[In the following excerpt, Belsey maintains that the spectable of women dressing as men in Shakespeare's comedies generally has the effect of challenging commonly perceived distinctions between traditionally "masculine" and "feminine" characteristics.]

Meaning depends on difference, and the fixing of meaning is the fixing of difference as opposition. It is precisely this identification of difference as polarity which Derrida defines as metaphysical. In conjunction with the common-sense belief that language is a nomenclature, a set of labels for what is irrevocably and inevitably there—whether in the world or in our heads—this process of fixing meaning provides us with a series of polarities which define what is. These definitions are also values. In the oppositions 'I/you', 'individual/society', 'truth/fiction', 'masculine/feminine' one term is always privileged, and one is always other, always what is not the thing itself.

The insistence on meaning as single, fixed and given is thus a way of reaffirming existing values. Conversely, those moments when the plurality of meaning is most insistent are also moments of crisis in the order of existing values. A contest for meaning disrupts the system of differences which we take for granted, throwing into disarray the oppositions and the values which structure understanding. The contest for the meaning of the family which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries disrupted sexual difference, and in the space between the two sets of meanings, the old and the new polarities, there appear in the fiction of the period shapes, phantasms perhaps, that unsettle the opposition defining the feminine as that which is not masculine—not, that is to say, active, muscular, rational, authoritative … powerful. Women are defined precisely as the opposite sex, and the 'evidence', the location of this antithesis, is the process of reproduction. The family as the proper source of that process, the place of reproduction, is thus among the major determinants of the meaning of sexual difference itself. A radical discontinuity in the meaning of the family, which is not in any sense an evolution, produces a gap in which definitions of other modes of being for women are momentarily visible. The period of Shakespeare's plays is also the period of an explosion of interest in Amazons, female warriors, roaring girls and women disguised as pages.

An interest in female transvestism is not, of course, confined to the Renaissance. It stretches at least from Ovid's story of Iphis and Ianthe (Metamorphoses, IX, lines 666-797) to twentieth-century pantomime. But it is hard to think of any period when the motif is so recurrent. It appears in five of Shakespeare's comedies of love and marriage. And in turn Rosalind and Viola, Portia, Julia and Imogen are the direct descendants of a long line of English and European Renaissance heroines of prose and drama, Neronis, Silla and Gallathea, Lelia, Ginevra, Violetta and Felismena, who are disguised as men in order to escape the constraints and the vulnerability of the feminine.

The great majority of these fictions are romances, narratives of the relations between women and men. It was the love stories of Hippolyta and Penthesilea, rather than their battles, which were commonly recounted. In The Faerie Queene romantic love leading to Christian marriage is personified in Britomart, the female knight, who does physical battle with Radigund for possession of Artegall. Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Lelia, Silla and Violetta disguise themselves specifically to follow the men they love. Perhaps the most remarkable instance is the story of Frederyke of Jennen, known in Germany and the Netherlands in the fifteenth century and translated into English in 1518. Another edition appeared soon after this, and a third in 1560, testifying to the story's English popularity. A merchant's wife whose husband mistakenly believes that she has been unfaithful to him flees from Genoa to Cairo in male disguise. There she is made in rapid succession the king's falconer, a knight and then a lord. Left to govern the realm in the king's absence, she leads the army in a great victory against an invading force, and finally becomes protector of the realm until, twelve years later, in possession of evidence of her innocence, she reveals the truth of her identity and is reunited with her husband. Love and marriage are saved by the transgression of the opposition they are based on.

The redefinition of marriage entails a redefiniton of the feminine. It is not easy to imagine Griselda as a source of apt and cheerful conversation. She is the antithesis of her husband, not his like in disposition. It is as if in order to find a way of identifying women as partners for men, the romances of the sixteenth century draw on the old heroic and chivalric tradition of friendship between men—Palamon and Arcite, Damon and Pithias, Titus and Gisippus. Diguised as boys, Julia, Rosalind and Viola become the daily companions of the men they love and, paradoxically, their allies against love's cruelty. Portia fights Bassanio's legal battle for him—and wins. The two conventions of love and friendship appear side by side in Two Gentlemen of Verona, where by loving Silvia Proteus betrays both his friend, Valentine, and his mistress, Julia (II. vi). If the symmetry between love and friendship is disturbed when Julia disguises herself as Sebastian, it is thrown momentarily into crisis when Valentine offers Silvia to his friend as a token of reconciliation between them. But Julia's presence, possible only because she is disguised as a boy, and her swoon, which simultaneously reaffirms her femininity, are the means to the full repentance of Proteus and the reinstatement of both love and friendship, leading to closure in the promise of a double marriage (V. iv. 170-1).

