Transvestites in Renaissance Drama
He looks at transvestitism and its problems, its reaches, and its revolutionary backbone counterpoint to Jacobean customs. He begins with the case of the two 16th Century French transvestites – two lesbians -who in their sexual practices used a dildo and who were burned and hanged respectively for disguising themselves as a men and using dildos in their intercourse. He cites the heroine of the 1978 text Rubyfruit Jungle as a voice against the their revolution: “That’s the craziest, dumbass thing I ever heard tell of. What’s the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man?” The point is lost in their revolution: If in their attempt to remove themselves from the hole of subjectivity, why abandon female biology, why blend back into the roles of a man. Dollimore states: “To suggest that gender difference can be maintained through cross-dressing and inversion is still to maintain or imply the crucial claim: it is difference working in terms of custom and culture rather than nature and divine law.” In effect, the transvestite is counterproductive to any feminist cause – dressing as men, using, albeit superficially, a phallus in their sexual practices. But who can role-play? Certainly not women, in the case of the real life, where King James attempted to eliminate transvestitism in 1620.
But why is this seen as such a threat? The women who use dildos are not replacing the penis, only reinforcing its importance. Transvestitism was viewed as perversion, an upsetting cause to both the social order and to Nature itself. However, what most transgressing agents miss is the point that – in Dollimore’s terms: “Real faith lies in honest doubt.” This kind of role-playing and switches in identity markers is without cogent strategy. Dollimore states: “This is a defiance based upon dependence, a rebellion not so much against authority as within it.”
All revolutions are dependent upon a pre-existing structure. A reinscription to an accepted structure. Dollimore: “This is why we are mistaken if we think that deviancy exists outside the dominant order. Though socially marginal the deviant remains discursively central: though an outcast of society, the transvestite remains indispensable to it. For example: the process of identifying and demonizing deviance may be ‘necessary’ to maintaining social order.” Dollimore looks at the texts of the time period as an indication of sexual progress, or regression. He examines the concept and the process of transvestitism in Renaissance drama.
Dollimore states: “What intrigues me about Renaissance drama, especially its drama, is a mode of transgression which finds expression through the inversion and perversion of pre-existing categories and structures which humanist transgression seeks to transcend, to be liberated from; a mode of transgression which seeks not to escape from existing structures, but rather a subversive reinscription within them – and in the process a dis-location of them.”
He examines the Thomas Middleton’s and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl. But in looking at this text he claims only a partial reading – not in the sense of distorting the text to meet the ends of his thesis, but in the sense of correlating elements of the texts that participate in an oppositional process against and within Jacobean society. He views the text as a part of a “social process.”
The play is based off the life of Mary Frith, a cross-dresser, a well-known deviant of the authorities. Though she achieved a notoriety for fighting in the streets, hanging with thugs and prostitutes, being brought to court for theft and burglary, and achieving the title of whore, Middleton and Dekker play down these attributes and soften her image in their character Moll Cutpurse in the dedication and prologue:
“Worse things, I must needs confess, the world has taxed her for than has been written of her; but ’tis the excellency of a writer to leave things better than he finds ’emâÂ?¦ Yet we rather wish in such discoveries, where reputation lies bleeding, a slackness in truth than fullness of slander.”
The character Cutpurse is described as a “codpiece daughter”; who some say is “a man/ And some both man and woman.” But by dressing as a man, she also performs socially stronger and quicker and sharper than the men in her play. The character acts as a criticism of masculinity. She has the view that prostitution has power and gain in it since it offers sexual exploitation and dominance over patriarchal weakness.
But if we examine her station fully our conclusion is such that her sexual revolution is thinner than it is massively groundbreaking. Her feminists critics have charged her, like Dollimore does, as an agents of reinscription back into the male codes. By behaving like a man, she instructs not independence, but mimicry.
Dollimore examines using the notions of the stage as a mirroring of Jacobean life. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the character Rosalind, after deceiving the other characters by dressing as a boy (even her own father) to meet her ends in love, addresses the audience in the play’s epilogue:
“It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologueâÂ?¦ My way is to conjure you, and I’ll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you; and I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as me, and breaths that I defied not”
This is an interesting position for the actor – played by a young boy – a charge of male transvestitism, a double-removal of the sexual positioning: In the opening the segments, the young male actor plays the woman Rosalind, the character Rosalind dresses as a boy to trick Orlando (the love interest), but the play’s end, the character has assumed the role of a lady again – the joke is on us, bellows the other characters of the play. (It’s a comedy). And yet this epilogue- which breaks the spell of cross-dressing and performance delusions – poses an interesting charge – whether Shakespeare had intended a charge or no: Men can fashion themselves as a lady – as a lady dressing as a man, as transforming into a lady again, as a lady embracing the affections of another man – and yet, women cannot do the same? The epilogue can be read as a sort of apology for all this cross-dressing. Or as another set of regulations posed against women in this time period. In a sense the theatre itself is a part of the sexpolitik, the domination of accepted role-playing delimited only to men. In the Roaring Girl, the transvestite is played by a young boy. Dollimore does not mention this. What he does mention is the built in mode of playing in the drama: “The theatre provided a model of the role playing which was so important for social mobility, the appropriation and successful deployment of power.” The world as a stage, etc. Life as playing. Nature as a mirror to mankind, but the mirror equals as an artificial construct.
Most depressing is a line in Middleton’s The Changeling. If we use the text as an archaeological guide to the constructs and orders of Jacobean life, what do we do with this line in Act IV, Scene 3, where Albius and Lollio compare women to the insane: “You need not fear, sir; so long as we are there with our commanding pizzles, they’ll be as tame as the ladies themselves.”
