The Mutability of Gender and Sexuality in Shakespearean/Jacobean Drama

July20

If there is one truth to the art of theatre in the age of Shakespeare and the period directly following it (the Jacobean era, during which Ben Jonson ascended to the literary throne left empty by the Bard’s death), it is that boundaries, borders and segregating lines of distinction are not what they seem. They are, in fact, in a constant state of flux despite their apparent and implicit immutability, and this is never truer then when it comes to the depiction of what might perhaps be referred to as tertiary characteristics of gender and sexuality (that is, those characteristics of behaviour, dress and appearance that are entirely socially constructed rather than reliant on biological imperatives). However, this truth, much like the borders it describes, is itself subject to change and exceptions, and only through comparison with other forms of Shakespearean drama can these be truly appreciated or defined.

Three perfect examples of this behaviour as it relates to the theatre of Shakespearean times are the Bard’s Twelfth Night (1601), a classic comedy concerned with the manipulation of gender through the act of cross-dressing, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1612), which follows the narrative form of a modified revenge tragedy while depicting an overwhelmingly and oppressively male reaction to the concept of an apparently unmarried woman at the center of a sphere of political power, and the tragedy Titus Andronicus (1584-1589), which combines notions of racial difference with the threat of uncontrolled and uncontrollable female sexuality, its avatar of matriarchal terror simultaneously juxtaposed with the actualised notion of violated feminine innocence.

The Twelfth Night is a play most definitely born of the spirit of Elizabethan theatre, one which opens and immediately, confidently occupies itself (and thus, its audience) with the extended comedic implications of cross-dressing (that most classical of comedic tropes), the maintenance of a confused and confusing love triangle and the exacting of similarly comedic, though infinitely darker, revenge upon a figure of Puritan authority (a contentious issue in itself, given the historical context in which the play came to be written and performed). The play subsequently manages to manufacture a considerable degree of thematic stratification in a somewhat inadvertent fashion, thanks to the theatrical conceit of having its female roles played by pre-pubescent male youths.

Where, for instance, are the audience’s sympathies to lie in the confusing entanglement of role and gender which can be described as that of a man (Cesario) who is actually a woman (Viola), who is simultaneously adored in her male role by a woman (Olivia) and, implicitly, a man (Orsino) whom she in turn falls in love with, in a form only truly visible to the audience who are external to the play’s contrivances, as Viola (who is, in the physical reality outside of the play, actually being played by a feminised boy)?

The above-described sexual cacophony formed the basis for the so-called Puritan complaint on the nature of the theatre, best summarised in Phillip Stubbes’, “The Anatomie of Abuses” (1583). Stubbes wrote that there “are good Examples to be learned in [plays]. Truly, so there are: if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, lie and falsify…”.

Though the passage goes on in a similar fashion for more than fourfold the length of the above quote, and though this was not the sole facet of the theatrical tradition the Puritans took issue with, the essential “complaint” was that, in the theatre, one transcended boundaries in an unacceptable and sacrilegious manner, and all through the association of manners of dress both with position and gender, so that boys were women, and lowly actors took on the role of royalty.

The practice of associating gender with accepted Elizabethan behavioural models and manners of dress (that is, for instance, a woman was readily identifiable as a woman because she dressed and acted like one) had the two-fold effect of both producing the complaint and allowing for the theatrical trope of the so-called “convincing cross-dresser” whose disguise is utterly impenetrable to the other characters in the play (Viola, in this case).
Indeed, so deeply-rooted is this concept that Shakespeare happily switches Sebastian with Cesario and Viola the same, in Twelfth Night’s final moments. While the misunderstandings are now cleared up in the climax, Orsino continues to refer to the now-revealed Viola as “Boy”, which in the context of lines like, “Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times / Thou never shouldst love woman like me” (V.i.258–266) implies a certain homoerotic attraction and questions whether Orsino is, in fact, in love with Viola or Cesario.