The effect of this motif of women disguised as men is hard to define. In the first place, of course, it throws into relief the patriarchal assumptions of the period. 'Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold' (As You Like It, I. iii. 106): that women are vulnerable is seen as obvious and natural. It is not, on the other hand, seen as essential or inevitable, but as a matter of appearance. Rape is a consequence not of what women are but of what men believe they are. Rosalind tells Celia,

We'll have a swashing and a martial outside,
As many other mannish cowards have
That do outface it with their semblances.
                 (As You Like It, I. iii. 116-18)

Not all men are equally courageous, but they are all less vulnerable then women because they look as if they can defend themselves. Similarly, Portia's right to exercise her authority depends on her lawyer's robes, and the episode can be seen as making visible the injustice which allows women authority only on condition that they seem to be men. Even while it reaf-firms patriarchy, the tradition of female transvestism challenges it precisely by unsettling the categories which legitimate it.

But I want to propose that a close reading of the texts can generate a more radical challenge to patriarchal values by disrupting sexual difference itself. Of course, the male disguise of these female heroines allows for plenty of dramatic ironies and double meanings, and thus offers the audience the pleasures of a knowingness which depends on a knowledge of sexual difference. But it can also be read as undermining that knowledge from time to time, calling it in question by indicating that it is possible, at least in fiction, to speak from a position which is not that of a full, unified, gendered subject. In other words, the plays can be read as posing at certain critical moments the simple, but in comedy unexpected, question, 'Who is speaking?'

As she steps forward at the end of As You Like It, Rosalind says to the audience, 'It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue' (V. iv. 198), and a little later, 'If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me' (lines 214-16). The lady is not a woman. In a footnote to the second of these observations the Arden edition reminds modern readers of the answer to the implied riddle: 'a boy-player is speaking'. Here in the margins of the play, when one of the characters addresses the audience directly and, by acknowledging that what has gone before is a performance, partly resumes the role of actor (though only partly, of course: the epilogue is a speech written by the dramatist for the actor to perform), the uncertainty about the gender of the speaker in a period when women's parts are played by male actors is part of the comedy. A male actor is speaking, but the joke is that he is simultaneously visually identifiable as a woman, the lady, dressed for her wedding ('not furnished like a beggar', as she insists, line 207), and that he/she will curtsey to acknowledge the audience's applause (line 220). A male actor and a female character is speaking.

The comedy of uncertainty about whether a character is speaking from inside or outside the fiction is evident as early as Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres (c. 1500), where the servants, A and B, come out of the audience at the beginning of the play and assure each other that they are not actors. The epilogue of As You Like It simply compounds the uncertainty and therefore the comedy by confusing the gender roles, so that the question 'Who is speaking?' elicits no single or simple answer. But the comedy of the epilogue owes its resonance in its context to the play's recurrent probing of the question, 'Who is speaking when the protagonist speaks?' And here the uncertainty depends not only on the fact that a male actor plays a woman. Even in the most illusionist of modern theatre, members of the audience live perfectly comfortably with the knowledge that the actor is not really the character, that they have seen the actor in other roles and the character played by other actors. The convention that female parts are played by male actors is presumably equally taken for granted on the Renaissance stage. Within the fictional world of the play, the question 'Who is speaking?' is complicated not so much by the extratextual sex of the actor as by the gender of the protagonist.

It is not that Rosalind-as-Ganymede becomes a man or forgets that she is in love with Orlando. On the contrary, the text repeatedly, if ironically, insists on her feminine identity: 'I should have been a woman by right' (IV. iii. 175); 'Alas the day, what shall I do with my doublet and hose?' (III. ii. 215); 'I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind and come every day to my cote and woo me' (III. ii. 414-15). But at other moments the voice is not so palpably feminine and the pleasure of the audience is not a product of irony. When they arrive in the Forest of Arden, Celia-as-Aliena is too exhausted to go any further (II. iv. 61). It is Rosalind-as-Ganymede, therefore, who negotiates with Corin for accommodation: 'Here's a young maid with travel much oppress'd, / And faints for succour' (II. iv. 72-3). We have seen the psychological transformation of Rosalind into Ganymede earlier in the same scene: '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; therefore courage, good Aliena' (lines 3-7). The audience's pleasure in the comedy here is the effect of Ganymede's escape from the limitations of Rosalind's femininity.

