SOURCE: "Is There a Class in This (Shakespearean) Text?," in Renaissance Drama Vol. XXIV, 1993, pp. 101-21.

[In the following essay, Kastan explores the nature of social crossdressing on the Shakespearean stage.]

We be men and nat aungels, wherefore we know nothinge but by outward significations.

—Thomas Elyot

Money changes everything

—Cyndi Lauper

At least two considerations may prevent a quick and confident "yes" to my titular question ["Is There a Class in This (Shakespearean) Text?"]. The first is perhaps the more easily confronted. Historians have usefully reminded us that the language of class relations applied to the social formation of early modern England is an anachronism.¹ Indeed "class" is a nineteenth-century analytic category and as such was obviously conceptually unavailable to the people of Tudor and Stuart England.² But their own social vocabularies of "estate" or "degree," while insisting on social differentiation on the basis of status rather than on the basis of income and occupation, no less powerfully testify to a system of social inequality that the concept of class would help articulate and analyze. Classes, in the most precise economic definition, perhaps can be said to come into being only within the social conditions of bourgeois production, but classes, in their abstract social sense, can be seen to have existed as long as social organization has permitted an unequal distribution of property, privilege, and power.³

It may well be, then, that any anxiety about the deployment of the language of class in the discussion of Shakespeare's plays is an unnecessary scruple. Even if the culture did not experience its social relations overtly as class relations, certainly social stratification arid the tensions resulting from the forms of inequality are evident in the plays and can be usefully examined. Hymen, at the end of As You Like It, announces the delight of the gods "when earthly things [are] made even" (5.4.109), but the plays again and again reveal that to be a delusive hope or a Utopian dream, belied by social differentiation and conflict, that is, belied precisely by an unevenness that is reproduced both on stage and in the playhouse itself. Like the Chorus in Henry V who imagines the socially diverse Elizabethan audience as "gentles all" (1 Cho. 8), the king addresses his troops as "a band of brothers" (4.3.63), all "gentled" in their shared enterprise, but the resistant reality of social difference is made clear in the body count at Agincourt:

Where is the number of our English dead?
Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk,
Sir Richard Keighley, Davy Gam esquire:
None else of name, and of all other men
But five and twenty.

(4.7.100-04)

Even in the leveling of death, twenty-five of Henry's "brothers" retain their subaltern anonymity. In Coriolanus, Menenius's fable of the Belly idealizes the body politic as a harmoniously ordered whole, but Menenius immediately undermines his own corporate image: "Rome and her rats are at the point of battle" (1.1.161). The familiar fable here offers not a full articulation of the Roman polity but a tactical advantage for a privileged segment of it. Menenius buys time for Marcius's arrival to quell the uprising, and the tendentiousness of the elaborated analogy is revealed in the slide from imagining Rome as a unified, if differentiated, social body of patricians and plebs to seeing Rome only as its patricians and needing to defend itself from the "rats" that would feed upon it.

Yet even if "class" can be more or less happily accepted as an effective heuristic if not a properly historical category to describe and analyze the stratification of social relations in these plays (as well as in early modern England itself), a more problematic issue still remains to be addressed. The question "is there a class in this text?" cannot be answered merely by assessing the propriety of the analytic vocabulary.⁴ If the question were (to quote Mary Jacobus) "is there a woman in this text?" the continuing difficulty emerges clearly. Certainly women's roles are written into Shakespeare's plays, but boy actors were, of course, required to play the female parts; so the answer must be both "yes" and "no." Women are prescribed but were themselves not present on stage; they were represented in the transvestite acting tradition of the popular Elizabethan theater. To speak of the women in Shakespeare's plays is, then, to speak not of women as historical subjects but only of the heavily mediated representation of women that the commercial theater offered: male actors, speaking words written by a male writer, enacting female roles. Increasingly, therefore, we have come to see the need to analyze not simply "the women in Shakespeare" but their representation. In a significant sense, there are no women, only males playing "the woman's part." If these "parts" have something significant to say about women in early modern England, it is, then, not least because of the mediations that make them present.

