Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England

1 Squeaky Voices: Marston, Mulcaster, and the Boy Actor

Chapter 1 Squeaky Voices: Marston, Mulcaster, and the Boy Actor Perhaps because of the burgeoning industry of Shakespeare films and the late twentieth-century fascination with everything Elizabethan , new students of early modern English drama often are surprisingly familiar with the conditions under which Shakespeare's plays were originally performed, even the very unmodern convention of using boys to play female parts. And though some consumers ofShakespeare still echo Stephen Orgel's query about why the English professional stage took boys for women, another intriguing question concerns process: not why but how was gender negotiated on an all-male stage? Whereas work by Orgel and other scholars has been most attentive to the visual aspects of early modern gender performance, I am interested in how the aural dimensions of the Elizabethan theater shaped its representations of gender.1 The impact of sound on the performance of gender is at the heart of two recent popular interpretations of Shakespearean theater, John Madden's Shakespeare in Love and Michael Hoffman's William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.2 In each of these Hollywood films, a major turning point of the plot involves a male actor realizing that his physiological state prevents him from mimicking a woman's voice effectively, a failure that threatens to undermine the success of the play. Although Madden's and Hoffman's films approach the Bard in distinct ways, they resolve this play-within-the-film vocal crisis in strikingly similar ways. In Shakespeare in Love, the cast of Romeo and Juliet is surprised to learn a few minutes before the curtain rises that the voice of the boy who will play Juliet has begun to change. The film maintains that this is cause enough to pull the actor from the part, even though the only possible substitute for him is a woman, whose presence on the stage thwarts royal decree.3 Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream imagines what would 22 Chapter 1 happen if a postpubescent male actor, with a fully cracked voice, were allowed to play the female role. When the deep-voiced Flute uses a falsetto vocal style to personate Thisbe in the play within the film, his audience breaks into laughter at his aesthetically unpleasant, squeaking sound. The solution here is not to bring in a real woman's voice, as in Shakespeare in Love, but to allow the grave voice to be used. Flute completes the play in his natural voice and the performance, like that of Romeo and Juliet, is portrayed as a smashing success. In Madden's and Hoffman's dramatizations of the boy-actor stage convention, the success of a play is contingent on the physiological state of the male body and its capacity to produce a satisfying aural experience for the audience. Both films suggest that it is better to risk legal censure or the audience's distraction than to allow an unstable, squeaking male voice onstage. In their displacement of squeaking voices, these modern performances diverge from early modern theatrical practice. For in contrast to today's audiences , early modern theatergoers had ample opportunity to hear unstable male voices. Whether the frequent staging of squeaking voices in early modern plays points to a dramatic convention or offers evidence of a theatrical custom-that boy actors continued to perform while their voices were changing-there is much at stake in noting the role of these voices on the stage and in the culture at large.4 Onstage or off, a squeaking voice announced a boy's transition into manhood at the same time that it indicated that the transition had yet to be completed. As it attested to a boy's liminal position in a gradual and uneven process of pubescent change, the squeaking voice exposed the fragile condition of young male bodies and, as a corollary , the aleatory nature of gender differentiation. This chapter examines how early modern authors, on and off the stage, figure the unstable voice as a function of an unmanageable body, focusing on the implications of these views for the dramatization of male masculinity .s My approach to boy actors and the enactment of gender differs from that of prior scholars, most of whom have focused on the ramifications of boys playing the parts of women. I examine the implications of boys playing a range of male parts, including youth characters in plays by adult companies like the King's Men and male adult roles in plays by the children...