In Cymbeline when Imogen disguises herself as Fidele, Pisanio tells her,

You must forget to be a woman: change
Command into obedience [she is a princess]:
  fear, and niceness
(The handmaids of all women, or, more
  truly,
Woman it pretty self) into a waggish
  courage
                                 (III. iv. 156-9)

Fear and niceness (fastidiousness, daintiness) are the essence of the feminine, the text insists, 'Woman it pretty self, her identity. But the verbs contradict the notion of a fixed essence of womanhood: 'You must forget to be a woman; change.…' It is the mobility implied by the verbs which characterizes Imogen's reply: 'I see into thy end, and am almost / A man already' (lines 168-9). The scene is not comic; there are no distancing dramatic ironies to point to the absurdity of the claim. To be a woman, the text proposes, means to be nice and fearful; but it also means, as the play demonstrates, to be capable of a radical discontinuity which repudiates those defining characteristics. Imogen concludes: 'This attempt / I am soldier to, and will abide it with / A prince's courage' (lines 184-6). The context in which Imogen takes on the characteristics of a soldier and a prince is a journey which is to lead her to her husband.

Rosalind-as-Ganymede reproduces the conventional invective against women for Orlando, and shocks Celia:

You have simply misused our sex in your loveprate. We must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest.

(IV. i. 191-4)

Who is speaking when the protagonist mocks women? The question is more or less eliminated in the process of reading the text by the speech prefixes, which identify the speaker as Rosalind throughout, and in modern performances, where Rosalind-as-Ganymede is played by a woman. No wonder that most of the standard twentieth-century criticism treats the disguise as transparent and stresses Rosalind's femininity. But if we imagine the part played by a male actor it becomes possible to attribute a certain autonomy to the voice of Ganymede here, and in this limited sense the extratextual sex of the actor may be seen as significant. Visually and aurally the actor does not insist on the femininity of Rosalind-as-Ganymede, but holds the issue unresolved, releasing for the audience the possibility of glimpsing a disruption of sexual difference.

The sixteenth-century narrative source, Lodge's Rosalynde, is illuminating in this context. The third-person narrative, compelled, as drama is not, to find appropriate names and pronouns to recount the story, normally identifies the disguised heroine as Ganimede and uses the masculine pronoun. This leads to a good deal of comedy which depends on our acceptance of the dis-continuity of identity:

You may see (quoth Ganimede) what mad catell you women be, whose hearts sometimes are made of Adamant that will touch with no impression; and sometime of waxe that is fit for everie forme: they delight to be courted, and then they glorie to seeme coy … And I pray you (quoth Aliena) if your roabes were off, what metall are you made of that you are so satyricall against women? Is it not a foule bird defiles [his] owne nest? … Thus (quoth Ganimede) I keepe decorum, I speake now as I am Alienas page, not as I am Gerismonds daughter: for put me but into a peticoate, and I will stand in defiance to the uttermost that women are courteous, constant, vertuous, and what not.

Of course this is as absurd as it is delightful, but the delight stems from the facility with which RosalyndeGanimede can speak from antithetical positions, transgress the norms of sexual difference. What is delightful is that, in becoming Ganimede, Rosalynde escapes the confinement of a single position, a single perspective, a single voice. The narrative calls its central figure a 'Girle-boye', and celebrates the plurality it thus releases.

In As You Like It Rosalind is so firmly in control of her disguise that the emphasis is on the pleasures rather than the dangers implicit in the transgression of sexual difference. Other heroines are not so fortunate. In The Famous History of Parismus by Emanuel Forde (1598) Violetta disguised as Adonius disrupts the story's pronouns when she spends the night sleeping between Parismus, whom she loves, and Pollipus, who loves her:

the poore soule lay close at Parismus back, the very sweet touch of whose body seemed to ravish her with joy: and on the other side not acquainted with such bedfellowes, she seemed (as it were) metamorphosed, with a kind of delightful feare … early in the morning Adonius was up, being afraid to uncover her delicate body, but with speed soone araid himself, & had so neatly provided al things against these two knights should rise, that both of them admired his behaviour …

Barnabe Riche's Silla, disguised as Silvio, is compelled to reveal the truth when she is accused of being the father of Julina's child. The double danger implicit in concealment and exposure similarly unsettles the narrative:

And here with all loosing his garmentes doune to his stomacke, and shewed Julina his breastes and pretie teates, surmountyng farre the whitenesse of snowe itself, saiyng: Loe, Madame! beholde here the partie whom you have chalenged to bee the father of your childe. See, I am a woman …

What happens in these instances is not like the case Barthes identifies in Balzac's 'Sarrasine', where the narrative is compelled to equivocate each time it uses a pronoun to identify the castrato. Nor is it that the reader does not know what is 'true', as in a modernist text. It is rather that the unified subjectivity of the protagonist is not the focal point of the narrative. It is not so important that we concentrate on the truth of identity as that we derive pleasure (in these cases a certain titillation) from the dangers which follow from the disruption of sexual difference.

