[In the following essay, Jardine examines the treatment of crossdressing in Twelfth Night, as well as the relationship between economic dependency and sexual availability in early modern England.]

Viola: He nam'd Sebastian. I my brother know
Yet living in my glass; even such and so
In favour was my brother, and he went
Still in this fashion, colour, ornament,
For him I imitate.

(3.4.389-93)²

[Ingling Pyander]
Walking the city, as my wonted use,
There was I subject to this foul abuse:
Troubled with many thoughts, pacing along,
It was my chance to shoulder in a throng;
Thrust to the channel I was, but crowding her,
I spied Pyander in a nymph's attire:
No nymph more fair than did Pyander seem,
Had not Pyander then Pyander been;
No Lady with a fairer face more grac'd,
But that Pyander's self himself defac'd;
Never was boy so pleasing to the heart
As was Pyander for a woman's part;
Never did woman foster such another,
As was Pyander, but Pyander's mother.
Fool that I was in my affection!
More happy I, had it been a vision;
So far entangled was my soul by love,
That force perforce I must Pyander move:
The issue of which proof did testify
Ingling Pyander's damnèd villainy.
O, so I was besotted by her words,
His words, that no part of a she affords!
For had he been a she, injurious boy,
I had not been so subject to annoy.(3)

This paper¹ tries to accommodate some of the apparently contradictory currents stirred by these two cross-dressing passages, to provide a single, coherent version of the erotic possibilities contained under a kind of rubric of transvestism in the early modern period. For, in the current text-critical literature, we seem to be being told both that these are texts of sexual fantasy, disturbing and transgressive, and that these texts record some ‘actual’ possibility for individualized, subversive affirmation of sexuality.⁴ I do not myself believe we shall ever know how many cross-dressed youths and young women were to be found on the streets of London around 1600, but I do believe that it is possible to show that the distinctive ways in which the textual imputation of their existence function in the various narratives which have come down to us can be resolved into a consistent positioning of dominant to dependent member of the early modern community.⁵

I have, of course, spoken about cross-dressing before, in Still Harping on Daughters (Jardine 1983). But that was in the context of an argument specifically focused on the irrelevance of any detectable emotional intensity associated with the cross-dressed boy-player to any reconstruction, on the basis of the drama of the age of Shakespeare, of a peculiarly female early modern intensity of feeling. Here my argument will be differently focused: upon the way in which, in the early modern period, erotic attention—an attention bound up with sexual availability and historically specific forms of economic dependency—is focused upon boys and upon women in the same way. So that, crucially, sexuality signifies as absence of difference as it is inscribed upon the bodies of those equivalently ‘mastered’ within the early modern household, and who are placed homologously in relation to that household's domestic economy. Inside the household, I shall argue, dependent youths and dependent women are expected to ‘submit’, under the order of familial authority, to those above them. And the strong ideological hold of the patriarchal household ensures that, in the space outside the household—in the newer market economy whose values govern the street and the public place—the tropes which produce structural dependency as vulnerability and availability are readily mobilized to police the circulation of young people.

Outside the household, the freely circulating woman is ‘loose’ (uncontained)—is strictly ‘out of place’,⁶ and her very comeliness in conjunction with her unprotectedness (no male kin with her) signifies as availability (as it continues, residually, to do today). And outside the household the dependent boy (the ‘youth’) is also constructed, via the patriarchal household, as ‘at risk’—more legitimately in transit on ‘business’, but also, in his transactional availability, sexually vulnerable.⁷ In the street, the bodies of the boy and the unmarried woman elide as they carry the message of equivalent sexual availability—male and female prostitution is represented textually (and probably fantasized communally) as transvestism. The boy discovered as a girl reveals her availability for public intercourse; the girl dis-covered as a boy reveals that intention to sodomy for financial gain.⁸ The boy who walks the street cross-dressed as that comely girl (whether in reality or in fantasy/grotesque fiction) does not, therefore, misrepresent himself—he conceals (and then reveals) the range of sexual possibilities available. The girl who enters the male preserve (ordinary, tavern or gaming-house) cross-dressed does not misrepresent herself, either. She is, in any case, ‘loose’, and eases the process of crossing the threshold into the male domain—controls the manner of presenting herself in a suitable location for paid sex.⁹

