At the behest of my good friend Chloe, I write this blog post about the prevalence of swapping clothes as an integral plot device and comedic bit in Shakespeare’s comedies. DISCLAIMER: I am not an expert in this field (yet!), so some of this information may be oversimplified or slightly faulty. I recommend that you pursue any of the scholarship on these topics if you are interested.
When I think of swapping clothes in Shakespeare, a few plays immediately come to mind: Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It. Of course there are exchanges of clothing in many other plays, but I am not entirely qualified to discuss those, having not had much interaction with those texts.
Taming of the Shrew: In Act I, Scene 1, Lucentio and his servant Tranio exchange clothing, so that Lucentio can pursue Bianca, who he has just fallen in love with, while Tranio attends to the business that Lucentio is now abandoning in Padua.
Lucentio: Basta; content thee, for I have it full.
We have not yet been seen in any house,
Nor can we lie distinguish’d by our faces
For man or master; then it follows thus;
Thou shalt be master, Tranio, in my stead….
Aside from modern physical comedy, like the struggle of getting off ridiculous boots (in 2007, I saw a production of Taming of the Shrew at the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival in which Lucentio handed Tranio his gilded codpiece like it was the holy grail. Needless to say, the entire audience was crying with laughter), I think a lot of what makes exchange of clothing hilarious has faded with time (but maybe not!). In Elizabethan England, Sumptuary Laws regulated how people could dress depending on their class.
The laws passed on June 15, 1574 read,
“None shall wear in his apparel:
Any silk of the color of purple, cloth of gold tissued, nor fur of sables, but only the King, Queen, King’s mother, children, brethren, and sisters, uncles and aunts; and except dukes, marquises, and earls, who may wear the same in doublets, jerkins, linings of cloaks, gowns, and hose; and those of the Garter, purple in mantles only.
….
Woolen cloth made out of the realm, but in caps only; velvet, crimson, or scarlet; furs, black genets, lucernes; embroidery or tailor’s work having gold or silver or pearl therein: except dukes, marquises, earls, and their children, viscounts, barons, and knights being companions of the Garter, or any person being of the Privy Council….”
The laws continue to great length, describing how most people were required to wear the Renaissance equivalent of a burlap sack (which is most definitely an overstatement. They had real clothing). Clothing was an outward mark of excellence. During the Renaissance, the idea of a secret interior identity was a new concept (Shakespeare explores the idea of interiority most famously in Hamlet, but also in his Trojan War tragedy, Troilus and Cressida). A man could be understood by the clothing he wore–a practice that makes sense in a world without cameras, print journalism, and an internet in which you can find millions of pictures of celebrities. It saved people from committing a social or political faux pas. Like a military uniform, clothing declared your rank. Therefore, to have a noble lord swap clothing with a lowly servant was to overtly disregard social norms and state laws, the same kind of humor that makes modern audiences laugh at films like I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.
Twelfth Night and As You Like It: These two plays don’t necessarily have scenes in which clothes are exchanged, but the idea of this “improper” dress is perhaps even more integral to the plots. Both plays revolve around a woman (Viola and Rosalind, respectively) who dress up as men to better their position in the world. Viola washes up on the shores of Illyria after a storm has capsized her ship,
thinking she is the only survivor. As a single woman, she is utterly powerless, so she decides to dress as a man and enter the court of the Duke of Orsino. Enter many love triangles and confusion as the suitee of the Duke, Olivia, falls in love with the “boyish” Viola (now Cesario).In As You Like it, Rosalind must flee the court of her uncle after she is wrongly accused of treason (essentially) and, “because that [she] is more than common tall,”dresses as a swashbuckling shepherd (I, 3, 94). Enter Orlando, the love of her life, who she tricks into wooing her as a boy. Enter next Phoebe, who falls in love with Rosalind (now Ganymede) for chiding at her.
The crossdressing in these two plays, though hilarious, is far more complicated of a social comment than the clothes swapping in Shrew. Women who dress as men threaten the status quo and play with the strong Elizabethan polarity of gender/sexuality.
Shakespeare wrote many great female roles, filled with terse comments, witty retorts, and astounding truisms; yet, all these great women were played by boys.[1] Most Elizabethans readily accepted the believability of these boys as women. Women in portraits were already portrayed as rather boyish, slim-hipped, and flat-chested, assuming an hour-glass shape through bone and padding (Orgel 70). In addition, proper female behavior was determined by the conventions of the stage (John Downes declared actor Edward Kynaston to be more convincing than his female colleagues) (Orgel 70). As Rosalind affirms to Orlando, “boys and women are for the most part cattle of [the same] color” (III, 2, 421-22). This ease with which boys portrayed the female gender presented a means to contradict the strong gender binary that defined Elizabethan England by creating an androgynous player. As You Like It epitomizes this androgyny through the character of Rosalind, whose many layers of sexuality threaten perceived gender roles and stereotypes.
