ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 presented evidence that calls into question the cultural dominance of a one-sex anatomical model and suggested that an emergent two-sex paradigm led to the questioning and dismissal of the possibility of corporal transformation. The present chapter considers sexual transformations and corporal instabilities occurring in early modern literary and dramatic narratives. My proposition is that instances of sex change and anatomical ux in late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century ction are not evidence of a dominant cultural paradigm in which corporal instability was accepted, but rather that they constitute explorations of gendered behaviour based upon xed and unchanging notions of human corporality. The early modern English stage was more concerned with the social and sexual relationships that audiences actually did see staged than the offstage shifts in anatomy it occasionally suggests; regardless of conservative narrative conclusions (such as the hypothetical sexual transformation promised at the end of Lyly’s Gallathea, or the un-staged death of Falstaff and rejection, by Hal, of the homoerotic and homo-social world of the tavern in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy), what takes place before audiences in early modern corporal-transformation narratives is sustained and sympathetic exploration of same-sex relationships. Plays that appear on the surface to offer biologically ambiguous characters (Falstaff) or sexual transformation as a narrative get-out clause (Gallathea) may be read more protably as investigations of social, erotic and sexual relationships than enquiries into the relatively straightforward question of biological sex identity.