But if a transvestite acting tradition determines the presentation of women on the stage, a similar fissure between the represented object and the representing agent affects the presentation of class. Plays may well present a variety of class locations (and locutions), but they are, of course, all themselves mediated by the modes of representation in the theater.⁵ Though kings and clowns notoriously mingled on the English Renaissance stage, kings and clowns were not themselves present, only the actors that played them. In 1602, Richard Vennar of Lincoln's Inn attempted to resolve, or at least reduce, the problematic of class representation by offering an aristocratic historical pageant, England's Joy, to be enacted at the Swan, as the playbill announced, "only by certain gentlemen and gentle-women of account" (Chambers 3: 500). Vennar's promise of gentle instead of common players would not, of course, have fully closed the gap between those who are represented and those who represent, but it would at least have avoided any severe social dislocation between the two. But Vennar never produced his play, attempting to run off with the considerable receipts without ever performing it (and leaving the theater to be sacked by the outraged audience). In the commercial theater, however, aristocratic roles were not performed by "gentlemen and gentlewomen," nor were the actions of royalty represented, as the Chorus in Henry V desires, with "Princes to act." Actors of lower social rank, of course, mimed their social betters. Stephen Gosson, in his Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions, says that the players were "either men of occupations . . . or common minstrals, or trained up from their childhood to this abominable exercise" (sig. G6v), though some of these "glorious vagabonds," as the academic authors of the Parnassus plays noted contemptuously, achieved an undeserved social eminence: "With mouthing words that better wits have framed, / They purchase lands, and now Esquiers are made" (2 Return from Parnassus, lines 1927-28). Class positions, then, appear on Shakespeare's stage exactly as women do, only in the mediations of a transvestite acting tradition. The oft-noted crossdressing of the Renaissance stage unnervingly crossed class as well as gender lines; not only did boy actors play women but commoners played kings.

In recent years, feminist scholarship has powerfully, if variously, considered the implications of crossdressing both in and outside of the theater for understanding the Renaissance sex-gender system,⁶ but little attention has been paid to the implications of crossdressing for understanding the socioeconomic ordering of Elizabethan and Stuart England. "How many people crossdressed in early modern England? (95), Jean Howard has recently asked; and while she admits that the number must have been "limited," her estimate must be considerably revised upward if we include transgressions of class identity as well as of gender.

If sexual crossdressing, like that of the notorious Mary Frith, was seen as scandalously bizarre, social cross-dressing was seen as dangerously common. Regularly protest was heard against the "mingle mangle," as Philip Stubbes called it, produced by this social transvestism, "so that it is verie hard to knowe, who is noble, who is worshipful, who is a gentleman, who is not" (sig. C2v). In addition to five "Acts of Apparel," at least nineteen proclamations to regulate dress were issued in Tudor England in order to preclude "the confusion . . . of degrees" that results "where the meanest are as richly appareled as their betters" (Hughes and Larkin 3: 175).⁷ Though these sumptuary laws clearly were written for economic as well as political motives, being in part designed to cut down on imported luxuries and to protect the English wool trade by restricting the market for imported fabrics, the deep anxiety they voice about the "unmeasurable disorder" that crossdressing might bring about is unmistakable. The proclamation of 1559 laments "the wearing of such excessive and inordinate apparel as in no age hath been seen the like" (Hughes and Larkin 2: 136). People did crossdress and in considerable numbers, and the state strove to prohibit it, acutely aware that such cross-dressing threatened the carefully constructed hierarchical social order of early modern England. Regulation of dress was necessary to mark and secure social difference, in order to prevent, as William Perkins writes, "a confusion of such degrees and callings as God hath ordained, when as men of inferiour degree and calling, cannot be by their attire discerned from men of higher estate" (sig. GG2v). Or, as Gosson wrote in 1582, "if priuat men be suffered to forsake theire calling because they desire to walke gentlemanlike in sattine & velvet, with a buckler at theire heeles, proportion is so broken, unitie dissolued, harmony confounded & the whole body must be dismembered and the prince or the heade cannot chuse but sicken" (sig. G7v). "Many good Lawes haue been made against this Babylonian confusion," remarked Fynes Moryson, "but either the Merchants buying out the penaltie, or the Magistrates not inflicting punishments, have made the multitude of Lawes hitherto unprofitable" (Itinerary 4: 233-34).

But social crossdressing, legally prohibited on the streets of London, was of course the very essence of the London stage. Actors crossdressed with every performance, and although the early Tudor iterations of the sumptuary laws specifically exempted "players in enterludes" from its edict, none of the Elizabethan proclamations restating them mentions this exemption.⁸ On stage, men of "inferior degree" unnervingly counterfeited their social betters, imitating not merely their language and gestures but their distinctive apparel. If there was no effort to produce historically accurate representations (recall Henry Peacham's drawing of the scene from Titus Andronicus), the stage did attempt to provide convincing representations of social rank. Philip Henslowe's wardrobe contained such gorgeous items as "a scarlett cloke with (1-32) brode gould Laces: w^t gould byttens of the same downe the sids," another in "scarlett w^t buttens of gould fact w^t blew velvett," and "a crimosin Robe strypt w^t gould fact w^t ermin" (Diary 291-92). Edward Alleyn apparently paid more than twenty pounds for a "black velvet cloak with sleeves embrodered all with silver and gold." But if such dress obviously permitted a lavish aristocratic display, its wearing was arguably criminal. The 1597 proclamation on apparel prohibited the wearing of "cloth of gold or silver . . . or cloth mixed or embroidered with pearl, gold, or silver" to any "under the degree of a baron, except Knights of the Garter [and] Privy Councilors to the Queen's majesty" and denied the wearing of velvet "in gowns, cloaks, coats, or other uppermost garments" to all "under the degree of a knight, except gentlemen in ordinary office attending upon her majesty in her house or chamber, such as have been employed in embassage to foreign princes, the son and heir apparent of a knight, captains in her majesty's pay, and such as may dispend £200 by the year for term of life in possession above all charges" (Hughes and Larkin 3: 176).

