Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England by Stephen Orgel (review)

42Rocky Mountain Review includes The Revenge, based on Narcissus Luttrell's attribution in 1682, and The Debauchee, based on a seventeenth-century notation in John Philip Kemble's copy. She does not include The Counterfeit Bridegroom or The Woman Turn'd Bully. The Counterfeit Bridegroom seems to me the best play ofthe lot and most like other Behn works; The Revenge, by comparison, is a clumsy adaptation. I would like to know how Todd evaluates the plays on their merits, not their publishing history. Taken together, the books in this review show how lively the discussion of Restoration drama has become. Fortunately, these new works are only a sampling ofwhat is becoming available. The rediscovery seems at long last under way, and the "problem child" has found a place in both theatre and scholarship. This time, let's hope it's permanent. STEPHEN ORGEL. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 196p. In Impersonations, Stephen Orgel asks that we reconsider early modern gender construction and suggests that gender, which in the mid- to latetwentieth century we have believed a fixed and binary category, once was more fluid, that the boundaries were less distinct. His book develops from an initial query: why was England the only country in Europe that had an all male public theater during the early modern era? That is also to ask why English audiences, unlike audiences in Italy and Spain, accepted boys as women on the stage. Orgel considers and rejects the conventional answers. No, it was not because society thought it immodest for women to appear in public. Women performed in masques, civic pageants, and private entertainments and attended plays in large numbers. No, it was not historical precedent. English women had performed in medieval productions. Exploring this issue leads Orgel to other questions. When As You Like It was performed at the public theater, did audiences see Rosalind or a boy actor? Why did only the boy actors play women's roles? What did boys and women have in common that might explain the transference? Orgel argues that boys and women were culturally analogous, "antithetical not to each other, but to men" (103). Both boys and women were acknowledged objects of adult men's desire and filled similar roles within the patriarchy. Both women and boy actors, who were apprentices, were subordinates in a hierarchy. Along the way Orgel disputes a number of commonplaces about working-class England. He points out, for example, that boys in adult acting companies, often referred to as apprentice actors, were not officially apprenticed as actors because there was no actors' guild. The boys were apprenticed to members of the acting company who also were members of occupational guilds, as Ben Jonson was a bricklayer. Thus boy actors technically might be apprentice grocers, eligible to enter the grocers' guild when their apprenticeships were complete. Nor were women excluded from Book Reviews43 the stage because the theaters operated on a guild model that barred women except as wives or widows. Drawing on economic historian K. D. M. Snell's Annals ofthe Labouring Poor, Orgel maintains that well into the seventeenth century women participated in the guilds as "fully independent, legally responsible craftspersons" (73). One way to approach gender construction, Orgel argues, is through apparel. Transvestite theater was only one aspect of a culture in which gender was partially dependent on clothing. "What allows boys to be substituted for women in the theatre ... is not anything about the genital nature ofboys and women, but precisely the costume, and more particularly, cultural assumptions about costume" (103-104). Although on stage boy actors crossed the gender boundaries in ways that were culturally acceptable, in society more often it was women who cross-dressed. Orgel focuses on Elizabeth Southwell and LadyArbella Stuart, both ofwhom crossdressed in their attempts to escape England and live with the men they had chosen. The masculine woman could be threatening to the patriarchy, as were Southwell and Stuart, or an inspiring ideal, as in images of Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury. That gender roles were more fluid in the Renaissance than patriarchal historians and critics have believed seems to Orgel the best way...