Cross dressing is a favorite device on Shakespeare’s stage, particularly in the comedies.  It is a device that seems to serve many functions.  There is the obvious use as a plot device, which is to say that it allows a character to be in disguise, and thus creates some level of confusion and action in the play.  In comedy, this can be thought to be the main function of cross dressing. 

Viola, in Twelfth Night, probably comes to mind first for most readers of Shakespeare’s plays when thinking about cross dressing.  But she is certainly not alone.  Rosalind (As You Like It), Imogen (Cymbeline), Portia and Jessica (The Merchant of Venice), along with many other women in the Shakespearean canon, all provide audiences with various degrees of confusion and entertainment as a result of their antics while dressed as men.  And of course we wouldn’t want to overlook their brothers, Falstaff (The Merry Wives of Windsor) and Flute (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) as men who cross dress in Shakespeare’s plays. 

But besides the obvious use of cross dressing for the purpose of plot advancement, it serves several other purposes too.  It offers us a sort of access point to ideas surrounding gender issues.  When we see a person of one sex dressing and acting as the opposite, it allows us to consider  the implications of gender roles and expectations.  What does it mean, for instance, that cross dressing allows all of the women who engage in it more freedom, making them into stronger characters, while those 2 men (poor guys!) who dress as women take a definite step downward?  Indeed, both Falstaff and Flute are constant sources of humor when they dress as women. 

We might simply look at all of this with “Shakespeare’s day” in mind, and wonder what it all might have meant for people living then, perhaps even breathing a sigh of relief that we live in a more enlightened era.  If, on the other hand, we give it a little more thought (say perhaps, as we plan to stage one of the plays), it might likewise allow us to consider these questions in light of our own generation’s gender politics.  Such an exercise might serve to challenge our idea of just how enlightened our era is.

Cross dressing (and disguise in general, I would add) on Shakespeare’s stage serves one other function that I think is easily missed when we read rather than view the plays.  It calls attention to the whole play-acting endeavor that we are watching.  Stephen Greenblatt, in his introduction to Twelfth Night in The Norton Shakespeare, says that in the play, “clothes do not simply reveal or disguise identity; they partly constitute identity” (p. 1761; see bibliographical information below).  I believe that the same can be said of nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays, though it is more prominent in some than others.  Think, for example, of Hamlet.  As soon as Hamlet begins to hide behind the disguise of madness, his sanity begins to slip, and we wonder just how much he is pretending.  In this, he brings to mind The Tempest’s Antonio, who would “have no screen between this part he played / And him he played it for, he needs will be / Absolute Milan” (1.2.107-109).  In Twelfth Night, Viola begins to play her part through the wearing of garments, and seems to quickly lose herself in the part she plays.  

I think stage performances, in fact, invite this emphasis on garments because of the distancing between the audience and the characters they watch.  In a stage performance, we do not get the benefits (or distractions) of close ups and other techniques more common to film.  We must, as a result, rely on the larger, often more stereotypical, devices to point to a person’s characteristics or emotions.  On stage, everything must be done large, even over-acted when compared to the screen.  What easier way to mark some change in fortune or character, then, than to change one’s garments, the most readily visible outward markers of such things?  There is only so much one can do to change the body of the actors, but the change of clothing can easily serve for a shorthand for other, more significant changes.

Finally, it should not be overlooked that  there is one convention particular to the English Renaissance stage that is easily forgotten when watching contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s work, that being the use of boy actors to play women’s roles.  When we consider the idea of cross dressing in light of this convention, many of the humorous lines become all the funnier.  Think, for instance, of Cleopatra’s revulsion at the idea of seeing “[s]ome squeaking Cleopatra boy [her] greatness” (5.2.216).  The melodrama of the lines spoken by a female acting in the role can be humorous enough, but how much more so when spoken by the boy who is in the very act of “boying” her?

In the comedies, cross dressing and disguise play a special part in making the plays work.  In part, we can link this practice to the Carnival spirit that many critics connect with Shakespeare’s comedies.  I like the way the use of clothes and disguise make misbehavior and misrule, confusion and chaos, both possible and allowable on the comedic stage.  When our characters, especially the women, don a disguise, they seem to find freedom to indulge in the excesses of Carnival.

Come to think of it, I do think there is an equivalent in society today.  When we get online and begin moving about behind our disguises and costumes (i.e., our screen names), don’t we often see exactly the same thing happen?

For a continuation of this discussion, visit these entries:

The Importance of Garments and Dress in Cymbeline

I False?

The Troubling Question of Genre

©2007 Shelly Bryant

Citations from the plays are taken from The Norton Shakespeare.

Greenblatt, S., W. Cohen, J. E. Howard, and K. E. Maus, eds.  The Norton Shakespeare.  New York and London:  W. W. Norton, 1997.

For an interesting article along this theme, connecting the practice of Shakespeare’s stage with those of other genre’s, visit the MLA site and listen to this recording.