Understandably, then, the theater, with its constitutive transgressions, was a politically charged arena in an age when social identities and relations seemed distressingly unstable, an instability in part constituted by the contradictory definition of status, as in the proclamation, both in terms of rank (a knight or baron) and in terms of wealth ("such as may dispend £200 by the year"). This contradiction reveals the vulnerability of the traditional culture based on hierarchy and deference to the transformative entrepreneurial energies of a nascent capitalism; and in the antitheatrical tracts that proliferated after the building of the Theatre in 1576 and the Curtain in 1577 the cultural anxiety about the fluidity of social role and identity found shrill voice. The oft-cited Deuteronomic prohibition (22.5) against males wearing female dress was regularly linked to a fear of social inferiors aping their betters. Gosson finds it equally objectionable that in the theater a boy would "put one the attyre, the gesture, the passions" of a woman and that "a meane person" would "take vpon him the title of a Prince with counterfeit port, and traine" (Playes Confuted, sig. E5r). William Rankins, in his hysterical account of the monstrous contaminations of playing, insists that "Players ought not amidst their folly present the persons of Princes" (sig. C3r). But anxiety was directed not merely at dressing "up," at the potential derogation of authority that its miming might effect; it was equally directed at dressing "down" (Rankins is as worried about the counterfeiting of rustics as he is of royalty). What was worrisome was that class positions could be mimed at all.

Though Stephen Greenblatt, following Tom Laqueur's work on Renaissance anatomical knowledge, provocatively sees the transvestite acting tradition of the pre-Restoration stage as the inevitable result of a culture whose idea of gender was "teleologically male" (88), viewed from the perspective of class rather than gender, a theater dependent upon crossdressing seems notably less inevitable or natural and perhaps more profoundly unsettling to the fundamental social categories of the culture. If the theater is not, as Jonas Barish enthusiastically claims, guilty of an "ontological subversiveness" (331), at least in the context of the social anxieties of late sixteenth-century England the theater, with its shape-shifting of professional actors, was indeed a threat to the culture of degree. Acting threatened to reveal the artificial and arbitrary nature of social being. The constitutive role-playing of the theater demystifies the idealization of the social order that the ideology of degree would produce. The successful counterfeiting of social rank raises the unnerving possibility that social rank is a counterfeit, existing "but as the change of garments" in a play, in Walter Ralegh's telling phrase. In the theaters of London, if not in the theatrum mundi, class positions are exposed as something other than essential facts of human existence, revealed, rather, as changeable and constructed. When "every man wears but his own skin, the Players," as Ralegh writes, "are all alike" (147).

But if role-playing intellectually challenged the wouldbe stable and stabilizing social hierarchy, the role-players were themselves perhaps a greater social threat.⁹ If the actors' ability to represent a full range of social roles disturbingly identified these as roles, the actors' conspicuous existence in society exposed the instability of the social categories themselves. Their success was perhaps the most visible of the contradictions that daily belied the fantasy of a stable social hierarchy. The actors' extravagant presence on the streets of London, no less than the substantial amphitheaters that they were able to erect, was an unmistakable sign of the vulnerability of the traditional culture of status to the transformative energies of capitalistic practice.

Though efforts were regularly made to fix players within the familiar terms of social organization, the actors and their companies conspicuously defied the prevailing social logic; if their "ouerlashing in apparel," in Gosson's phrase, and their "sumptuous Theatre houses," as Thomas White termed them, were, to such critics, alike "monument[s] of Londons prodigalitie and folly" (Chambers 4: 204, 197), they were also striking and unavoidable evidence of the considerable profits to be made in the burgeoning entertainment industry of Elizabethan London. "It is an euident token of a wicked time," wrote William Harrison, "when plaiers wexe so riche that they can build suche houses" (Chambers 4: 269). And while most of the players in fact remained poor, usually able only to counterfeit prosperity, the profits being limited to the sharers in the companies or the landlords of the playhouses themselves, a few, like Burbage or Shakespeare himself, did indeed "wexe . . . riche." Some "there are," wrote the author of Ratseis Ghost, glancing wrily at the affluence of Edward Alleyn, "whom Fortune hath so wel favored, that what by penny-sparing and long practise of playing, are growne so wealthy they have expected to be knighted, or at least to be conjunct in authority, and to sit with men of great worship, on the Bench of Justice" (sig. A4r). While Alleyn never did attain his desired knighthood, he did become Master of the Royal Game and amass a fortune considerable enough to found Dulwich College in 1619. And Shakespeare, of course, was also able to turn his "share" into significant wealth and property, even purchasing a coat of arms for his father and "his posterite," apparently adorned with the resonant motto, non sanz droict.¹⁰ The extraordinary claim of the parvenu was perhaps the immediate object of Jonson's gibe in Every Man Out of His Humor, when Puntarvolo suggests "Not without mustard" as the motto for the arms, with a crest of "a boar without a head Rampant," that the rustic Sogliardo purchased for thirty pounds (3.4.86); and certainly in The Poetaster, Jonson unmistakably does condemn the social pretensions of the actors: "They forget they are i' the Statute, the Rascals; they are blazoned there; there they are tricked, they and their Pedigrees: they need no other Heralds, Iwisse" (1.2.53-55).