In As You Like It, a man plays a woman who plays a man who plays a woman. The plot of the play, like the actor who plays Rosalind, expresses and toys with the fundamental relationships between men and women (Rackin 30). Rosalind sustains a gender ambiguity of exceptional authority. During the Renaissance, gender relations were relationships of power. Cross-dressing, then, had incredible symbolism. In As You Like It, especially, Rosalind’s doublet and hose could unravel the structures of domination and subversion premised on binary sexuality. Like her actor, she is an androgyne. Essentially, Rosalind and the actor are a microscopic attempt at the mythic macrocosm’s unity. Shakespeare demonstrates the feminizing of the male as a return to the wholeness of Platonic and pre-lapsarian (fall from Eden) perfection (Kimbrough 18). Within the world of As You Like It, the transformation works in reverse: the masculinization of the female fulfills the platonic humanitas (original human nature).
Specifically, a transsexual disguise liberates Rosalind from the confines of appropriate female behavior and allows her a broader range of human character traits. Like the boy actor’s ability to slide between male and female by costume, Rosalind can switch between woman and man by invoking whichever she choses. As a boy, she engages in a playful masquerade, disabusing the stock notions of men and women. As a woman, she uses her disguise to test the man she loves and controls her own wooing, the usual dominion of the man. In her androgynous position, she has the special ability to understand and mock the social restrictions caused by gender stereotyping (Kimbrough 25).
This playful yet powerful masquerade is best illustrated in Act IV, scene one. “Under that habit,” Rosalind may speak her mind while allowing Orlando to speak his, removing the object of his stupor from their first meeting (III, 2, 300; I, 2). When Orlando arrives late, Rosalind is furious. As is commonly acted, her honest emotion as a female lover is revealed; yet, she is safe from discovery because Orlando’s assumes that she is playing. In fact, Rosalind seems to forget her pretense, and Celia must remind her: “it pleases him to call you so, but he hath a Rosalind…” (70-71). Yet, even with her “woman’s” emotion, Rosalind runs witty circles around Orlando, smoothly transitioning her preference for the slow-moving snail to a metaphor for cuckoldry. As Ganymede, Rosalind presents a boyishly bawdy wit, deftly transforming Orlando’s seeming failure at wooing into an insult to his sexual appeal:
Orlando: Who could be out, being before his beloved mistress?
Rosalind: Marry, that should you if I were your mistress….
Orlando: What out of suit?
Rosalind: Not out of your apparel, and yet out of your suit. (86-93)
Being unable to woo his love, he will fail to consummate the marriage (for which the removal of one’s suit is necessary). Rosalind also displays an excellent “men’s” wisdom, chiding Orlando for dying from love. Being the manliest of men, she declares that “men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (112-13). Proper male lovers die in battle or by drowning accidentally instead. In this instance, Rosalind mocks stereotypes of men. Furthermore, and spectacularly, Orlando accepts Ganymede as his Rosalind within one hundred lines of text. Then, ten lines later, he marries him/her. With her boyish charms and honest love, Rosalind successfully woos Orlando, even as a man. When this scene is staged, the two lovers often kiss, which reinforces Rosalind’s ability to successfully carry multiple genders simultaneously.[2]
Finally, Rosalind begins her discourse on women, listing their impatience, pettiness, and, worst of all, cuckoldry (146-147, 155-163, 178-183). Furthermore, Rosalind declares that women who are unfaithful will deftly place the blame on their husbands, saying “You shall never take her without her answer unless you
take her without her tongue” (183). These sexist comments, however, are undermined as soon as Rosalind presents them. As an extremely verbose and intelligent female character, any complaint she makes against women must be interpreted as great irony—an inclusion of the audience in her game with Orlando while she razes assumptions about women. Through androgyny, Rosalind tricks Orlando into marriage—and perhaps a kiss—and successively undermines gender stereotypes. Clearly, by writing such a scene, Shakespeare demonstrates the power of androgyny as a tool through which a woman may deftly wield a man’s power.
The actors’ subversion of gender roles provided Shakespeare with a powerful weapon to mock society. In As You Like It, the many layers of androgyny bestow inordinate powers upon Rosalind. Furthermore, as Rosalind was played by a boy, the object that challenged gender roles in England (an object of concern for the anti-theatricals) controls the action of the play. The actor’s threat escalates through Rosalind’s cross-dressing; her slips between genders emphasize his. Moreover, the boy refuses to choose a gender in the play’s epilogue, indefinitely prolonging the siege on the gender binary. He begins as a woman—“It is not the fashion to see the lady…”—and transitions to a man with “if I were a woman” (Epilogue, 1, 17). Most threatening of all, the boy actor reminds the audience that it was their imagination that carried the gender reversals and androgyny, and they will continue to do so. The subversive female, though the part of a threatening boy, was maintained by the society she endangered.
[1] Shakespeare’s England was special in this respect, as women performed professionally on stage in Spain, France, and in other European nations.
[2] There is also a degree of homoeroticism implied by this moment in the scene.
Works Cited
elizabethan.org/sumptuary/who-wears-what.html
Erickson, Peter B. “Sexual Politics and the Social Structure in ‘As You like It.’” The Massachusetts Review 23.1 (1982): 65–83. Print.
Kimbrough, Robert. “Androgyny Seen Through Shakespeare’s Disguise.” Shakespeare Quarterly 33.1 (1982): 17–33. JSTOR. Web. 29 June 2015.
Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Print.
Rackin, Phyllis. “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage.” PMLA 102.1 (1987): 29–41. JSTOR. Web. 29 June 2015.
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Folger. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Print. Folger Shakespeare Library.
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