SOURCE: "The Figure of Woman," in Guise and Disguise: Rhetoric and Characterization in the English Renaissance, University of Toronto Press, 1993, pp. 129-66, 204-11.

[In the essay that follows, Davis examines Shakespeare's use of transsexual disguise.]

A woman's face with Nature's own hand
  painted
Hast thou, the master mistress of my
  passion;
             William Shakespeare, Sonnet 20

Thus is the manifest and exalted, even as she is masked and lost, in discursive parades that set her outside her self; ideally offered to the oratorical disputes between men.

Luce Irigaray The Speculum of the Other Woman

I

Near the end of her essay on disguise in Elizabethan drama, M.C. Bradbrook asserts that after Shakespeare stopped writing for the stage the 'deeper implications of disguise … did not long survive,' suggesting that dissembling characters could no longer aptly represent issues of selfhood and identity. Even by 1609 a certain predictability is found in the motif. The example is taken from Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster. 'Bellario's true sex is not revealed till the end, though by this time any theatrical page might be assumed to be a woman in disguise.'¹ In this view it seems that an audience accustomed to stage effects and plot twists, its sophistication registered in the exclusive cost of attending the private theatres, automatically expects such reversals of appearance and persona. Many plays in the period show the donning of transvestite garb and include complaints against the distresses of sexual disguise. The heroine of Lyly's Gallathea laments, 'O woulde the gods had made mee as I seeme to be, or that I might safelie bee what I seeme not'; Shakespeare's Viola declaims, 'Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness.'² In these confessional asides, the process of sexual dissemblance is made a thematic issue. With the recurring treatment of the processes and dilemmas of cross-dressing, even for plays like Epicoene and Philaster where the cross-dresser is disguised from the start, the impact seems to reside less in startling revelations than in a gradual build-up and complication of familiar issues and theatrical tropes.

In performance a 'theatrical competence' shared by spectator and actor could emphasize such themes and consider gender as a key part of the dramatic process.³ Transvestite roles could be exaggerated to remind the audience who is and isn't wearing the pants. Numerous scenes allow for such emphasis: Lyly has Gallathea and Phillida try to learn from each other how boys behave; Shakespeare provides the comic duel between Cesario and Aguecheek; Ganymede embarrassingly faints when hearing of Orlando's wound; and Epicoene could swagger every now and then. No doubt there were extra insights and pleasures to be gained for those who watched and didn't suspend disbelief. And perhaps the more readily these insights were had, the more they were to be enjoyed: in recognizing the male actor beneath a female character impersonating a man, or beneath a male character who pretends to be a woman; glimpsing roles and identities baroquely but not opaquely layered on top of and relativizing each other. On account of these frequently compounding theatrical cues—the sort of plot and character reversals that Virginia Woolf wryly uses to exemplify the Elizabethan period in Between the Acts—Bradbrook infers that androgynous disguise was, if not passé, a generic commonplace that audiences anticipated, understood, and were satisfied to see again.⁴

The period's continuing religious and moral debates over theatricality, disguise, and 'excesse of Apparrell,'⁵ especially in reference to sexuality and gender, undermine this thesis of pervasive acceptance of dramatic cross-dressing. The plays' cultural context informs their critical perception. As Jean Howard has recently noted, theatricality and dress were often seen to challenge an 'official ideology of social stasis' that sought to rein-force gender and class distinctions.⁶ A well-known Elizabethan exchange over theatrical cross-dressing had pitted Rainolds against Gager and Gentili, the former arguing that 'even the shortest use of women's clothing is sufficient to stir up unclean passions' in both actors and audience. Rainolds combines homophobic and misogynist themes to attack a 'lust' compounded by seeing boys dressed as women.⁷

This dispute over theatrical costume exemplifies conservative religious-moral disapproval and suspicion towards fashion in the period. The 'Homilie against Excesse of Apparrell' warns of the threats to social rank: 'that euery man behold and consider his owne vocation, in as much as GOD hath appointed euery man his degree and office, within the limittes whereof it behoueth him to keepe himself. Therefore all may not looke to weare like appareil, but euery one according to his degree, as GOD hath placed him' (103). It goes on to reveal both a specific focus against women's dress and sexual desire, citing the patristic source of Tertullian, and an anxious concern over the blurring of gender distinctions through the disguisings of fashion: 'For the proude and haughtie stomacks of the daughters of England, are so maintained with diuers disguised sortes of costly appareil, that as Tertullian an auncient father saith, there is left no difference in appareil betweene an honest matrone and a common strumpet. Yea many men are become so effeminate, that they care not what they spend in disguising, euer desiring new toyes and inuenting new fashions' (105). The disputes over costume and fashion were to grow in number and intensity under the Stuarts, less on account of a rising tide of puritanism than, as Margot Heinemann points out, because of the increasingly complex array of cultural, political, and religious attitudes that theatre and fashion were taken as signifying.⁸ Though cross-dressing may have begun to lose dramatic surprise, perhaps to the point of being predicted by theatre audiences, it retained an urgent social significance that could circumscribe the throne, with Prynne being punished for slandering the queen in Histriomastix.

These opposing social functions and effects of dress, cross-dressing, and theatricality reveal their complicated relation to the period's sexual politics. On the one hand, dramatic transvestism might be seen to challenge cultural impositions of gender and identity. Such is Phyllis Rackin's view that in 'inverting the offstage associations, stage illusion radically subverted the gender divisions of the Elizabethan world.'⁹ In these critical terms, the attacks and pronouncements against theatricality and dress respond to such subversive gestures. On the other hand, gender divisions may not have been as rigid as some critics might suggest; the concerns of the homilies seem to acknowledge that more flexible images of sexual identity were in social circulation outside the theatre. In addition, the place of the stage was shifting from the liberties of 'whatever could not be contained within the strict bounds of the community'¹⁰ to a more central, fixed locus, with the opening of private theatres complementing court performances, shows at the Inns of Court, and royal and mayoral processions. Along with this shift, images of transsexual disguise seem to have been being accommodated if not co-opted by an urban ideology that was starting to fragment and limit rituals of inversion and misrule¹¹ and to reconsider the social roles of women as attitudes towards marriage and the family began to alter.¹²

Despite definitive interpretations by modern critics, then, dramatic cross-dressing frequently evades univocal readings as either subversive or stabilizing. It may work normatively or transgressively, within the theatre and without, representing the range of cultural functions that gender performs. Specific attitudes towards androgyny as a type of worrying deviance are doubtless being worked through in the hybrid figures of dramatic cross-dressing. Yet as the contradictory evaluations of these androgynous images suggest, they also serve to convey and question general myths and concerns about sexuality. As Harold Garfinkel affirms in his study of sexual passing, the 'intersexed' figure discloses the 'omnirelevance of sexual statuses to affairs of daily life' by compressing, juxtaposing, and disturbing a 'community of understandings' that would envisage sexuality as 'a natural fact of life,' and in so doing efface it 'as a natural and moral fact of life.'¹³ Dramatic androgyny, which Bradbrook and other seem to consider a predictable reversal of either dramatic or social personae, is more interestingly used to stage the complex ambiguities of sexuality and the social construction of gender. It interrogates conventionalized cultural and literary discourses through which apparently straight male and female characters can be depicted.¹⁴

In introducing practices of expedient change that are socially and personally motivated, transvestite disguise undermines commonsense presumptions of gender as a 'temporally identical thing over all historical and prospective circumstance and possible experiences … the self-same thing in essence.'¹⁵ It relates sexual identity to the ethopoetic processes of characterization and so opens up questions concerning the motives that underlie sexuality and the desires that interact with gender. The juxtaposing of a 'natural' and a disguised sexual ethos suggests the dialogic conflict between essentialist and sophistical notions of selfhood. Particularly in plays of the period, where confusions among characters are commonly reconciled by confessions of 'true' selfhood, the interpersonal and social stakes of gender are highlighted. Reviled and accepted, socially marginalized and enclosed, androgynous disguise concentrates a contested ideology of sexual identity. In so doing, and as the repeated references of the homily on apparel to the Bible and to Tertullian suggest, it rehearses feminist and misogynist themes from the classical and Christian canons and enables many Renaissance texts to engage this discursive context. As well as being a familiar theatrical device and social concern, cross-dressing figures in a textual tradition of gendered characterization and the rhetorical construction of sexuality. This tradition will be examined in this chapter by considering the connections dramatic cross-dressing has, first with the rhetorical practices of epideixis and misogyny, both of which seek to presume and construct unambiguous gender roles, and then with an androgynous ethos that emerges in a range of Renaissance texts through the speech act of confession. A text's confessional revelation may serve more to question the determined gender that its preceding discourse of character has already presumed than finally to confirm its characters' sexual identities.

The structure of the androgynous figure is metonymic. It represents the interchange of parts and names of identities. The deep ethopoetic reference of rhetoric, implicit in the conception of the 'proper' as that which is self-sufficient and self-possessed, re-emerges in the disruptions to univocal meaning and identity that Elizabethan definitions of metonymy note:

when a word hath a proper signification of the owne, and being referred to an other thing, hath an other meaning.¹⁶

Metonimia, when of things that be nigh together, wee put one name for another.¹⁷

Through these definitions, metonymy may either exchange meanings or, by virtue of its marked rhetoricity, reaffirm 'proper' meaning.¹⁸ It inscribes the dialogic process of androgyny, for in terms of gender, cross-dressing relocates social-sexual roles, parts, and names, with similarly ambiguous effects of stabilization and subversion.

In the deeper rhetorical logic that informs many Renaissance texts, however, the conventional, naturalized order of gender and discourse is based on man, and woman signifies a deviation from masculine essence.

Ian Maclean has traced this order to the hierarchical thinking of Aristotelian metaphysics:

In the distinction of male and female may be discerned Aristotle's general tendency to produce dualities in which one element is superior and the other inferior. The male principle in nature is associated with active, formative and perfected characteristics, while the female is passive, material and deprived, desires the male in order to become complete. The duality male/female is therefore paralleled by the dualities active/passive, form/matter, act/potency, perfection/imperfection, completion/incompletion, possession/deprivation.¹⁹

We might add a further parallel, the rhetorical duality of the proper and the figurative, with its implications for self-representation. In this opposition, woman embodies figurative speech; she is the rhetorically improper persona who may disrupt or confirm the categories of gendered ethos.

Typically, this metonymic femaleness structures androgyny in two ways. First, it may disguise maleness and cause androgyny, as in the induction to The Taming of the Shrew, 'if the boy have not a woman's gift / To rain a shower of commanded tears, / An onion will do well for such a shift' (Ind i.124-6). Here the onion is not only an external prop that enables the boy to act like a woman; it also signifies the dissembled guise of crying that women characteristically assume to produce certain emasculating effects upon men. Secondly, femaleness emerges through the guise of 'masculine usurp'd attire' and forms the end point of androgyny.²⁰ In each case, a prior male ethos is corrupted by a belated feminizing that metonymically constructs androgyny.²¹ Femaleness can be the cause of androgyny, as in Taming, or its effect, as in Twelfth Night and Philaster. In both cases, the possibility of corruption confirms the prior presence and wholeness of the male ethos. The causal exchange in these examples reifies an original maleness and woman's belated figurai function. Such logic is also metonymic in structure, as one of Peacham's examples of the trope suggests: 'when the efficient cause is understood of the effect … when the effect is gathered by the efficient.' This interchangeable causality reinforces the function of androgyny as a rhetorical motif in texts of the period, one that affects their discursive logic and tropes.²²

The metonymie structure engenders the proper order of meaning, wherein a privileged 'male' tenor holds an essential priority as 'the underlying idea or principal subject which the vehicle or figure means.'²³ This order posits the representing female figure as a supplement to the 'principal subject.' The underlying meaning of maleness is displaced into a feminized and feminizing figurai discourse and acquires a consequent androgyny in its characterization. The logic intrinsic to this rhetoric again works with ambiguous cultural effects. On the one hand, it may envisage an original male ideal as threatened by the figurai self-difference introduced through an emasculating vehicle or trope. On the other hand, this rhetorical logic may also function to grant masculinist discourse a presence and an influence that are based upon the absence of an archetypal androgynous figure. Such seems to be the moral of Aristophanes' myth of the hermaphroditic origins of sexual love in the Symposium: 'So you see, gentlemen, how far back we can trace our innate love for one another, and how this love is always trying to redintegrate our former nature, to make two into one, and to bridge the gulf between one human being and another.'²⁴ Aristophanes' lost third sex explains and naturalizes the existing hierarchical relationship between the sexes; it is this relationship's origin and its eternal goal. Through a similar mythic structure, figurative language was often seen as the archetypal norm that originates and justifies social institutions. Cicero's classic statement in De Oratore on 'the highest achievements of eloquence' was picked up by rhetoricians like Wilson and Puttenham, who held that poets 'were the first law-makers to the people, and the first politicians, devising all expedient means for th' establishment of Common wealth.'²⁵ Through these interconnected myths of rhetorical, sexual, and social origin and reunion, the threat to patriarchal discourse of a figurative androgyny that emerges in other contexts may be defused, again with a suggestion of the social ambiguity of the androgynous image.