The "Statute" that Jonson invokes is one of the iterations of the 1572 act for the relief of the poor (14 Eliz. c. 5) that notoriously linked players to rogues, vagabonds, and beggars. The social aspirations of the actors are belied by their juridical status: "Proud Statute Rogues," as the aspiring actors are termed in Marston's Histrio-Mastix (3.1.241). Itinerant players were masterless men, their unauthorized presence disturbing to the social order and liable to harsh penalty. Convicted, they could "bee grevouslye whipped, and burnte through the gristle of the right Eare with a hot Yron of the compasse of an Ynche about"; and with a third conviction they were to "suffer paynes of Death" (Chambers 4: 269-70).

But, of course, players were regularly licensed and legitimated, lawfully performing, by the terms of the legislation, in the service of a "Baron of this Realme" or "any other honorable Personage of greater Degree," or by permission of "two Justices of the Peace." In 1598, legislation removed the licensing authority from the magistrates, and then in 1603, when James assumed the throne, licensing rights passed even from the nobles of the realm into the hands of the royal family itself. Nonetheless, the licensing provision provided opportunities for companies of players to form and to perform. Players were freed from liability to prosecution, provided with the patronage that supposedly fixed them within the social order and legally subjected them to the statues on retainers. Players were bound into a reciprocal relationship of control and responsibility.

If, however, the ability of actors legally to play depended upon this structure of service, it was a structure that existed more as legal fiction than social fact. The companies of players that nominally existed in the household of some great lord in fact functioned on a clear commercial basis, dependent on their patron only for the right to function professionally. When, for example, in 1572, a Statute of Retainers was executed that, like the Act for the Relief of the Poor enacted later that year, attempted to restrict the activities of various "masterless men," including "common players in interludes and mistrels, not belonging to any Baron or honourable person of greater degree," the six actors that made up Leicester's Men petitioned their lord not for any "stipend or benefit at your lordship's hands" but only for his "licence to certify that we are your household servants" (Malone Society Collections 1, pts. 4 & 5, 348-49). Service, then, was merely the protective coloring under which the commercial theater formed and flourished. In 1615, one critic protested that however much the actor "pretends to have a royall Master or Mistresse, his wages and dependance prove him to be the servant of the people" (Chambers 4: 256).¹¹

The commercial realities of playing could not successfully be hidden under the cover of livery. In 1584, the Queen's Men appealed to the Privy Council for the right to perform publicly, first on the grounds that their public playing was merely rehearsal time for their court performances and, second, for "helpe and relief in our poore lyvinge" (Chambers 4: 299). The Corporation of London, however, filed a brief opposing the request on both grounds. They argued, first, that although the actors "pretend that they must haue exercise to enable them in their seruice before her maiestie . . . it is not convenient that they present before her maiestie such playes as haue ben before commonly played in open stages before all the basest assemblies in London and Middle-sex"; and, second, they insisted that in any case it was not appropriate "that players haue or shold make their lyuing on the art of playeng" when they might make their "lyuings vsing other honest and lawfull artes, or [be] reteyned in honest seruices" (Chambers 4: 300).

The players were, in spite of the insistent fictions of service, easily identified as professional actors, and their acting provoked continuous opposition precisely on the grounds of its professionalization. In 1591, Samuel Cox, condemning theaters as "dangerous schools of licentious liberty," focuses his disgust not on the plays but on the players, wishing that they "would use themselves nowadays, as in ancient former times they have done" when they either played for the king but "had other trades to live of, and seldom or never played abroad," or were "ordinary servants" in the houses of noblemen "without making profession to be players to go abroad for gain," or were, like Shakespeare's mechanicals, "certain artisans . . . as shoemakers, tailors, and such like" that would play in the town halls "or some time in churches" only "to make the people merry" (Chambers 4: 237). Cox produces a fantasy of theatrical innocence when playing was uncontaminated by commerce. The reality, of course, was that playing was a profession and that players played for profit. Though in 1574, the London Common Council ordered that players act only "withowte publique or Commen Collection of money of the Auditorie or behoulders theareof" (Chambers 4: 276), this was a belated and ineffective effort to counter the patent granted by the crown earlier that year to James Burbage, John Perkin, John Laneham, William Johnson, and Robert Wilson for the first acting company licensed to play commercially throughout the country.

