30 Great Myths about Shakespeare (29 page)

That Shakespeare's female characters were played by males is not in doubt, but what has been more controversial is, first, the question of the age of these actors, and second, the dramatic effect of this theatrical cross-dressing. Our popular phrase “boy players” suggests youthful performers whose voices have not yet broken. Many references in Shakespeare's plays suggest that treble voices played women: Orsino tells Cesario his “small pipe / Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound” (
Twelfth Night
1.4.32–3); Hamlet greets the players at Elsinore with special affection for “my young lady and mistress … Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring” (
Hamlet
2.2.426–31). But it has sometimes been difficult for modern readers to imagine such pre-pubescent actors having the maturity and gravitas to play, for example, Cleopatra. Janet Suzman, herself a Cleopatra directed by Trevor Nunn in a version filmed for television in 1974, voices this skepticism: “I find it hard to think he wrote [Cleopatra] for a boy … there must have been some kind of prima donna in his company playing women's parts. It could never have been acted by a boy.”
³

On the other hand, evidence from the period just after Shakespeare was writing gives us some suggestion that male actors in women's roles were typically teenagers under the age of 21.
⁴
It is one of the delicious ironies of the debates about theater in the early modern period that much of our evidence about theater practice comes from its fiercest moral detractors. Much of the disapproval of the theater in the period is focalized on male actors performing female roles. “All men are abominations that put on women's raiment,” wrote the Oxford theologian John Rainolds in 1599, and anti-theatricalist polemic stresses the youth of the cross-dressed actors. Defending the theater against these attacks, Thomas Heywood, himself a dramatist, also suggests that female roles are indeed taken by younger male actors, but tries to differentiate between cross-dressing in and out of the theater: “nor do I hold it lawful to beguile the eyes of the world in confounding the shapes of either sex, as to keep any youth in the habit of a virgin, or any virgin in the shape of a lad, to shroud them from the eyes of their fathers, tutors, or protectors, or to any other sinister intent whatsoever. But to see our youths attired in the habit of women, who knows not what their intents be.”
⁵
Because there is no “sinister intent” to deceive, Heywood argues, male actors in women's clothing is an understood theatrical convention outside the moral codes of the rest of society.

So the evidence identifies “young men,” “boys,” and “youths” as the actors likely to play women's parts—designations suggesting a range of ages through childhood towards maturity. Puberty, including the breaking of the voice, may well have been later in early modern England than today. One popular medical textbook suggests that boys are “apt to change their voice about 14 years of age” but there is evidence of even later maturation among choral school students, with the treble voice remaining to age 17 or 18.
⁶
David Kathman shows that the actors who performed female roles in Shackerley Marmion's
Holland's Leaguer
(1631) and Massinger's
The Roman Actor
(performed 1626) were all teenagers between 13 and 17 years old at the time of performance.
⁷
Richard Sharpe, the first Duchess of Malfi in Webster's play, was probably between 17 and 21 years old, and he later graduated to playing male roles with the company. Kathman's exhaustive examination of the named actors in the period up to the closing of the theaters shows that the adult male sharers (part-owners) in the theater companies never, so far as we can tell, acted female roles, and that instead young men aged between 13 and 21 took these parts. Kathman points out that “boy” also means “apprentice,” so perhaps the term “boy” needs to be seen in institutional terms—these were theatrical apprentices—rather than in terms solely related to age.

There is further evidence that young male actors were highly capable and popular. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, the biggest commercial and artistic threat to the Lord Chamberlain's Men was the newly formed boys' companies: Rosencrantz's report that “there is … an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for't. These are now the fashion” (2.2.340–2) was a topical one. Companies of teenage male actors were hugely successful, carrying complex, often saucy or satirical, plays without adult sharers, and the major dramatists wrote for them: Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Marston, and George Chapman among others.