This mythic discourse underlies the dramatistic motif of transvestite disguise. The essentialist ethopoetic tradition, re-envoiced by male speakers in patriarchal contexts, may be interrogated rather than simply inverted by the androgynous figures. Androgyny conveys neither an antithetical nor a confirming social deviance; rather the figure may confound cultural priorities and systems of gender and identity by revealing their ambiguous interdependence. As a kind of femininized masculinity, androgyny exemplifies the uncertain ethopoetic effects of the trope of disguise, which sets up various categories of identity like the prince and the subject and then calls them into question through the equivocal terms that constitute them. The rhetorical means of establishing and expressing these categories exposes them to dialogic challenge.

As a tragicomedy, a hybrid genre that 'combines old sexual discourses in new ways,'²⁶ a sexual-disguise play like Philaster stages a similar disruption of notions of gender and identity and their function in social order. Indeed, Beaumont and Fletcher's text seems a particularly significant example of the ethopoetic issues raised by an androgynous rhetoric. With many similar texts it can be considered 'as a play about masking, about the conscious and unconscious assumption of false identities and about levels of self-knowledge and self-deception,' as Coppélia Kahn observes of Twelfth Night.²⁷ Yet in contrast to such Shakespearean versions, Philaster does not conclude with sociosexual order seemingly restored, even though the protagonist regains his throne and wins his beloved. The androgynous figure Bellario/Euphrasia remains outside the political-marriage finale, a reminder of social limits imposed on and by orthodox sexuality and proper selfhood. The character exceeds the return to the norms of gender and identity, the restoration of 'personal and interpersonal "oneness" ' that often seems central to the dénouement of Shakespearean romantic comedy.²⁸ Such exclusion foregrounds questions about the neat closure of events in Twelfth Night that are half-hinted at in Orsino's final speech, which registers Viola's continuing androgyny, the constant dependence of gender on guise, and his own ambiguous desire. Like Rosalind's epilogue to As You Like It, these words toy with the idea of transvestism, sustained beyond the theatrical frame, while seeming to reject it: 'Cesario, come—/ For so you shall be while you are a man; / But when in other habits you are seen, / Orsino's mistress, and his fancy's queen' (V.i.385-8).

A marked supernumerary within the play's social world, Bellario also serves to focus the stylistic excess often attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher's work onto questions of gender and self-representation. This excess is often contrasted unfavourably with Shakespearean discourse. As Bradbrook's comments suggest, Beaumont and Fletcher are seen to be flawed, their defects due to their relative belatedness to Shakespeare. Indeed, against Shakespeare's prior, proper, and singular corpus, their collaborative work is constructed in terms of a discursive deviance not dissimilar to that of androgyny. It offers no univocal image of the author. Its unresolved ambiguities can be seen as signs of incompletion in comparison to the late romances, typically considered as 'genres of wish-fulfillment' and of personal synthesis.²⁹ It is also regarded as a kind of decadence that parasitically threatens the integrity of Shakespeare's text, either by corrupting earlier master-pieces and paragons of characterization, or, as when Fletcher worked with Shakespeare on The Two Noble Kinsmen, by vitiating the bard's efforts and very identity: 'He and Beaumont had pulled Hamlet down to the comic level of Philaster; now Shakespeare's Palamon and Arcite could be irreverently handled in the same play as Shakespeare was presenting.'³⁰ If not decadent, Beaumont and Fletcher's style is regarded as 'rhetorical' in a merely figurai sense, where 'we consciously follow the ebb and flow of Philaster's passion, responding to his diatribes and laments as declamatory exercises.'³¹ In this view, the text's 'spatial design' formalizes its characterization, placing 'ultimate stress … less upon the nature of the participants than upon the artifice which employs them.'³² Just as androgyny may concentrate key notions of gender and identity, the intensity of this 'artifice,' rather than leading away from characterization, may test the ethopoetic process through which generically and socially standard characters, especially the heroic male protagonist, are portrayed. The rhetorical rhythms of Beaumont and Fletcher's work put into question both the subjective investments that motivate self-representation, and perhaps the not-unrelated critical investments that motivate the icon of Shakespeare. For running through and determining these criticisms of their work is a consistent psychological essentialism that derives from early-nineteenth-century celebrations of the Shakespearean rhetoric of character, a tradition exemplified by Schlegel's contrasting comment that Beaumont and Fletcher's 'poetry was not an inward devotion of the feeling and imagination, but a means to obtain brilliant results. Their first object was effect.'³³

The political and sexual dilemmas in Philaster that are concentrated in the triangle of Philaster, Arethusa, and Bellario rest on the identity of the last. The androgynous woman is here central to personal and social certainty. Her characterization seems to reveal both the discursive presuppositions of gender and the inconsistencies of identity that these presuppositions would suppress. The discontinuity of selfhood and gender emerges most tellingly in the impassioned speeches of the protagonist, Philaster. In their extreme fervour, and indeed through their resounding misogynistic echoes of Hamlet, his complaints against Arethusa and Bellario soar beyond the 'proper' norms of the heroic male. In her pivotal and inconstant role, Bellario both triggers this androgynous rhetoric and then seems to restore its gendered balance at the play's end. Her word discloses the instabilities of a masculinist discourse that pursues its ethopoetic goals through the figure of woman, its rhetorical 'master mistress.' For this project inevitably deconstructs the masculine ideal it aims to realize through revealing the figure of woman within that ideal. Woman is the figurai difference that both guarantees and denies the telos of masculine characterization.³⁴ The significance of Bellario's androgynous disguise lies, then, not only in its display of themes of sexual self-knowledge and deception but in its revelation of the discursive means through which sexual selves can be known and deceived. Citing dramatic and non-dramatic precursors through the over-determined trope of androgyny and a familiar story-line of usurpation, restoration, and sexual politics, Philaster replays a rhetorical tradition of gendered ethopoesis.

II

The main features of this ethopoetic tradition can begin to be seen in the classic rhetorical texts of male praise for woman, Gorgias' and Isocrates' encomia on Helen. Their well-wrought styles disclose a paradoxical relationship between the speaking male and the spoken female, the two figures that the encomia necessarily depict. The man's praise, which begins by presuming his separate perspective upon woman, gradually intertwines them, as he becomes reliant on her figure or image to portray himself and so fulfil what Joel Fineman calls 'the cogito of praise … "I praise therefore I am." '³⁵ This interdependence destines the loss of an original ethos that the speaker would understand as uttering his words of praise and then being reinforced by them. Androgynous disguise constructs a similar ambiguity regarding a prior ethos, not only for the disguised figure but for others who find their own gender and identity being disturbed by his or her presence. If the paradox of praise is 'not simply the negation of straightforward praise but, instead, its peculiar imitative double, a rhetorical doubling,'³⁶ then androgyny is, like misogyny, an analogue of praise, as the ethopoetic doubling of straight gender. The classical encomia instigate this sexual doubling in a rhetoric of characterization that later works will both imitate and revise.

Gorgias' text initially reacts to the canonical dominance of a proper, heroic, male ethos that derives from the Homeric works and that casts Helen antithetically as a perpetual 'reminder of the calamities.'³⁷ The orator will conclude by claiming 'I have removed by my speech a woman's infamy' (31), construing the speech as his own heroic rescue of the fair sex.³⁸ Though saving Helen from cultural blame, the Encomium deprives her of any agency, characterizing her as the object of male strength, speech, and desire—'she was seized by force, or persuaded by speeches, (or captivated by love)' (23)—all of which are seen as functions of each other and are reproduced by the speaker's own powerful rhetoric:

the persuader, because he compelled, is guilty; but the persuaded, because she was compelled by his speech, is wrongly reproached … The power of speech bears the same relation to the ordering of the mind as the ordering of drugs bears to the constitution of bodies … Things that we see do not have the nature which we wish them to have but the nature which each of them actually has; and by seeing them the mind is moulded in its character too … So if Helen's eye pleased by Alexander's [ie, Paris'] body, transmitted an eagerness and striving of love to her mind, what is surprising?

(27-9)

This ancient, mechanistic account of perception empowers Paris' sexual identity and weakens Helen's. Her love is an effect of perception, and her perception is an effect of Paris' original presence. She experiences the same kind of passive sight and selfhood that Shakespeare's Cressida complains about—'The error of our eye directs our mind' (V.ii.106)—where woman's random gaze is cognitively overpowering, subjecting her emotionally and sexually to the masculine presence she observes.³⁹ Paris' persuasive mastery thus forms a rhetorical parallel to his preverbal, visual essence. Together they construct a discourse of masterful desire and sexuality that reifies male speech on the basis of female pathos.

Gorgias' self-congratulatory closing consolidates this pattern. He assumes a rhetorical control analogous to Paris'. Helen, the apparent topic, is overshadowed by a speaker whose own discursive pleasure emerges as the ultimate motive of the Encomium: 'I have removed by my speech a woman's infamy, I have kept to the purpose which I set myself at the start of my speech; I attempted to dispel injustice of blame and ignorance of belief, I wished to write the speech as an encomium of Helen and an amusement for myself (31). The confessional statement of intentions reveals a self-reflexive aim that realizes satisfaction more from its own words than from women and that represents itself metonymically through the figure of Helen. She is the occasion for a rhetorical narcissism to exercise and enjoy itself by declaiming upon favourite topoi, which, as E.R. Curtius suggestively defines, generally work as 'intellectual themes, suitable for development and modification at the orator's pleasure.'⁴⁰

In this view, Helen is an effect of praise that reveals and satisfies the male ethos. As Lauren Silberman has noted, Spenser seems to criticize this reductive transposition of female character through the legend of Britomart: 'Here haue I cause, in men iust blame to find, / That in their proper prayse too partiall bee, / And not indifferent to woman kind.'⁴¹ Men's 'proper prayse' of the other is a process of self-praise and definition, that also erases woman's role in history. Gorgias' Encomium at first seems to acknowledge Helen's historical causality. Through her beauty she produces, though not the Trojan war itself (caused by 'great reasons'), the rhetorical tradition of the Trojan war: 'In very many she created very strong amorous desires; with a single body she brought together many bodies of men who had great pride for great reasons' (21). If the physical and martial priority of the men seems momentarily displaced by and dependent on Helen's 'amorous' influence, this inspirational effect is in turn eclipsed by the history of their discourse and action. Her causal role is used to undermine her own agency.

These historical and subjective transpositions between cause and effect also appear in Isocrates' 'Encomium on Helen.' Early in the text, Helen is the vehicle through which men's great deeds can be spoken of: 'I think this will be the strongest assurance for those who wish to praise Helen, if we can show that those who loved and admired her were themselves more deserving of admiration than other men.'⁴² As topos, Helen allows these male feats to be eternally replayed in oratorical arenas and verbal battles—masculinist rhetoric as warfare.⁴³ Isocrates' title echoes Gorgias' title, and he vigorously attacks his rivals: 'They ought to give up the use of this claptrap, which pretends to prove things by verbal quibbles, which in fact have long since been refuted, and to pursue the truth' (4). 'Helen' figures the truth of Isocrates' speech as opposed to the 'erstic disputations' of others (6), and he glorifies her beauty as a sign of virtue, which is 'the most beautiful of ways of living' (59). As sign, Helen is then precluded from the virtue won by men and seems only to serve as a pretext to man's utterance, which circulates among a closed male audience: 'while it is partly because of Homer's art, yet it is chiefly through her that his poem has such charm and has become so famous among all men' (65).

