SOURCE: "Androgyny: Crossdressing and Disguise," in Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 2nd Edition, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996, pp. 231-71.

[In the following excerpt originally published in 1975, Dusinberre discusses Shakespeare's use of women in male disguise as a means to more fully explore the nature of femininity. ]

The boy actor had a special affinity with those women who offended Elizabethan and Jacobean society by wearing men's clothes. Condemned by opponents of the stage for dressing as a woman, he was often also guilty of disguising that woman as a man. Viola's melancholy reflection when she sees Olivia's ring fell on well-tuned ears:

My master loves her dearly
And I (poor monster!) fond as much on him.¹

Viola was a monster on two counts: a man acting a woman and a woman in breeches. The woman in theatrical disguise aroused the same fear in moralists as the masculine woman in breeches. When Greene's Dorothea in James IV asks her dwarf whether she looks like a man in her disguise as squire, he retorts: 'If not a man, yet like a manly shrew.'² Trousers on a woman, whether on the stage or off it, spelled insubordination. . . .

The masculine woman and the woman in disguise are both disruptive socially because they go behind the scenes and find that manhood describes not the man inside the clothes, but the world's reactions to his breeches. Masculinity is as much a mask as femininity, and the face it hides may be Sir Andrew Aguecheek's, or Petruchio's, or Volumnia's, or Moll Cutpurse's, or Portia's, or that of Coriolanus himself, bewildered by emotions the mask cannot express:

Like a dull actor now,
I have forgot my part, and I am out,
Even to a full disgrace.⁴³

A woman in disguise smokes out the male world, perceiving masculinity as a form of acting, the manner rather than the man. But the charade only works if the sexes stick to their parts. When the lover fails to importune the lady in Love's Cure, she must relinquish reluctance if she is to bring him to the sticking-point. Beatrice, called on to admire Benedick's valour, mischievously delivers the wrong speech:

Beatrice: He is a very valiant trencherman; he
hath an excellent stomach.
Messenger: And a good soldier too, lady.
Beatrice: And a good soldier to a lady; but
what is he to a lord?⁴⁴

Rosalind can play the man as convincingly as a coward:

Were it not better
Because that I am more than common tall,
That I did suit me all points like a man?
A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh,
A boar-spear in my hand, and in my heart
Lie there what hidden woman's fear there will,
We'll have a swashing and a martial outside,
As many other mannish cowards have
That do outface it with their semblances.⁴⁵

Portia revels in the prospect of her own boyish braggardism; the world will see her and Nerissa

in such a habit,
That they shall think we are accomplished
With that we lack; I'll hold thee any wager
When we are both accoutered like young men,
I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two,
And wear my dagger with the braver grace,
And speak between the change of man and boy,

With a reed voice, and turn two mincing steps
Into a manly stride; and speak of frays
Like a fine bragging youth: and tell quaint lies
  How honourable ladies sought my love,
Which I denying, they fell sick and died:
I could not do withal:—then I'll repent,
And wish for all that, that I had not kill'd them;
And twenty of these puny lies I'll tell,
That men shall swear I have discontinued school
About a twelvemonth: I have within my mind
A thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks,
Which I will practise.⁴⁶

Society values the rules of masculine and feminine behaviour because they are easy to follow. The dramatist of Shakespeare's theatre values them because they help him to turn his boy actors into women. Shakespeare affirms Portia's femininity by assigning her the woman's view that masculinity is a charade. The boy actor imagines a boy's pranks; declaring what he is, he gives the illusion of being what he is not: a woman acting a boy. Shakespeare draws attention to the boy actor only to confirm his woman's nature. Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew petulantly brushes aside her importunate tutor:

I am no breeching scholar in the schools.
I'll not be tied to hours nor 'pointed times,
But learn my lessons as I please myself.⁴⁷

The woman is born from the boy's petulant denial of his own identity. She mocks the boy who creates her. Imogen interrupts Pisanio's recital of the waggish tricks which must take the place of feminine foibles once she is disguised as a man:

Nay, be brief:
I see into thy end, and am almost
A man already.

None of the men in the play resemble Pisanio's sketch of a man, any more than Imogen herself resembles his idea of a woman, except in the one respect in which she is different from most women. 'Change/Command into obedience,'⁴⁸ instructs the attendant of a princess, forgetting that women obey and men command. But when the playwright makes his boy actors act women, who are to act men, he gives them a sexual identity too positive to be confused with the change in their clothes. The woman character acquires independence from the boy who acts her.