The professional theater, commercially organized and buoyed by royal support (a commitment of a piece with an economic policy that characteristically sought to establish monopolies to organize and restrict trade), provoked an increasingly impassioned antitheatricality, and, appropriately, one that often came to recognize professionalism itself as the proper object of attack. John Stockwood, in a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1578, speaks out against the "flocking and thronging to baudie playes by thousandes," and disgustedly observes that, "reckening with the leaste," theatrical profits "amounteth to 2000 pounds by the yeare" (Chambers 4: 200). Anthony Munday ends his diatribe against the stage by combining the familiar attack on the immorality of what is represented with an attack on the immorality of the motives for the representation: "To conclude, the principal end of all their interludes is to feede the worlde with sights, & fond pastimes; to juggle in good earnest the monie out of other mens purses into their owne handes" (sig. H7r-v; see also Prynne sig. X3r). Stubbes objects to the profane content of plays but equally to playing itself and players "making an occupation of it" (sig. Mlv); and Gosson similarly attacks the actors' professionalism: "let them not look to Hue by playes" (Playes Confuted, sig. G7r).

In 1618, a Catholic archpriest, William Harison, issued a general proclamation forbidding priests to attend plays, but under challenge he agreed that the order "doth not forbid to go to any stage plays, but to go to play or plays, acted by common players on common stages," defining "a common player [as] one that professeth himself a player and lives by the gain thereof, as by his trade or occupation" (qtd. in Bradbrook 95). Plays, argued William Prynne, "are but recreations, which must not be turned into professions" (qtd. in Mann 97). Enacted privately and not for profit, however, plays may seem less noxious: John Northbrooke echoes a familiar position in holding that plays are tolerable so long as they "be not made a common exercise, publickly, for profit and gaine of money, but for learning and exercise sake." But, of course, playing did move out of the schools and into the theaters, the drama becoming, in "those places . . . whiche are made vppe and builded for such playes and enterludes, as the Theatre and the Curtaine is," unmistakably "a common exercise" played primarily "for profit" (Chambers 4: 198-99).

In the new professional environment, when playing established itself literally as show business, actors achieved a remarkable measure of affluence and respect. The playhouses themselves were the most obvious indication of their success. Johannes de Wit commented in 1596, "There are four amphitheatres in London of notable beauty" (qtd. in Gurr 132); and by 1629, as Edmund Howes reports in his revision of John Stow's Annales (1631), seventeen playhouses had been built in and around London, though not all still were standing (1004). And in these purpose-built playing spaces the drama flourished, both artistically and commercially. In 1617, Fynes Moryson remarked that not only were there "more Playes in London then in all the partes of the worlde I haue seene," but also that "these players or Comedians excell all other in the worlde" (Shakespeare's Europe 476). "The actors," according to Robert Greene in Never Too Late, "by continuali vse grewe not onely excellent but [he added bitterly] rich and insolent" (sig. 14r). In 1603, King James's patent to the King's Men permitted them "to shewe and exercise publiquely to theire best Commoditie" at "theire nowe vsual howse called the Globe within our County of Surrey, as alsoe within anie towne halls or Moute halls or other conveniente places within the liberties and freedome of anie other Cittie, vniversitie, towne, or Boroughe" and requested that the actors be allowed "such former Curtesies as hath bene given to men of theire place and quallitie" (Chambers 2: 208-09). And by this patent, the actors became formally members of the Royal Household, Grooms of the Chamber, entitled to call themselves gentlemen.

And yet in spite of—or rather precisely because of—the actors' new dignity, the old anxieties and familiar terms of abuse resurfaced. "The Statute hath done wisely to acknowledg him a Rogue errant," wrote an essayist in 1615, "for his chiefe essence is, A daily Counterfeit: He hath beene familiar so long with outsides, that he professes himselfe (being unknowne) to be an apparant Gentleman" (Chambers 4: 255). Not merely a counterfeiter of roles in the theater, the actor is a "daily Counterfeit" outside, able to assume a social status not rightfully his own. Both "errant" and "unknowne," he unsettlingly moves up and down the countryside and the social scale—again a rogue in the anxious, antitheatrical imagination. The masterless actor, unnervingly mobile both socially and geographically and unmoored from the traditional, hierarchical culture of deference and dependency by the commercial practices of his profession, provoked widespread concern if not contempt.

"Hee is politick also to perceive the common-wealth doubts of his licence" (Chambers 4: 257), continued the essayist, and within a generation the "commonwealth" would brutally rescind it. In 1648, when Parliament passed the third of its orders to close the theaters, it held that "all Stageplayers and Players of interludes and common Playes . . . whether they be wanderers or no, and not withstanding any License whatsoever from the King or any person or persons to that purpose" are "declared to be, and are, and shall be taken to be Rogues" and "liable unto the pains and penalties" of the law (Firth and Rait 1070). An acting profession that achieved its most impressive aesthetic and economic successes in the face of a law that deemed it rogue and beggar, forcing commercial consolidation around the fiction of aristocratic patronage, was dissolved, if only until the Restoration, by a law that made the same judgment but closed the loophole that had served the profession virtually as its charter.