I suggest that the way in which dependency functions in relation to representations of the sexual in early modern English culture is vital to a suitably historicized reading of cross-dressing and gender confusion in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.¹⁰ Here I shall try to show this set of relations in operation in the complex gender doubling and twinning of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

‘The household was the classic form of patriarchy’, writes Alan Bray (1982: 51). In the period with which we are concerned, ‘family’ and ‘household’, as descriptions of the ordered unit for communal living, designate groupings which include both close and distant kin, and a range of non-kin.¹¹ There is a constant ‘drift of young persons’ (as David Herlihy calls it), a flow of young adolescents into and out of the wealthier households—both of distant kin, and of non-kin in ‘service’.¹² And, in addition to the body of young well-to-do dependents in the wealthy household, there were numbers of adolescent servants: ‘The great majority of the adolescent population probably entered some form of service or apprenticeship’, writes Ralph Houlbrooke. In Ealing, in 1599, about a quarter of the total population of 427 was in service of some kind (1984: 173).¹³ Of the eighty-five households in Ealing, ‘a staggering 34.2 per cent of them contained one or more servants’ (Bray 1982: 50-1). Finally, ‘in the upper and middle ranks of society children were commonly sent away from home to another household’ (Houlbrooke 1984: 150), as part of their education. (Whilst they resided in Calais, the Lisles placed two of their daughters with French families of a wealth and status corresponding to their own (St Clare Byrne 1985: 126-7). ‘The patriarchal household with its servants was an institution that touched the lives of an immense number of people’ (to quote Bray again); ‘it was an institution that necessarily influenced the sexual lives of those who lived within it’ (1982: 51). That patriarchal household exercised its considerable authority and wielded its extensive economic power predominately over young men and women between the ages of 14 and 24.

It is against this kind of background that Susan Amussen locates patriarchal authority at the most fundamental levels of consciousness-formation in the period:

[The catechism] asserted that the family was the fundamental social institution, and that order in families was both necessary for and parallel to, order in the state. In the catechism, this idea is developed in the discussion of the Fifth Commandment, to ‘honour thy father and mother’. The 1559 Prayer Book's catechism … summarized …

My duty towards my neighbour is to love him as myself, and to do to all men as I would they should do unto me: to love, honour, and succour my father and mother: to honour and obey the King and all that are put in authority under him: to submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters: to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters: … to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do my duty in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call me.

(1988: 35-6)¹⁵

In the middle to upper ranks of society, deference and submissiveness were internalized in the form of ‘good manners’:

In a society in which service was the most important avenue to advancement at all levels, one of the most essential skills was the ability to make oneself acceptable to superiors. … Marks of respect to be shown in conversation with superiors included baring the head, dropping the right knee, keeping silence till spoken to, listening carefully and answering sensibly and shortly. Compliance with commands was to be immediate, response to praise heartily grateful.

(Houlbrooke 1984: 147)¹⁶

For dependent youth, obedience was both a condition of their economic support, and an internalized state.

In 1630, Meredith Davy of Minehead, was prosecuted for sodomy at the Somerset Court of Quarter Sessions.

According to the evidence of his master's apprentice, a boy ‘aged twelve years or thereabouts’ called John Vicary, with whom he shared a bed, Davy had been in the habit of having sexual relations with the boy on Sunday and holiday nights after he had been drinking; eventually the boy cried out and Davy ended up before the Justices.