Despite her rhetorical effacement, Helen assumes a responsibility for male discourse through both the metonymic interchange of cause for effect and the paradox of praise. As figurative vehicle she allows her praisers not merely to talk of her but to speak. Only on the basis of her metonymic effect—that is, on the basis of her silence—can the linked ideals of male sexual, military, and oratorical performance and preeminence be represented, as the orator tries to display his own archetypal ethos. However, Helen's figurai function as a metonym of male virtue sets up a rhetorical process that from the start defers this singular ethopoetic goal. The male speaker is reliant upon her. The encomia necessarily employ an androgynous rhetoric, with woman as vehicle, that undermines the hierarchy of univocal gender and masculine identity that the epideictic structure presumes to reinforce.

This ambiguous rhetorical relation between man and woman continues and intensifies in the Renaissance reproduction of the classical topoi. The subservient discursive function of woman appears in various texts, quite strikingly in Cymbeline for example, where it motivates the bet between Posthumus Leonatus and Iachimo on Imogen's virtue, a bet that is in effect an 'oratorical dispute' at her expense, and one that values its own words above her. If, Posthumus says, Iachimo wins, 'I am no further your enemy; she is not worth our debate' (I.iv.165-6). On the other hand, what Thomas Greene calls the 'heuristic' form of Renaissance imitatio, which emphasizes derivation plus distance from the original,⁴⁴ seems to draw out questions concerning woman's rhetorical place and the hierarchy of gender it is used to represent in the classical works. Marlowe's 'interrogative text' Doctor Faustas uses Helen to dramatize the fall of the protagonist's essential Christian ethos. Rather than confirming his selfhood, she marks its sexual loss, an ironic inversion of the neo-Platonic soul's union with the godhead: 'Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss: / Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies. / Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again' (xviii.101-3).⁴⁵ In Troilus and Cressida, masculine ideals of virtue, figured in the encomia through Helen's incomparable beauty, are challenged by Thersites' cynicism, which would rewrite the Trojan war as a discourse of male jealousy, 'All the argument is a whore and a cuckold' (II.iii.68). He demythologizes the tradition of martial masculinity given to the Renaissance through the classical tradition, as does La Rochefoucauld in his seventh maxim on the rivalry of Augustus and Antony, by affirming that its motive lies in a jealous desire for absolute, heroic selfhood that nonetheless is determined by its mediation through the sexual other and rivalry with other men.⁴⁶

These Renaissance revisions of classical plots and personae represent a fractured structure of gender. The hierarchical order of male and female, with its attendant oppositions of whole and part, tenor and vehicle, is not simply reversed; instead the possibilities of their dialogic relationship are raised. The essentialism that underlies the encomia is complicated as the male ethos reveals its interdependence with woman even when, as in misogynistic texts, she is openly repudiated. Although it is the negative form of epideixis, misogynist rhetoric reproduces the structural paradoxes of gender inscribed in the encomia. Within the recurring disclaimers and criticisms of female character and the implicit justifications of male identity sounds a discourse of androgynous ethopoesis.⁴⁷

III

Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique adopts a consistently misogynistic tone that both rehearses the masculinist premises of the rhetorical tradition and exposes them to the paradox of ethopoetic gender. It opens with an epistle to Lord Dudley that expresses themes of rhetorical domination and desire. The epistle is epideictic; yet unlike the encomia on Helen and more like a love sonnet, it seeks to woo its addressee—to persuade Dudley to offer support and patronage. As well as stroking the noble ego, the letter reveals a conflict of desire between praiser and praised, in the request and rejection, superiority and inferiority, that underlie its address: 'If pleasure maie provoke vs, what greater delite doe wee knowe, then to see a whole multitude, with the onely talke of man, rauished and drawne which way he liketh best to haue them?'⁴⁸ Wilson makes explicit the rhetorical desire that was noted in narcissistic form in Gorgia's speech. He gives a sensual twist to the conventional description of the orator's aims to 'instruct, move and charm his hearers,'⁴⁹ depicting the interaction between the wills and passions of speaker and audience in terms of sexual domination that were not unfamiliar in the Renaissance. Relations between the passions and the will were commonly coded into terms of gender and power, with the will sometimes being stereotyped as an empowered female, because of its exceptional sway. Thus in A Helpe to Discovrse, a sort of everyman's common-place book, the anonymous authors instruct that 'Will is as free as Emperor, cannot be limitted, barred of her liberty, or made will by any coaction, when she is vnwilling.'⁵⁰ Here a misogynist trope, suggesting the inversion of the patriarchal body politic that Elizabeth could represent, underlies the explanation of the will's power and forms the basis of a common image of psychological affect.

Wilson's model of rhetorical pleasure reproduces a visual, verbal, and sexual hierarchy of provocation and stimulation. 'Wee' watch the male orator watching the results of his words; and in each case watching is full of knowing delight. The masterful orator moves and positions the passive audience, taking them 'which way he liketh best to have them.' Their multitude increases his mastery and 'our' voyeuristic pleasure. This appreciation vicariously connects 'vs' to him within his system of pleasure, for we enjoy what he enjoys even if we don't do it ourselves. The implication is that, having watched and entered this visual order, we could do it too. Wilson himself assumes a double role as the virile orator and the aroused observer, his company with 'vs' removing any offensive hint of emasculation for Lord Dudley.

The sexually loaded description feminizes the orator's audience, subjecting its passion to his will. The monologic rhetorical address that derives from Aristotle, with its effects of pathos, is sexualized. The audience's pleasure in its ravishment remains dependent on the speaker's primary, causal desire. The imagery of ravishment indicates the gendered presumptions of the rhetoric: an opposed audience and speaker, with 'maleness' supposedly precluded from the former and fixed within the speaking function. Yet a male presence reappears in the specular pathos of 'delite' that 'wee'—a second audience including the author, Lord Dudley, and other would-be rhetoricians—feel from watching and hearing the speaker's still-primary verbal desire. This second male function, although it is not the addressed, feminized audience but one that voyeuristically observes and listens to the masterful speaker, reflects the impressed passivity and pleasure of that first audience. The resultant ambiguity of male pleasure as ravisher and ravished—the ravisher ravished—inheres most strongly in the paradoxical role of 'Wilson' himself, who as the enjoyer of this rhetoric is, like Gorgias, the narcissistic object of his own discourse.

The epistle tries simultaneously to establish a conventional hierarchy of verbal gender and to suppress the androgynous ethos that thereby emerges. As the Arte continues, the system of macho rhetorical pleasure is reinforced by the transfer of the male audience's passive pleasure to woman. This stereotyping builds to a clichéd misogynist joke that would preclude woman from speech. Tracing this development through Wilson's text reveals the metonymic structure of androgyny implicit in its masculinist rhetoric.

Explaining what he calls the first kind of oratory, 'praise, or dispraise,' and thus again suggesting the importance of epideixis, Wilson notes that when speaking about people their sex is an important theme: 'To bee born a manchilde, declares a courage, grauitie, and constancie. To be borne a woman, declares weaknesse of spirit, neshnesse of body, and ficklenesse of mind' (13).⁵¹ Gender is an essential sign of one's physical, emotional, and cognitive self. The emphasis on birth suggests a presocial fixedness to these traits. Since gender 'declares' them, it becomes a discursive form that, through an apparently natural priority, presents a zero degree of social contingency. And as the truths of character uttered at birth by gender seem incontrovertible, they may function rhetorically as commonplaces.

Nature and gender reinforce each other to establish a uniform type of encomiastic speech that becomes the model for other rhetorical genres. Uniformity exerts a certain pressure upon the way in which topics are to be represented. A predilection for similarity and consistency is a function not only of content but of rhetorical form, as Wilson demonstrates in an example from a set piece on love: 'Naturali love, is an inward good will, that we beare to our parents, wife, children, or any other that be nigh of kinne to us, stirred thereunto not onely by our flesh, thinking that like as we would loue ourselues, so wee should loue them, but also by a likenesse of minde' (33). This homogenization of love into terms of nature and inwardness is achieved through the use of 'similitude,' which is later defined as 'a likenesse when two thinges, or more then two, are so compared and resembled together, that they both in some one propertie seeme like' (188). In this scheme, similitude is a figure of comparison that does not deviate from proper meaning as does metonymy ('when a word hath a proper signification of the owne, and being referred to an other thing, hath an other meaning' [175]). Through the visual notion of resemblance, similitude revises difference as a unitary 'likenesse,' recalling the narcissistic ethos that would structure masculinist rhetoric. The slippage between the discursive functions of likeness is then exemplified by its rhetorical pressure on the topic of love. Likeness bases different types of love on self-love, 'like as we would loue ourselues, so wee should loue them,' and then locates this 'Naturali love' in an 'inward good will' that preserves the patriarchal family of 'parents, wife, [and] children.' The narcissistic motive translates love into a unity founded on the intrinsic identity of male selfhood and its 'inward' will. On this basis, love's place in a reflexive order of masculine identity and desire is established.

As a rhetorical form, likeness represents a number of culturally valued relationships. In its construction of love, it inscribes rules of personal interaction that seem to foster altruism and direct desire outwards. The premise of this orientation to the other, however, is a masculine self-identity, perhaps not so much assumed as sought, that remains as the object of desire. Thomas Wright suggests the presence of this specular self-identification within love, prior to one's male self turning to another, when it seems that the narcissism is projected: 'The ground of every man's love of himself is the Identity of a man with himself, for the lover and beloved are all one and the same thing.'⁵² Likeness determines the relations between self and other by structuring their difference through the essential identity of selfhood.

In this visual construct, women are conceived as complementary to male identity for the sake of social and sexual harmony. As an example of exhortation, Wilson quotes a letter by Erasmus that urges his male correspondent to marry: 'leauing to liue single, whiche both is barrarne, and smally agreeing with the state of mans Nature … giue your selfe wholy to most holy Wedlocke' (40). The letter's implied program is that woman is to give herself to 'mans Nature,' a primary 'state' that determines the social and religious orthodoxy symbolized by 'holy Wedlocke.' Yet since man requires woman to realize this 'state,' his incompleteness and dependence on her are also intimated. It is woman's faithfulness to this structure that sustains society and raises marriage above other personal relationships. Erasmus distinguishes the wife by her unequivocal identity—her intrinsic opposition to any kind of dissimulation—which allows for her full union with man: 'when others are matched together in friendship, doe we not see what dissembling they vse, what falshood they practice, & what deceiptful parts they play … whereas the faithfulness of a wife is not stained with deceipt, nor dusked with any dissembling' (54). Implicitly attacking traditions of male bonding, these remarks intimate the inauthenticity and incompletion of the masculinist ethos. They try to construct a univocal role for woman in order to salvage the naturalized image of cultural continuity and male identity, and in so doing paradoxically note that identity's dependence upon her.

This dependence is suppressed and revealed as Wilson's text continues. At one point the male speaker is instructed on the effectiveness of contrast. The notion does not, however, suggest a heterogeneous rhetorical principle that would subvert the valued order of likeness that has already been established. Contrast is figured through woman's appearance and morality, social indices of her sexuality that deviate from the ideal norm of a homoeostatic ethos. As likeness signifies man, contrast or inconstancy becomes the sign of woman within a code of cultural tropes. The speaker's control over contrast, its availability as a figure to be used by him, contrasts him to it. This control implies his discursive status and the fixed order in which contrast, like Spenser's Mutabilitie, is conceived, as an antithesis subsequent to natural likeness: 'By contraries set together, things oftentimes appeare greater … set a faire woman against a foule, and she shall seeme much the fairer, and the other much the fouler … if any one be disposed to set forth chastitie, he may bring in of the contrary part whoredome, and shewe what a foule offence it is to Hue so vncleanly, and then the deformitie of whoredome, shall much set forth chastitie' (125).⁵³

Once again, within a logic of juxtaposed appearances, contrast's, and thus woman's, difference is constrained by certain priorities. This visual hierarchy both establishes woman's threat to homoeostatic character and seeks to control it through a misogynist attack against dissembled and mutable sexuality, imaged here as elsewhere in denunciations of her beauty and make-up.⁵⁴ The female trope of contrast—'she can turn, and turn; and yet go on / And turn again'—is subject to the discursive norm of male likeness.⁵⁵ Her sophistical inconstancy offends the male speaker's verbal and rational consistency. In Wilson's example, the contrasted term reinforces the patriarchally valued first term and affords it a moral priority. The orator would order woman's character, and thereby his own, through a hierarchy of the verbally, sexually, and ethically proper.

