacco pipe, drinking, smoking, and brawling with rogues and cutpurses. Her prototype is the historical figure of Mary Frith, a. k. a. Moll Cutpurse. Moll was a celebrity of the local underworld, 'a notorious bagage', said a witness to her penance at Paul's Cross, 'that used to go in mans apparell and challenged the feild of divers gallants'. Middleton and Dekker acquit their heroine of any crimes the historical Mary Frith may have committed, but both the historical figure and the dramatic character are products of London's popular culture in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Moll Cutpurse is too deeply woven into the texture of contemporary urban life to be appropriated for romantic adventures or pastoral interludes.

The Roaring Girl was produced by Prince Henry's Men; both Mary Fitzallard the ingenue and Moll the roaring girl were originally played by male actors. To make the theatrical convention of the cross-dressed heroine work in an all-male cast, the actor who plays a woman must first appear in a costume which establishes a female persona. The change to men's clothes must be clearly depicted. Thus before Viola appears as Cesario, she asks the captain to present her 'as an eunuch' to Orsino (I, i, 56). Before Rosalind appears as Ganymede, she announces that she will 'suit [herself] all points like a man' (I, iii, 116).

Establishing Moll's character requires a variant on this technique. The actor who portrays Moll must represent a woman whose persona is habitually masculine. Moll is not a woman disguised as a man, but a creature of 'heroic spirit and masculine womanhood' (II, i, 323-4). So Moll first appears, not in the breeches she will wear for the rest of the play, but in a frieze jerkin and a skirt. This is the modish masculine attire which earned fashionable women the censure of many preachers and pamphleteers during the early years of the seventeenth century. This costume establishes her sex; her swaggering freedom establishes the costume's appropriateness. Only then does she appear in breeches to duel with Laxton the lecherous misogynist who had offered her gold for a rendezvous at a Brainford inn:

In thee I defy all men, their worst hates,
And their best flatteries, all their golden witchcrafts,
With which they entangle the poor spirits of fools.
Distressed needlewomen and trade-fallen wives,
Fish that must needs bite or themselves be bitten,
Such hungry things as these may soon be took
With a worm fastened on a golden hook:

Those are the lecher's food, his prey.
(III, i, 90-6)

Moll's speech, exposes the economic structure of the hierarchy of gender. Moll's subsequent action, to duel with Laxton, wound him, and force him to beg for his life, presses further against that hierarchy, for it exposes the violence on which the cultural construction of gender rests. In defending the 'distressed needle-women and trade-fallen wives' whose hunger makes them 'the lecher's prey', Moll appropriates the protective function which allows men to justify sexual hierarchy. In remaining invulnerable without male protection, she confounds patriarchal distinctions between the fragility of good women and the rebellious autonomy of the bad.

Moll's duel radically reinterprets the convention of the cross-dressed heroine. The male adversaries of other woman warriors discover only after the battle that they have been struggling against a woman. Moll wears men's clothing during her duel with Laxton, but she is not disguised. He knows her identity before he reluctantly begins to fight: 'Draw upon a woman? why, what dost mean, Moll?' (III, i, 69). By forcing Laxton to fight against a woman and yet fight according to the male code of ritual combat, Moll demands the same respect that Laxton would extend to a male adversary. She demands that the assumptions of male supremacy be tested in the relentless meritocracy of the battlefield. This test demonstrates that a woman can not only engage in violence, but control and direct it for social purposes; she can adopt the male virtue of courage to defend the female virtue of courage to defend the female virtue of chastity, transforming chaste passivity into active autonomy.

Moll is not the first dramatic character to challenge the male monopoly on violence. Middleton and Dekker's innovation lies in the way that challenge is legitimized. Popular drama does acknowledge woman's capacity for violence, but it is commonly trivialized in comedy and demonized in tragedy and chronicle. Katherine the shrew will be tamed; Joan of Arc will be burned as a witch. The patriarchal structures of authority stand. But Moll's duel with Laxton does not resemble the erratic and unsanctioned violence of conventional stage shrews and witches. She fights according to the rules of the male code, and her use of violence cannot readily be either trivialized or demonized, even when she fights against patriarchy, defying 'all men' in the person of one would-be seducer. This is not the violence which erupts in terrorist raids and riots, but force sanctioned by a legitimate power to chastise and admonish. It is commensurate with the circumstances and regulated by a code of honor. Moll prepares for the duel with a soldierly braggadocio:

Would the spirits
Of all my slanderers were clasped in thine,
That I might vex an army at one time.
(III, i, 111-13)

She wounds Laxton 'gallantly', as he admits, and spares his life because she 'scorn[s] to strike [him] basely' (III, i, 125, 122). 'If I could meet my enemies one by one thus', says Moll with perfect chivalry, 'I might make pretty shift with 'em in time' (III, i, 130).