As the resident playwright for a well-established and stable theater company, Shakespeare wrote with a keen eye for the personnel resources available for his plays. Almost all his plays require between two and four actors in female roles:
Much Ado About Nothing
, in which a cabal of four women meet as Beatrice is tricked in 3.1, is unusual. Stanley Wells suggests that the worry that he would run out of appropriate actors made Shakespeare scrap his original plan for a further female character in the play, Innogen, mother of Hero (her name appears in a couple of stage directions although she has no lines and is usually expunged by editors as an error in drafting: Josie Rourke's 2011 production reintroduced her and gave her the lines Shakespeare gives to Antonio). Wells suggests that the much-remarked absence of mothers in Shakespeare's plays (where is Queen Lear, or Duchess Prospero or Frederick or Senior, or Mrs Egeus? and look what happens to Thaisa and Hermione after they have given birth in
Pericles
and
The Winter's Tale
) may have practical theatrical, rather than sociological, reasons.
⁸
If he is right about Innogen, then more boys must have been available for
Love's Labour's Lost
(four women and two boy pages on stage in the final scene).

Heywood's common-sense defense of the practice of cross-dressing in the theater suggests it should be understood as convention: part of the make-believe of theater. But Shakespeare's plots seem often to be teasing us with the knowledge of the male actor underneath the female costume, particularly through the common plot-device of female characters dressing as men. When Rosalind in
As You Like It
takes on the male persona of Ganymede in the Forest of Ardenne (the name had strong associations of male homosexuality), there are numerous jokes about his/her ambiguous gender position. At the end of the scene in which Rosalind, dressed as Ganymede and pretending to be Rosalind, is mock-married to Orlando, Celia scolds her: “we must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest” (4.1.192–4). Within the fiction of the play what is beneath the doublet and hose is a female body, but within the theater? The joke, taken direct from the prose romance by Thomas Lodge that Shakespeare uses as his source for the play, has a double resonance on a transvestite stage. And, like other of Shakespeare's heroines dressed in male clothing (Viola in
Twelfth Night
, Julia in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
), it is not entirely clear that Rosalind appears back in her female clothing at the end of the play, although most modern productions have her do so. Her epilogue, however, teases the audience with the ambiguous sexual allure of the man-woman (it would send poor John Rainolds rushing for his smelling salts): “If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me …” (5.4.212–14). Stephen Orgel's ludic essay “Nobody's Perfect; or, Why Did the English Renaissance Stage take Boys for Women?” plays on the final elusive line of Billy Wilder's cross-dressing film comedy
Some Like It Hot
(1959): Rosalind's epilogue, like the film (which ends with one heterosexual couple, Joe and Sugar, and the phlegmatic Osgood apparently accepting the pragmatic “Daphne”) does not close down the “queer” sexuality indicated by cross-dressing.
⁹

The dramatic effect of male actors in women's roles was not, then, neutral. Neither the plays themselves nor their moralistic detractors deny the erotic suggestiveness of the cross-dressed male actor, and Shakespeare frequently adds to this in his comedies by including transvestite disguise within the plot. The poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge formulated the notion of “willing suspension of disbelief” as a way to identify the implicit contract between the reader or viewer and non-realistic elements in literature, but although it is sometimes used of the Shakespearean theater, Coleridge's idea is not entirely appropriate. It is hard to suspend our disbelief about Viola's femininity in
Twelfth Night
when the plot keeps drawing attention to gender as performance, just as Francis Flute's unwillingness to play the female character of Thisbe in the play-within-the-play of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
draws attention to the male actors performing the “outer” play's Helena, Hermia, Hippolyta, and Titania. Rather than the “suspension of disbelief” it seems the plays require a kind of collusion from audiences willing to switch between an immersion in the fiction the play is presenting and a more self-conscious awareness of its material basis in the theater. On the other hand, describing the moving death of Desdemona in an Oxford production, one spectator uses the female pronoun without any awkwardness: the gender of the character and the gender of the actor could be held to be distinct.