One element in her independence lies in her detachment from the role of femininity. The woman is aware of herself as actress not in the theatre, but in a social setting. The Wise-woman of Hogsdon in Heywood's play advises one of the heroines, whom she believes to be a boy, how to act a girl: 'Thou shalt be tyred like a woman; can you make a curtesie, take small strides, simper, and seeme modest? me thinkes thou has a womans voyce already.' Luce assures her: 'Doubt not of me, He act them naturally.'⁴⁹ The Lord in the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew summons his page to play Sly's lady:

Sirrah, go you to Barthol'mew my page
And see him dressed in all suits like a lady.
That done, conduct him to the drunkard's chamber
And call him madam; do him obeisance.
Tell him from me—as he will win my love—
He bear himself with honorable action
Such as he hath observed in noble ladies
Unto their lords, by them accomplishèd:
Such duty to the drunkard let him do
With soft low tongue and lowly courtesy,
And say, 'What is't your honor will command
Wherein your lady and your humble wife
May show her duty and make known her love?'
And then with kind embracements, tempting kisses,
And with declining head into his bosom,
Bid him shed tears, as being overjoyed
To see her noble lord restored to health
Who for this seven years hath esteemèd him
No better than a poor and loathsome beggar.
And 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,
Which in a napkin being close conveyed
Shall in despite enforce a watery eye.
I know the boy will well usurp the grace,
Voice, gait, and action of a gentlewoman.

When the players begin their entertainment for Sly, The Taming of the Shrew itself, two young ladies enter: Kate the curst, and Bianca, full of 'mild behavior and sobriety,' like the lady played by Bartholomew. Her father rages at the elder:

Why, how now, dame, whence grows this insolence?
Bianca, stand aside. Poor girl, she weeps.⁵⁰

Shakespeare seasons the sorrow of Bianca with the suspicion of an onion close conveyed in a napkin. The boy feigns the woman's sorrow, and the woman's sorrow is feigned.

Disguise makes explicit in women what one writer describes as 'an ambiguity which corresponded to an ambiguity in the self, divided between surveyor and surveyed.'⁵¹ The woman observes her disguised self. But when the woman is played by a boy, she watches two people, herself disguised, and the boy who plays her. Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, disguised as the page Sebastian, describes to Silvia the lady Julia, who is

About my stature: for at Pentecost,
When all our pageants of delight were play'd,
Our youth got me to play the woman's part,
And I was trimm'd in Madam Julia's gown,
Which served me as fit, by all men's judgments,
As if the garment had been made for me;
Therefore I know she is about my height.
And at that time I made her weep agood,
For I did play a lamentable part.
Madam, 'twas Ariadne, passioning
For Theseus' perjury, and unjust flight;
Which I so lively acted with my tears,
That my poor mistress, moved therewithal,
Wept bitterly; and would I might be dead,
If I in thought felt not her very sorrow.⁵²

Julia watches a boy put on Julia's gown and play a woman deserted by her lover. When he weeps she weeps in pity for him and he feels her sorrow, for the boy actor is Julia herself. Cleopatra shares with Antony, in a passion at once both real and theatrical, a highly developed aesthetic sense of self which allows the artist both to be and to observe himself being—the Callas temperament. Cleopatra dreads not death, but the image of her own femininity amateurishly acted:

The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels: Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I the posture of whore.⁵³

Cleopatra, professional player of her own part as woman, spurns the boy who is also herself. The woman is audience to the boy.

In As You Like It Rosalind disguised as Ganymede watches her own performance as a boy. She consents shamefacedly to Oliver's friendly jibe: 'You a man! / You lack a man's heart,' protesting that she was only acting. 'Well then,' cries Oliver, 'Take a good heart, and counterfeit to be a man.' Rosalind, no longer acting, sighs: 'So I do: but i'faith, I should have been a woman by right.' Disguise makes Rosalind a man-woman. Trudging into Arden with Celia wilting on her arm as a shepherdess, she muses: 'I could find in my heart to disgrace my man's apparel, and to cry like a woman: but I must comfort the weaker vessel, as doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat.' Breeches compel her bravery, but the bravery is her own, perceived in the woman by the boy. As Ganymede she draws her own portrait for Orlando:

I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more newfangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey: I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry; I will laugh like a hyen, and that when thou art inclined to sleep.⁵⁴

Rosalind revels in Orlando's discomforture at a boy's vision of the contrary wife of whom Erasmus had urged that 'she be not mery when he murneth nor dysposed to play when he is sad.'⁵⁵ Projecting a woman's incorrigibility, the boy is incorrigible. 'But will my Rosalind do so?' asks Orlando, bemused. 'By my life,' she rejoins, 'She will do as I do.' Being a woman, she thrives on not being a woman: 'I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offences as he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal.'⁵⁶

Acting a man in the forest, acting a woman for Orlando, Rosalind acquires a Puckish insight into the theatrical nature of masculinity and femininity. Recognising the two roles, she travels from one to the other with the versatility of the Elizabethan player obliged to double parts. As a boy she is Orlando's equal; as a woman she is Celia's equal. Meredith might have had Rosalind in mind when he wrote:

The heroines of Comedy are like women of the world, not necessarily heartless from being clearsighted: they seem so to the sentimentally-reared only for the reason that they use their wits, and are not wandering vessels crying for a captain or a pilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with men, and that of men with them: and as the two, however divergent, both look on one object, namely, Life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring them to some resemblance. The Comic poet dares to show us men and women coming to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that when they draw together in social life their minds grow liker; just as the philosopher discerns the similarity of boy and girl, until the girl is marched away to the nursery.⁵⁷

The boy actor was a spur to the creation of heroines of allegedly masculine spirit. The high spirits and sharp repartee which characterised the Children's companies are reborn in the quick wits, audacity and independence of Shakespeare's heroines. But where Phyllida and Gallathea in Lyly's play are accessible to boy actors because they embody a boy's view of women, Shakespeare's women are both women and boys.