Moll fights to defend her own autonomy and to vindicate other women. The two motives are interwoven: Moll's autonomy reveals by contrast the source of other women's subordination. Women's economic vulnerability, Moll claims, is the source of their exploitation, yet 'she that has wit and spirit / May scorn / To live beholding to her body for meat' (III, i, 132-4). Moll's economic independence rests on the wit and spirit which grant her the ability to defend herself in combat. Tell the censuring world, she commands the astonished Laxton,

'twere base to yield where I have conquered.
I scorn to prostitute myself to a man,
I that can prostitute a man to me.
(III, i, 108-10)

Prostitution, which Moll has already removed from the realm of misogynistic moralizing, merges with a language of combat and conquest. Sexual exploitation is identified with physical coercion; defeat equals prostitution. Moll need not yield sexually because she can conquer martially. Her martial art enables her to resist the exploitation most female flesh is heir to; it forces a patriarchal society to acknowledge her autonomy.

It also provides the psychological foundation for that autonomy. A man's willingness to expose himself to blows, Simone de Beauvoir writes [in The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley, 1952], is his final recourse against attempts to reduce him to the status of object. It is 'the authentic proof of each one's loyalty to himself, to his passions, to his own will'. It is this loyalty—then, as now, no more frequent among women than combat duty—which 'Captain Moll' demonstrates throughout The Roaring Girl. Her willingness to fight constitutes a fierce and active loyalty to herself. When the comedy ends, she remains unmarried and insubordinate:

I have no humor to marry … a wife you know ought to be obedient, but I fear me I am too headstrong to obey, therefore I'll ne'er go about it … I have the head now of myself, and am man enough for a woman; marriage is but a chopping and a changing, where a maiden loses one head and has a worse i' th' place.

(II, ii, 35-44)

Moll's belligerent autonomy is not presented as an example for other women. She is an inexplicable exception to every rule, 'a creature / So strange in quality, a whole city takes / Note of her name and person' (I, i, 95-7). Her martial art is an individual strategy for survival, not a program for general insurrection. The text of The Roaring Girl represents a radical revision of the hierarchy of gender but restricts its benefits to the androgynous heroine whose singularity is assumed. The cultural circumstances which might create other roaring girls remain hidden. Yet the theatrical circumstances of The Roaring Girl's original production offer a model the text alone does not disclose.

The Consistory of London Correction Book for 1611 records Mary Frith's presence at

all or most of the disorderly and licentious places in this cittie as namely she hath usually in the habit of a man resorted to alehouses taverns tobacco shops and also to play houses there to see plaies and proses and namely being at a play about three quarters of a yeare since at ye Fortune in man's apparel and in her boots and with a sword at her syde … [she] also sat upon the stage in the public view of of all the people there present in man's apparel and played upon her lute and sange a song.

The play's epilogue corroborates the Consistory record, for it announces that, should the writers and the actors have failed to satisfy their patrons' expectations, 'The Roaring Girl herself, some few days hence / Shall on this stage give larger recompence' (lines 35-6). The exact meaning of this announcement remains mysterious, yet legal and literary records concur: the stage of the Fortune was part of Mary Frith's territory. Since she appeared there to play her lute and to sit on the stage, she may well have watched an actor play her greatness, and perhaps she improvised asides and business from her position on stage or even took the part herself for some portion of the play.

When Middleton and Dekker evoke Moll's historical presence at the Fortune, they qualify the nature of the entertainment. Like Elizabeth's improvized participation in royal entertainments, Moll's association with the Fortune makes The Roaring Girl a festive celebration of a woman's autonomy. In constructing the dramatic character of 'Captain Moll', The Roaring Girl confounds gender categories within the world of the play; in evoking Mary Frith's presence on the stage of the Fortune, in person, The Roaring Girl confounds gender categories in the world of the spectators. When Mary Frith created the quasi-theatrical persona of Moll Cut-purse, she transformed playgoing into playacting. No more (but no less) a professional player than Elizabeth, Mary Frith was apparently the first woman to appear on the stage of the public playhouse….

While Mary Frith and Prince Henry's Men reinterpreted Elizabethan androgyny for Jacobean audiences at the Fortune, the private theatres also explored the motif in satirical city comedies. Yet the theatrical values of the private playhouse alter the representation of androgyny. The open stages of the public playhouses, inheriting the theatrum mundi of medieval theatre, evoked the mysteries of forests and islands, the rage of sea storms and battlefields, the grandeur of the ancient forum and the bustle of the modern metropolis. The buildings which housed the private playhouses—the singing school at Paul's, the refectories of Blackfriars and Whitefriars—were designed for communal rather than public functions. Their small stages and candlelit halls could recall a Lylian theatrical tradition, with its associations of otiose seclusion and the miniaturized world of childhood.