This is not the place to consider at any length the politics of the theaters' closing in the 1640s,¹² but clearly the parliamentary injunctions against playing cannot be understood solely or even primarily as an effort to neutralize a royalist institution, for the theaters were never simply that, as the persistent efforts at control and censorship themselves attest. The closing of the theaters may better be understood not as part of an offensive against the monarch but as largely a defensive action, responsive to Parliament's awareness of its own vulnerability to the unauthorized voices, on stage and in the audience, that the theater empowered. The injunctions against playing were designed to stabilize a political situation even as Parliament sought to replace the crown as the source of that stability. It was not, however, the King or even the King's Men but the political aspirations of the common people as they came in conflict with the central dynamic of the revolution that were the primary object of the closing ordinances. The theaters were places, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, "where freedom can appear" (6), places where authority was contested—both on stage, in the plays themselves that interrogated and challenged authority, not least by subjecting their images of rule to the judgment and censure of an audience of commoners, and in the democratic constitution of the audience itself, where "maisterles men & vagabond persons" were permitted to assemble, as the Lord Mayor had written in 1595, "to recreate themselfes" (Chambers 4: 318), or worse, to re-create themselves, to multiply the heads on the already many-headed monster of the common people. For Parliament in the late summer of 1642 the threat of the mobile and unlegitimated articulation of the theater, precisely its errancy, was too great to bear.

The professional theater of Renaissance England, I've been arguing, by its constitutive masquerade as well as its commercial organization contains in its materializations of an unnerving exchange a threat to social order, a threat the Parliament of the 1640s instinctively recognized and articulated by reinserting the actor within the demonized category of the masterless man. Indeed, the commercial theater made it obvious that the actor had no master, whatever the juridical assertion, other than the audiences that he needed to please, and that he held no fixed position within the social formation, flaunting his mobility in the face of an increasingly defensive traditional culture. The nakedly autobiographical Roberto, in Greene's Groats-worth of Witte, meets up with a well-dressed stranger and is amazed to discover that he is an actor:

A player, quoth Roberto, I tooke you rather for a Gentleman of great liuing; if by outward habit men shuld be censured, 1 tell you, you would bee taken for a substantiall man. So I am where I dwell (quoth the player). . . . What though the world once went hard with me when I was fain to carry my Fardle a footeback . . . its otherwise now; for my share in playing appareil will not be solde for two hundred pounds. (33)

Even the "hyerlings of some of our plaiers," Gosson wrote, "which stand at reversion of vi.s by the weeke" are able to "iet under gentlemens noses in sutes of silke," looking "askance ouer the shoulder at euery man of whom the Sunday before they begged an almes" (S[c]hoole of abuse sig. C6r).

Either by virtue of his own money or his access to the company's properties, the actor was able, even off stage, to mime social positions, calling into question the traditional culture of status that depends precisely on the fact its attributes can neither be imitated nor purchased. But the exchanges that defined the theater relentlessly undermined the stability of that culture, insisting on the permeability of its social boundaries. Visible distinction cannot be maintained. Thomas Platter reports that "it is the English usage for eminent lords or knights at their decease to bequeath and leave almost the best of their clothes to their serving men, which it is unseemly for the latter to wear, so they offer them for sale for a small sum to the actors" (167).¹³ Thus, the silk suit that permitted the hireling to look askance at his social betters no doubt belonged to one when new.

But lest this fact be used to secure rather than disrupt the social hierarchy, we should note the complaint of Thomas Giles in 1572 against John Arnold, Yeoman of the Revels, protesting the policy to "lett to hyer" the gowns of the Revels' office. Giles's complaint lists twenty-one occasions in the previous year when gowns were rented out. Clearly the Revels' office regularly let or sold its costumes to professional players once they were too worn for court performance (Feuillerat 21-28). But Giles protested that Arnold was renting clothing to the citizens of London as formal wear: gowns were lent to the various Inns of Court; a gown was lent to the Lord Mayor; another for "the maryage of the dowter of my lord montague"; and, most scandalously, red cloth of gold gowns were lent to a "taylor" marrying in the Blackfriars. Giles complains about the "grett hurt spoylle & dyscredt" that the garments suffer on account of their "comen usage," being worn by those "who for the most part be of the meanest sort of mene" (Feuillerat 409-10). If clothes make the man, so apparently does the man make—or mar—the clothes. Giles's complaint is no doubt somewhat disingenuous, as he had a business with "appareil to lett" competing with the entrepreneurial Arnold; nonetheless, it is clear that clothing regularly circulated into and out of the playing spaces (Henslowe's contracts with actors often specified penalties for leaving the theater wearing the company's costumes),¹⁴ endlessly producing and dissolving difference between inside and out, between surface and substance, between playing and being, producing and dissolving difference in the very social categories that the elite would have clothing make both legible and secure. If it isn't quite accurate to say that the theater, with its imitative disruption of the traditional culture of status, brought that culture to an end, certainly the theater's conspicuous presence signaled its vulnerability to dissolution in the transformative energies of the nascent capitalism of early modern England; and if it isn't quite accurate to say that the entrepreneurial successes of the acting companies actually brought "class" into being, certainly in the visible signs of their abundant energies and aspirations they brought class into view.