Encountering only each other, Phyllida and Gallathea learn nothing new about men from their disguise. But Rosalind sees Orlando through a man's eyes because he treats her as he might treat another man. Orsino in Twelfth Night, who can only address the high fantastical to the Lady Olivia, talks to his page as to a rational being. Had Rosalind worn a skirt, Orlando might have courted her with the masculine panache which she delights to display in the boy Ganymede. Theatrical disguise robs courtship of the artificial exaggeration of masculine and feminine difference sustained in the skirmishes between Phoebe and Silvius.

Yet Shakespeare, faced with actors who were literally the same, focused his imagination on creating out of more and more likeness, a sense of difference. Benedick and Beatrice speak more alike, act more alike than Orlando and Rosalind because Beatrice never looks like a man, so Shakespeare can afford to have her, as More would have wished, talk and think like one. Rosalind, who looks like one, is all vivacity, spirit, speed, susceptibility and fancy to an Orlando silent, melancholic, never drawn wholly into her sphere, wanting a world of substance as well as shadows: 'O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes! .. . I can live no longer by thinking.' As Corin is to Touchstone, so Orlando is to Rosalind; he cannot compete, but nor does he want to, any more than he wants to be cured of his love, and in this play his tranquil ease beside her greater brilliance marks masculinity beside a femininity not obscured by breeches.

Celia keeps before the audience a Rosalind who is always a woman. Affirming the fiction of boyhood, Celia continually destroys it. Rosalind laments Orlando's tardiness: 'Never talk to me, I will weep.' Celia retorts: 'Do, I prithee—but yet have the grace to consider that tears do not become a man.' Insisting that Rosalind is a man, Celia draws attention to the illusion of manhood. Rosalind assures Orlando: 'And I am your Rosalind,' and an anxious sisterly voice nudges the forgetful Ganymede: 'It pleases him to call you so; but he hath a Rosalind of a better leer than you.' In the play of shepherd and shepherdess the actors dry up and require a prompter, so that Celia, startled at Rosalind's swoon, cries: 'There is more in it . . . Cousin, Ganymede.' Celia stands witness that Rosalind is not changed from the girl of the first scenes. To that girl, the presence of Orlando in the forest is a delight at first marred by her own masculine appearance: 'Alas the day, what shall I do with my doublet and hose?' A woman in love demands the licence of womanhood: 'Good my complexion! dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet-and-hose in my disposition?' Celia stands evidence to a fixed point in Rosalind's nature to which the moving foot of her acting of the masculine and the feminine always hearkens back. 'You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate: we must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest.'⁵⁸ Shakespeare separates his women from the boy actors who play them: at their most boyish they are still women watching their own performance as boys.

Shakespeare's actors gave him none of the actress' short-cuts to femininity—pre-packaged sex appeal, bosoms, hair, the tricks of the feminine trade which the female child may learn as soon as she sees she is admired. Shakespeare wrote into his text, just as he wrote blood and darkness into Macbeth, a femininity which would survive the most gangling of Ganymedes. Actresses tend to play Shakespeare's heroines too feminine; like elaborate scenery, too much archness has the effect of tautology. Shakespeare used poetry to evoke a scene he could not reproduce in the theatre; to suggest the physical passion which his actors could not demonstrate realistically; to create women when he had only men. To annex to his plays too much of what he had not is only to waste what he gives. Some of the finest Shakespearian women are still schoolboys.

Boys make bewitching girls, where women make lumbering youths. Slighter than the adult actor, a boy could still make a convincing girl even when disguised as a boy. The age at which a boy actor ceased to act women is a moot point. Malvolio describes Cesario as 'not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy; as a squash is before 'tis a peascod, or a codling when 'tis almost an apple: 'tis with him in standing water between boy and man.'⁵⁹ Portia proposes to 'speak between the change of man and boy, / With a reed voice,'⁶⁰ implying one harsher than her normal speaking voice. The natural transition from playing women to playing men is at the breaking of the voice, but boys' voices broke later in Shakespeare's time than now, and a trained voice not only tends to break later than an untrained one, but its alto tone may be prolonged even into the late teens.⁶¹ Nathan Field, boy actor and dramatist, may have played women's parts into his late teens or even till he was twenty, but it is unlikely that he continued to play them once his voice was really broken.⁶² The dramatists draw attention to women's high voices. Hamlet accosts the Player who will play the Queen: 'Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring.'⁶³ Quince instructs Flute to 'speak as small as you will.'⁶⁴ The comedy of Flute's name and profession as bellows-mender consists in the gruffness artificially repaired with which he renders Thisbe's dulcet tones. The vocal contortion is part of his amateurishness, not comic at all if Hippolyta declares it to be the silliest stuff she has ever seen in a tenor voice. The disguised heroine's lightness of voice gives her the skittishness of Lyly's boy pages which makes Cesario seem at once saucy to Maria and the Fool, and wistful to Orsino:

For they shall yet belie thy happy years,
That say thou art a man: Diana's lip
Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe
Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound—
And all is semblative a woman's part.⁶⁵

Shakespeare may have used poetry to enhance a difference not easily discernible without its suggestion. But it seems more likely that when Arviragus and Guiderius sing the dirge for the youth Fidele (Imogen in disguise) Arviragus mentions their broken voices because he noticed that Fidèle's was unbroken, intuitively associating the unknown sister with his mother:

And let us, Polydore, though now our voices
Have got the mannish crack, sing him to th' ground,
As once to our mother: use like note and words,
Save that Euriphele must be Fidele.⁶⁶

The point about the encounter between Sir Andrew and Viola is not that they both look like men but that they both look like girls. Young men wore their hair long, as Barnaby Rich had bitterly complained. When Julia disguises herself as a boy Lucetta reminds her to cut her hair, but she replies:

No, girl, I'll knit it up in silken strings,
With twenty odd-conceited true-love knots.⁶⁷

In an age of effeminate fashions, it was easy for the boy actor to look like a woman.

The respectability of the theatre depended on the dramatist's ability to suggest that the boy actor was not Haec-Vir, the feminine man, any more than the woman he acted was Hie Mulier, the masculine woman. One way was to juxtapose the woman in disguise with the effeminate male adult actor. Middleton's Lactantio in More Dissemblers Besides Women is a typical Jacobean courtier, 'This perfiim'd parcel of curl'd powder'd hair.' He is debauched: attended by one pregnant mistress disguised as a page, he contrives for a second also to disguise herself, pretending to be shocked by her masculine immodesty in her new attire:

I arrest thee
In Cupid's name; deliver up your weapon,
[Takes her sword.
It is not for your wearing, Venus knows it:
Here's a fit thing indeed.

The author of Haec-Vir might have retorted that Lactantio had surrendered all manhood except the power of begetting, and had thus obliged his women to assume masculine bearing in his stead. The girlishness of the page measures the hero's girlishness, just as Viola's manhood queries Sir Andrew's. Dondolo describes

a young gallant lying a-bed with his wench, if the constable should chance to come up and search, being both in smocks, they'd be taken for sisters, and I hope a constable dare go no further; and as for knowing of their heads, that's well enough too, for I know many young gentlemen wear longer hair than their mistresses.

Femininity and masculinity become a Lewis Carroll joke in a looking-glass world; when the dancing master hears his boy pupil cry for a midwife, he expostulates:

A midwife? by this light, the boy's with child!
A miracle! some woman is the father.
The world's turn'd upside down: sure if men breed,
Women must get; one never could do both yet.

The effeminate man's reward for his inversion of nature is a wife in breeches:

He durst not own her for his wife till now;
Only contracted with her in man's apparel,
For the more modesty, because he was bashful,
And never could endure the sight of women.⁶⁸

The masculine woman in Haec-Vir justified herself by pointing to the womanish man: 'What could we poore weake women, doe lesse (being farre too weake by force to fetch backe those spoiles you have unjustly taken from us) then to gather up those garments you have proudly cast away, and therewith to cloath both our bodies and our mindes; since no other meanes was left us to continue our names, and to support a difference?'⁶⁹

Virginia Woolf claimed that 'it was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress and of a woman's sex.'⁷⁰ The dramatists declared that whereas an instability in Lactantio's nature made him wear feminine clothes, the boy actor's clothes were only a theatrical device. In The Roaring Girl Middleton conceived a scene between a woman in disguise, her lover, and Moll Cutpurse in the masculine woman's breeches. Despite the fact that they not only all three look like men, but are men, there is no mistaking the two who are women. Moll comments when Sebastian kisses his disguised mistress: 'How strange this shows, one man to kiss another.' Sebastian retorts:

I'd kiss such men to choose, Moll;
Methinks a woman's lip tastes well in a doublet.⁷¹

Clothes, in the theatre and out of it, manifest only that nothing that is so, is so.