Jonson incorporated these associations into the domestic setting of Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, performed at Whitefriars in 1609. On the open stage of the Fortune, Moll Cutpurse travels through the public places of the city; in the monastic refectory of White-friars, the dyskolos and his boy bride remain within doors. The Whitefriars setting for Morose's house, with its 'double walls and treble ceilings, the windows close shut and caulked', where he 'lives by candlelight' (I, i, 184-6), is both illusionistic and fully thematized. The mise-en-scène is cluttered with the trivialized paraphernalia of private life: cosmetics, crockery, and especially with the continual chatter of women and servants. The fortification itself makes the interior vulnerable to invasion.

By setting his representation of androgyny in these domestic interiors, Jonson reinterprets the theatrical convention of cross-dressing. The setting exerts a centripetal force over the action, pulling the characters into the narrow space of drawing rooms and bedchambers. Shakespeare's, Heywood's, and Middleton's cross-dressed heroines move into the world of public action, but when the collegiate ladies try to appropriate the public space of the masculine world, they must contend with this centripetal force, which leaves them both dislocated and ungendered. They are, Truewit exclaims,

an order between courtiers and country madams, that live from their husbands and give entertainment to all the Wits and Braveries o' the time, as they call 'em, cry down or up what they like or dislike in a brain or a fashion with most masculine or rather hermaphroditical authority.

(I, i, 75-80)

While the collegiates venture into traditionally masculine preserves, the male characters restrict themselves to the world of feminine concerns, avoiding politics for the otium of private life. Morose 'come[s] not to your public pleadings or your places of noise … for the mere avoiding of clamors and impertinencies of orators that know not how to be silent' (v, iii, 41-6); and while Morose flees from the hurly-burly of public life into a dark and silent domesticity, Clerimont 'can melt away his time … between his mistress abroad and his ingle at home' (I, i, 23-5).

Within this feminized space, the entry of the androgynous title character takes on the significance of espionage. The body of Epicoene is the comedy's locus of eros and dominance, and its layers of disguise and artifice are deployed strategically in the battle of the sexes. Epicoene first appears camouflaged as 'the silent woman', a rare creature whose modesty assures both her silence and her chastity. She is enclosed and domesticated—the ideal which the poetaster Daw evokes in his 'ballad, or madrigal of procreation':

To equate speech with masculinity and silence with feminine 'increase' makes women's speech tantamount to abortion. The vociferous collegiates, who have 'those excellent receipts … to keep … from bearing of children' (IV, iii, 57-8), become barren by their own act of violence.

This violence lends new significance to the patriarchal proverb, ' woman without a tongue is like a soldier without a weapon.' Words are indeed women's weapons in Epicoene, and conversation becomes a form of combat. This focus on verbal combat serves ideological ends, for if physical strength is not the criterion of force, a woman can more readily be represented as an aggressor who possesses the terrorist's advantage over the lumbering procedures of duly constituted authority. At the same time, verbal combat respects the theatrical resources of Whitefriars. The small stage of the private playhouses cannot easily accommodate the swashbuckling duels in which the Fortune and the Red Bull specialized. Jonson can afford to parody the bravura swordsmanship of the public playhouse in the mock duel of Daw and La Foole, for the symbolic violence of women's speech provides a verbal substitute for theatrical spectacle. Epicoene uses her tongue as Moll uses her sword: 'Why, did you think you had married a statue or a motion only?' she exclaims, and, 'I'll have none of this coacted, unnatural dumbness in my house, in a family where I govern' (III, iv, 37-8, 53-5). Morose's horror at this 'Amazonian impudence' (III, v, 41) measures his own egotism, for even Truewit must admit, 'she speaks but reason' (III, v, 42). Yet Morose underscores the comedy's equation of violence and female self-assertion. Quailing at Epicoene's gubernatorial ambitions, Morose does not compare her to the shrewish Xantippe, but to the warriors Semiramis and Penthesileia (III, iv, 57).

Act v exposes another layer of the artifice within which Epicoene's body is concealed. Dauphine delivers Morose from his marital fiasco by revealing that his bride is a boy. Neither the modest maiden nor the termagant wife exists, either within the dramatic fiction or on the Whitefriars stage. The images of delicate modesty and of aggressive sexuality are both exposed as male fantasies to which real women are demonstrably irrelevant.

