RENAISSANCE THEATER

Frontispiece to William Alabaster's Roxana, 1632

It is generally well-known that women were not allowed on the Renaissance stage, as it would have been too “tempting” for male audience members to see the female body put so on display and too licentious to do so. So, even the most feminine of female characters, from the much-sought after Rose (The Shoemaker's Holiday, Dekker, 1599) to the paragon of female beauty, Helen (Doctor Faustus, Marlowe, 1588) would have been played by boy actors whose voices had not yet dropped. The female heroines are notably young in plays of the time, particularly in Shakespeare (mostly because he is the most visible of the contemporaneous playwrights and because he had more female leading characters than most), often being only twelve to fourteen years of age (see Juliet, Perdita, Viola – who is problematic in her own right). This ensured that pre-pubescent boys could reasonably play the parts and convincingly so. If legitimately older female characters were needed, the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, for example, as compared to Hermione in The Winter's Tale, men would dress in drag and these characters would be played to comic effect. All males playing females would be costumed as women, in everything from corsets to dresses to wigs, and this cross-dressing, although not universally accepted (the issues with which will be addressed later), was considered to be less transgressive and offensive than seeing an actual woman.  

In the following pages, we will discuss the performance of gender and sexuality on the Renaissance stage by both actors and characters alike, and we will examine and perhaps further problematize some of the issues surrounding those performances. The issue of cross-dressing will be taken up, as well as an assessment of female characters, and a history of women's eventual appearance on the stage.  

CROSS-DRESSING ON STAGE * FEMALE CHARACTERS * WOMEN ON STAGE