The man-womanishness of disguise may have helped to rebut accusations that boy actors excited homosexuality. Orlando and Orsino develop love for a playfellow and confidant rather than for a sexual opposite—Erasmus' idea of love born from the harmony of like minds. When the woman in disguise is wooed by a woman she reverts to boyhood while protecting her womanhood. Rosalind is masculine to Phoebe's femininity—scornful, down-to-earth, impatient at the follies of women. Viola is robust in her relation to Olivia—proud, uncompromising, scrupulous: the lady, being of her element, is not in her welkin. In Lyly's Gallathea two girls woo each other without lasciviousness: passion reaches the audience filtered through comic distance. The image of love is fantastic, grotesque, lyrical, asexual, a pastime for gods and nymphs. Cupid haunts the grove disguised as a nymph, and nymphs haunt the grove disguised as boys in order to evade Neptune. Lyly's love-struck girls inhabit the same uncomplicated emotional climate as the boys in the Elizabethan friendship plays. There is little overt homosexuality in Elizabethan drama outside Marlowe's Edward II. Nor would it arguably have been politic for the dramatists, despite their capacity for evasion, to nurture on stage propensities for which moralists condemned the theatre.

Caroline drama compromises with the homosexual situation in a way that Elizabethan drama never does. Women disguised as men woo other women with more sense of physical involvement, less moral keenness and less honesty when the subterfuge is discovered. In Ford's The Lover's Melancholy, or Brome's A Mad Couple Well Match'd, or Suckling's Brennoralt or Shirley's The Sisters, ladies disappointed by suitors turned feminine are left high and dry with no questions asked and unreal protestations of eternal friendship covering unequivocal amorous betrayal. So many feelings are cavalierly swept under the carpet that the only conclusion possible is that these are not feeling beings. The earlier playwrights took care to develop in the disguised woman an unmistakable allegiance to the fact of her womanhood, while freeing her from its restrictions. Caroline drama, less interested in the restrictions, is also less interested in the woman, or in the man she might become. Blasé about both nature and custom, the Caroline dramatist peopled the theatre with monsters without noticing it.

Obliged to convince the audience of the boy actor's femininity even when he looked, because of his disguise, exactly like the boy he was, Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights created a femininity to outlast the boy actor's changes of costume. Not having a natural woman on the stage, the dramatists concentrated on making audiences believe in the fiction of real women. The fact that the boy actor gave them no help freed them to look beyond the acquired manners of femininity, as the masculine woman herself had done when she cast aside a woman's dress.

Women share with other women experiences which men can never have. The Duchess of York in Richard II despairs of finding in the Duke that love for a child which is born with the struggle for life:

Had'st thou groan'd for him
As I have done, thou wouldst be more pitiful.⁷²

Imogen compares her longing to see Posthumus with a mother's longing for delivery:

Ne'er long'd my mother so
To see me first, as I have now.⁷³

Giovanni in The White Devil cites his mother Isabella's feeding of him as a proof of her love:

I have often heard her say she gave me suck,
And it should seem by that she dearly lov'd me,
Since princes seldom do it.⁷⁴

Lady Macbeth's image of dashing the babe from her breast evokes her femininity even more potently for Shakespeare's time because a noblewoman, like Juliet's mother, would not have been expected to suckle her child. On this primal level a woman's nature diverges from a man's, forging the tie which Hermione allows to be stronger than the tie of childhood amity:

To tell, he longs to see his son, were strong:
But let him say so then, and let him go;
But let him swear so, and he shall not stay.
We'll thwack him hence with distaffs.⁷⁵

The Duchess of Malfi's last thought is for her children:

I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers, ere she sleep.⁷⁶

Women are one with other women in the experience of motherhood in a way that men are with other men on the battlefield, both united against the isolation of violence and fear of death. The dramatists place the boy actor in a spiritual community of women.

Women are intimate not just as individuals, but as women. Brought up together in separation from the male world, women develop a loyalty to their sex, while the male child in their midst prepares himself to move into the company of men. Challenged to choose between her father and her childhood playmate, Celia embraces the feminine tie:

I was too young that time to value her,
But now I know her: if she be a traitor,
Why, so am I: we still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together,

And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable.⁷⁷

Helena reproaches Hermia not only with betraying a friend, but with betraying her sex to men:

Is all the counsel that we two have shared,
The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent,
When we have chid the hasty-footed time
For parting us—O! is all forgot?
All school-days friendship, childhood innocence?
We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles created both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key;
As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds,
Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem:
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart,
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one, and crownéd with one crest.
And will you rend our ancient love asunder,
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?
It is not friendly, 'tis not maidenly—
Our sex, as well as I, may chide you for it;
Though I alone do feel the injury.

Women are reared in closeness to become competitors for male favour; the intrusion of a man converts intimacy into enmity. They have few weapons with which to war on each other; Hermia threatens scratching where Lysander draws a sword on Demetrius. Women try instead to influence a man against another woman, talking not to each other but to their defenders: 'She was a vixen when she went to school.' Helena turns to the two men who have deserted her friend:

I pray you, though you mock me, gentlemen,
Let her not hurt me. I was never curst:
I have no gift at all in shrewishness:
I am a right maid for my cowardice:
Let her not strike me. You perhaps may think,
Because she is something lower than myself,
That I can match her.⁷⁸

When the sewing stops, the needle which worked the sampler pricks the helping hand. Women grow up knowing that men have power: father, brother, husband. To fight other women they enlist a man. If the four lovers in the wood all wore breeches there would still be no mistaking the women.

