Female cross-dressing was a common plot device in early modern English drama:  between 1590 and 1604, nineteen plays featured female characters who dressed as men.  This phenomenon became more popular as the century progressed.  Between 1660 and 1700, nearly a quarter of the plays initially produced in London theaters featured such disguise roles. [1] The question of what these cross-dressed characters do is complicated by the question of who played them—as well as by the fact that the answer to this question changes over the course of the seventeenth century.  Practice dictated that boys be commissioned to play women's parts until the closing of the theaters during the English Civil War.  Several years into the Restoration, it had become quite normal for women to appear on the stage in both female and male parts. 

Critical awareness of this topic has grown dramatically in recent years.  Interest in “gender trouble” and other forms of identity manipulation have received a great deal of attention in the last decade or so, and scholars of the Renaissance have found the English stage particularly fertile ground for exploration of these issues.  Central to these investigations is the question of what clothing tells us about culture:  How do norms in dress reflect larger social tides?  Can we view the early modern fascination with cross-dressing as evidence of a rupture in a patriarchal system—as evidence of proto-feminist currents in English culture?

These are indeed sensible questions to ask.  Unfortunately, discussion of them has tended to divide scholars into two primary camps.  To one camp belong critics like Jean Howard, who argues that “crossdressing threatened a normative social order based upon strict principles of hierarchy and subordination, of which woman’s subordination to man was a chief instance, trumpeted from pulpit, instantiated in law, and acted upon by monarch and commoner alike.” [2] Such critics tend to draw heavily on literary sources, often reading the identity manipulation in dramatic texts against the conservative polemics of anti-theatrical writers such as Phillip Stubbes. [3] To the other camp belong scholars who maintain that female cross-dressing was hardly the subversive act many of their colleagues have made it out to be, for dressing as a man indicates a desire to be or seem male that does nothing to topple the rigid gender hierarchy of early modern English culture.  As Valerie Hotchkiss asserts, "female transvestites, both in literature and as documented historical cases, conform to androcentric models by assimilating maleness." [4] Critics who make these kinds of arguments tend to draw more heavily on historical evidence they believe suggests that cross-dressing affirms rather than challenges traditional gender roles.

Such critical investigations have produced rich readings of literary sources and have uncovered fascinating archival documents.  However, the "two-camp" approach to scholarship ultimately limits the field of inquiry.  In attempting to argue that female cross-dressing either was or was not proto-feminist, many scholars have blurred important distinctions between the various historical circumstances under which cross-dressing occurred, as well as distinctions between historical and literary circumstances.My dissertation avoids this critical impasse by drawing on the work of cultural and social historians to construct an anatomy of the phenomenon, as it were—to categorize the various motivations that led women to dress as men.  The first category might be described as episodic cross-dressing, and is comprised of women who dress as men temporarily and for some specific purpose, such as skirting political snags or fleeing from the Tower.  The second category, occupational cross-dressing, consists of women who dressed as men in the service of work—perhaps as sailors, pages, or soldiers—and often took place for several years at a stretch.The third category is made up of women who donned male attire in order to avoid unwanted sexual advances or marriage.In some cases, this type of transvestism was permanent; several women from this category ended up living their lives as monks whose sex was only identified posthumously.  The final category is carnival cross-dressing:temporary gender-bending in the name of revelry. 

The last two divisions are least important to my argument.  The first two are crucial.  Episodic cross-dressing—perhaps the least common form of female transvestism historically—was actually the most common type of cross-dressing in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama.  The heroines are always unmasked before the play's end, and the disguise often occurs in the service of a traditional, hierarchical relationships.  Shakespeare's Rosalind, Portia, and Viola are perhaps the most well-known characters who belong to this group.  In As You Like It, Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede and flees her tyrannical uncle.  Portia dons judge's robes in the famous trial scene from The Merchant of Venice, engineering Antonio's release from an especially bad bargain.Finally, Twelfth Night's Viola, believing her brother dead after a shipwreck, disguises herself as a page in order to serve the Duke Orsino.  Constance Jordan has pointed out that many of Shakespeare’s romances are concerned with the notion of misrule, both on a political and a personal level.The plays’ denouments often restore right rule to the characters’ worlds. [5] I would argue that incidents of cross-dressing in Shakespeare tend to serve as a symptom of misrule that requires redress, so to speak:  they are a reaction to bad government, sometimes explicitly political, and sometimes more personal.  When Shakespeare’s heroines don breeches, they do so not because they consciously—or even unconsciously—wish to blur the boundaries between genders; they do so becomes something else is wrong.

Of course, Shakespeare did not have the final word on how female cross-dressing operated in early modern drama.  By setting the above texts against others of his period, such as Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's The Roaring Girl and John Fletcher's The Woman's Prize: or, The Tamer Tamed—which is itself a rewriting of The Taming of the Shrew—I address the variety in representations of leading ladies in doublets and hose, showing that while cross-dressing is generally a sign of some sort of social or political upheaval, the degree to which gender specifically factors into that upheaval depends largely on the author.  Still, as we follow the development of English drama from the early seventeenth century to the Restoration, it is possible to discern a general trend: while episodic cross-dressing still occurs in the later drama, a greater number of these plots center around occupational cross-dressing.To help explain this trend and bridge the gap between the earlier and later texts, I examine a cross-section of literature from the middle of the century.  These uneven and often extremely bawdy plays have received virtually no critical attention, largely because they were printed and circulated during a time when English theaters had shut down.  Their inevitable status as protests, explicit or implicit, against the anti-theatrical sentiments that had temporarily prevailed makes their treatment of female cross-dressing particularly illuminating:  restorations of order seem less convincing, and there is a sense in which the very structure of the plays reflects the chaos of a time without a monarch in a divided nation.  Perhaps not surprisingly, more of a martial spirit is present in these texts, in which an important recurring character is the woman as fighter—sometimes literally, and sometimes more metaphorically.  My dissertation ends with Thomas Shadwell and Margaret Cavendish; I focus on plays like Shadwell's The Woman Captain and Cavendish's Loves Adventures and The Convent of Pleasure.  These authors both extend the notion of woman-as-fighter in their dramas, and their focus on occupational cross-dressing goes hand-in-hand with a stronger sense of female agency.

If we are concerned with deciding whether or not these early modern texts can be seen as forerunners of modern feminism, then we must answer both yes and no:  there are texts in which disorder in apparel is justified only in its capacity to, paradoxically, restore order in another arena.There are others in which playing with categories of identity and critiquing social hierarchies is in itself part of the point.  Still, while questions of gender open up important paths for exploration, there is a temptation to over-generalize, to draft a complex cultural phenomenon inextricably linked to economics, as well as national and local politics, into the service of in a more contemporary political agenda—or, indeed, a methodological agenda, since the lines drawn in the sand often seem to separate literary scholars from historians.  In borrowing methodologies commonly used in both disciplines, this dissertation helps shed light on how female cross-dressing worked historically and on how literary representations of it fit into the larger contextual picture.  Such a focus in turn leads to an enhanced understanding not just of the phenomenon, but of how it changed over time—and of the relationship between our knowledge and how we talk about what we know.