(Bray 1982: 48)

As Bray glosses this:

The young apprentice would have had a lower standing in the household than Davy, who was an adult; and it was presumably this which encouraged him—wrongly as it turned out—to think that he could take advantage of the boy. It is an important point. In a household of any substantial size the distinction in their status would have been only one of a series of such distinctions; it was part of the nature of the household itself. The household was a hierarchical institution, in which each of its members had a clearly defined position. It was also a patriarchal institution, in which the pre-eminent position was that of the master; and the distinction in status between master and servant was in some respects a model for distinctions between the servants themselves.

(ibid.)

And, if we stay with this case just a little longer, once the alleged social transgression had taken place, the outcome of the discovery and prosecution seems to support the view that such activity was regarded as only slightly beyond the boundaries set on allowable demands for ‘submission’ from one considerably lower in the social hierarchy of the household.¹⁷

Richard Bryant, the servant who slept in the room with Davy and the boy … eventually took the matter to the mistress of the household, but it is striking as one reads his evidence how long it took him to realize what was going on and how reluctant he is likely to appear to us now to have been to draw the obvious conclusions.

(Bray 1982: 77)

Finally, at the end of the boy, John Vinlay's, evidence, he notes: ‘since which time [Davy] hath layn quietly with him’. In other words, household life continued unchanged—the boy continued to share a bed with (hence, to be in a position of submission to) the alleged assaulter. Davy himself ‘denieth that he ever used any unclean action with the said boy as they lay in bed together; and more he sayeth not’ (Bray 1982: 69).¹⁸

In Twelfth Night the twin siblings, Viola and Sebastian, are of good family and fatherless.¹⁹ They are, therefore, obliged to become dependent on households other than those of their own close kin. Indeed, one might argue that finding a place in the domestic economy of a household other than that of their family of birth is the initiation of the drama—they are shipwrecked on an unspecified voyage, and voyages are (in narrative) conventionally quests or searches.²⁰ In addition to the careful specification of their being orphaned before the age of majority (‘when Viola from her birth / Had numbered thirteen years’), the audience are persistently reminded of the extreme youth of both twins (since each resembles the other so completely):

Olivia: Of what personage and years is he?
Mal: Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy: as a squash is before 'tis a peascod, or a codling when 'tis almost an apple. 'Tis with him as standing water, between boy and man. He is very well-favoured, and he speaks very shrewishly. One would think his mother's milk were scarce out of him.

(1.5.157-64)²¹

After the shipwreck, the first objective of the siblings is to transform their state from vagrancy to service (or, possibly, from wage-labour to service—Sebastian's ‘gets’ Antonio's purse, while Viola's relationship with the captain is constructed as a cash-transaction).²² Both twins make immediately for the court of the Duke who ‘governs here’. Both exchange their non-renewable cash assets (Viola's purse; Sebastian's borrowed purse) for the security of ‘service’ within a wealthy household (‘I'll serve this duke’ (1.3.55); ‘I am bound to the Count Orsino's court’ (2.2.41-2)). Viola's cross-dressing eases her way into Orsino's service.²³ Sebastian, mis-taken for Cesario, takes Olivia to be spontaneously offering an invitation to enter her service—an invitation he accepts as the very ‘dream’ he wished for: ‘Go with me to my house … would thou'dst be rul'd by me!’ (4.1.53,63).²⁴

The eroticization of Viola/Cesario and of Sebastian is dramatically constructed in terms of their relationship to the domestic economy, and the place they occupy in relation to the heads of their adopted households. In the case of both Cesario's and Sebastian's ‘place’, this is fraught with erotic possibility in the very process of being established as ‘service’ (something which by now we might expect, in the light of the discussion of the early modern household at the beginning of this paper). The audience is entirely aware of the ambiguity in Sebastian's ‘retention’ by Olivia—he reads it as an invitation to enter her service, she offers it as a profession of passionate, sexual love and a marriage proposal. But Orsino's attachment to his new ‘young gentleman’, Cesario, is no less charged with erotic possibilities:

Val.: If the Duke continue these favours towards you, Cesario, you are like to be much advanced. …
Viola: You either fear his humour, or my negligence, that you call in question the continuance of his love. Is he inconstant, sir, in his favours?