Born unequal in the eyes of the world, but with infant opportunity to observe each other's equality, brothers and sisters cherish a closeness streaked with hostility. Isabella fears Claudio's weakness because she knows it as well as she knows her own strength. Her rage at his wavering is a nursery laceration, unmoderated by acquired respect:

O, you beast!
O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Is't not a kind of incest, to take life
From thine own sister's shame? What should I think?
Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair:
For such a warped slip of wilderness
Ne'er issued from his blood.⁷⁹

Society hands all the cards to Claudio, and he asks Isabella for her only one—her chastity. The brother inherits his father's authority towards his sister: Ferdinand and the Cardinal have absolute power over the Duchess. But the sister who bows to the parent's yoke is restive under the brother's. The Duchess of Malfi secretly goes her own way. Ophelia, subject to her father's preaching, rebels at her brother's—the faintest hint of insurrection to presage the revolt of insanity:

I shall the effect of this good lesson keep
As watchman to my heart. But good my brother
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles like a puffed and reckless libertine
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.⁸⁰

The sister sees the libertine before society takes the boy out of smocks like her own and gives him breeches and the right to rule her, and she refuses to obliterate the memory of a being like herself. The boy actor, literally the same beneath a woman's clothes, entered naturally into the sister's role.

Women have a delightful sense of confederacy with their own sex when they are in love, where men find other men tiresome. Benedick mocks Claudio and betrays his passion to Don Pedro; Proteus is a gadfly to the moony Valentine. Enobarbus talks to Antony about war and the need to leave Cleopatra. Cleopatra talks to her women about Antony, and imagines him talking of her:

O Charmian!
Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?
Or does he walk? or is he on his horse?
O happy horse to bear the weight of Antony!
Do bravely, horse, for wot'st thou whom thou mov'st,

The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm
And burgonet of men. He's speaking now,
Or murmuring, 'Where's my serpent of old Nile?'
For so he calls me.⁸¹

In As You Like It Celia's discovery to Rosalind of Orlando's love is an enchanting game whose rules both women know. Celia enhances Rosalind's joy by prolonging the disclosure: 'O Lord, Lord! It is a hard matter for friends to meet; but mountains may be removed with earthquakes and so encounter.' Rosalind is eager, inconsequential: 'Is it a man?' insatiable and irrational: 'But doth he know that I am in this forest and in man's apparel? Looks he as freshly as he did the day he wrestled?' A woman's love is not complete without a listener.

In the same scene, immediately following, Orlando and Jacques converse about Rosalind. Jacques informs the lover: 'I do not like her name.' Orlando retorts: 'There was no thought of pleasing you when she was christened.' Jacques calls Orlando's love his worst fault, and the lover rejoins: ' 'Tis a fault I will not change for your best virtue. .. . I am weary of you.' The man wants to protect his passion from idle stares where the woman wants to feed hers by communicating it. As Jacques dawdles laconically from the stage, a saucy lackey accosts Orlando. Shakespeare frames the lovers' first meeting with an interchange between two women, and an interchange between two men. The boy actor steps out of the feminine world as unmistakably as Orlando emerges from the masculine.

Shakespeare often places in among the boy actors a man on whom they may prove their femininity. Women treat a man alone in their company with a tantalising mixture of flirtation and exclusion. The presence of Alexas spices the vivacity of Cleopatra and Charmian and Iras. The ladies in Love's Labour's Lost rehearse their mockery of the lords on Boyet. Both Le Beau and Touchstone are whetstones to the wit of Rosalind and Celia, where a woman would not do. Touchstone is not taken in. After a complicated witticism from the heroine he glances at the gallery to which both the Fool and the lady play: 'You have said: but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge.'⁸² Women together make a single man among them feel an alien being, a Bottom among the fairies. A man either pays attention to a woman or he does not; a woman acknowledges his presence with delicate indirection. Beatrice assures Benedick at the end of his speech of her own inattention to it: 'I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick. Nobody marks you.'⁸³ A real man on the stage throws into relief the boy actor's femininity.

The more traditionally feminine the woman the more ill at ease she is in breeches. Rosalind and Portia thrive on the masculine life where Imogen wilts beneath it.

The young princes sense her otherness: were she a woman they would woo her. Imogen's presence emanates refinement and delicacy, even fastidiousness; life becomes an art:

But his neat cookery! he cut our roots in characters,
And sauced our broths, as Juno had been sick
And he her dieter.