While the ending that traditional Comedy required (one of semi-absolute resolution) has been produced, it also has the effect of underscoring the essentially conceited nature of the play’s characters, who are in love with the concept of loving, to the point that Olivia accepts Sebastian for Cesario unconditionally, as if she were simply in love with his/her physical appearance.

By the same token, Orsino waxes poetic to Cesario, of all people, on the deeper nature of a man’s love as compared with a woman’s love, which is made up in the “palate” and not in the “liver”, and states that Cesario should, “Make no compare / between that love a woman can bear me / And that I owe Olivia” (II.iv.91–101), the irony of his speech being that the charges he makes of a ‘woman’s love’ (i.e. “They lack retention” or may have their feelings changed easily) are qualities he fosters within himself, and which lead him to instantly accept the now-revealed Cesario/Viola gestalt in Twelfth Night’s climax. The gulf he quantitatively ascribes to the emotional characteristics of the genders is clearly not nearly as wide as he believes.

This self-indulgence is one reflected in the many upper-crust characters throughout the play, mirrored in the most decadent member of the cast, Sir Toby Belch, who simultaneously contrives to teach the Puritan steward Malvolio his place and, to a modern mind, hypocritically “marries down” to the gentlewoman Maria, whose aspirations are not condemned and punished as the former’s are. In Shakespeare’s world, however, marriage is not only a matter of class but also a matter of direction of intention and gender, as an aristocratic man may choose a mate regardless of social class, but a plebeian male does not have the same ability, nor may a woman of simple breeding actively seek out a partner above her supposed “station in life”.

Illustrations of this are wide-ranging, but the best example comes not from Shakespeare himself, but from the lesser-known John Webster, in his The Duchess of Malfi, which, along with his The White Devil (1612) deals with many of the darker aspects of human nature, to the point that T.S. Eliot, in Whispers of Immortality (1920), wrote of Webster as always seeing “the skull beneath the skin”.

The titular Duchess is, to a surprising extent, one of the strongest heroines of the Jacobean period, even despite her untimely death well before the play’s end. She actively defies the stereotypical conventions of her gender which should by all rights make her simply the unwitting victim of this revenge tragedy, rather than its heroine. Instead she is both, a dichotomy reflected in her dual status as both a head of state and a woman supposedly unmanned, though in reality this is a ruse to protect her status and center of power, as well as her secret family fathered by Antonio, ostensibly a representative of the lower-class.

In many ways, the Duchess bears a strong resemblance to the previous ruler, Elizabeth I, referred to as the ‘Virgin Queen’ or ‘Gloriana’, who was simultaneously deified by her public and rumoured to have been maintaining a romantic relationship with her cousin and royal Master of Horses, Robert Dudley. This reflection on the passing of the Tudor era appears in many works of the Jacobean era, including The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), where the skull of a certain ‘Gloriana’ is key to the revenge plot, in itself surely not a coincidence. but it is only through her, in many ways inordinate, suffering that the audience gains knowledge of her inner strength. In many ways, Webster defies his contemporaries (of which Shakespeare was one) in structuring this revenge tragedy in such a way as to leave the “protagonist” dead well before the end of the play, her presence replaced by the (in many ways) generic male revenger, Antonio.

(The above is a short excerpt from the Richard III-esque cinematic interpretation of The Revenger’s Tragedy, starring Christopher Eccleston.)

The play is one made up of boundaries, and this understanding is reached within its first Act, during which Antonio returns from the French court full of admiration for its form and function, and implicit in his praise is a disdain for the Italian court to which he belongs and with which he is making a comparison. However, the reality is that borders in Webster’s play are much closer to home, and are circumscribed most particularly between the aristocratic upper class and the common man, as we discover when the Duchess is barred from remarrying by her controlling (and in many cases incestuously minded) brother Ferdinand, his apparent reasoning for which is his fears for the family bloodline, which he attempts to master and purify through his sister.

The Cardinal ponders, “Shall our blood/ The royal blood of Castile and Aragon/ Be thus attainted?” (II.v.22-24), a woman being simply a vessel for the fathering of heirs. While it is normally the place of a father and/or a husband in this social context to control a bloodline, Ferdinand takes it upon himself to perform this duty in place of either (one of many hints as to his desire for his sibling), and the Duchess’s refusals and flagrant disregard for Ferdinand’s commands drive him to have her murdered.

