Abstract
These moments from the ‘Induction’ of John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida and the final scene of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene foreground the modes of representation, and specifically those of gender representation, on the early modern stage. The insistence given by ‘Antonio’ that he cannot play a lady is at first surprising, given the common practice of boy actors playing female roles on the English stage. However, his concerns relate to particular aspects of this performance, which draw attention to the actor’s physiological state, his developing sexual maturity and the extent to which he can manipulate his body. Primarily this difficulty is located in the aural representation of femininity, in the control of the voice; but ultimately it relates to the difficulties of switching between and adequately simulating both the female and male part aurally and visually. In contrast, the shift from male to female part is represented as straightforward in Jonson’s Epicoene.
‘ANTONIO’: I a voice to play a lady! I shall ne’er do it […] Ay but when use hath taught me action to hit the right point of a lady’s part I shall grow ignorant, when I must turn young prince again, how but to truss my hose.1
DAUPHINE: Then here is your release, sir [He takes off Epicoene’s peruke] you have married a boy.2
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Notes
John Marston, Antonio and Mellida, in ’The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. Keith Sturgess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 1–56 (’Induction’, 11. 69–76). Further references are given in the text.
Ben Jonson, Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman, ed. Roger Holdsworth (London A and C Black, 1979, repr. 2005), 5.4.188–9. Further references are given in the text.
On Epicoene, see Richmond Barbour, “’When I Acted Young Antonius”: Boy Actors and the Erotics of Jonsonian Theatre’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 110.5 (1995), 1006–22 (p. 1016)
Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 105–9
Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 73–88
Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 100–2. On Antonio and Mellida, see Gina Bloom, “Thy Voice Squeaks”: Listening for Masculinity on the Early Modern Stage’, Renaissance Drama, 29 (1998), 39–71
Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 49–74.
W. Reavley Gair, The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 118.
See Aaron Kitsch, ‘Bastards and Broadsides in The Winter’s Tale’, Renaissance Drama, 30 (2001), 43–71.
Scholars assuming a constant awareness of the disparity between player and role include: Anthony Caputi, John Marston, Satirist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), p. 113
R. A. Foakes, ‘John Marston’s Fantastical Plays: Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge’, Philological Quarterly, 41. 1 (1962), 229–39.
Private Theatres’, Review of English Studies, 38 (1987), 471–82
Ejner Jensen, ‘The Boy Actors: Plays and Playing’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 18 (1975), 5–11
Kathleen McLuskie, ‘The Act, the Role, and the Actor: Boy Actresses on the Elizabethan Stage’, New Theatre Quarterly, 3 (1987), 120–30
Peter Stallybrass, ‘Transvestism and the Body Beneath: Speculating on the Boy Actor’, in Susan Zimmerman, ed., Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 64–83.
Shapiro, Children of the Revels, pp. 104–12. See Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, eds, Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All Male Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), which challenges the contention that the early modern stage was all-male.
See Will Fisher, ‘Staging the Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern Culture in Early Modern English Culture’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 230–57
Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 18, 103; Stallybrass, pp. 64–83.
William Percy, Comoedyes and Pastoralls with their Songs, Huntington Library, MS HM 4, fol. 5. Further references are given in the text. On the debates surrounding performance, see Matthew Dimmock, William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven: A Critical Edition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 52–7.
Thomas Middleton, A Mad World, My Masters, in ‘A Mad World, My Masters’ and Other Plays, ed. Michael Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 1–66 (2. 1. 127–8).
Lucy Munro, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 2.
John Lyly, Love’s Metamorphosis, in The Plays ofJohn Lyly, ed. Carter Daniel (London: Associated University Presses, 1988), pp. 287–336 (p. 305). Further references are given in the text.
George Chapman, May Day, ed. Robert E Walsh, in The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies, gen. ed. Allan Holaday (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), pp. 311–96 (1.1.7–8). Further references are given in the text.
Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 26–7.
Adrian Weiss, ‘A Pill to Purge Parody: Marston’s Manipulation of the Paul’s Environment in the Antonio Plays’, in The Theatrical Space, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 81–98.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), pp. 1659–759 (2.2.325–46).
John Marston, ‘To the Equal Reader,’ in Parasitaster, or The Fawn, ed. David A. Blostein (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 11. 20, 65–6.
John Marston, Jack Drum’s Entertainment (London: Tudor Facsimile Texts, 1912), sig. A2r. Further references are given in the text.
On anxieties about masculinity and bodily lack, see Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 1–34; pp. 150–74.
On likeness, see Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures in Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 17–23, 125.
See Gina Bloom, “Thy Voice Squeaks”: Listening for Masculinity on the Early Modern Stage’, Renaissance Drama, 29 (1998), 39–71 (esp. p. 44) on the anxiety resulting from the vocal exposure of the liminal state of the boy’s body.
John Marston, What You Will, ed. M. R. Woodhead (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1980), 3.2.1105–7.
Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 16. On the formative nature of masculinity, see also Fisher, pp. 231, 242
Coppélia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 1, 17
Ruth Karras, From Boys to Men: Formation of Masculinity in late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
Henry Cuffe, The Differences of Ages of Man’s Life (London, 1607), p. 113 [italics in original]. Further references are given in the text.
Richard Brathwait, The English Gentleman (New Jersey: Walter J. Johnson Inc., 1975), p. 4.
See Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 7.
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1962), p. 51; Orgel, Impersonations, p. 15.
Germaine Greer, The Boy (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), p. 21.
John Sommerville, The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 15.
See Keir Elam, ‘The Fertile Eunuch: Twelfth Night, Early Modern Intercourse and the Fruits of Castration’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 47.1 (1996), 1–36 (p. 33).
See Erica Fudge, ‘Calling Creatures by their True Names: Bacon, the New Science and the Beast in Man’, in Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman, eds, At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 91–109.
See David Kathman, ‘How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?’, Shakespeare Survey, 58 (2005), 220–39.
Sukanya B. Senapti, “’Two Parts in One”: Marston and Masculinity’, in The Drama of John Marston, ed. T. E Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 124–44 (p. 126).
See Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 34–7.
Victor Freeburg, Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915), pp. 101–20.
Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 129–44.
J. A. Riddell, ‘Some Actors in Ben Jonson’s Plays’, Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 285–98 (pp. 285, 295).
See Katherine Eisamann Maus, Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 128–57.
See Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 195–6.
See, for example, Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea o fHuman Interiority, 1780–1930 (London: Virago Press, 1995), on the child as an emblem of the adult human condition.
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© 2009 Edel Lamb
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Lamb, E. (2009). The Child as Trope: Performing Age and Gender on the Early Modern Children’s Stage. In: Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594739_2
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