In Twelfth Night these dangers, here romantic rather than erotic, constitute the plot itself—which means for the spectators a certain suspense and the promise of resolution. Viola, addressing the audience, formulates both the enigma and the promise of closure:

What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master's
  love:
As I am woman (now alas the day!)
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia
 breathe?
O time, thou must untangle this, not I,
It is too hard a knot for me t' untie.
                                         (II. ii. 35-40)

Of all Shakespeare's comedies it is perhaps Twelfth Night which takes the most remarkable risks with the identity of its central figure. Viola is just as feminine as Rosalind, as the text constantly insists (I. iv. 30-4; III. i. 160-2), and Cesario is as witty a saucy lackey as Ganymede. But it is only in Twelfth Night that the protagonist specifically says, 'I am not what I am' (III. i. 143) where 'seem' would have scanned just as well and preserved the unity of the subject.

The standard criticism has had few difficulties with the 'Patience on a monument' speech, identifying the pining figure it defines as Viola herself, and so in a sense she is. But it is by no means an unproblematic sense. The problems may be brought out by comparison with a parallel episode in Two Gentlemen of Verona (IV. iv. 108 ff.). Julia disguised as Sebastian is wooing Silvia on behalf of Proteus. The ironies are clear, sharp and delightful. Sebastian asks Silvia for her picture for Proteus: Silvia says a picture of the neglected Julia would be more appropriate. Sebastian offers a ring: Silvia refuses it, since it was Julia's, and Sebastian, to her surprise, says, 'She thanks you'. Is Julia not 'passing fair'?, Silvia asks. She was, Sebastian replies, until, neglected by Proteus, she in turn neglected her beauty, 'that now she is become as black as I'. 'How tall was she?' asks Silvia, and Sebastian replies:

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.
                                  (IV. iv. 156-70)

In these exchanges the irony depends on the series of identifications available to the audience which are not available to Silvia. Julia looks like Sebastian, her clothes fit Sebastian, Sebastian plays Ariadne lamenting betrayal in love so convincingly, and Sebastian feels Julia's own sorrow, because Sebastian is Julia and Julia is betrayed. The audience's pleasure here consists in recognizing the single speaker who momentarily occupies each of these identities as Julia, and the speeches as an elaborate invention rehearsing what we know to be true within the fictional world of the play.

But this is not so clearly the case in the (roughly) corresponding episode in Twelfth Night. Orsino is telling Cesario that men's love is more profound than women's:

Viola        Ay, but I know—
Duke What dost thou know?
Viola Too well what love women to men may
             owe:
     In faith, they are as true of heart as we.
     My father had a daughter lov'd a
      man,
     As it might be perhaps, were I a
      woman,
     I should your lordship.
Duke                And what's her history?
Viola A blank, my lord: she never told her
            love,
     But let concealment like a worm i' th'
             bud
     Feed on her damask cheek: she pin'd in
            thought,
     And with a green and yellow melancholy
     She sat like Patience on a monument,
     Smiling at grief. Was not this love
            indeed?
                                 (II. iv. 104-16)

How do the identifications work in this instance? Cesario is Viola and Cesario's father's daughter is Patience who is also Viola. But the equations break down almost at once with, 'what's her history?' 'A blank'. Viola's history is the play we are watching, which is certainly not a blank but packed with events. Nor is it true that she never told her love. She has already told it once in this scene (lines 26-8), and she is here telling it again in hints so broad that even Orsino is able to pick them up once he has one more clue (V. i. 265-6). In the play as a whole Viola is neither pining nor sitting, but is to be seen busily composing speeches to Olivia and exchanging jokes with Feste; and far from smiling at grief, she is here lamenting the melancholy which is the effect of unrequited love.

How then do we understand these fictions as telling a kind of truth? By recognizing that the Viola who speaks is not identical to the Viola she speaks of. If Viola is Patience, silent like Patient Griselda, it is not Viola who speaks here. Viola-as-Cesario repudiates the dynastic meaning of the feminine as patience, and yet that meaning is as present in Cesario's speech as the other, the difference which simultaneously defines Cesario as Orsino's companion and partner in suffering, and Viola as a woman.

In reply to Orsino's question, 'But died thy sister of her love?', the exchange ends with a riddle. 'I am all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too: and yet I know not' (lines 120-2). At the level of the plot the answer to the riddle is deferred to the end of the play: Viola doesn't die; she marries Orsino. But to an attentive audience another riddle presents itself: who tells the blank history of Viola's father's pining daughter? The answer is neither Viola nor Cesario, but a speaker who at this moment occupies a place which is not precisely masculine or feminine, where the notion of identity itself is disrupted to display a difference within subjectivity, and the singularity which resides in this difference.