(1.4.1-8)

‘Love’ here hovers dangerously between the mutual bond of service and passionate emotional attachment.²⁵ And the confusions possible in the Orsino/Viola service relationship are clinched shortly thereafter:

Duke: O then unfold the passion of my love,
Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith;
It shall become thee well to act my woes:
She will attend it better in thy youth,
Than in a nuncio's of more grave aspect.
Viola: I think not so, my lord.
Duke: Dear lad, believe it;
For they shall yet belie thy happy years,
That say thou art a man; Diana's lip
Is not more smooth and rubious: thy small pipe
Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman's part.
I know thy constellation is right apt
For this affair …
… Prosper well in this,
And thou shalt live as freely as thy lord,
To call his fortunes thine.
Viola: I'll do my best
To woo your lady: [Aside] yet, a barful strife!
Who'er I woo, myself would be his wife.

(1.5.24-42)

As Orsino eroticizes Viola in relation to Olivia he specifies the possibilities for eroticizing his own attention to the ‘small pipe’ and the ‘maiden's organ’ of the preferred youth in his service. As ‘pipe’ and ‘organ’ are ‘semblative a woman's part’ they position Cesario as desired dependent of Orsino—as available for his own sexual pleasure. So that when Orsino takes the hand of Cesario, at the close of the play, and claims her as his sexual partner, he does no more than confirm the terms of his original engagement with his ‘young gentleman’:

Duke: Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times
Thou never should'st love woman like to me.
Viola: And all those sayings will I over-swear,
And all those swearings keep as true in soul
As doth that orbed continent the fire
That severs day from night.
Duke: Give me thy hand,
And let me see thee in thy woman's weeds.

(15.1.265-71)²⁶

Of course, the erotic twist in Twelfth Night is achieved by the irony that it is Olivia—the lady of significant independent means and a disinclination to submit herself and her lands to any ‘master’²⁷—whose eroticized relationship of ‘service’ with Cesario is most socially and sexually transgressive. I think critics are right in seeing this as Olivia's ‘come-uppance’—patriarchy's retribution for mis-taking the conventions both of service and of marriage as a female head of household in an order explicitly designated male in its defining relationships.²⁸

In the resolution of the play, however, the easy redeployment of the erotic possibilities of Viola's and Sebastian's service to the households of Orsino and Olivia, respectively, literally resolves the union of the two lines. At the end of the play, the marriages of the twin siblings to Olivia and Orsino effect what Orsino's courtship of Olivia was originally designed to achieve—the Orsino and Olivia households enter into a kin relationship with one another:

Olivia: My lord, so please you, these things further thought on,
To think me as well a sister, as a wife,
One day shall crown th'alliance on't so please you,
Here at my house, and at my proper cost.
Duke: Madam, I am most apt t'embrace your offer.
[To Viola] Your master quits you; and for your service done him,
So much against the mettle of your sex,
So far beneath your soft and tender breeding,
And since you call'd me master for so long,
Here is my hand; you shall from this time be
Your master's mistress.
Olivia: A sister! you are she.

(5.1.315-25)

The happy ending is one in which the erotic potential of service is appropriately contained within the admissible boundaries of the patriarchal household—dependent women ‘mastered’ by husbands or brothers; dependent boys elevated by marriage into masters and heads of households themselves (even desired dependent girls regulated into dependent younger sisters). But, to return to my opening remarks, this is romance—a fictional resolution in which insuperable problems are superable, convenient twinning can iron out the crumpled social fabric of early modern life. In the street, the problem remains—the troubling possibility, ‘in a throng’, that those who appear to be available in the market place, gender-wise, are not what they seem (either are not available, but in transit between households, or are cross-dressed and marketing sodomy for female prostitution, female prostitution for boy-playing). In the market place, the disreputable sexual favours sought from passing, available ‘youth’ blatantly fail to comply with the procreative requirements of reputable, marital intercourse. And the very confusion which hovers around desirability surely points to the historic specificity of early modern eroticism. Eroticism, in the early modern period, is not gender-specific, is not grounded in the sex of the possibly ‘submissive’ partner, but is an expectation of that very submissiveness. As twentieth-century readers we recognize the eroticism of gender confusion, and reintroduce that confusion as a feature of the dramatic narrative. Whereas, for the Elizabethan theatre audience, it may be the very clarity of the mistakenness—the very indifference to gendering—which is designed to elicit the pleasurable response from the audience.²⁹

