Shakespeare Re-Dressed: Cross-Gender Casting in Contemporary Performance, and: Shakespearean Performance: New Studies (review)

What happens when contemporary actors cross-dress to perform Shakespeare? According to James C. Bulman’s stimulating new collection of essays, you never can tell, still less draw from the experience too many conclusions about the past. The questions raised by today’s transvestite Shakespeare are bound to exceed, or perhaps stop short of, the example set by those who used to squeak on the South Bank. The very multiplicity of the critical voices Bulman has assembled—both enchanted and skeptical, steeped variously in queer theory, gender politics, and historical performance practice—underlines the degree to which the meaning of any production is significantly a local affair that resists theoretical hegemony. If there is a lesson for historical performance criticism it is in such breadth of reception: no longer, Bulman believes, should scholars be so preoccupied by whether, as if by fiat, the Shakespearean boy actor was either an unremarkable convention or the subject of erotic interest.

Although the practice is still not by any means mainstream, Shakespeare Cross-Dressed ranges among North American and British productions of the last century and this one, not without repetition between contributors or occasions when more legwork would have yielded more variety. There is an unavoidable focus on that hotbed of experiment, the Southwark Globe, with occasional nods towards more exotic fabrications such as the all-female, all-sequined Takarazuka Revue Company of Japan, whose student here, Melissa D. Aaron, does not, for better or worse, appear to have seen perform. Likewise, if more forgivably, while a number of contributors touch on the persistence of boy actors in English public schools, none admits to having seen any. One of the most impressive essays makes a virtue of a parallel omission. In “Cross-Dressing, Drag, and Passing: Slippages in Shakespearean Comedy,” Jennifer Drouin expertly anatomizes the distinctions and continuities among those three categories of transvestism, setting up key definitions for her readers and fellow contributors while showing with deadly tact just how carelessly some distinguished scholars have ignored them. The point is more telling for being illustrated not by performance analysis but through highly accomplished close readings of Twelfth Night and As You Like It. True, there are moments when gender politics and speculative character analysis walk hand in hand, while the local, variable world of performance occasionally begs to be admitted, but Drouin’s is an essay that scholars and tutors in this field will want to consult.

The care she brings to criticism others bring to live shows. Mainstream theater critics take their usual bow throughout the volume as curmudgeons out to uproot the radical, and many contributors indicate that academics might supplant them stylistically as well as ideologically, so high is the prevailing standard of writing about live performance. The palm goes to Cary M. Mazer’s meticulous account of the few seconds in Cheek by Jowl’s 1991 As You Like It when a male Rosalind / Ganymede permitted a flagrantly gay Jaques to feel an imaginary breast. Sacrificing nothing of the moment’s spontaneity, Mazer’s essay, “Rosalind’s Breast,” guides readers elegantly through the labyrinth of signification it opens up.

The same production enjoys canonical status in the first of two fine essays by the editor, who pulls it “out of the closet” with reference to the late 1980s British politics of homophobia. In doing so, Bulman arguably diminishes the show’s playful ambiguities, his insistence on its gay politics countermanding his editorial position that one should not be too dogmatic about the reception of cross-dressed Shakespeare. By contrast, his second essay has the Globe Twelfth Night eschewing “an overtly gay identity politics” by bringing “transvestism into the cultural mainstream” (237). Where Bulman’s essays border, for all their skill, on the adulatory, Robert Conkie’s mordant account of...