More dissertation thoughts... these about the gendered issues of the actors playing women on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage.
Part of performing gender on the Elizabethan stage is, as Mary Bly argues, the eroticization of the male player by virtue of his performance of a female character. While Bly concentrates predominantly on the Whitefriars plays, her point about the self-aware nature of erotic language is valid for any actor crossing the gender boundaries: “One consequence of a female character’s ribald wordplay is that the body of the cross-dressed actor is aggressively eroticized.”[1] The “aggression” upon which Bly focuses is particularly significant in terms of the masculinized female character – Lady Macbeth, Joan de Pucelle, Margaret of Anjou, Goneril, Regan, the Duchess of Malfi, etc. – who wields military or pseudo-military power. Their eroticization occurs in a disturbing rather than humorous way; references to being “unsexed” or martial, the adoption of the phallic sword, knife, or dagger, refocus the sexual gaze from the “female” body just as bawdy jokes do, but with a terrifying rather than comic intent. To darkly eroticize the bodies of these tiger-women (both Margaret of 3 Henry VI and Evadne of The Maid’s Tragedy are referred to as tigers) is to grant power to both the women and to the male actors who portray them, reminding the audience that such figures are transgressing transgression, not by playing women playing men, but by presenting women who feel no need to play at masculinity because they already are men; like Elizabeth, they already have the “heart and stomach of a” man, though they put on “the body of a weak and feeble woman.”[2]
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