Notes

1. Since I wrote this paper, Alan Bray published his crucial article on homosexuality and male friendship in Elizabethan England (1990: 1-19). I have also benefited from discussion of a draft of this paper with Alan Bray, and wish to express my gratitude to him.

2. All references to Twelfth Night are to the Arden edition.

3. Thomas Middleton, ‘Micro-Cynicon’ (1599), in Bullen 8, 1886: 131-3. I am grateful to Bray (1982), in whose work I first found reference to this poem.

4. For the transgressive version see, most recently and convincingly, Dollimore (1986: 53-81). For the ‘actual’ affirmation version see Rose (1984: 367-91); and Howard (1988: 418-40).

5. Most of the textual accounts of cross-dressing (whether on the stage or in the street), like the ‘Ingling’ verse just cited and the Rainolds poem I use in Still Harping on Daughters, are clearly already adjusted to the fictional tropes of cross-dressing/illicit desire. Even sumptuary rules (as cited by Howard and others) aspire to control excesses which threaten good order—which is to say, dress which signifies, on which disorder is inscribed. The deposition relating to Mary Frith is a good example of the textual difficulties: in the record (whose narrative shape is controlled by the recording clerk and ‘his Lordship’, the bishop (?) who interrogates), the ‘immodest and lascivious speeches’, and ‘shame of her sexe’ collides with the slender textual traces of her refusal to accept the charge ‘being pressed’, ‘whether she had not byn dishonest of her body & hath not also drawne other women to lewdnes by her perswasions & by carrying her self lyke a bawde’. To cross-dress is to signify as (to ‘carry oneself’ as) a bawd (deposition transcribed in full in Mulholland 1987: 262-3). The spate of ‘Moll Frith’ plays which accompanied her court appearance seize upon the event's bawdy potential (Mulholland 1987: 13)—for example, by suggesting she might ‘take her own part’ in the play (which ‘part’, and how related to stage cross-dressing?) and that she would play the viol on stage (the lewd possibilities of viol playing are considerable, as Howard points out in her essay for this volume). In a paper for the 1989 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Stallybrass quoted Augustin Philips's will in which he left his apprentice various specified desirable items of clothing, and his ‘bass viol’. Here too it seems possible that the legacy has been adjusted to the tropes of (intimate) devoted service—the bass viol and the shared items of dress connoting the closeness of the master-servant relationship.

6. It is fascinating that this exactly corresponds to Mary Douglas's ‘dirt is matter out of place’ (1966).

7. See R. Ascham, The Scholemaster, and its ‘morals’ source, Xenophon's Cyropaedia. I am extremely grateful to Lorna Hutson for making the vulnerability of the ‘youth’ clear to me, and for all the helpful discussion we had on this paper.

8. Throughout this paper I use the contemporary term ‘sodomy’ rather than the nineteenth-century ‘homosexuality’, or any of its cognates. In this I follow Bray (1982: 13-14), and Bullough in Bullough and Brundage (1982: 55-71).

9. To see how far back this goes as a fictionalizing of ‘loose’ women transgressively entering the male preserve see Knighton's Chronicon (1348), quoted in Rickert (1949: 217). I am grateful to Rob Pope for bringing this passage to my attention.

