Fangs Of Malice: Hypocrisy Sincerity And Acting

Scene One. As Secret As Madenhead

Scene One as secret as maidenhead When Duke Orsino speaks to Viola, disguised as Cesario, of his attractions in Twelfth Night, it is in a language loaded with suggestion: Diana’s lip Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, And all is semblative a woman’s part. (1.4.31–34) Modern audiences immediately understand what is happening here: the duke is unconsciously responding to the sexual potentiality visually represented to us by a sexually mature actress wearing boy’s clothes. The key to Viola’s virgin mystery (she describes her history as “[a] blank, my lord” [2.4.110]) lies in visualizing the woman’s body wrapped in inappropriate costume: one kind of “worm i’th’bud” (2.4.111). Her “growing to perfection” (2.4.41), like the unfolding of a rose, is an unclothing . Wistfully, Viola seems to recognize that her blooming as a woman necessarily implies the violation and end of her virginity— again represented in terms of costume by those “maiden weeds” (5.1.255) whose recovery is blocked by Malvolio’s suit against the captain at the end of the play. Orsino’s refusal to kiss Viola until she dresses appropriately in “other habits” (5.1.387) suggests a kind of stalemate. But the emphasis on costume and the theatricality of the bawdy phrase “woman’s part” should lead us to wonder how Viola’s blossoming into womanhood would strike an audience used to seeing women’s roles enacted by boys. What the actor playing Viola will himself blossom into is not a woman at all, but a man. “For they shall yet belie thy happy years / That say thou art a man,” Orsino says (1.4.30–31). The histories of the boy actors Nathan Field and Edward Kynaston indicate that these apprentices could grow up to play adult lovers and tyrants or could grow up and continue to play women. Thus the actor playing Viola, a boy figuring a woman disguised as a boy on the Elizabethan stage, stands poised at a critical moment in a professional progression from “woman’s part” to “man’s estate.” “Let the usurping actress remember that her sex is a liability, not an asset,” Harley Granville-Barker remarked as he coined the expression “boy-actress.”4 Granville-Barker’s nostalgia for an idealized “celibate stage” finds some interesting echoes in recent feminist criticism. Stripped of its misogynist language, Granville-Barker’s idea that the boy-actress’s lack of what he called “feminine charm” could be an “asset ” anticipates Juliet Dusinberre’s assertion that Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were “freed” by the convention of cross-dressing in the theater and in the plots of plays to “explore . . . the nature of women untrammeled by the customs of femininity.”5 “Obliged to convince the audience of the boy actor’s femininity even when he looked, because of his disguise, exactly like the boy he was, Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights created a femininity to outlast the boy actor’s changes of costume” (Shakespeare, 257). Thus both Dusinberre and GranvilleBarker in their different ways suggest that the institution of the boyactress provides a key to understanding Shakespeare’s women. But Granville-Barker failed to follow through on this idea in his actual discussions of the plays, and Dusinberre’s declaration of “Shakespeare’s feminism” offers little help in deciphering the multiple sexual ambiguities that crown the Illyria of Twelfth Night.6 For psychoanalytic critics, these ambiguities are seen as comprehensible in terms of adolescent development. “The sexual ambiguity of this stage,” says W. Thomas MacCary, “reflects itself in sexual ambivalence, all of which Shakespeare figures in his use of transvestitism.” For Copp élia Kahn, this confusion is shared by the audience: “We experience the state of radical identity-confusion typical of adolescence when the differences between the sexes are as fluid as their desire, when a boy might feel more like a girl than a boy, or a girl might love another girl rather than a boy.”7 But neither MacCary nor Kahn addresses the physical fact of the boy-actress’s own adolescence: the androgyny of figures like Viola or Rosalind remains for them confined to the play’s written texts. Joel Fineman recognizes the importance of theatrical convention : “A playwright such as Shakespeare, whose psyche assembled as secret as maidenhead [ 5 around and responded to polarities, doubling negations, structures of distributive reciprocity, had...