The Roaring Girl

The Roaring Girl

Though its primary function is usually plot driven--as a source of humor and a means to effect changes in characters through disguise and deception—cross dressing is also a sociological motif involving gendered play. My earlier essay on the use of the motif in Shakespeare's plays pointed out that cross dressing has been discussed as a symptom of "a radical discontinuity in the meaning of the family" (Belsey 178), as cul-tural anxiety over the destabilization of the social hierarchy (Baker, Howard, Garber), as the means for a woman to be assertive without arousing hostility (Claiborne Park), and as homoerotic arousal (Jardine). This variety of interpretations suggests the multivoiced character of the motif, but before approaching the subject of this essay, three clarifica- tions are necessary at the outset.

First, no matter what is represented on stage, the fact that boys are actually playing cross dressing men and women is insistently metaphorical; the literal fact of trans-vestism (that is, the boy actor impersonating either a woman, a woman cross dressed as a man, or a man cross dressed as a woman, not the represented character) is divided between the homoerotic and the blurring of gender. On the other hand, the represented female character who cross dresses functions literally to relieve the boy actor, at least for a time, from impersonating a woman. Represented characters who cross dress may pre-sent a variety of poses, from the misogynist mockery of the feminine to the adroitly and openly homoerotic. In the case of the title character of Jonson's Epicoene, the motif is utilized as disguise intended to effect a surprise ending for Morose and his heterosexual audience, for whom the poet also pr...

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Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

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Howard, Jean. "Cross-dressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern Eng- land." Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 418-40.

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Jonson, Ben. Epicoene, or The Silent Woman. Ed. L. A. Beauline. Lincoln: U of Nebraska, 1966.

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