10. This, I now think, is a more correct version of what I wrote earlier: ‘The dependent role of the boy player doubles for the dependency which is women's lot, creating a sensuality which is independent of the sex of the desired figure, and which is particularly erotic when the sex is confused’ (1983: 24).

11. For a clear account of the consistent use of the terms ‘family’ and ‘household’ to designate those who cohabit under a single roof, as dependants of one adult male in the eighteenth century see Tadmor (1989). In Bray (1982), see especially the clear account on pp. 44-6.

12. ‘The overall pattern in the circulation of members between [households of specified levels of wealth, in fifteenth-century Florence] was similar for men and for women, but there are also some significant differences in the movements of the two sexes. The richest households tend to gather in both boys and girls as they age, from birth up to their middle teens. At exact age 15, the 25 per cent of wealthy households contain 45 per cent of the boys and 43.5 per cent of the girls (as opposed to 39 per cent and 35 per cent respectively of the cohort of babies, age 0-2). This drift of children primarily means that wealthy households were taking in orphaned relatives. The incoming children probably also included many young relatives who had lost their fathers, and whose mothers had remarried and deserted them [sic]. The mother joined the household of her new husband, but usually did not take her children with her. The kindred of her late husband had to look to their care. … If we had data on servants and apprentices [registered with their household of birth in the Florentine census] we would undoubtedly observe an even more massive drift of young persons into and out of the homes of the wealthy. We know from other sources that “life-cycle” servants were numerous at Florence, as widely in traditional society. These young people, girls especially, spent their years of late childhood in service; they thereby earned their keep and accumulated from their earnings the dowry they needed for marriage’ (Herlihy 1985: 153).

13. See Laslett in Laslett and Wall (1972: 125-58, table, 130). See also Wall (1978).

14. Data from Laslett and Wall. See also Beier (1985: 22-6); and Laslett's introduction, passim, for the complexity of the early modern household or family.

15. See also Bray (1982: 45), and the work in progress on early modern adolescence and service by Paul Griffiths (Clare College, Cambridge), especially his unpublished paper, 1990.

16. For the classic statement see Laslett (1972: 10): ‘The seventeenth century patriarchal family had many of the characteristics of the patriarchal household. It included not only wife and children, but often younger brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces: male superiority and primogeniture were unquestioned. Most striking was the presence of very large numbers of servants, whose subjection to the head of household was absolute.’

17. For a brilliant account of the ambiguities concerning the relationship between service and sexual favours contained within the early modern patriarchal household, see Cynthia Herrup's paper on the trial of the Earl of Castlehaven. I read this paper while I was working on my own, and Herrup's argument was tremendously helpful in sharpening my own perception of the relationship between household dependency and the construction of sexuality.

18. On sexual exploitation of servants in general see, most recently, Amussen (1988: 159). In Othello, the shared bed in service, used by Iago to enflame Othello's jealousy, fully exploits the sexual availability of the bedfellow: ‘I lay with Cassio lately, … In sleep I heard him say “Sweet Desdemona, / Let us be wary, let us hide our loves;” / And then, sir, would he … kiss me hard, / As if he pluck'd up kisses by the roots, / That grew upon my lips, then laid his leg / Over my thigh, and sigh'd, and kiss'd’ (3.3. 419-31).

19. There is a steady, interesting insistence in the text on the good birth of the twins, and on their having full purses at their disposal. This seems to place them pivotally between the household economy and that of the market place. Although employment in the former was, historically, as precarious as that in the latter (wage-labour), there is no question that in the play-text only the household is seen as a suitable ‘place’ for Viola and Sebastian. On wage-labour versus service see Beier (1985).

20. ‘My father was that Sebastian of Messaline whom I know you have heard of. He left behind him myself and a sister, both born in an hour’ (2.1.16-19); ‘My father … died that day when Viola from her birth / Had numbered thirteen years’; ‘O, that record is lively in my soul! / He finished indeed his mortal act / That day that made my sister thirteen years’ (5.1.240-6).