Femininity is all things to all men. Guiderius admires Imogen for her housewifery, Arviragus for her singing: 'How angel-like he sings.' What a man finds feminine defines not the nature of women, but his own nature. Nevertheless, Imogen's disguise discomforts her. When she urges the youths to hunt as usual, she might be speaking of herself:

Stick to your journal course: the breach of custom
Is breach of all.⁸⁴

Breaking custom in her apparel, Imogen obstructs the current of her own life. Femininity is so deeply ingrained in her that to annihilate it is a kind of death, like Ophelia's madness, or Lady Macbeth's hallucinatory sleep-walking. Rosalind, Portia, even Viola, whose minds travel easily between the world of men and the world of women, extend rather than endanger their sense of self when they assume a man's dress. Imogen, less versatile, more vulnerable, herself more fully realised in the traditional feminine world, never acquires the double image of the comic heroines, the man-woman spirit, which is perhaps why the Victorian actress, Helena Faucit, preferred her above all Shakespeare's heroines. She spoke of 'Imogen, in whom all that makes a woman most winning to unspoiled manly natures is unconsciously felt through the boyish disguise.'⁸⁵ Mrs Jameson wrote in 1832 that 'the preservation of her feminine character under her masculine attire, her delicacy, her modesty, and her timidity, are managed with the same prefect consistency and unconscious grace as in Viola.'⁸⁶ But Viola disguised is in part Sebastian, her own natural division of herself, watching Viola the woman:

She never told her love,
But let concealment like a worm i'th'bud
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love, indeed?
We men may say more, swear more—but indeed
Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love.⁸⁷

Imogen never sees herself as a man; the moment of her unmasking is as a consequence the least ambivalent dramatically and psychologically of any in Shakespeare's plays. Forgetting her disguise—which Viola or Rosalind would never have done—she presses forward to alleviate the anguish of Posthumus' remorse. He turns on her, enraged that a page should steal his scene:

Shall's have a play of this? Thou scornful page,
There lie thy part.

Posthumus, histrionic, always playing to his own private amphitheatre of over-heated, under-rehearsed passions, encounters his wife as another player on his own stage. Art and life marry. All disguises vanish before the question Imogen had to disguise herself in order to ask: 'Why did you throw your wedded lady from you?'⁸⁸

When disguise gives a woman a double image of herself the dramatist has more difficulty getting her out of her breeches. Virginia Woolf described 'Shakespeare's mind as the type of the androgynus, of the man-womanly mind. . . . It is one of the tokens of the fully developed mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex. .. . It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or manwomanly.'⁸⁹ The experience of Rosalind, or Viola, or Portia as men colours their character as women. A man's attire, like a man's education, allows them to be more complete and fully developed women. Disguise draws men and women together in the comedies through their discovery of the artifice of difference which social custom sustains. Lyly solved the awk wardness of resolving disguise by allowing one of his girls to change sex, but his mechanical plot device was innocent of any symbolism of harmony between the masculine and the feminine. Shakespeare's heroines integrate their experience as men with their feelings as women, which makes it harder for the dramatist to return them to their skirts. Orlando tires of the disguise before Rosalind. Rosalind is a perfect woman when a man; as a woman she needs more of a man than Orlando. Rejoicing with her in the saturnalian revelry of her masculinity in Arden, the audience regrets relinquishing her to her father to be formally given to a husband. Its playfellow must again become the possession of the male world. Shakespeare himself wanted his heroine to escape and brought her back as insouciant and elusive as ever to tell the audience that she was still Jove's own page: 'If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.'⁹⁰

Viola, as isolated in her sorrow as Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, cherishes a special unacknowledged intimacy with the audience. When Viola tells Orsino that she knows:

Too well what love women to men may owe:
In faith they are as true of heart as we,

the audience shares her doubleness. It identifies with the two selves with whom the actor himself has intercourse, where its relation with the Fool is only one of straightforward dialogue. Viola's love is nourished in the secrecy, suppression and melancholy of her disguise. The audience is committed not to her success but to her sadness. To be queen of a fancy so opal as Orsino's seems an unenviable bliss and Orsino, having squandered his treasury of love, is himself loth to lose his page: 'Cesario, come! / For so you shall be, while you are a man.' Outfaced by his own eloquence, he can find—like Cordelia—no genuine currency in which to court Viola except

Give me thy hand,
And let me see thee in thy woman's weeds.

This is exactly what the audience does not want to do; Viola is Viola in her breeches. Constant where Orsino is changeable, possessing a moral sensitivity which places Olivia in the same hemisphere as Cressida, Viola's other self is not the man she loves, but her brother:

One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons,
A natural perspective, that is and is not.

Viola sees herself in his mirror:

If spirits can assume both form and suit
You come to fright us.

Sebastian's presence exorcises the wickedness of disguise; Nature has clothed his spirit in a shape to question Viola's 'masculine usurp'd attire:'

A spirit I am indeed,
But am in that dimension grossly clad,
Which from the womb I did participate.⁹¹

In the magical reunion of the twins, man and woman, Shakespeare soothes the mind with an illusion of concord between the masculine and feminine only to dispel the illusion by separating Viola from the second self with whom she has learnt to live. She is diminished by a return to a world where she must be Orsino's lady after the momentary freedom of a Twelfth Night masculinity which restored Nature's wholeness.

