Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-31T22:27:53.548Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Act, the Role, and the Actor: Boy Actresses On the Elizabethan Stage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Kathleen McLuskie
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recent feminist criticism has led to a reassessment of women's roles in the Elizabethan drama, especially in such ‘difficult’ plays as The Taming of the Shrew or Shakespeare's problem comedies. Yet this has often been with an implicit belief in the appropriateness of ‘psychological’ or ‘interpretive’ approaches to character and gender quite alien to the period in which the plays were first performed. In the following article. Kathleen McLuskie. who teaches in the Department of Theatre at the University of Kent, looks at the different, often conflicting approaches to the sexuality of performance in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, at how these were reflected both in theatrical conventions and in contemporary attitudes to the plays and the ‘boy actresses’ – and at some possible implications for modern productions.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 3 , Issue 10 , May 1987 , pp. 120 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes and References

1. Jensen, Ejner J., ‘The Boy Actors: Plays and Playing’, RORD, XVIII (1975), p. 5–11Google Scholar.

2. Jardine, Lisa, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Dramain the Age of Shakespeare, (Brighton, 1983), Chapter 1, p. 9–36Google Scholar.

3. See Barish, Jonas, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 1981)Google Scholar, Chapter 4, ‘Puritans and Proteans.’

4. Heywood, Thomas, An Apology for Actors, ed. Freeman, Arthur (New York 1973)Google Scholar, C3v.

5. See Henslowe's, inventories of costumes in Foakes, R. A. and Rickert, R. T., Henslowe's Diary (Cambridge, 1961), p. 291–4Google Scholar, 319–19, 321–3. A suggestive modern reconstruction of the role of the boy player is provided by David Gentleman's cartoon showing the transformation of a boy into a woman by the addition of petticoat, corset, bumroll, dress, ruff, wig, fan and jewels in Brown, John Russell, Shakespeare and His Theatre (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 26–7Google Scholar.

6. Foakes, R. A., Illustrations of the English Stage 1580–1642 (London, 1985), p. 88Google Scholar.

7. The term was used by A. C. Nuttall in a discussion of Barthes at a colloquium at the University of Kent. It conveys not pragmatic reality of the empirical world but the convincing representation of that empirical world in fiction. See Barthes, Roland, ‘L'Effet du reel’. Communications, XI (1968)Google Scholar.

8. The Shakespearian locus classicus in As You Like It, II, vii, 139–166, ‘All the world's a stage’, is a case in point. The Seven Ages of Man is a literary construction, listing types much as Heywood's poem does. The evident discrepancy between that conventional representation and the characters of Orlando and Adam validates the greater ‘realishness’ of the fictional characters.

9. Dunbar's, William widow is equipped with ‘a watter spunge … within my wyde clokis/Than wring I it full wylely and wetis my chekis’. The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. Mackenzie, W. Mackay (London, 1932), p. 95Google Scholar.

10. Examples include Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster; Ford, The Lover's Melancholy, Ben Jonson, Epicoene; and the anonymous The Maid's Metamorphosis.

11. This charge was brought most explicitly by Stubbes and Prynne. For a full discussion of the evidence see Davies, W. Robertson, Shakespeare's Boy Actors (London, 1939), p. 10–15Google Scholar, and Lisa Jardine, op. cit.

12. See Bentley, G. E., The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, Vol. II (London, 1941–1968), p. 43–45Google Scholar.

13. On attempts to control the theatre see Wickham, Glynne, Early English Stages, Vol. II, Part I (London, 1963)Google Scholar, Chapters III and IV.

14. Clark, Stuart, ‘Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft’, Past and Present, LXXXVII (1970), p. 98–127Google Scholar.

15. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses, quoted in Jonas Barish, op. cit., p. 92.

16. Ibid., quoted in Lamar, Virginia A., ‘English Dress in the Age of Shakespeare’, in Wright, Louis B. and Lamar, Virginia A., Life and Letters in Tudor and Stuart England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1958), p. 389Google Scholar.

17. Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, (London. 1908), p. 325.

18. Ibid., p. 330.

19. Ibid., p. 328.

20. Ibid., p. 334–5.

21. Fitzgeffrey, Henry, Satires and Satyricall Epigrams (1617)Google Scholar, sig. B4v, C2.

22. Anon, , Hic Mulier: or the Man-woman: being a Medicine to cure … the Staggers in the Masculine femminies of our Times (London, 1620)Google Scholar, sig Cv.

23. For a full discussion of this argument and a sensitive attempt to distinguish between debate and polemic see Woodbridge, Linda, Women and the English Renaissance (Urbana, 1984)Google Scholar, Part One: ‘The Formal Controversy’, p. 13–138.

24. The contest over definitions of sexuality is not, of course, restricted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For a discussion of modern versions of this contest see Weeks, Jeffrey, Sexuality and Its Discontents (London, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the importance of clothes as the site of this contest see Wilson, Elizabeth, Adorned in Dreams (London, 1985)Google Scholar. On attempts to locate this discussion in the sexual behaviour (as opposed to sexual polemic) of the period, see Ingram, Martin, ‘The Reform of Popular Culture’, ‘Sex and Marriage in Early Modern England’, in Reay, Barry, ed., Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, (London, 1985)Google Scholar.

25. Gouge, William, Domestical Duties (London, 1622)Google Scholar.

26. See Jeffrey Weeks, op. cit., Chapter 3.

27. Francis Osborne's Traditional Memoryes, quoted in Goldberg, Jonathan, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, 1983), p. 143Google Scholar.

28. Twycross, Meg, ‘Transvestism in the Mystery Plays’, Medieval English Theatre, V, No. 2 (1983), p. 150Google Scholar.

29. See for example, Greene, Gayle, Lenz, Carolyn and Neely, Carole, eds., The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Urbana, 1980)Google Scholar, especially ‘Women and Men in Shakespeare: a Selective Bibliography’, p. 314–36.

30. In ‘Track and Field’, RSC News, Summer 1985, p. 4.

31. Downes, John, Roscius Anglicanus: or An Historical View of the Stage from 1600–1708, ed. Summers, Montague (London, 1928), p. 21Google Scholar.

32. Ibid., p. 26.

32. Cibber, Colley, Apology for a Life (1750), p. 133Google Scholar.

34. Havelock Ellis, ‘Introduction’ to the Mermaid edition of John ford (repr., New York, 1957), p. xvi.

35. In The Female Eunuch (London, 1970), p. 207–10.

36. Manchester Royal Exchange, 1980.

37. Royal Shakespeare Company, 1983.