ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, Lady Falkland, the first English woman playwright, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, has only been recovered from obscurity, primarily through feminist and performance studies. Although cross-dressing was a pressing and disturbing topic in real life as well as in the theatre of the English Renaissance, which was preoccupied by issues concerning identity, and it is also a dominant discourse in Renaissance cultural studies, it must be understood in the context of the bisexual and ambivalent fashion of its time. The original portrait of Elizabeth Cary, of which the one in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is a reduced gouache copy from the nineteenth century was painted by Paul Van Somer. The tabs around the waist and the ‘wings’, or epaulettes, on the shoulders, that Stubbes mentions, are very clearly distinguished in both portraits. The resemblance can be seen clearly in the somewhat earlier portrait of the Earl of Southampton, William Shakespeare’s patron.
