The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Eighty In which boys will be girls

Some of those wretched Puritans got it right. They knew, at least, the sex of it, the way the audience's excitement at a performance of Romeo and Juliet, say, was something both peculiar and perverse. What was being enacted in our playhouse was the same hot thing that had been enacted centuries before, in the beginning of the theatre, at those exaltations which formed part of the worship of the god Dionysus. Aeschylus calls that god 'the womanly one'. In Euripides, he is 'the womanly stranger'. At times he has also been termed 'man-womanish'. The sexes are fused in him. The arousal he causes in his followers is like nothing else. He is the great enigma at the heart of a mystery.

You get the same idea in alchemy. There the hierosgamos or coniunctio is the chemical wedding of male and female in one. No alchemist myself, I know what this means.

When I put on my rose-coloured petticoats and my high-heeled shoes with roses, when I wore quilted and beaded under-skirts and long, hard bodices stiffened with whalebone and encrusted with embroidery and gold lace, when I pulled up my cart-wheel farthingale to be spanked as the shrew, or bewailed all the perfumes of Arabia as I sleep-walked in Lady Macbeth's nightgown of Judas-colour satin faced with fur, I was both female and male, the flower and the thorn. Sometimes, quite intoxicated by my roles, bewildered and bewitched by all the woman's words I had to say, I think I imagined myself one of those devotees of the goddess Isis, who castrated themselves and changed sex to become her. At such times, no doubt, my performance was particularly good, and in the eyes of the audience I perhaps became Cordelia or Desdemona, Cleopatra or Juliet. At other times, though, more thoroughly and more often, I was the perfect androgyne, male and female in one, changing from boy to girl and back again, to the very great excitement of my audience. That it excited me, and how, I have already told you. The fervour and fever in the spectators was mostly to be inferred from their rapt and breathless silence. But once or twice I saw certain poor souls in the shadows quite carried away, jerking off under cover of their cloaks, or pressed up hard against their neighbours. I was never insulted by this. It stood tribute to my art, as to the mystery of our craft.

Consider: in all orgies, at all times in history, cross-dressing has been of the essence. Put a man in a woman's clothes, or a woman in a man's, and you have instantly an invitation to sweet disorder, to sexual riot and confusion, and to a breakdown of all the usual inhibitory canons of behaviour.

I say that the spectacle of boys dressed as women on our stage was meant to be erotically exciting. Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant or is lying. What's more, Mr Shakespeare's plays, more than any other plays ever written, play about with this sexual confusion to a point where I insist I do not exaggerate by likening their effect to what happened in the worship of the great god Dionysus.

Some of the Puritans knew this, as I said. Here is John Rainoldes (no relation!), writing in 1599 on Th' Overthrow of Stage-Plays, after seeing me as Beatrice kissing Benedick at the end of Much Ado About Nothing:

'When Critobulus kissed the son of Alcibiades, a beautiful boy, Socrates said he had done amiss and very dangerously: because, as certain spiders, if they do but touch men only with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain and make them mad: so beautiful boys by kissing do sting and pour secretly in a kind of poison, the poison of incontinency.'

In another passage in the same pamphlet, Rainoldes gets even hotter on the subject:

'Those monsters of nature, which burning in their lust one towards another, men with men work filthiness, are as infamous as Sodom: not the doers only, but the sufferers also.'

This Rainoldes must have been a closet sodomite, since that is all the thrust of his argument. No sodomite myself, I say our subversions were more terrible even than he imagined. Making men burn for men was only one aspect of the matter.

Here is Phillip Stubbes, whose The Anatomy of Abuses was published in the year that I was born, so he cannot be talking about my performances, yet the general argument is much the same:

'It is written in the 22nd chapter of Deuteronomy that what man so ever weareth woman's apparel is accursed, and what woman weareth man's apparel is accursed also ... Our apparel was given us as a sign extinctive to discern betwixt sex and sex, & therefore one to wear the apparel of another sex is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the verity of his own kind. Wherefore these women may not improperly be called Hermaphroditi, that is, monsters of both kinds, half women, half men.'

