Ganymedes were, of course, not the only group of individuals to be categorized by their participation in sexual acts. On the contrary, the typecasting of women is a familiar part of the early modern sexual terrain, and one that Foucault more or less ignores. One of the factors that makes women such fascinating additions to the sexual taxonomy of this period, though, and that makes them important for a discussion of ganymedes is their paradoxical relation to sexual subjectivity. Women could be characterized absolutely by their sexual acts, without really being imagined to possess agency, or even desire.

Early modern women were sometimes represented as a kind of sexual fixed point in an otherwise chaotic staging of eroticized identities. When Ben Johnson wants to portray debauchery at its worst, for instance, he has his master cozener Volpone engage in an elaborate fantasy of sexual license. "Inviting" the chaste and married Celia to be his mistress, Volpone promises her participation in an extended erotic stage play:

my dwarfe shall dance,
My eunuch sing, my foole make vp the antique.
Whil'st, we, in changed shapes, act Ovids tales,
Thou, like Evropa now, and I like Iove,
Then I like Mars, and thou like Erycine.

. . . . .

Then will I have thee in more moderne formes,

. . . . .

And I will meet thee, in as many shapes:

It is a mark of Celia's perfect adherence to the role of the virtuous woman that she refuses to participate in Volpone's theatrical production, that she maintains her personal integrity by declining to play the adulterous role that both her husband and her would-be lover have scripted for her. In spite of the bewildering transformations of the men around her (her husband reverses in minutes his initial decision to lock his wife up in a chastity belt, deciding instead to prostitute her in hopes of winning Volpone's money; Volpone himself leaps up from his pretended deathbed to inform her that he had appeared just the day before as a mountebank at her window), Celia remains constant to her own and her husband's honor. In fact, her character requires no development beyond the demonstration that she will never swerve from the course of chastity.

To repeat a point made often by feminist critics, a reputation for participating in or resisting participation in a particular sexual act had the power to characterize a woman absolutely—onstage, at least—in the English Renaissance.⁹ For all that Jonson apparently delights in the possibilities of the ever-changing theatrical self, made manifest in the play's nearly endless recourse to disguise and deception, Volpone also exploits the notion of a woman's constancy, the possibility that a woman's sexual fidelity and, by extension, her infidelity, could stand for everything about her. Such a notion is possible, of course, only when women are considered as objects of greater or lesser use to the system of family and marriage, only in an essentially male erotic economy. To the Volpone who stages a theater of erotic pleasure, Celia matters because she either will or will not take up the adulterous part assigned her. Moreover, the conjunction of theatricality and sexuality in an endless exchange of erotic roles, so highly prized by Volpone, depends implicitly upon Celia's unwillingness to play those roles. Her absolute stillness and chastity make her appealing as a sexual object, after all, at the same time that her resistance to Volpone's role-playing provides him with a kind of foil for his sexual improvisations. The erotic fluidity of the self that characterizes Volpone's fantasy includes the deployment of a fixed sexual self, a feminine locus to which sexuality can attach as an identity, rather than a masculine escape from identity through sexual play. Celia inhabits this identity not so much because of her own desires as because of her perfect adherence to the desire of her husband.

I mention Celia here because I want to make the case that the ganymede, the effeminate boy who was stereotypically the object of male homosexual desire in early modern England, was similarly imagined to be defined by his sexual availability to mature men and similarly deployed as a locus of sexuality's power to stigmatize or characterize. When the dangerously powerful male favorite Gaveston plans to entertain his king in Marlowe's Edward II, for instance, he gives elaborate stage directions:

Sometime a lovely boy in Dian's shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
And in his sportful hands an olive-tree,
To hide those parts which men delight to see,
Shall bathe him in a spring.

As many critics have noted, this passage is (erotic in part because of the fantasy that the lovely boy is "in Dian's shape," that he impersonates a goddess.¹¹ Oddly, though, Gaveston expresses the fantasy that a boy wearing only bracelets and an olive branch could convincingly represent Diana. The erotic opportunity offered the viewer here is not in fact the deliberate impersonation of a goddess. The boy impersonates nothing. He simply has, always, "naturally," the body of a Dian; he entertains merely by displaying himself at opportune moments. In order, in other words, to do justice both to the passage's obvious homoerotic content and to its claims to represent a tale out of Ovid, an audience would have to imagine the boy's profound physical androgyny, a kind of ocular proof of his femininity that goes beyond the use of long gowns and chopines to emphasize the ambiguous "parts men love to see." This lovely boy is almost impossibly effeminate. In Gaveston's staging of erotic transformations, the boy's part is to register an ineluctable physical androgyny; what was free erotic play for James and Villiers becomes ontology for the lovely boy, his physical nature. The celebration of an eroticized fluidity of self relies implicitly upon the fixity of the boy as an androgynous erotic object, giving him a sexuality that has little or no relation to any desires he might be imagined to express. His body is, thus, paradoxically both fluid and fixed: fluid in its failure to adhere to any one gender and fixed in its permanent ambiguity.