It cannot, of course, be sustained. At the end of each story the heroine abandons her disguise and dwindles into a wife. Closure depends on closing off the glimpsed transgression and reinstating a clearly defined sexual difference. But the plays are more than their endings, and the heroines become wives only after they have been shown to be something altogether more singular—because more plural.

In an article first published in French in 1979 Julia Kristeva distinguishes between two 'generations' (though the term does not necessarily imply that they are chronologically consecutive) of feminism. The first generation has been concerned with public and political equality for women (votes, equal opportunities, equal pay). The danger here, she argues, is that feminists who succeed in these terms come to identify with the dominant values and take up positions as guardians of the existing order. The second generation has insisted on an irreducible feminine identity, the opposite of what is masculine, accepting the theoretical and ideological structure of patriarchy but reversing its values. This leads to a radical, separatist feminism. The distinction does not, I suspect, stand up to historical analysis, but it does offer models of two kinds of feminist commitment from which Kristeva distinguishes a third generation, or perhaps a third possibility which, she says, 'I strongly advocate, which I imagine?', in which 'the very dichotomy man / woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics'. There can be no specifically feminine identity if identity itself does not exist. In the post-structuralist analysis subjectivity is not a single, unified presence but the point of intersection of a range of discourses, produced and reproduced as the subject occupies a series of places in the signifying system, takes on the multiplicity of meanings language offers. Kristeva's third possibility proposes the internalization of 'the founding separation of the socio-symbolic contract', difference itself as the ground of meaning, within identity, including sexual identity. The effect will be to bring out 'the multiplicity of every person's possible identifications' and the relativity of his or her sociosymbolic and biological existence.

The fragmentation of sexual identity in favour of this fluidity, this plurality, deconstructs all the possible metaphysical polarities between men and women. It is not a question of bisexuality, though the heterosexual 'norms' based on the metaphysics of sexual difference lose their status in the unfixing of sexual disposition. Nor is it a balance between extremes which is proposed, the 'poise' or 'complexity' which criticism has often found characteristic of Rosalind and Viola. The point is not to create some third, unified, androgynous identity which eliminates all distinctions. Nor indeed is it to repudiate sexuality itself. It is rather to define through the internalization of difference a plurality of places, of possible beings, for each person in the margins of sexual difference, those margins which a metaphysical sexual polarity obliterates.

One final instance may suggest something of the fluidity which is proposed. A Midsummer Night's Dream gives us on the periphery of the action a marriage between a warrior and an Amazon: 'Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries' (I. i. 16-17). The text here proposes a parallel where we might expect an antithesis. None the less, apart from their shared commitment to blood sports, Theseus and Hippolyta take up distinct positions on all the issues they discuss. Where Theseus is cynical about the moon, Hippolyta invokes conventional poetic imagery (I. i. 4-11); when Theseus sceptically supposes that the young lovers have been deluded, Hippolyta counters cool reason with wonder (V. i. 2-27); but when Hippolyta finds the mechanicals' play 'the silliest stuff that ever I heard', it is Theseus who invokes imagination: 'The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them' (V. i. 207-9). A criticism in quest of character, of fixed identities, might have difficulty here, since the stereotypes of masculine rationality and feminine imagination are now preserved, now reversed. As a kind of chorus on the edges of a play about love, which in many ways relies on stereotypes, Theseus and Hippolyta present a 'musical discord' which undermines fixity without blurring distinctions. Difference coexists with multiplicity and with love.

My concern in this essay has been with meanings and glimpses of possible meanings. Fictional texts neither reflect a real world nor prescribe an ideal one. But they do offer definitions and redefinitions which make it possible to reinterpret a world we have taken for granted. Post-structuralist theory liberates meaning from 'truth', 'the facts', but it implies a relationship between meaning and practice. New meanings release the possibility of new practices.

It is not obvious from a feminist point of view that, in so far as they seem finally to re-affirm sexual polarity, Shakespeare's comedies have happy endings. It is certain from the same point of view that the contest for the meaning of the family in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not, though on this there is a good deal more to be said. What I have been arguing is that that contest momentarily unfixed the existing system of differences, and in the gap thus produced we are able to glimpse a possible meaning, an image of a mode of being, which is not a-sexual, nor bisexual, but which disrupts the system of differences on which sexual stereotyping depends.

Whether the remainder of the story of the relations between men and women ultimately has a happy ending is, I suppose, for us to decide.