It is a hierarchy that includes linguistic form. The values of the proper are perceived in a masculinist grammar that would synthesize nature and culture: 'yet in speaking at the least, let vs keepe a naturali order, and set the man before the woman for maners sake' (167). The passage from 'naturali order' to 'maners sake' suggests the mythicizing of rhetoric, as the order of gender becomes the grammatical structure of speech. The formal limitations of woman's discursive place are 'naturali' conditions that seek to control her unnatural volubility, 'that endless daily talk frequented by women.'⁵⁶ At their extreme they preclude her from utterance: 'What becometh a woman best, and first of all? silence. What second? silence. What third? silence. What fourth? silence. Yea, if a man should aske me till Domes daie, I would still crie silence, silence: without the which no woman hath any good gift, but hauing the same, no doubt she must have many other notable gifts, as the which of necessitie, doe euer followe such a vertue' (202). Silence, the lack of speech, would ideally characterize woman and, as it does for Jonson's Morose, denote her possession of other traits—'gifts' granted to her by man—that are socially valued.

Wilson's views disclose the silence that the encomiasts implicitly valued in their portraits of Helen's physical beauty. It signifies a symbolic passivity that has two related consequences. First, woman's silence would restrict her to a cultural role as audience, unable to speak or act socially except to facilitate the speech of men, as Duchess Elisabetta and Emilia Pia do for Castiglione's courtiers.⁵⁷ Secondly, the constraints of silence limit her speech to the rules of a masculine hermeneutic, and she is cast, using Cixous's terms, ' "within" the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier.'⁵⁸ A visual structure of rhetoric that sees the male ethos as the proper origin of speech, from the rules of grammar to the conventions of epideixis, is enjoined upon woman. She is openly to reflect male speech. A discursive ethos that might express a hidden motive is explicitly proscribed in her social discourse and demeanour, as John Donne emphasizes in the Christmas sermon of 1624. Citing Saint Cyprian, and so recalling the misogynistic rhetoric of the church fathers, he announces: "It is not enough for a virgin to bee a virgin in her owne knowledge, but she must governe her selfe so, as that others may see, that she is one, and see, that shee hath a desire, and a disposition, to continue so still … She must appeare in such garments, in such language, and in such motions … as they that see her, may not question, nor dispute, whether she be a maid or no.'⁵⁹ The onus on woman's utterance and action is that it be overtly perceptible to 'others,' precluding the interpersonal inconstancy of 'dissembling' that Erasmus had feared. Donne's emphasis on the virgin intimates the urgency of univocal female ethopoesis for elementary social structures. Cultural truth depends on woman's words about herself, as Castiglione's Lord Gasper graphically emphasizes in describing the dangerous consequences of woman's sexuality, dangers that may lie not so much in her actions themselves but in what she may say about them: 'they may apply their force to keepe themselves in this one verrue of chastitie, without the which children were uncertain, and the bond that knitteth all the worlde together by bloud … should be loosed.'⁶⁰ 'Chastitie' is a symbolic rather than a natural category, applied here to woman's speech as well as her actions. It works to characterize her sexuality univocally, in the fixed and certain terms favoured by masculinist rhetoric.

In spite of the limits imposed on woman's speech, actions, and rhetorical role, her word assumes a central function in defining cultural truths. It can form the basis of interconnecting and reinforcing networks of personal, familial, and sociopolitical structures, as an early exchange in The Tempest between Prospero and Miranda suggests:

Thy father was the Duke of Milan and
A prince of power.
Mir.       Sir, are not you my father?
Pros. Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and
She said thou wast my daughter; and thy
  father
Was Duke of Milan, and his only heir
And princess no worse issued.
                                  (I.ii.54-9)

It is the word of Prospero's wife that constructs these reciprocal relationships of paternal and patriarchal identity.⁶¹ Though marginalized by encomiastic rhetoric and, as Prospero's sceptical tone intimates, easily positioned within misogynistic speech, the figure of woman assumes a pivotal function in a potentially unstable masculinist discourse of social and personal values. She is the antithesis—contrast—that can anchor male speech and selfhood in the truth of likeness; or, through her inconstancy, she can undermine the structure of properness she is used to shore up. As Donne's, Gasper's, and Prospero's emphasis on admissions of chastity suggests, this ambiguity radiates from woman's sexual identity within the ethopoetics of gender.

In the third book of the Institutes, Calvin also warns against this ambiguity, perceiving its effects in the connections between the instability of woman's speech, identity, and sex and a subversively dramatistic reality. He is dismissing the practice of confession as a mere show of truth-telling. Three times the commentary notes the eclipse of univocal gender through the androgynous effects of woman's confession. It seems that because of its traditional function as 'the true discourse on sex,' confession is also empowered to disguise this truth, to conceal it at the supposed moment of revelation.⁶² Such concealment is represented here as an effect of a feminizing speech. In arguing against confession, Calvin seeks to preclude this disruption of words and gender, where confession functions as an androgynous speech act. These remarks extend the implications of confession from a specifically religious ritual to a wider genre of sexual self-revelation. Calvin's dicta were of course central to arguments against the stage, particularly on questions of gender and cross-dressing.⁶³ Although discussing the practice of confession, he touches on the same theme, the dramatistic relation of truth to gender. And in a work as relentlessly serious as the Institutes, this section's use of (or attempt at) sarcastic humour seems to highlight this concern and the incredulity with which Calvin contemplates the possible confusion of sexual identity.

Calvin begins his remarks on confession by typically attacking the medieval theologians. His caustic tone recalls the agonistic efforts of Gorgias and Isocrates in using the figure of Helen against their rivals: 'when these worthy fathers enjoin that every person of both sexes (utriusque sexus) must once a-year confess his sins to his own priest, men of wit humorously object that the precept binds hermaphrodites only, and has no application to any one who is either a male or a female.'⁶⁴ Confession triggers a blurring of sexual differences in what is depicted as a wholly male ritual: the male penitent addresses a priest, according to rules that are either enjoined by 'fathers' or ridiculed by 'men of wit.' Confession is both the pretext of this scene of male discourse and that which disrupts it, by introducing a feminizing hermaphroditism. The confessional revelation of sexuality does not reinforce this masculinist order and the discrete roles of those who envoice it, but serves generally to androgynize them, as occurs in the ideal scene of oratory that Wilson depicts.

These traces of equivocal gender emerge only when confessional truth is represented. Calvin does not object to revelations that are not verbalized but remain unmediated disclosures to God and so recognize his transcendent presence: 'the surest rule of confession is, to acknowledge and confess our sins to be an abyss so great as to exceed our comprehension' (549). The unspoken confession redefines the self in its original submission to God. Its truthfulness lies in the 'abyss,' an absence of human speech and 'comprehension,' which in turn signifies the pure presence of selfhood prior to discourse. In contrast, the uttered form of 'auricular confession … a thing pestilent in its nature' (550) disrupts man's submissive essence. The popish rhetoricity and staging of confession corrupt the inner identity of man as determined by God, and suggest the links between Calvin's antitheatricalism and its misogynistic premise. For this order of unspoken confession to God is also the model for woman's discursive relation to man, a silent subjection whose 'auricular' transgression recalls her natural talkativeness.

The clearest signs of the corruptions caused by confession emerge for Calvin in a sort of feminized sexual theatre: 'a certain matron, while pretending to confess, was discovered to have used it as a cloak to cover her intercourse with a deacon' (541). Confession becomes a motivated sexual disguise that is both worn 'as a cloak' and enacted by a noticeably eager woman. It then generates a larger confusion of sexuality that ranges from the hermphroditism noted above, to the implied passivity of the deacon's male sexuality, to the traditional prohibitions in 'the innumerable acts of prostitution, adultery, and incest, which it produces in the present day' (551). The portrayal of the matron and the emphasis on her desire weight Calvin's denunciation of confession against the sexual duplicity of woman's speech. However, her performance provokes his own voyeuristic pleasure at the popish ritual. His criticisms reflect the suppression of self-threatening pleasure in Rainolds' attack on theatricality⁶⁵ and anticipate Wilson's scene of passive, narcissistic delight at rhetorical expertise. The matron's theatrically disguised word undermines the truth of male sexuality. It is analogous to the verbalized confession that taints the penitent male. In this scheme of confessional, religious discourse, woman represents the corruption of the soul through speech. She embodies a sexualized rhetoric that may threaten the intrinsic male ethos.

The figure of woman, though widely conceived as secondary and external to the primary ethos, suggests this internalized confusion to other authors during the Renaissance. Even the passion of heterosexual love may realize androgynizing effects, as it fragments essential male character. In the long section on love melancholy, Burton writes of lovers' loss of humanity and ratio, which he conceives as male virtues: 'at last insensati, void of sense; degenerate into dogs, hogs, asses, brutes; as Jupiter into a bull, Apuleius an ass … For what else may we think those ingenious poets to have foreshadowed … but that a man once given over to his lust … is no better than beast.'⁶⁶ The divine mutability that Vives saw as that epitomizing human nature here signifies the sexual loss of man's identity. The sort of 'interinanimation' that a younger Donne could celebrate in 'The Ecstasy' assumes a self-negating potency for Thomas Wright when 'hearts were more present, in thoughts and desires, with such bodies where they liked and loved than with that wherein they sojourned and lived.'⁶⁷ Donne himself preached on Easter Day 1625 that 'no outward enemy is able so to macerate our body, as our owne licentiousnesse.'⁶⁸ This image of the crossover between outwardness and inwardness implies a sexual deconstruction of essentialist or proper selfhood. The sermon's ensuing comments on the 'licentious man's' self-induced ruin can either suggest that the female inconstancy which threatens maleness from without is a figure for man's own inconstancy, his intrinsic androgyny, or imply the reverse, that man's internal ruin is a metonym for the extrinsic threat of woman.⁶⁹

This confounding of the 'true' relation of the sexes, and of individual male identity, recalls the collapse of the imaginary structure of praise that the narcissistic reference of the encomia had implied but not acknowledged. The rhetorics of praise and of confession form a dialogic complex. Both may undermine the masculinist ethos, by revealing the sexual and discursive paradoxes of its essentialist premises. Yet where the epideictic structure would seek to displace this disclosure onto the figure of woman, by making her the object of praise or of attack, confessional rhetoric unveils such strategies and undermines the proper ethos that they represent. The attempt to displace self-subversion is most frequently inscribed through the epideictic switch from praise to misogyny. Misogyny seeks to preserve selfhood by denouncing woman, but in doing so admits its rhetorical interdependence with the other. In Cymbeline, for example, having boastingly praised Imogen's virtue, as Collatine did of Lucrece, Posthumus later denounces both himself and her in a generalized attack against the figure of woman. The change from praise to misogyny leads him first to imitate the discursive inconstancy that is the mark of woman, and then to confess that what corrupts the male tenor, his archetypal self-image, is an imperceptible, inner, female trace. It contradicts the visual ideal of the masculine ethos and already resides within: 'Could I find out / The woman's part in me' (II.v.19-20). Posthumus' rhetorical progression through praise, misogyny, and confession reproduces the determined discursive path that androgynizes masculine self-representation.

The rhetorical function of woman is that of an ethopoetic metonym for a male identity that is endlessly incomplete. Rather than merely serving his selfportrayals, woman names the continual disruption of male ethos and desire. Montaigne laments this process in 'Sebond' in terms of 'The lustfull longing which allures us to the acquaintance of women, seekes but to expell that paine, which an earnest and burning desire doth possesse us with, and desireth but to allay it thereby to come to rest, and be exempted from this fever.'⁷⁰ The sequence of desire, pain and fever, and 'lustfull longing' that drives 'us' to women, suggests a continuing metonymic deferral of desire.⁷¹ It locates 'woman' as the ultimate effect of this desire rather than its cause. She externalizes masculine dissatisfaction, giving it a verbal and personal goal—'woman'—that may then be construed as its origin.

