ABSTRACT
Recent scholarly examinations of the English Renaissance theatre as a site for sexual production, focusing primarily on Shakespeare, have addressed the erotic dynamic of the transvestite stage only obliquely. Their preoccupation has been with the function of cross-dressing within dramatic fictions as socially liberating role inversion (as exemplified, for example, by Rosalind, Viola, Portia), and thus, more fundamentally, with sexuality as gender oppression.1 In such a critical paradigm, the eroticism implicit in transvestism is theatrically incidental; subsumed into the gestalt of the fiction, it serves a larger (and of course subversive) design.2