II

To explore, however tentatively, the politics of the transvestite playing I have been exploring, I want to end with a brief look at an example of crossdressing in King Lear, though one not of dressing up but of dressing down: at Edgar and his assumption of the role of Poor Tom. Though no one seems to have explicitly related Edgar's disguise as a sturdy beggar to the dominant and demonized term of the antitheatrical discourse that surrounded the theater, a number of critics have shown that Edgar's disguise finds a source in the rogue literature that proliferated in the second half of the sixteenth century. John Awdeley begins his Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561) with a description of the "abramman" as "he that walketh barearmed and bare-legged, and feigneth himself mad, and carryeth a pack of wool, or a stick with bacon on it, or such childlike toy, and nameth himself Poor Tom" (qtd. in Kinney 91). But the rogue literature functions ideologically to justify repression rather than compassion as a political response to the growing numbers of poor and homeless that actually were present in England, presenting their vulnerability as a tactic of a carefully crafted con-game. They become clever exploiters of a country's Christian charity instead of the pitiful victims of the early capitalistic state's social and economic dislocations.

If, however, the rogue literature, with its accounts of abram-men and other counterfeit poor, must be acknowledged as one source of Edgar's disguise, and the antitheatrical discourse another, each symptomatic of a potential for fraud, as Jean-Christophe Agnew has seen, in the emerging impersonal capitalistic market (63-69, 125-35), Shakespeare, as well as his audience, must also have found "proof and precedent / Of Bedlam beggars" (2.3.11-12) in the raw social realities of English life. One of the reiterated proclamations against vagrancy protested the increased presence in 1598 of "idle people and vagabonds" who were "in many parts of the realm and specially about the city of London and her majesty's court manifestly seen wandering in the common highways" (Hughes and Larkin 3: 196). King James was disgusted enough by the vagrancy he saw at Newmarket to write the Virginia Company suggesting that the vagrant youths be transported to the New World. Edgar's "roaring," then, must sound as the all-too-familiar, alienated—and also alienating—voice of the homeless poor, loudly protesting their impoverished condition.

But Edgar's role-playing is, of course, fraudulent. Lear thinks he has discovered "the thing itself," "unaccommodated man" (3.4.108), but we know that he has found only an aristocrat playing a Bedlam beggar, or, more accurately, only an actor playing an aristocrat playing a Bedlam beggar, or, rather, as the antitheatrical voice would have it, only one sturdy beggar playing another. No doubt it could be argued that Edgar's spectacular counterfeiting, like that of the abram-men, similarly serves merely to manage anxieties about London's poor and to reinforce the very social boundaries that have been transgressed. But, at least within the play, his disguise pointedly does not work either to justify or confirm the existing social order. Poor Tom's poverty indeed becomes for Lear one mark of "how this world goes" (4.6.147), and if it is but mimed it is nonetheless part of the process that leads Lear to understand that disparities of wealth and power are not signs of an immutable hierarchical order but of an intolerable social injustice. "[C]ivill policies," cynically observed Pierre de La Primaudaye in The French Academy, "cannot well be preserved but by a certaine inequalitie" (qtd. in Winny 106), but Lear comes to see that the "inequalitie" in his kingdom, the world of "houseless heads and unfed sides" (3.4.31), is unacceptable and his own responsibility. The means of social amelioration rest not with heaven but with sympathetic human action, with a redistribution of wealth, a shaking of "the superflux" to those in need that will alone "show the Heavens more just" (3.4.35-36). "Distribution," as Gloucester says, "should undo excess, / And each man have enough" (4.1.70-71).

No doubt the play's Utopian politics are undercut precisely by the gap King Lear insists upon between rich and poor.¹⁵ The sympathy Lear discovers to animate his leveling depends upon an experience that the play insists is unique ("we that are young / Shall never see so much . . ."). As Jonathan Dollimore writes, "in a world where pity is the prerequisite for compassionate action, where a king has to share the suffering of his subjects in order to 'care,' the majority will remain poor, naked and wretched" (191). Still, the play itself, its representation, produces "pity," allows an audience "to share the suffering" not just of the fond and foolish king but of the "houseless poverty" he has "ta'en / Too little care of (3.4.32-33). It is difficult, of course, to gauge the politics o/the play (as opposed to the politics in the play) apart from an analysis of its playing in a particular place at a particular time; but certainly, as "houseless poverty" has again emerged as a social fact and a political issue, Edgar's counterfeiting may well remind even the bourgeois audience of the modern theater of the reality of human misery that waits outside and suggest that it need not be so.