The external placement displaces cause and effect. While subjecting woman to man's discourse, and making her its misogynist target, this metonymic shift also grants her a figurai potency. Her externalization as the goal of man's desire realizes, through 'the irony of the "peripety," ' her internalization as his motive. She functions as the 'synecdochic representative' of his discursive desire, 'represent[ing] the end or logic of the development as a whole.'⁷² Despite her secondary function as the object rather than the speaker of traditional rhetorical pieces, woman is the 'master-mistress,' androgynous key to the representation of man and herself. The metonymic logic that structures these forms of rhetoric inscribes the splitting of the male ethos and tenor that occurs through the attempt at self-representation. The figure of woman is an ambiguous trope of masculine ethopoesis. She unsettles his own modes of characterization, exemplified by the epideictic inversions between himself and her, and shifts the place of her own speech in the verbal structure, through the androgynous effects of confessional truth.

IV

Theatrical versions of androgynous disguise in the Renaissance frequently portray this ambiguity in social dramas where the male ethos is initially idealized. A number of plays by Beaumont and Fletcher depict the androgynous process and its effects on exemplary male identities such as the brave prince and the loyal subject. In works like A King and No King and The Maid's Tragedy these topics are addressed through pairs of characters, who represent male and female ethopoetic processes in conflict. In Philaster the conflict is compressed within the androgynous characterization of Bellario and Philaster. As noted earlier, the heightened rhetoric of these plays serves to foreground the ethopoetic discourse through which the characters confront each other and the conflicts of gender and identity within themselves. There is a rhetorical rhythm, frequently developed through the alternation between epideixis and confession, whereby male characters first imply the imaginary structure of their own identity in its relation to others before having the presumptions of this structure undermined and being in effect 're-characterized.'

A King and No King begins after the conquest by Arbaces, king of Iberia, of his Armenian foe Tigranes. The classical ethopoetic trope of military virtue and self-realization is immediately cited. Arbaces orders Tigranes to marry his sister, and though not naming her, he praises her highly. Her beauty is the counter-part of his martial prowess, and the encomiastic strains and images reflect his opinion of himself: 'shee can doe as much / In peace, as I in Warre; sheele conquer too / You shall see, if you have the power to stand / The force of her swift lookes.'⁷³ These lines reiterate many of the themes of masculinist rhetoric. Arbaces reflexively praises himself and uses his sister to show his own qualities. She is unnamed, since her identity is irrelevant to his self-portrait; however, it later becomes ironically apparent that she is not named because Arbaces is wholly ignorant of her identity, and of his own, and of the relationship between them.

The common love-war conflation also suggests the place of woman in man's martial rhetoric. As Helen's beauty did for the ancient heroes and orators, his sister's beauty figures Arbaces' archetypal power, which is military and rhetorical, a fusion of body and spirit. Unlike Helen, whose passivity was strongly implied, in this play the woman is a rival to active male power. Her 'swift lookes' have the physical 'force' that Arbaces displayed on the battlefield, and while her character seems dependent on his report, it is soon to realize effects that will overturn his speech and thought. Nonetheless, for the moment Arbaces presumes a priority that his sister, Panthaea, initially reinforces, through her first selfless words, inquiring into 'My brothers health' (II.i.78), and then in her comments on the language of his letter to her: 'The kindest words, Ile keepe um whilst I live / Here in my bosome; theres no art in um, / They lie disordered in this paper, Just / As hearty Nature speakes um' (II.i.201-4). She internalizes the naturalized guise with which her brother's words invest themselves and imprints his fashioned ethos upon her own body. Yet as the following scenes reveal, and in a similar way to that in which Campaspe affected Alexander in Lyly's play, her subjected body and beauty subvert his social persona, revealing its ethopoetic inconstancy.

Having returned to the court, Arbaces sets about making the match between Tigranes and Panthaea, despite his sister's taking it 'Something unkindly … To have her Husband chosen to her hands' (III.i.2-3). He does so by proclaiming his absolute authority, a speech act that would decree his univocal will: 'I must have her know / My will, and not her owne must governe her … Shee should be forcst to have him, when I know / Tis fit: I will not heare her say shee's loth' (III.i.4-20). Arbaces' illocutionary power forecloses Panthaea's opposition, subjecting her discursive will, anticipated in her spoken 'lothness,' to his. He outlaws her speech and imposes the cultural regimen of woman's chaste silence.

This rhetorical authority is soon undermined. On seeing Panthaea, Arbaces silently struggles against his rapid falling in love. The sight of her disrupts the discourse of praise he had formerly controlled. In a confessional aside he notes his own self-loss—'Speak, am I what I was?' (III.i.80)—which he then tries to counter by invoking solidly male, military imagery. In confusion at his incestuous desire, he threatens anyone who says that the woman standing before him is his sister, decreeing that 'Shee is no kinne to me, nor shall shee be; / If shee were any, I create her none' (III.i.161-2). While the overt royal word strives to master the personal passion and the social identities that have produced this dilemma, his further asides emphasize the onset of deep pain similar to that acknowledged by Montaigne. Though addressed to the self as a type of inner speech, these asides do not reinforce Arbaces' identity but express its social, moral, and spiritual loss:

… you are naught to me but a disease,
Continuali torment without hope of ease;
Such an ungodly sicknesse I have got,
That he that undertakes my cure, must first
Overthrow Divinity, all morali Lawes,
And leave mankinde as unconfinde as
  beasts …
                            (III.i.190-5)

In commanding Panthaea and her supporters' silence with Lear-like obstinacy—'Let me not heare you speake againe … No man here / Offer to speake for her' (III.i.198-201)—he indicates the failure of his command, and ironically admits her significance and power in his discourse. Panthaea becomes an externalized sign of his inner sexual confusion: 'Incest is in me / Dwelling alreadie' (III.i.330-1). She is blamed by him as the cause of his internal distress, a female figure who concentrates the conflicts between his individual desire and social order. Panthaea becomes a synecdoche for the play's paradoxical title, whose male, political categories—king / no king—hinge on her equivocal role.

We see this kind of social and personal dependence on woman elsewhere in Beaumont and Fletcher's work. In The Maid's Tragedy, Amintor's response to his new wife Evadne's confession of her affair with the king not only challenges his self-conception—'What a strange thing am I?' he asks (II.i.318)—but also threatens the reciprocal, masculinist code of honour that supposedly sustains the social relationship between sovereign and subject: 'The thing that we call honour beares us all / headlong unto sinne' (IV.ii.316-17). Evadne's actions disrupt Amintor's conception of obedience, driving him to a confused contemplation of regicide. Similarly, in the scene where Arbaces and Panthaea meet alone, her admission of love for him brings them closet to transgression, as they alternately embrace and fly from each other (IV.iv.l ff), and in his next speech we see Arbaces resigned to a life of sin and hell (V.iv.1-11).

However, in A King and No King such catastrophe is avoided by the further revelation that Arbaces and Panthaea are not brother and sister. Their love, having threatened the social order, finally restores it. Following the pattern of Shakespearean resolutions, the unravelling of the secrets of identities and birthrights stabilizes a confusion of personal and social positions, in which the loss of kingship and selfhood had threatened—'the whole storie / Would be a wildernesse to loose thy selfe / For ever' (V.iv.286-8). Arbaces' loss of royal preeminence translates into personal happiness, while Panthaea gains crown and husband. The characters' relations are co-ordinated by a benevolent cultural system that reconciles social and individual personae and is celebrated in the final lines: 'Come every one / That takes delight in goodnesse, helpe to sing / Loude thankes for me that I am prov'd no King' (V.iv.351-3).

The removal of the incest threat is based on the reassertion of Arbaces' and Panthaea's familial and personal difference. The play's conclusion is prepared through a separation of identities that enables order and relationships to be reimposed. Although Arbaces loses his dominant role, the structure of character is reaffirmed through the distinctions between man and woman, sovereign and subject, which grant everyone their social place.

Philaster, however, lacks this final and total ordering. Despite the betrothal of prince and princess and the restoration of the Sicilian crown, someone is left out. The androgynous character Bellario/Euphrasia exceeds the conventional resolution. She cannot be fitted into the ideal pattern of youthful consummation and cultural continuity: 'I grieve such vertue should be laied in earth / Without an Heyre' comments Philaster (V.v.197-8). This ending gains further significance as it differs in the two quarto versions. In the first quarto of Philaster (the second is the copy-text), Bellario is set to marry the courtier Trasiline, thus fulfilling the narrative pattern of plays like As You Like It and Twelfth Night, where marriage serves to close the plot on a note of social renewal. Bellario's isolation in the second ending seems to recall the exclusion of troubling characters like Jacques and Malvolio from the romantic endings of those plays, figures who question the ideal prospect of sociosexual regrowth. Robert K. Hunter has simply suggested that the first ending of Beaumont and Fletcher's play is either 'authorial early drafts later recast into dramatically superior Q2 form,' or 'not authorial.'⁷⁴ These claims need to be reconsidered in view of the later ending's overt rejection of the conventional romance conclusion. In re-marking its later deviation from the generic norm it initially upholds, Philaster highlights the equivocal function of androgyny in both constructing and challenging the social system.

The significance of Bellario's exclusion may seem arbitrary, especially as she rejects the king's offer to find a noble match for her and pay her dowry. Her refusal and the plot's thematic remainder momentarily appear idiosyncratic:

                Never sir will I
Marry, it is a thing within my vow,
But if I may have leave to serve the
  Princesse,
To see the vertues of her Lord and her,
I shall have hope to live.
                            (V.v.187-91)

However, Bellario's personal wilfulness masks a broader social process that relies on and constructs her metonymic role. To apply Girard's terms to this dramatic resolution, Bellario functions as a scapegoat, a 'surrogate victim,'' whose final isolation is a relatively non-violent sacrifice in order 'to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric.'⁷⁵ She rights a society disrupted, before the play's events commence, by the deposition of Philaster's father from 'his fruitfull Cicilie' (I.i.24). Along with her chastity, which retains a strongly positive symbolic value (and is crucial to the dénouement), Bellario's androgyny is the central element that affords her scapegoat function. Through doubled gender, she may represent all the other characters, a sociosexual vehicle that works through the similarities between her ambiguous self and them. At the same time, her hybrid but abnormal likeness to everyone also represents the degree of difference and distance that is required for the scapegoat figure to be cast out and social synthesis to take place. Bellario is alternately similar to man or woman; her similarity to both makes her different from each; and she also signifies the hermaphroditic links between them—'the persistent doubleness, the inherent twinship'—that could underlie Renaissance conceptions of sexual selfhood.⁷⁶ In Philaster, it is this sort of symbolic flexibility that makes the androgynous woman suitable for the sacrificial role. The metonymic complexity marks Bellario as the central figure in the text's sociosexual thematics. The symbolic power of her persona is further strengthened by the mystery of her disappearance and return, which, in effect, doubly charges her identity, since she returns twice, once in each gender.⁷⁷

The other characters come to understand Bellario's androgyny in these constructive terms, as the key to their drama's stabilizing conclusion. By emphasizing her individual role in events, they naturalize the sociosexual structure of their community as that which she has disrupted. Her disguise seems to them first to have created the social danger, and the confession of her 'true' sex then restores harmony, exemplifying Donne's conception of the cultural centrality of woman's unequivocal persona, 'as they that see her, may not question, nor dispute, whether she be a maid or no,' with 'maid' marked for Philaster and the others as female and chaste:

                          tell me why
Thou didst conceale thy sex; it was a fault,
A fault Bellario, though thy other deeds
Of truth outwaigh'd it: All these Jealousies
Had flowne to nothing, if thou hadst
  discovered,
What now we know.
                            (V.v.146-51)

Philaster makes Bellario's disguise the pivotal factor for the events. In so doing, he ignores the social and sexual causes of her disguise, the differences between royalty and nobility, male and female, and the conflict between personal and social desires, that she explains prompted her action: 'I knew / My birth no match for you, I was past hope of having you' (V.v. 174-6). His interpretation replays the metonymic transposition of woman's actions from social effect to social cause.

