LHMP #525 Howard 1988 Cross-Dressing, the Theatre and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England

The articles looks at the phenomenon of crossdressing in England contrasting several angles: polemical literature condemning it, legal records punishing it, and cultural practices (such as theater) normalizing it, as well as some of the socio-economic background that made cross-dressing a flashpoint at this time. [Note: Although this article doesn’t address the point, I’ll remind readers that when polemics such as Stubbes and Hic Mulier talk about cross-dressing, they are often referring to specific individual garments or styles, not about an entire cross-gender wardrobe.) Although the article discusses both male and female cross-dressing, I’ll be focusing on the latter.

Female cross-dressing could simultaneously challenge and support patriarchal structures, depending on audience. But there was an overall theme—not only in literary depictions, but in legal treatment—that associated female crossdressing with sexual transgression and unruliness. It wasn’t so much that women claimed masculine rights to sexual license by crossdressing as that any challenge to the rules governing female behavior was felt to signal a lack of any restraint, and a lack of sexual restraint was a particularly salient example.

Another aspect was the blurring of social boundaries. Just as violations of class-based clothing expectations blurred the boundary between the aristocracy and the rising wealthy middle class, violations of gendered clothing expectations were felt to destroy the distinction of gender. Regardless of any practical consequences of these violations, there was a general social anxiety about the loss of order and structure. (The article notes “tensions between a social order based on hierarchy and deference and one increasingly based on entrepreneurship”—a tension that played out repeatedly across the centuries in various ways.

The article notes the interaction of conventional gender signals with medicalized theories of sex and gender. If distinctions of sex were divinely ordained and immutable, how was it possible for clothing to challenge them? There’s a discussion of the one-sex versus two-sex model and how—regardless of medical theory—legal and social attitudes were clearly founded on the idea of two distinct sexes, not on the gender continuum of the one-sex model. But conversely, if the two-sex model were true, why would it need to be continually reinforced?

Crossdressing men “dressed down” and raised the specter of homosexuality (becoming women), but crossdressing women “dressed up” and raised the specter of being out of (male) control. Fears of female sexual incontinence were primarily heterosexual, not homosexual.

The Hic Mulier tract specifically connects female crossdressing with other “world turned upside down” possibilities like government by “the untamed Moore, the naked Indian, or the wilde Irish,” bringing in religious, racial, and ethnic prejudices alongside misogyny.

Around 1600, both formal and informal punishments for gender transgressions became more frequent than before and after. But these anxieties were provoked, in part,  by very real increases in female freedom and economic power during the era. Increases in female literacy and access to printed texts increased exposure both to moralistic literature and to broader understandings of the world. Women, as well as men, were theater-goers, being exposed to the ways the stage played with and transformed gender relations.

The article moves on to a close reading of The Roaring Girl, the play that most pushes the boundaries of crossdressing and gender as a central part of the plot, as compared to the play Epicoene, which uses gender disguise for satire and mockery. Shakespeare’s three main crossdressing plots are also discussed, in which crossdressing, rather than challenging gender roles, ends up reinforcing them, even when women are depicted as being able to successfully inhabit a male role.