ABSTRACT
How many people cross-dressed in Renaissance England? There is probably no way empirically to answer such a question. Given biblical prohibitions against the practice and their frequent repetition from the pulpit and in the prescriptive literature of the period, one would guess that the number of people who dared walk the streets of London in the clothes of the other sex was limited. None the less, there are records of women, in particular, who did so, and who were punished for their audacity; and from at least 1580 to 1620 preachers and polemicists kept up a steady attack on the practice. I am going to argue that the polemics signal a sex-gender system under pressure and that cross-dressing, as fact and as idea, threatened a normative social order based upon strict principles of hierarchy and subordination, of which women’s subordination to man was a chief instance, trumpeted from pulpit, instantiated in law, and acted upon by monarch and commoner alike.1 I will also argue, however, that the subversive or transgressive potential of this practice could be and was recuperated in a number of ways. As with any social practice, its meaning varied with the circumstances of its occurrence, with the particulars of the institutional or cultural sites of its enactment, and with the class position of the transgressor. As part of a stage action, for example, the ideological import of cross-dressing was mediated by all the conventions of dramatic narrative and Renaissance dramatic production. It cannot simply be conflated with cross-dressing on the London streets or as part of a disciplining ritual such as a charivari or skimmington. In what follows I want to pay attention to the differences among various manifestations of cross-dressing in Renaissance culture but at the same time to suggest the ways they form an interlocking grid through which we can read aspects of class and gender struggle in the period, struggles in which the theater-as I hope to show-played a highly contradictory role.