Bellario gives what Othello would call 'ocular proof of her femaleness when she 'discovers her haire, ' a euphemized bodily token of her sex, to her incredulous father (V.v. 112). She is thereby relocated as an object of a controlling masculinist gaze. Through observing her sex, the group recognizes and sorts itself out. Her revealed body, in its gender and overtness, is immediately fixed within the social hierarchy and has that hierarchy inscribed and imposed on itself. Its ambiguous gender becomes a cultural synecdoche, with 'the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body.'⁷⁸ This multiple function of the body as personal, social, and textual, recurs through the play. The subtitle, Love Lies a-Bleeding, connotes the social, personal, and sexual disintegration that seems about to begin when Philaster turns on both Bellario and his beloved Arethusa.⁷⁹ As noted, the drama seems to avoid this dissolution through sacrificing the androgynous scapegoat in order to represent what Andrew Gurr has called 'the orthodoxy of selfhood.'⁸⁰ This interpretation, the one that the characters themselves wish to accept, sacrifices or ignores Bellario's desire for the sake of social, moral order and of an orthodox ethos conceived in masculinist terms. Bellario's heroism typically involves the chastening of her sexuality.⁸¹ Her double scapegoat function as cause and effect serves finally to conceal the extremes of collapse to which order has been stretched at the expense of her sexuality.

The ambiguous processes of gendering are not restricted to this overtly androgynous character but, as Gurr suggests, apply equally to the orthodoxy of selfhood that seems finally to be reinforced for all the characters. Bellario's self-exposure serves not only to settle the dilemma but, more subtly, to disrupt it, through implying the continuing ambiguity of Philaster's character, the exemplary ethos represented by the play. Her confession, as the sort of androgynous speech act abhorred by Calvin, registers the confusion of his desire and identity. For in announcing the truth of her own gender, Bellario reveals the androgynous truth of Philaster's, which underlies his heroic male ethos and echoes equivocally throughout the play and the closing scene. The apparent realization of this ideal masculine ethos in the betrothal to Arethusa and the restoration of the throne is undermined, as we will see, by his final muted admission of a split desire for an androgynous ideal. An interpretive response based on the ethopoetic synthesis of the conclusions of Shakespearean romance seems unable to account for the hero's 'schizophrenic unity,' which emerges in the course of the play.⁸²

Like Hamlet, Philaster opens amidst an ongoing political intrigue that seems to set the stage for a tale of brave and decisive action. The king of Calabria has usurped the Sicilian throne from Philaster's father yet remains unable to have the prince killed because of the masses' love for him. Three courtiers inform us of this and of their secret support for Philaster, whom they praise as a heroic figure. They themselves are, however, compromised by having helped the usurper: 'My selfe drew some blood, in those warres, which I would give my hand, to be washed from,' admits their leader Dion (I.i.24-6). Because of this uneasy situation the king hopes to arrange his daughter Arethusa's marriage to a foreign prince, Pharamond of Spain, in order to produce a legitimate heir and, through machiavellian policy, 'to bring in the power of a forraigne Nation, to awe his owne with' (I.i.38-9). The drama concentrates key cultural ideas in a situation that rapidly includes marriage, sex, and the fates of Arethusa, Philaster, and all of Sicily.

Philaster's confused situation is politically and personally interwoven. The object of the people's and the courtiers' admiration, he is a much eulogized figure, the model of male virtue, 'the bravery of his age' (III.i.6). The paradox of this praise is its disabling effect upon him. The fine words of others make him a passive figure, incapable of acting in the very way that his praisers envisage. Like the object of the classical encomia, Philaster is used to signify masculinist ideals and, because he is so used, is cut off from them. His character is androgynized, being reduced to a traditionally feminized passivity through the praise of his ideal maleness.

This encomiastic paradox works most strongly through the words of the prince's dead father. Philaster feels possessed by his father's spirit, which urges him heroically to seize power:

              now he tells me King,
I was a Kings Heire, bids me be a King,
And whispers to me, these are all my subjects:
                            … dives
Into my fancy, and there gives me shapes,
That kneele, and doe me service, cry me
  King:
But I'le suppresse him, he's a factious spirit,
And will undoe me:
                                          (I.i.269-76)

The spirit echoes at the deeper levels of Philaster's mind, filling his consciousness with past, present, and future possibilities for selfhood. He struggles to fulfil these discursive images of himself, the ethoi that others have constructed for him and that he has only partly internalized. His dilemma is to reconcile these images with those that he makes for himself. The command to fill the father's place arises from Philaster's uncertain and reluctant interiorization of his father's word, a word he wishes both to obey and to resist—obeying through regaining the throne, but resisting through his love for the daughter of his enemy. His contradictory response reveals the effects of confounded desire in his own inaction.⁸³ This inner dialogue between the positive and negative sides of his encomiastic image is then opposed externally by the word of the present king, who commands Philaster's obedience: 'Be more your selfe, as you respect our favour' (I.i.257). The tension between 'your selfe' and 'our favour' inscribes Philaster's struggle with an internally conflicted subjectivity in the face of an externally imposed subjection.

A stable point within this conflict soon emerges in his relationship with the princess Arethusa. Although she embodies his rejection of the father's word, the king's daughter is also a political and personal foil to Philaster and enables him to grasp a sense of self through these contrasts: 'Nature, that loves not to be questioned / Why she did this, or that … never gave the world / Two things so opposite, so contrary, / As he and I am' (I.ii.23-7). Her idealizing love for him, though starting from the encomiastic perspective of others, seems to allow him to accept the image of selfhood presented in their words. The sense of oppositeness allows Philaster to feel a stability of self. He can then act positively for the first time, as he expediently suggests that they employ his 'trustiest, lovingst, and … gentlest boy / … To waite on you, and beare our hidden love' (I.ii.138-40; emphasis added). The boy, a sign-vehicle of Philaster's secret, intrinsic desire, will ground him in an externalized selfhood and emotion, a process that has commenced already, through the reflexive effects of the praise of the boy that he expresses to Arethusa.

This 'boy' is of course Bellario, who, from the start, is thus loaded with the meanings, intentions, and desires of others. When Philaster relates the circumstances in which they met, he casts Bellario as the object of perception and language, asserting his own active masculine status through speaking of him, 'I have a boy … Hunting the Bucke / I found him' (I.ii.111-14).⁸⁴ Bellario's persona, however, is a complex figure. His gender seems constantly to undermine the maleness that it signifies, and Philaster is taken mainly with his 'pretty helpelesse innocence' (I.ii.123). Rather than simply feminizing the boy, Philaster's perception suggests the interplay of gender and desire in himself through his reaction to Bellario's attention to him: 'The love of boyes unto their Lords, is strange' (II.i.57). Again we might see Beaumont and Fletcher's play taking up a submerged theme of Shakespearean romance and revealing it as a central topos in the sexual discourse of selfhood. Philaster's words and later actions make overt Orsino's ambiguous recognition of Viola through Cesario, which the courtier Valentine wryly notes—'he hath known you but three days, and already you are no stranger' (I.iv.2-4)—and which Orsino himself equivocally admits: 'thy small pipe / Is as the woman's organ, shrill and sound, / And all is semblative a woman's part' (I.iv.32-4). While Philaster would attribute the love all to the boy, and distance himself from its homoerotic aim, his response to its strangeness intimates his own part in their androgynous rapport. Subsequently, he will love Arethusa only indirectly, through the love of a boy for himself, a love whose activeness once again ironically casts him passively as its object.

This sensed androgyny in Bellario seems to make him the ideal go-between, as one who always metonymically signifies the other. At the same time, Bellario's mediation disrupts the course of desire between lover and beloved, most obviously by detouring their discourse through himself and his passion for Philaster, which makes his accounts of their love vehicles for his own wish-fulfilling romance. This role as messenger also inscribes the androgynous and narcissistic doubling of the lovers' desire, which, while seeking out the other, also chooses its own image in the hermaphroditic envoy. Such messages of doubled desires are similarly sent in Twelfth Night, as Viola observes, 'My master loves her dearly, / And I (poor monster) fond as much on him; / And she (mistaken) seems to dote on me' (II.ii.33-5). As Derrida has noted, these repetitive and redoubling effects lie deep within the discursive function of the archetypal love-messenger, 'the son of Hermes and Aphrodite,' Hermaphrodite, who represents the self-deferring course of desire.⁸⁵ When he sends Bellario to Arethusa, Philaster admits that 'Thy love doth plead so prettily to stay, / That (trust me) I could weepe to part with thee' (II.i.40-1). He mourns the loss of the androgynous boy and his ideal love, and like Orsino 'finds himself in the position of not being the object of desire but the desiring subject.'⁸⁶ In her turn, Arethusa learns of Philaster's affection through Bellario's reports of his distracted behaviour (II.iii.50-62). She enjoys imagining herself as wholly reliant on these accounts, delighting in their figurai representation more than the 'truth' they might signify: 'thou knowest, a lie / That beares this sound, is welcomer to me, / Then any truth that saies he loves me not' (II.iii.64-6).

An ambiguous process of homosexual, heterosexual, and narcissistic desire is thus in train before Megra, caught sleeping with the Spanish prince Pharamond, accuses Bellario and Arethusa of having sex. Megra's charge translates the unasked but already disruptive questions of Bellario's gender and the others' desire into social effect, setting the sexual plot off on an even more convoluted course. At this point, too, the apparent revelation of Bellario's identity becomes linked to wider social events. The three lords, scheming for Philaster's return to power, seize upon the news, believing that ''Twill move him' to assail the king (III.i.35). They anticipate the sublimation of his disappointed desire into direct political action. However, Philaster's desire implodes, the cataclysmic images with which he responds to the courtiers' revelation signifying the upheaval of his own body politic and the fracturing of the princely ethos (III.i.67-149). The loss of a heroic masculine identity that motivates Hamlet's speeches against Ophelia and Gertrude becomes one of the later play's key motifs.

Megra's accusation is immediately accepted, suggesting the social investment in woman's sexual word. Acts three and four comprise a sequence of speeches among Philaster, Arethusa, and Bellario, through which the effects of their deceived and deceiving claims reverberate. The discursive dependence on Bellario's guise is compounded by the effects of Megra's lie. Whereas before the lovers had unwittingly responded to the redoubling of their desire through Bellario, they now react deliberately but no less emotively, assuming that they know the full significance of their personal and sexual relationships. Their images of each others' deceptions underpin a sense of pained selfhood. Philaster's violent threats against the others might suggest that this knowledge reinforces his own identity, granting it a masculinist power. Yet Bellario's mysterious guise continues to call forth a response that undermines as it determines this imagined male ethos: 'Tell me thy thoughts; for I will know the least / That dwells within thee, or will rip thy heart / To know it; I will see thy thoughts as plaine, / As I doe now thy face' (III.i.226-9). Through the violence of his rhetoric, Philaster believes that the truth of Bellario can be seen and known, and that this truth, tested in combat with his rival, would prove the independence of the 'I.' Yet his admitted misperception of Bellario's face undermines the motivated urge to see himself through this anatagonist. In the face of the other he perceives not a self-defining rival but his lover's desire, which calls forth his own self-confounding love.

The ensuing exchanges record a chain reaction of misrecognition that spreads from one character to the next, investing each through the illusory guise of the others. Despite his vengefulness, Philaster is unable to strike Bellario, as his anger gives way to his homoerotic vision: 'I must love / Thy honest lookes, and take no revenge upon / Thy tender youth' (III.i.273-5). Though stopping short of physical action, he still derives a narcissistic pleasure from his rhetorical despair and, like Hamlet, uses the misogynistic topoi he fires at Arethusa to consolidate the truth of his male persona against her falseness: 'that foolish man, / That reades the story of a womans face, / And dies beleeving it, is lost for ever' (III.ii.117-19). In a bitter soliloquy, he denounces 'the dissembling traines / Of womens lookes' (IV.iii.3-4), as well as Bellario's 'misbeseeming' and 'dissembling trade' (IV.iii.27,33). His accusations against them seek to reaffirm his own 'authentic' ethos. Arethusa, shocked by his outbursts, appeals to Philaster for 'constancy,' and then introjects his misogyny, doubting herself but at the same time trying to defend her desire through turning on Bellario as a 'dissembler' (III.ii.134-6).