In underscoring the absence of women as characters or players at the close of Epicoene, Jonson's comedy acknowledges that men have created this theatrical representation of femininity. At the same time, it also denies women any power to challenge those fantasies. Many playwrights have created theatrical worlds from which women are absent; Jonson has created a world in which they are unnecessary. As the body of the male actor emerges from the fantasized image of the female character, the economics of patrilineal inheritance emerge from the politics of androgyny. Threatened with losing his uncle's estate, Dauphine has been 'sick o'th uncle' (I, i, 143), as Truewit remarks, coining the name of Dauphine's malaise on analogy with 'mother', a common name for hysteria, or 'womb-sickness'. In replacing 'mother' with 'uncle', Truewit's metaphor suggests, and the play's conclusion reveals, that women are superfluous, even in the production of heirs. Dauphine will inherit from his uncle; the estate will derive through an exclusively male line.

The battle of the sexes has been merely a mock-battle. Beneath the costume of the shrewish wife is the body of the hired actor; beneath the battle of the sexes is a struggle between older and younger men for power and property. In the course of this struggle, the elder is unmanned. First he confesses impotence in the strategic fiction which he hopes will free him from his disastrous marriage: 'I am no man, ladies … Utterly unabled in nature, by reason of frigidity, to perform the duties or any the least office of a husband' (v, iv, 44-7). Then he acknowledges true impotence when he signs the papers which make Dauphine his heir: 'Come nephew, give me the pen. I will subscribe to anything, and seal what thou wilt for my deliverance' (v, iv, 198-200). Dauphine succeeds to the patriarchate, ending the social disorder which licenses unruly women. As Perseus deploys the acquiescent Amazons to rout the boisterous witches, Dauphine employs an actor's artificially feminized body to reinforce patriarchal authority over the coven of collegiate ladies. Morose had quailed at Epicoene's 'Amazonian impudence', but when her status is revealed, and the revelation also exposes Daw's and La Foole's false sexual boasts, Truewit praises Epicoene as an 'Amazon, the champion of the sex' (v, iv, 234-5). But Epicoene's revelation has in fact reinforced the patriarchal distinction between ruled and unruly women. 'You', Truewit tells the exposed braggarts, 'are they that when no merit or fortune can make you hope to enjoy their bodies, will yet lie with their reputations and make their fame suffer. Away you common moths of these and all ladies' honors' (v, iv, 237-40). Like the Amazons of The Masque of Queens, Epicoene plays the role of the phallic woman who enforces social restrictions on female sexuality. As she does, the 'hermaphroditical authority' of the collegiates, like the incantatory power of the witches, is lost: 'Madams,' Truewit exults, 'you are mute upon this new metamorphosis' (v, iv, 243-4).

There is still another layer to the artifice in which Epicoene's body is concealed. The Whitefriars production of Epicoene, like the Fortune production of The Roaring Girl, makes an extra-dramatic comment on its own representation of androgyny. Nathan Field, the leading player of the Children of the Revels and Jonson's protégé, created the role of Epicoene. Field, like Jonson, was the child of a minister who had died within months of his son's birth. When Field was first impressed for the Children of the Chapel, he became Jonson's Latin pupil. He began playing leading roles in Jonson's Cynthia's Revels and The Poetaster. Within a year of playing Epicoene, Field followed Jonson in the move from player to dramatist. His first comedy, Woman is a Weathercock, also produced at White-friars, exploits Jonsonian techniques and devices for a misogynistic satire. His next, Amends for Ladies, renews Jonson's challenge to the public playhouse representations of androgyny by recharacterizing Moll Cut-purse as a 'lewd impudent' and a monster 'without a sex' (II, i, 32, 36). When such a boy player reveals his identity, the theatrical fiction resonates with the actor's celebrity and his filial relationship to the dramatist. Jonson's comedy Epicoene was, in a common metaphor of poetic production, the dramatist's child; his character Epicoene, when played by Nathan Field, was also 'a son of Ben', a product of the paternal relations which form a recurrent motif in Jonson's life and works.

Through the joint enterprises of father and son, playwright and player, Dauphine and Epicoene, James and Perseus, Jonson assimilates androgynous warrior women into patriarchal politics. In The Roaring Girl, Middleton and Dekker exploit the swashbuckling traditions of the open stage and the recollection of Moll Frith to extend the theatrical convention of the cross-dressed heroine into a representation of physical violence which challenges the hierarchy of gender. In Epicoene, Jonson exploits the feminized space of the enclosed playhouse and the celebrity of Nathan Field to compress the convention into a representation of verbal combat which reinforces the hierarchy of gender. As Moll and Epicoene play the woman's part on their respective stages, they each incorporate new meanings into the theatrical convention of cross-dressing. The conflict between these meanings may remind us that we have not yet concluded whether androgyny will remain a male prerogative.