While revenge plays were generally written with a moral lesson at hand (as a form of theatre they were related to the 15th century ‘morality play’, after all), most often to do with the expunging of corruption and then, suitably, the death of the wronged revenger to correct the social order, most often due to a tragic flaw. How, then, do we reconcile the brutality of the almost saintly Duchess’s treatment at the hands of her brothers with her supposed crime, that of marrying beneath her social status, an act which Sir Toby on a whim manufactures without serious comment?

Indeed, such a reaction to female independence generally rested upon proof or suspicion of female infidelity (as with Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello), and Nicholas Brook surmises in his “Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy” (1979) that, “It has often been pointed out that there is a violation of the correct ‘order’ which is supposed to have affected Jacobean audiences with the moral force of a tragic ‘flaw’ but […] the play entirely assumes the audience’s complicity and therefore approval of the Duchess’s action”.

Titus Andronicus explores the touched-upon concept of female sexuality and conversely, chastity, in greater detail, both as a concept and as an almost physical item in itself, to which a form of ownership is ascribed. Here, we are presented with contrasts of character made through extremes, in the forms of the Lavinia/Tamora juxtaposition (that of virginal innocence versus the shadow of uncontrolled female power and sexuality in its ultimate combination, the barbarian Queen), and the equally extreme depiction of the Moor Aaron as simultaneously a singular force of evil and a loving parent as played against the the confused, wearied and titular Titus Andronicus, who starts the play as an Andronici war-hero and ends it crazed and more importantly, dead, but remembered as the type-cast revenging murderer, chiefly responsible for his daughter’s death.

(Above, the Anthony-Hopkins-flavoured adaptation of Titus Andronicus.)

Titus appears a play chiefly concerned with the control and dominance of female agency, and categorises it thus as entirely something for men to fear. Tamora is a representation of pitiless violence and sends forth her two lustful and murderous sons to do her bidding, and actively encourages their rape of Lavinia, and the Act in which this takes place places special significance on the horror of the ‘hole’ or ‘pit’ into which Bassianus (dead) is placed, and Quintus and Martius are held captive, whilst Aaron buries his treasure in a similar hole, all the while referred to as “this unhallowed and bloodstained hole” (II.iii.210) and “this fell devouring receptacle” (II.iii.235), and so the comparison between literal graves (holes in the earth) and the metaphoric imagery of the consuming female icon or genitalia is made (the concept that Freud would later christen “vagina dentata”, the toothed vagina which is linked with male castration anxiety).

Tamora is given power but this is a power that must be righted by the play’s end, as its only result is injustice, and so the ‘true’ male hierarchy must be reinstated, which it is. An understandable criticism of Titus has been that it is over-zealously misogynistic, and punishes both female characters in the play simply for their gender, a criticism borne out as even despite her brutal rape and disfigurement Lavinia is treated cruelly by her suspiciously deranged father, Titus, who as her father had previously denied her the right to marry Bassianus (thereby retaining and possessing Lavinia’s chastity).

While gender and sexuality may be alternately capable of flexibility and mutability within the typical structure of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic traditions, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that these changes are short-lived and attempt to highlight, for the intended original audience, the requirement for a return to the accepted social order and the curtailment of excess female agency.

Amazon.com stock the 1999 Hopkins adaptation of Titus Andronicus, the 2003 Eccleston adaptation of Revenger’s Tragedy, T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland, Prufrock, and Other Poems, and, of course, the complete Shakespeare.

Works cited:

BROOKE, Nicholas. Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.

ELIOT, T.S. The Wasteland, Four Quartets and Other Poems. Caedmon Press, 2000.

WEBSTER, John. The Duchess of Malfi. A.C. Black, 2003, 4th ed.

SHAKESPEARE, William. Twelfth Night (Folger Shakespeare Library Ed.), New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

SHAKESPEARE, William. Titus Andronicus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.