In his despair Philaster focuses on first one figure and then another. His passion wildly substitutes different personae, including himself, as the cause of his dilemma but is satisfied with none. He swings from asking Arethusa to slay him, to stabbing Arethusa and Bellario, to bitter self-reproach at his cowardice for doing so. In focusing first on himself, he wishes to cast himself as the victim of his own heroism, a stoic self-assertion. He then turns on Arethusa and Bellario, aiming to kill each of them to save his identity.⁸⁷ The irony of these acts of masculinist violence is deepened by the willingness of his female victims, who bare their bodies to his dagger. As they seek to fulfil their desire for him, their passivity prevents him from attaining the active ethos he seeks. In these coital scenes of stabbing and of love 'lying a-bleeding,' the heroic persona is all but eclipsed. (As comic relief, a country naïf enters and, his rustic sense of honour shocked, tries to defend Arethusa.)

It is only after this impassioned violence starts to subside that Philaster begins to recognize the absence of the ethos he has been seeking. His madness figures a rhetorical passage towards selfhood, leading him through epideictic images of the other to the confessional realization of his own intrinsic lack and a subdued 'equilibrium' that emerges from 'beneath the cloud of illusion, beneath feigned disorder.'⁸⁸ When the king asks Arethusa whether her attacker was Philaster, she answers, 'Sir, if it was he, / He was disguised.' Her remark strikes Philaster as totally enlightening, suggesting the deeper nature of his self-confusion: 'I was so: oh my stars! / That I should live still' (IV.vi.127-9). The uncovering of a disguise he has not controlled explains for him the inconstancy of selfhood through these events. At the same time, and beneath his awareness, these terms link him to the inconstant rhetorical image of woman and disclose the androgynous structure of his identity and behaviour to this point.⁸⁹

As Bellario had done, Philaster now functions as a surrogate victim, a crucial sign in the social system whose value is contested by others. The king wishes to kill him so as to end the political turmoil, but the courtiers foresee that Philaster's death would spark another round of reciprocal violence. Instead of executing him, the king sends Philaster to quell the rioting citizens (V.iv.l ff). Social (dis)order, like his father's spiritualized word, speaks through him, granting him roles that he does not control but that determine his identity. Finally, his heroic ethos is set up through the ideal reciprocity between himself and society, symbolized in the restoration of the crown and his marriage to Arethusa, which together form an image of sociosexual completion: 'enjoy Philaster / This Kingdome which is yours' (V.v.210-11). The political equation between the state and the prince seems to figure the resolution of the dilemmas of selfhood and identity that have plagued the whole community.

These forms of closure are, however, realized only when the figure of Euphrasia is revealed through Bellario's identity. Philaster's self-realization and the parallel restoration of social harmony depend on this discovery. Euphrasia is brought into the resolution by the other characters, who first threaten Bellario with death and torture if he doesn't reveal the truth, and then reconcile her disguise through their sense of the events' happy ending, inviting her participation in it. Arethusa, who alone might now find this androgynous figure a threat, herself issues the invitation: 'I, Philaster, / Cannot be jealous, though you had a Lady / Drest like a Page to serve you, nor will I / Suspect her living heere: come live with me, / Live free as I do; she that loves my Lord, / Curst be the wife that hates her' (V.v.191-6). Exemplifying Erasmus' ideal of womanly certitude, Arethusa locates the previously disruptive signs of sexual ambiguity within the heterosexual order of marriage, where Bellario's love for Philaster is simply evidence of his desirability. The power of the reordered society to absorb these signs reveals its reinforced strength and the sureness of the characters' renewed identities. In hindsight, the disruptions seem to have been necessary to realize this return to political and personal ideals. Bellario has purged the system and proven its ethopoetic integrity and propriety, which are rehearsed in the play's closing maxim: 'Let Princes learne / By this to rule the passions of their blood, / For what Heaven wils can never be withstood' (V.v.216-18).

The secret of the woman behind Bellario's guise seems to reassert Philaster's maleness and explain the disruptive attraction the androgynous figure had held for him. The female tenor of this figure would thus reveal the constancy of his character, which instinctively recognized in the disguised identity before him the sociosexual subjection of Euphrasia and so all along was seeking to assert his natural mastery:

              I was past hope
Of having you. And understanding well,
That when I made discovery of my sex,
I could not stay with you, I made a vow,
             … never to be knowne
Whilst there was hope to hide me from men's
  eyes
For other then I seem'd; that I might ever
Abide with you …
                                   (V.v.175-83)

The hopeless love, a desire that is forsaken as it longs to be 'discovered' (first by herself and then by Philaster), the virgin's vow, and the determination of her persona by 'men's eyes'—all these responses comprise a chain of disguises that Euphrasia is compelled to fashion anew within the masculinist discourse of desire. Her final revelation continues to represent the operation of this discourse; rather than allowing her selfhood to be realized, it imposes the cultural paradigms of sexual character upon her, in chaste service to Philaster.

Beaumont and Fletcher's text thus dramatizes in broad social terms the subversive and the stabilizing effects of identity and gender upon the representation of selfhood. The disguise of Bellario metonymically inscribes the conflicts between recognized and suppressed dimensions of sexuality, as other characters bewilderingly respond to the ambiguous signs of her androgyny. Their confusion is expressed in the sudden reversals of knowledge and emotion triggered by a series of set rhetorical speeches, the encomium and the confession, through which characters first presume the relationship between themselves and others and then reveal the 'truth' of these relationships. The formality of this rhetorical structure does not, however, efface the dramatic 'personality' of the characters, as many critics of Beaumont and Fletcher claim, but suggests the restrictions and conflicts of a discourse through which characters attempt to construct themselves and to interact with each other. The use of the encomium and the confession refers Beaumont and Fletcher's characterization to the rhetorical traditions in which relations between man and woman, and the process of sexual identity itself, were often depicted.

Bellario's revelation of her true gender is, then, the confessional speech act that seems to revise the relationships between the characters, allowing the social and discursive hierarchy of proper meaning and identity to be reaffirmed. As woman, she seems to reveal that the difference between male and female lies first in the intrinsic identity of each as a separate sexual being, and then in the subjection of woman to a masculinist ethos. At the same time, Bellario's confession is a revelation of androgyny, and of ambiguous identity not only in herself but in those who perceived her as a boy and responded to her disguised love. Such a one, of course, is the heroic Philaster. He resumes his identity on the revealed image of Bellario's femaleness, reproducing the essentialist structure of praise. Yet even as he seems to realize and resume this character, Philaster confesses to an ethos that resides within and breaks through the proper:

                        But Bellario,
(For I must call thee so still) tell me why
Thou didst conceale thy sex …
                                   (V.v.145-7)

The inexplicable compulsion of his parenthetic 'must call' registers the excess of androgynous disguise, an ethopoetic trope that reveals the sex it conceals and rejects the identity it envoices.

V

The interplay of personal and interpersonal identities in androgynous disguise stages the conflicting effects of the ethopoetics of gender. Through this rhetorical and dramatistic trope Renaissance texts may articulate conservative cultural and historical concepts of sexual selfhood. The objectifying, self-defining genres of encomium and misogyny are prominently used in such conventional representations. At the same time, the confessional speech act functions recurrently through this discursive tradition to undermine the epideictic pairing of sexual self and other, male and female. An ambiguous ethos emerges in the process of self-revelation, even where such confession presumes its own univocal utterance through the shedding of past disguises. The rhetoric of confession defers sexual self-presence.

In this way androgynous disguise complements the ethopoetic process that marks the rhetorics of sovereignty and subjection. Strategies of disguise and character-making reveal and challenge the political and sexual motives of power, obedience, and desire that structure and underlie Renaissance discourses of essentialist selfhood. It is therefore significant that the three dramatic genres and corresponding figures that have been considered—satire, allegory, and tragicomedy; malcontent/prince, courtier, and androgyne—all function dialogically by both invoking and interrogating the tropes of discursive selfhood. Such dialogism is the key to the hybrid ethos that is fashioned by disguise. Each of these genres is also marked by a certain thematic undecidability or unfinishedness, which reflects the paradoxical impossibility of removing a disguise and ending its social significance, once it has been knowingly or even unknowingly assumed.

This complex of rhetorical functions makes disguise a critical trope for the Renaissance discourse of selfhood. Within specific ideological contexts, it figures the limits of images of selfhood and of genres of self-representation. Or perhaps it is better to say that disguise figures the limits to the limits that such images and genres would set up. For in always anticipating, even as it defers or denies, its final divestment, disguise reveals the ongoing process of selfhood. It is a process that, though framed by presumptions of origin and completion, enacts a dialogic, unfinished, and hybrid identity.

Notes

¹ M.C. Bradbrook 'Shakespeare and the Use of Disguise in Elizabethan Drama' Essays in Criticism 2 (1952) 167.

²The Complete Works of John Lyly 3 vols ed R. Warwick Bond (Oxford: Clarendon 1902) II.i.4-5, Twelfth Night II.i.27.

³ Cf Keir Elam The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen 1980) 87.

⁴ Virginia Woolf Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World 1941) 88: ' "About a false Duke; and a Princess disguised as a boy; then the long lost heir turns out to be the beggar, because of a mole on his cheek; and Ferdinando and Carinthia—that's the Duke's daughter, only she's been lost in a cave—falls in love with Ferdinando who had been put into a basket as a baby by an aged crone. And they marry. That's I think what happens," she said, looking up from the programme.'

⁵ 'An Homilie against excesse of Appareil' in Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup eds Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547-1571) (Gainesville: Scholars' Fascimiles 1968) 102-9. Further references will be included in the text.

⁶ Jean E. Howard 'Renaissance Antitheatricality' in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor eds Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York: Methuen 1987) 167.

⁷ J.W. Binns 'Women or Transvestites on the Elizabethan Stage?: An Oxford Controversy' Sixteenth Century Journal 5 (1974) 113.

⁸ Margot Heinemann Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980) 21, 200-36; cf Jean E. Howard 'Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England' Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988) 422: 'Dress, as a highly regulated semiotic system, became a primary site where a struggle over the mutability of the social order was conducted.'

⁹ Phyllis Rackin 'Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage' PMLA 102 (1987) 38; cf Michael D. Bristol Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen 1985) 167, Jonathan Dollimore 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression: The Jacobean Connection,' Renaissance Drama 17 (1986) 77.

¹⁰ Steven Mullaney The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988) 22.

¹¹ Cf Natalie Zemon Davis 'The Reasons of Misrule' in Society and Culture in Early-Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1975) 116, Jonathan Haynes 'Festivity and the Dramatic Economy of Jonson's Bartholomew Fair' ELH 51 (1984) 654-68, Richard Wilson ' "Is this a holiday?": Shakespeare's Roman Carnival' ELH 54 (1987) 31-44.

¹² Cf Lawrence Stone The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1977) 135 and passim, Mary Beth Rose The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1988) 3 and passim.

¹³ Harold Garfinkel 'Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person, Part 1 ' in Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity 1989) 118-24 (original emphasis).

¹⁴ Cf Stephen Orgel 'Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women' South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989) 7-29; Howard 'Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle' 428, 439-40.

¹⁵ Garfinkel 'Passing' 133.

¹⁶ Thomas Wilson The Arte of Rhetorique ed G.H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon 1909) 175.

¹⁷ Henry Peacham The Garden of Eloquence ed R.C. Alston (Menston: Scolar Press 1971) c.ii.

¹⁸ As suggested in ch 1, in its distinction between the 'proper' and the figurative, the old rhetoric initiated more recent theories of the relation of metaphor and metonymy to the subject's speech—for example, the speculations of Roman Jakobson ('Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances' in Fundamentals of Language ['S-Gravenhague: Mouton 1956]) on their role in Freud's work on dreams and the language process generally (notions developed by Lacan).