Now, I, old Tiresias Pickleherring, say that there is much truth in Mr Stubbes's wholesome fulminations, and I should know. When I wore a woman's dress and spoke the woman's words written for me by Mr Shakespeare I did indeed PARTICIPATE with a woman's sex, and no doubt (thus initiate) I was guilty of adulterating the verity of my own kind. And yet how sweet, how very sweet it was! And what is my own kind, in any case, since all my long life it has seemed to me that I am Sappho imprisoned in a man's body?

Stubbes does at least do credit to the general disorder inspired by our cross-dressing, not just concentrating on the issue of effeminacy to the exclusion of all else. He sees quite clearly that the theatre is a pagan temple (which is why he abhors it), and that the god who is worshipped there is not Jehovah (nor even perhaps a male deity), and that the worshippers leave the place filled with a spirit which moves them to several different expressions of human passion:

'For proof whereof, but mark the flocking and running to Theatres and Curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide to see plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold. Then, these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, every one brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomites, or worse.'

Regarding the strange gender of the spirit behind the ecstasy of the playhouse, Stubbes is also on to something real when he associates the practice of cross-dressing with the power of women over men:

'I never read or heard of any people except drunken with Circe's cups, or poisoned with the exorcisms of Medea that famous and renowned sorceress, that ever would wear such kind of attire as is not only stinking before the face of God, and offensive to man, but also painteth out to the whole world the venereous inclination of their corrupt conversation.'

I have just the one more pamphlet in this box. It is the most arresting of them all - the Histrio-Mastix of William Prynne, published in London in 1633. Prynne sees that boys dressing as girls not only excites the boys 'to self-pollution (a sin for which Onan was destroyed) and to that unnatural sodomitical sin of uncleaness to which the reprobate Gentiles were given over', it also transforms them into women:

'And must not our own experience bear witness of the unvirility of playacting? May we not daily see our players metamorphosed into women on the stage, not only by putting on the female robes, but likewise the effeminate gestures, speeches, pace, behaviour, attire, delicacy, passions, manners, arts and wiles of the female sex, yea, of the most petulant, unchaste, insinuating strumpets that either Italy or the world affords?'

This is the finest critique I ever had! That Mr Prynne in his youth had seen me in the part of Cleopatra I have no doubt, especially since elsewhere in his Histrio-Mastix he works himself into another lather over such matters as Cleopatra's clothing herself in the habit of Isis during the course of that play, not to speak of her dressing her lover in her own 'tires and mantles' whilst she straps on his sword:

'A man's clothing himself in maid's attire is not only an imitation of effeminate idolatrous priests and pagans who arrayed themselves in woman's apparel when they sacrificed to their idols, and their Venus, and celebrated plays unto them (which as Lyra, Aquinas, and Alensis well observe was one chief reason why this text of Deuteronomy prohibits men's putting on of women's apparel as an abomination to the Lord), but a manifest approbation and revival of this their idolatrous practice. Therefore it must certainly be abominable, and within the very scope and letter of this inviolable Scripture, even in this regard.'

Before I leave the subject, ladies and gentlemen, picture to yourselves for a moment a pretty page boy pulling on a pair of Queen Elizabeth's black silk stockings when his mistress's back is turned. Then think of the boy's prick nestling in a pair of the Queen's warm discarded satin drawers, and being stirred perhaps to tumescence by the touch of their texture and the thought of Her. These images, I submit, excite both men and women. They are indifferent in their sexual excellence. It is the silk excitement makes us hot. It is the mixture of identities and tokens of sex: the Queen, the young boy, the soft and private petals, the sharp, upthrusting thorn. It is the silken confusion - that element of the forbidden, the perverse, the opposites kissing as they cross - which so fascinates and engrosses our senses. The dress is female, while groin and fist are male. This is the ultimate and primal image, the mystery enacted in that theatre of the soul which our bodies will avow before our minds. This is the play of all plays, the drama that Mr Shakespeare could not write, but which he wrote over and over by not writing it. All the secrets of creation can come down to this little scene. It is the secret dream in the darkest chamber. This is what happens in Lucy Negro's seventh room.