ABSTRACT
My paper starts from a puzzle: what did a Renaissance audience see when boy actors undressed on stage? The puzzle could, of course, be resolved by a simple (and, for my argument, damaging) move. The boy actor doesn’t undress, or, at least, doesn’t undress to the point of disturbing the illusion; the audience sees nothing. Against such a move, I want on the one hand to think quite bluntly about the prosthetic devices through which gender is rendered visible upon the stage. In that sense, the visible is an empirical question (although a question to which we seem to have surprisingly few answers). But, on the other hand, I want to suggest the degree to which the Renaissance spectator is required to speculate upon a boy actor who undresses, and thus to speculate upon the relation between the boy actor and the woman he plays. This speculation depends upon a cultural fantasy of sight, but a fantasy, I shall argue, that plays back and forth between sexual difference as a site of indeterminacy (the undoing of any stable or given difference) and sexual difference (and sexuality itself) as the production of contradictory fixations (fixations articulated through a fetishistic attention to particular items of clothing, particular parts of the body of an imagined woman, particular parts of an actual boy actor). I want to suggest that on the Renaissance stage the demand that the spectator sees is at its most intense in the undressing of the boy actor, at the very moment when what is seen is most vexed, being the point of intersection between spectatorship, the specular, and the speculative.