Cleopatra gives us perhaps the most extreme version of this consciousness of theatrical gender. At the end of
Antony and Cleopatra
she imagines the shame that will befall her if she is captured by Caesar in strikingly self-reflexive terms:

The quick comedians

Extemporally will stage us, and present

Our Alexandrian revels. Antony

Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

I'th'posture of a whore'

(5.2.212–17)

The fear of inadequate impersonation by a “boy” is a daring allusion to the artifice of theatrical representation: in the Jacobean theater, Cleopatra is already represented by a boy. That the performance can sustain this demystificatory moment so close to Cleopatra's final tragedy suggests something of the nuance and control Shakespeare could expect from the young actors playing women's roles.

Shakespeare, then, wrote the female roles in his plays for young male actors to inhabit. But when the theaters reopened after the hiatus of Cromwellian rule (1642–60), and women acted publicly for the first time, it was Shakespeare's roles for women, and in particular the so-called “breeches” or cross-dressed roles which allowed women to display their legs on stage, that were a major factor in the plays' revival: the first of the comedies to be put on was
Twelfth Night
. But it is a sign of Shakespeare's reiterability that for centuries his female roles have been taken by women actors who have inhabited them with the grace, action, and gesture of real women. Harriet Walter, who counts Cleopatra, Beatrice (
Much Ado About Nothing
), Lady Macbeth, Viola, and Innogen (
Cymbeline
) among her Shakespearean roles, observes that “Shakespeare's verse is as dense and as beautiful, the emotional depth as great, the wit even more brilliant, the psychology as complex in the female characters as in the male,” although she adds: “I find it curious to think as a modern actress my opportunities in the Shakespearean repertoire have been determined by the limitations or excellences of two or three generations of Elizabethan boy players.”
¹⁰

Notes

¹
 John Chamberlain,
The Letters of John Chamberlain
, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), vol. 1, p. 172.

²
 A full text of Coryate's
Crudities
is available at
www.archive.org

³
 Quoted by Marvin Rosenberg in his “The Myth of Shakespeare's Squeaking Boy Actor—or Who Played Cleopatra?”,
Shakespeare Bulletin
, 19 (2001), p. 5.

⁴
 David Kathman, “How Old Were Shakespeare's Boy Actors?”,
Shakespeare Survey
, 58 (2005), pp. 220–46 (p. 221).

⁵
 Tanya Pollard,
Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 226.

⁶
 
The Problems of Aristotle
(1595), quoted in Kathman, “How Old Were Shakespeare's Boy Actors?”, p. 222.

⁷
 Kathman, “How Old Were Shakespeare's Boy Actors?”, pp. 224–5.

⁸
 Stanley Wells, “Boys Should Be Girls: Shakespeare's Female Roles and the Boy Players,”
New Theatre Quarterly
, 25 (2009), pp. 172–7 (p. 175).

⁹
 Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect; or, Why Did the English Renaissance Stage Take Boys for Women?”,
South Atlantic Quarterly
, 88 (1989), pp. 7–29.

¹⁰
 Carol Rutter,
Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today
(London: The Women's Press, 1988), p. xxiv.

Despite the parallels between the early modern theater and Hollywood (see Myth 19), it's often asserted that the plays cannot be translated into film. In some ways the film industry's own judgments reinforce this notion: the only Shakespeare film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture was Laurence Olivier's
Hamlet
(1948), and a perhaps apocryphal story about its movie magnate backer J. Arthur Rank being reassured that that the finished film was “wonderful: you wouldn't know it was Shakespeare” attests to the ambivalence of the relationship between Shakespeare and cinema.
¹
Shakespeare has only once been nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay category (for Kenneth Branagh's
Hamlet
in 1996: it lost out to Billy Bob Thornton's
Sling Blade
). By Oscar standards, the only Shakespeare film to really succeed is not a play at all but the comic biography
Shakespeare in Love
(John Madden, 1998): it won seven Oscars, including for the screenplay.