Shakespeare evaded in The Merchant of Venice the problems that he created for himself in Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Portia's disguise scenes are a dramatic performance produced and presented with faultless fluency, like that other well-staged charade, the casket lottery at Belmont. The audience is never private with the young Daniel; it hears no catch in the voice, sees no panic, no laughter and alarm, no inner life. Shakespeare arouses no special affection for Portia in her breeches and therefore has none to disengage when he returns her to her gown. Disguise is contained within the stage scene. Shakespeare exploits the mockery of discovery without risking its embarrassment. Disguise expresses Portia's poise and control of the male world, but it is a poise present in Belmont itself and there is no sense of loss when the heroine returns home. Portia's clothes effect no metamorphosis on her spirit: the lawyer was never the lady, although the lady is always something of a lawyer. But the comedy is less perfect for lacking that imperfection in romantic resolution which fascinated Shakespeare as early as Love's Labour's Lost. The audience admires Portia, but it loves Viola.

The woman in disguise is a reveller in her own masque; her masculinity intrudes on the order of society making her, like the servant who plays the master in the Twelfth Night festivities, a mistress of misrule. Like the court masquer's, her unmasking reveals not the chameleon player, who might be anyone, but a new reality affirmed against the illusion of the play. The court masquer unmasks into the real world of the court,⁹² and the woman in disguise discovers herself as part of the movement of the play out of the theatre into life—out of Arden, out of Twelfth Night into the rain that raineth every day. . . .

Shakespeare's feminism is not optional, to be taken or left according to the critic's taste. The masculine woman's claim that feminine clothes did not necessarily express a feminine nature was vital to the theatre's justification of the boy actor and the woman in disguise. The boy actor prompted the creation of boyish heroines. Disguise freed the dramatist to explore, in Bacon's new case or experiment, the natures of women untrammelled by the customs of femininity. More would have approved of Shakespeare's suggestion that the masculine spirit can liberate women from the constraints of traditional femininity.

Notes

¹Twelfth Night, II.ii.33.

² IV.iv.9.

⁴³Coriolanus, v.iii.40.

⁴⁴Much Ado About Nothing, I.i.48.

⁴⁵As You Like It, I.iii.114.

⁴⁶The Merchant of Venice, III.iv.60.

⁴⁷ III.i.18.

⁴⁸Cymbeline, III.iv.155.

⁴⁹The Wise-woman of Hogsdon, II.i.

⁵⁰ i.104, I.i.71, II.i.23.

⁵¹ John Berger, G, p. 167.

⁵² IV.iv.156.

⁵³Antony and Cleopatra, v.ii.215.

⁵⁴ IV.iii.164, II.iv.4, IV.i.144.

⁵⁵A Mery Dialogue, declaringe the Propertyes of Shrowde Shrewes, and Honest Wyves, sig. A vii.

⁵⁶As You Like It, IV.i.152, III.ii.342.

⁵⁷An Essay on Comedy, p. 248.

⁵⁸As You Like It, V.ii.42, III.iv.I, IV.i.62, IV.iii.159, III.ii.217, 194, IV.i.196.

⁵⁹Twelfth Night, I.v.156.

⁶⁰The Merchant of Venice, III.iv.66.

⁶¹ W. Robertson Davies, Shakespeare's Boy Actors, p. 37.

⁶²The Plays of Nathan Field, pp. 8-9, 8, n. 53. The belief that Field continued to play women's parts after his voice had broken is based on the dubious authority of Malone.

⁶³Hamlet, II.ii.432.

⁶⁴A Midsummer Night's Dream, I.ii.46.

⁶⁵Twelfth Night, I.iv.30.

⁶⁶Cymbeline, IV.ii.235.

⁶⁷The Two Gentlemen of Verona, II.vii.43. Victor Oscar Freeburg, Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama, p. 26.

⁶⁸ IV.ii.122, I.ii.172, I.iv.71, V.ii.224, 219.

⁶⁹ Sig. C 2 .

⁷⁰Orlando, p. 133.

⁷¹ IV.i.46.

⁷² V.ii.102.

⁷³Cymbeline, III.iv.2.

⁷⁴ Webster, The White Devil III.ii.336.

⁷⁵The Winter's Tale, I.ii.34.

⁷⁶ Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, IV.ii.203.

⁷⁷As You Like It, I.iii.71.

⁷⁸A Midsummer Night's Dream, HI.ii.198, 324, 299.

⁷⁹Measure for Measure, III.i.135.

⁸⁰Hamlet, I.iii.45.

⁸¹Antony and Cleopatra, I.V.18.

⁸²As You Like It, III.ii. passim.

⁸³Much Ado About Nothing, I.i. 103.

⁸⁴Cymbeline, iv.ii.49, 10.

⁸⁵Shakespeare's Female Characters, p. 199.

⁸⁶Shakespeare's Heroines, p. 200.

⁸⁷Twelfth Night, II.iv.110.

⁸⁸Cymbeline, V.v.28, 261.

⁸⁹A Room of One's Own, pp. 97, 102.

⁹⁰As You Like It, Epilogue, 16.

⁹¹Twelfth Night, II.iv.105, v.i.384, 215, 234.

⁹² Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque, p. 118.