21. See also the Duke's emphasis on the extreme youth of Cesario when he cautions him against marrying an older woman (2.4.24-39). In the same passage the Duke calls Viola ‘boy’. Sebastian (mirror-image of the cross-dressed Viola) is consistently referred to as ‘youth’ (for example 3.4.368).

22. See Beier (1985) for a gloss on the security of service versus the insecurity of waged labour (the temporarily full purse).

23. It perfectly fulfils the trope of serving devotion, as represented in saints' lives and romance. See Jardine (1983).

24. In terms of tropes, here is the moralizers' trope of the vulnerable boy captured in service by dominating female householders. See Ascham, and of course, Plautus's Menaechmi and Secchi's Gl'Ingannati (both of which link this play with A Comedy of Errors). In Two Gentlemen of Verona the two tropes are run into one, when Julia takes the name Sebastian (a straightforward signifier of male dependency and vulnerability) in order to pursue her fickle lover in faithful service. See Beier (1985: 22): ‘Regarding [living-in service] we are told that the master/servant relationship was the lynch-pin of a patriarchal society in which “every relationship could be seen as a love-relationship”.’

25. In the source story the heroine, dressed as a boy, fears she may be asked by her master for ‘bedroom favours’. For a related discussion of the ambiguities of ‘love’ in the context of patronage see Barrell (1988: 18-43) on ‘love’ and patronage in Shakespeare's sonnet 29.

26. I think the ‘woman's weeds’ line is quite close in its possibilities to the seductively transgressive Pyander.

27. John Manningham's diary (1602) records a performance he saw of the play: ‘A good practise in it to make the steward beleeue his Lady widdowe was in Loue w^th him by counterfayting a lett^r / as from his Lady in generall tearmes telling him what shee liked best in him / and p[re]scribing his gesture in smiling his apparraile / &c./. And then when he came to practise making him beleeue they tooke him to be mad’ (Arden Twelfth Night, xxvi). Manningham's mistaken memory (‘widow’ when Olivia in fact mourns the deaths of her father and brother) confirms the fact that as a figure she is recognizably the independent woman of means whose own will and desires figure troublingly strongly in choice of husband (and thus, continuation of the paternal line).

28. Olivia's femaleness is also the cause of her steward Malvolio's mis-taking their service relationship as passionate ‘love’.

29. So, my final note addresses the vexed question of Middleton's The Roaring Girl. On this reading, Moll is neither male nor female, or both male and female, confusing the several traditions which represent economic dependency via cross-dressing in private and in public. So the joke about the promise that Moll herself would come and play her own part in the play, in place of the boy who ‘actually’ takes it, is that it simply makes no difference to the ‘performance’. Either way, that figure is replete with erotic potential.

Works Cited

Amussen, S. (1988) An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England, Oxford: Blackwell.

Barrell, J. (1988) ‘Editing out: the discourse of patronage and Shakespeare's twenty-ninth sonnet’, in J. Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 18-43.

Beier, A. L. (1985) Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640, London: Methuen.

Bray, A. (1982) Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 2nd edn 1988, London: Gay Men's Press.

———. (1990) ‘Homosexuality and the signs of male friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop Journal 29: 1-19.

Bullough, V. L. (1982) ‘The sin against nature and homosexuality’, in V. L. Bullough and J. Brundage (eds), Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, Buffalo, New York: Prometheus, 55-71.

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Jardine, L. (1983) Still Harping on Daughters, 2nd edn 1989, Brighton: Harvester.

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Mulholland, P. (ed.) (1987) The Roaring Girl, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Quaife G. R. (1979) Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England, London: Croom Helm.

Rickert, E. (1949) Chaucer's World, London: Oxford University Press.

Rose, M. B. (1984) ‘Women in men's clothing: apparel and social stability in The Roaring Girl’, English Literary Renaissance 14, 3: 367-91.

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