¹⁹ Ian Maclean The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980) 8; Michel Foucault, in The Use of Pleasure (vol 2 of The History of Sexuality trans Robert Hurley [New York: Vintage 1990]), notes the importance for masculine self-formation of ensuring the oppositions remain intact (47).

²⁰Twelfth Night V.i.250.

²¹ Carla Freccero, in 'The Other and the Same: The Image of the Hermaphrodite in Rabelais' in Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers eds Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986), traces depictions of woman's belated androgynizing effect on man to the Metamorphoses: 'in Ovid's account, hermaphroditism becomes a curse, the reduction of an essentially masculine nature' (150).

²² Peacham Garden of Eloquence C.ii. On the related metonymic function of woman in medieval discourse, see R. Howard Bloch 'Medieval Misogyny' Representations 20 (1987) 10.

²³ I.A. Richards The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press 1965) 97.

²⁴ Plato The Symposium 191c-d in The Collected Dialogues of Plato ed Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985); cf Freccero 'The Other and the Same' 145-6.

²⁵ Cicero De Oratore trans E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge: Loeb 1975) I.viii.34, George Puttenham The Arte of English Poesie ed Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1936) 7.

²⁶ Rose Expense of Spirit 9-10.

²⁷ Coppélia Kahn 'The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family' in Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn eds Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1980) 227.

²⁸ Joel Fineman Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press 1986) 301.

²⁹ Coppélia Kahn 'The Absent Mother in King Lear ' in Ferguson et al eds Rewriting the Renaissance 49. This reading of romance seems to derive from Northrop Frye The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum 1967): 'Translated into dream terms, the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality' (193). On the critical dismissal of Fletcherian tragicomedy as 'decadent,' cf Rose Expense of Spirit 181-5 and Dollimore 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression' 73.

³⁰ Clifford Leech 'Introduction' to The Two Noble Kinsmen in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Two Noble Kinsmen (New York: Signet 1986) xxxi.

³¹ Arthur C. Kirsch Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia 1972) 41.

³² Kirsch Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives 47;. cf Eugene M. Waith The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven: Yale University Press 1952) 42, 184; Andrew Gurr 'Introduction' in Philaster or Love Lies a-Bleeding (London: Methuen 1969) xxx.

³³ Augustus William Schlegel A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Literature trans John Black (London: Henry G. Bohn 1846) 468. This psychological essentialism often turns sexual; see Simon Shepherd's discussion of efforts to establish a suitable male heterosexuality for the bard and his work, 'Shakespeare's Private Drawer: Shakespeare and Homosexuality' in Graham Holderness ed The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1988) 96-110, and Joseph Pequigney Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985) 49-51.

³⁴ Cf Joel Fineman 'The Turn of the Shrew' in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman eds Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen 1985) 153, Terry Eagleton William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986) 65, Laura Levine 'Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization from 1579 to 1642' Criticism 28 (1986) 135-6; in 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression,' Dollimore suggests a related reading of Fletcher's Love's Cure: 'a relegitimation of masculinity coexists with an ironic critique of it' (73).

³⁵ Fineman Shakespeare's Perjured Eye 267.

³⁶ Ibid 65.

³⁷ Gorgias Encomium of Helen ed and trans D.M. MacDowell (Bristol: Bristol Classic 1982) 21. Further references will be included in the text.

³⁸ Like Eve, the betrayer or mother of mankind, Helen was also used to defend women. In Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Brighton: Harvester 1984), Linda Woodbridge notes that Helen served as 'one of the frequentest exempla of both formal defenders and attackers' (127). This reversibility again suggests the figurai ambiguity of woman.

³⁹ Cf Rose Expense of Spirit 206. Note Frank Lentricchia Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1983) 114 on philosophy's parallel deconstruction of the female subject through privileging a rhetoric of reason over 'feeling.'

⁴⁰ Ernst Robert Curtius European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages trans Willard Trask (New York: Pantheon 1953) 70. The humorous tone of Gorgias' conclusion may not mock Helen. As Maclean comments on Cornelius Agrippa's De nobilitate et praecellentia foemini sexus (1529), 'the humour may indicate the impossibility of discussing in serious terms the proposition of woman's equality, and therefore represents a strategy of discourse which is subversive in intention' (Renaissance Notion of Women 91). Woodbridge, however, emphasizes that the majority of misogynist Renaissance texts do adopt a jesting tone (Women and the English Renaissance 31 and passim).

⁴¹ Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene III.ii.1 in Spenser: Poetical Works ed J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1979); Lauren Silberman 'Singing Unsung Heroines: Androgynous Discourse in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene ' in Ferguson et al eds Rewriting the Renaissance 259-71.

⁴² Isocrates 'Encomium on Helen' in Isocrates 3 vols trans George Norlin and Larve van Hook (Cambridge: Loeb 1961-6) 111:22. Further references (to paragraph numbers) will be included in the text.

⁴³ Cf Cicero De Oratore II.lxxx.325 , Richards Philosophy of Rhetoric 24, Kenneth Burke A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press 1969) 52. Recalling Puttenham, we might note that his switch in the rhetoric of rhetoric, from warfare to courtly diplomacy, reflects a change in late-Renaissance ideals for male aristocratic behaviour; see Lawrence Stone The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford: Clarendon 1965) 244.

⁴⁴ Thomas M. Greene The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press 1982) 40.

⁴⁵ Jonathan Dollimore Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984) 109.

⁴⁶ La Rochefoucauld Maxims trans Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin 1986) 37-8; cf Rose Expense of Spirit 200-1, and René Girard 'The Politics of Desire in Troilus and Cressida ' in Parker and Hartman eds Shakespeare and the Question of Theory 188-209.

⁴⁷ On the interrelation of encomium and misogyny, cf Paolo Valesio Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1980) 271 nl5; Dympna Callaghan Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of King Lear, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil (New York: Harvester 1989) 125; R. Howard Bloch 'Chaucer's Maiden's Head: "The Physician's Tale" and the Poetics of Virginity' Representations 28 (1989) 127.

⁴⁸ Wilson Arte of Rhetorique A.iii. Further references will be included in the text.

⁴⁹ Quintilian Institutio Oratio trans E.H. Butler (London: Loeb 1969) III.v.2.

⁵⁰ W.B. and E.P. A Helpe to Discourse, or A Miscelany of Merriment (London: 1619) 119; cf Lily B. Campbell Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (New York: Barnes and Noble 1967) 99.

⁵¹ In The Book of the Courtier (trans Thomas Hoby [London: Dent 1948]), Lord Gasper, Castiglione's 'aggrieved misogynist' (Joan Kelly Women, History, and Theory [Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984] 39), makes a similar observation: 'when a woman is borne, it is a slacknesse or default of nature' (196).

⁵² Thomas Wright The Passions of the Mind in General ed William Webster Newbold (New York: Garland 1986) 242; cf La Rochefoucauld's maxim 262: 'There is no passion in which love of self rules so despotically as love' (Maxims 72).

⁵³ See Spenser Faerie Queene VII.lviii

⁵⁴ For example, Campaspe II.ii.31-57, Epicoene I.i.109-44, Hamlet III.i.106-49, Othello II.i.100-66, Castiglione The Courtier 66-7, Michel de Montaigne Essays 3 vols trans John Florio (London: Dent 1965) II:193, Wright Passions of the Mind 188, The Sermons of John Donne ed Theodore A. Gill (New York: Meridian 1961) 154; cf Callaghan Woman and Gender 118, Bloch 'Medieval Misogyny' 9-15.

⁵⁵Othello IV.i.254-5; cf Peter Stallybrass 'Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed' in Ferguson et al eds Rewriting the Renaissance 137, Catherine Belsey The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen 1985) 149.

⁵⁶ Wright Passions of the Mind 120; cf I Corinthians 14:34, Belsey Subject of Tragedy 191, and Parker Literary Fat Ladies 106-17, 125, especially 112, where Parker notes a similar deployment of nature in Peacham's Garden of Eloquence and Richard Sherry's Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550).

⁵⁷ Cf Kelly Women, History, and Theory 34-5.

⁵⁸ Hélène Cixous 'The Laugh of the Medusa' Signs 1 (1976) 887

⁵⁹Sermons of John Donne 104

⁶⁰ Castiglione The Courtier 219; cf Howard 'Cross-dressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle' on the 'strong discursive linkages … between female cross-dressing and the threat of female sexual incontinence' (420).

⁶¹ Cf Stephen Orgel 'Prospero's Wife' Representations 8 (1984) 1-13.

⁶² Michel Foucault History of Sexuality vol 1 An Introduction trans Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin 1981) 61; cf Elizabeth Hanson 'Torture and Truth in Renaissance England' Representations 34 (1991) 67 on the potential ambiguity of sworn speech in criminal trials.

⁶³ E. K. Chambers The Elizabethan Stage 4 vols (Oxford: Claredon 1923) 1:248; cf Howard 'Renaissance Antitheatricality' 169 on the links between women and acting.

⁶⁴ John Calvin The Institutes of the Christian Religion 2 vols trans Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids Mich: Wm B. Eerdmans 1966) 1:540. Further references, all to vol 1, will be included in the text.

⁶⁵ Cf Dollimore 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression': 'For John Rainolds the boy transvestite destroyed the fragile moral restraint containing an anarchic male sexuality' (65).

⁶⁶ Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy 3 vols (London: Dent 1968) III:154-5; in 'Nobody's Perfect' Orgel suggests that heterosexuality was generally conceived as more of a cultural threat than homosexuality (26).

⁶⁷ Wright Passions of the Mind 249.

⁶⁸Sermons of John Donne 151.

⁶⁹ Cf the two conclusions Levine draws from her study of antitheatrical texts—either 'there is no such thing as a masculine self or there is 'something horrendously "other" at the core of the self: 'Men in Women's Clothing' 136.

⁷⁰ Montaigne 'Apologie of Raymond Sebond' in Essays II:193.

⁷¹ Cf Jacques Lacan The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis trans Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton 1981) 154.

⁷² See Kenneth Burke A Grammar of Motives (Cleveland: Meridian 1962) 516-17.

⁷³ Beaumont and Fletcher A King and No King I.i. 188-91. All references to Beaumont and Fletcher are to The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon 10 vols ed Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1966). A King and No King and The Maid's Tragedy are in vol 2; Philaster is in vol 1. Further references will be included in the text.

⁷⁴ Robert K. Hunter 'Introduction' to Philaster in Dramatic Works 1:383, 385.

⁷⁵ René Girard Violence and the Sacred trans Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1977) 79, 8.

⁷⁶ Greenblatt Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press 1988) 78.

⁷⁷ On this motif, see Mary Douglas Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Conceptes of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge 1966) 95.

⁷⁸ Ibid 115.

⁷⁹ The publisher's address to the reader before the second quarto of 1622 uses this complex of bodily imagery to justify itself as the true edition: 'Courteous Reader. Philaster, and Arethusa his love, have laine so long a bleeding, by reason of some dangerous and gaping wounds, which they received in the first Impression … assuredly they will now find double favour, being reformed, and set forth suteable, to their birth, and breeding' (1:375).

⁸⁰ Gurr 'Introduction' Philaster lxvi.

⁸¹ Cf Lisa Jardine Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester 1983) 186.

⁸² John F. Danby Poets on Fortune's Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher (Washington: Kennikat 1962) 201-2.

⁸³ Cf Lacan's notion of 'the drama of Hamlet as the man who has lost the way of his desire': 'Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet' in Shoshana Felman ed Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading—Otherwise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1982) 12.

⁸⁴ On masculinist self-fashioning through hunting and love, cf sonnet 67 in Spenser's Amoretti.

⁸⁵ Jacques Derrida The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond trans Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987) 145.

⁸⁶ Tennenhouse Power on Display 63.

⁸⁷ Cf Dollimore 'Subjectivity, Sexuality, and Transgression': 'Masculinity is rooted in a sexual violence performed inseparably against both men and women' (75).

⁸⁸ Michel Foucault Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason trans Richard Howard (New York Vintage 1973) 34. Foucault also notes the revelatory function of madness in 'the tragicomic structures of preclassical literature' (34).

⁸⁹ Cf Lear's continuing struggle against the feminizing Hysterica passio, King Lear I.iv.296-9, II.iv.56-8, II.iv.296-9.