Notes

Versions of this essay were delivered on occasions arranged by Barnard College. The University of Colorado, The American University at Cairo, and Duke University. I would like to thank my hosts for these opportunities, especially for the discussions that followed, as well as offer special thanks to Margaret Ferguson, Jean Howard, Maureen Quilligan, Mary Beth Rose, Jim Shapiro, David Simpson, Peter Stallybrass, David Trotter, and Daniel Vitkus for their invaluable criticism and encouragement at various stages in the development of the essay.

¹ See, for example, valuable discussions on the language of social ordering by Burke, Cressy, and Wrightson.

² Even beyond the question of the historical specificity of a notion of class, the issue of its conceptual availability is of consequence, because unlike the familiar (and obviously silly) argument about the applicability of Freudian concepts to people living before Freud, class, it could be argued, needs to be available within the cognitive system of the people as a condition of its existence. If there is such a thing as the unconscious, it exists with or without an individual's awareness of its existence; a class, however, may be said to exist not as an a priori category waiting to be filled but only when people discover themselves as a class. Among the many influential considerations of class consciousness, see Lukàcs, Mészáros, ed. (esp. E. J. Hobsbawm's "Class Consciousness in History"), and Thompson.

³ Even Marx is inconsistent in his usage, sometimes identifying class as a historically specific concept as in The German Ideology, where the pre-industrial system of estates is contrasted with a true class system "which is itself a product of the bougeoisie" (87), while at other times using class as a universal category referring to discrete social groups in relations of domination and subjection, as in The Manifesto, where notoriously "the history of class struggle" is identified as "the history of all hitherto existing society" (108).

⁴ See Mary Jacobus's fine article by that name. Jacobus's essay, like my own, obviously finds its title in a play upon Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in This Class?

⁵ For a wonderfully rich account of the representation of popular energies on the Shakespearean stage, see Annabel Patterson's Shakespeare and the Popular Voice. But if Patterson effectively disrupts the elitist notions of both art and politics that have dominated the critical account of Shakespeare to reinstate the popular as a productive category and concern, she nonetheless largely ignores the mediations of the theater that permit the popular voice to be heard. Although she brilliantly recognizes the "ventriloquism" by which the popular voice speaks "through Shakespeare's playtext" (50), she resists seeing this as the inescapable nature of class representation on the stage. Powerfully opposing the political and ethical implications of the claims for the autonomy of discourse made by various post-structuralisms, Patterson insists that "it does indeed matter . . . who speaks," and she notes that the plays are "obsessed" with "questions of voice (or political representation)" (97). But dramatic representation is no less the issue. Patterson writes, for example, that Coriolanus "allows the people to speaker themselves as a political entity" (127, emphasis hers), but if in the playtext they may speak "for themselves," in the playhouse actors always must speak for them.

⁶ There have been, of course, many influential studies of crossdressing on the Elizabethan stage, but see especially, in this regard, Belsey, Howard 93-128, Levine, and Rackin.

⁷ On sumptuary legislation in early modern England, see Harte and two useful earlier studies by Hooper and Baldwin.

⁸ For example, in 1 Henry VIII c. 14: "Players in enterludes," along with "ambassatures Hencemen," "Harroldes of armes," "Mynstrelles," and men "weryng any apparrell of the Kyngs lyverey geven hym by the King, for the tyme beyng of his Attendance aboute the Kyngs Grace" are specifically exempted from the act's provisions. In Elizabethan England, however, dispensations again are made to "henchmen, heralds, pursuivants at arms, runners at jousts, tourneys, or such martial feats, or such as wear apparel given by the Queen's majesty" (Hughes and Larkin 3: 180), but the specific dispensation for players has disappeared.

⁹ Among the many useful studies of the status of players in Elizabethan England, see Agnew 101-48, Brad-brook 17-66, and Edwards 17-39.

¹⁰ For a full account of the specificities surrounding the grant of arms, see Schoenbaum 167-73.

¹¹ On the theater as "a proxy form of the new but partly fathomable relations of a nascent market society" (11), see Agnew (1-148), as well as McLuskie, who suggestively argues that the complex shift from patronage to commerce, a shift for the drama from "use value to exchange value," was "often confused with a shift from élite to popular culture" (127).

¹² For a full discussion of the closing, reconsidering the familiar narrative of "Puritan opposition," see my chapter "Publike Sports' and 'Publike Calamities': The City, the Crown, and the Closing of the Theaters" in Kastan; see also Martin Butler's suggestive account (136-40).

¹³ For another account of a gift of clothing to players, see Henry Herbert's report that "many rich clothes were given" to a troupe of French actors in 1635 (61). See also Knowler (2: 150).

¹⁴ See, for example, the agreement between Henslowe and the actor Robert Davies, in Henslowe Papers (125).

¹⁵ On the social dislocation in the play, see Seiden, Kronenfeld, and Daniel Vitkus's unpublished paper, "Poverty and Ideology in King Lear."

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