Even when theatrical staging and physicality are not at issue, literary representations of the beloved boy tend to emphasize the inevitability of the boy's sexual objectification, the sense that this particular boy is made for this particular kind of love. When Richard Barnfield writes his Affectionate Shepheard, he imagines a ganymede whose appearance "intangled" the speaker Daphnis's will: "Cursing the Time, the Place, the sense, the sin; / I came, I saw, I viewed, I slipped in."¹² Even though Ganimede is in love with Queen Gwendolen and unlikely to respond to Daphnis's advances, Ganimede is imagined to be the cause of the older man's desires by virtue of his physical beauty. As the poem's second stanza indicates by its syntax, Ganimede's physical attributes insert themselves into the middle of Daphnis's (admittedly peremptory) self-examination, where they intrude upon the speaker's power to resist him:

If it be sinne to loue a sweet-fac'd Boy,
(Whose amber locks trust vp in golden tramels
Dangle adowne his louely cheekes with ioy,
When pearle and flowers his faire haire enamels)
If it be sinne to loue a louely Lad;
Oh then sinne I, for whom my soule is sad.

Instead of penetrating the boy, this sentence structure suggests, Daphnis is physically penetrated by Ganimede's beauty. Into the middle of his mediation on sin is inserted a picture of Ganimede's amber locks and lovely cheeks. Daphnis's expressions move well beyond a statement of personal preference, here. Instead of noting simply that Ganimede's beauty pleases him, Daphnis implies that Ganimede's beauty acts upon him, virtually against the speaker's will. Even when the boy himself is imagined to love a woman, he is figured as the locus of homosexual desire; Ganimede's physical appeal is as absolute as the androgyny of Gaveston's boy. In each case, the speaker projects desire onto the body of the ganymede figure, making the boy a physical embodiment of homoeroticism.¹³

What the example of the ganymede suggests is that our current understanding of sodomy as lacking the power to inscribe early modern subjects is only a partial understanding. Representations of the subject who does the desiring, figured here as the courtly sodomite, do in fact imply that sodomy is merely one in a range of sexual behaviors with no particular signifying force. If we shift our focus to the object of desire, however, it becomes clear that the signifying force of sexuality has simply been deflected away from the sodomite. It registers instead in the body of the ganymede, the partner who, like a woman in a heterosexual coupling, might be said to lack power. The sodomite has the ability to change shapes at will; the ganymede, like the woman, is shaped by the sodomite's gaze into a static embodiment of that fluid will.

It is this imagined physical inevitability of the ganymede's participation in homosexual attraction that makes him, I think, an important figure in discussions of the relation between theatrical practice and homosexual identity. To the extent that "real-life" catamites were employed as boy actors, these boys would bring with them a reputation for sodomy that included a larger cultural willingness to attribute homosexual desire to them as physical types.¹⁴ Thus the theater itself, as an institution, negotiates a complicated set of attitudes about desire and the fixity of identity. Obviously theatrical performance gave great pleasure to the majority of Londoners in the period, and certain players became well known and much admired.¹⁵ At the same time, players as a class remained heavily stigmatized. Rather like the courtly sodomite, players were imagined to shift identities at will and to partake of illicit sexuality. On the other hand, resembling the literary figure of the ganymede more than the aristocratic man-about-town, they were not well shielded from the social consequences of their erotic performances. In documents I will explore below, the Renaissance version of a long antitheatrical tradition identified players as immoral and dangerous, not least because of their willingness to engage in sexualized display in general and to employ cross-dressed boys in particular. Further complicating the player's status in this period, city officials struggled to minimize or abolish professional playing in London for reasons both economic and moral, while the court officially acted as patrons of the theater companies, even asserting that it was necessary to maintain professional players in town so that Elizabeth could be properly entertained when she so desired. As a result, players might be particularly familiar with the discrepancies between aristocrats and citizens. Playing companies entertained most of London's population, but their official legitimacy came from their ability to entertain the court, while a less exalted group of officials stigmatized playing for their own complex reasons.

As an economic enterprise, then, the stage can be thought of as trafficking in sexual identity, negotiating a form of exchange between its wealthy patrons—the courtiers (and sovereign) whose sexual behaviors pointed toward no particular sexual identification—and the boys apparently desired by those courtiers, whose sexual and economic employment inscribed homosexual desire upon them. If free erotic play is the prerogative of the aristocratic sodomite, it is the actor's profession and an important source of his reputation. Like the ganymede, the player's body is given a kind of heaviness that balances the weightless erotic play of the courtly sodomite.