Introduction

This book explores the vexatious crossing of the boundaries between the sexes, emphasizing the transvestism of Shakespeare’s comic heroines and the emasculating androgyny of his male tragic heroes. Shakespeare may serve as the focal point in a chronology that ranges from the English translations of Ovid’s effeminized Hermaphrodite to Milton’s representation of the transition from prelapsarian sexual union to tragic difference after the fall. I critique the traditional paradigm that man is the principle of sameness-unto-itself (self-identity), and I unpack its misogynistic corollary, which projects the responsibility for all difference onto women. The play of sexual difference attaches itself to a material prop or support either in the mobile clothing of the transvestite or in the bipartite body of the hermaphrodite or, in Shakespearean tragedy, to a paronomastic language that undercuts fi rm gender distinctions. The male’s egoistic desire to defi ne himself as self-standing, not in any way dependent upon women, ultimately fi nds its defenses breached, its illusions punctured. Hamlet is troubled because his fl esh is “sullied” (1.2.129) since his ghostly father had sexual intercourse with an unfaithful woman.1 So sullied is his spirit by his ineluctable fl eshly origins in Gertrude, and so implicated is he in her adulterous bonds with Claudius, that Hamlet rails against himself as a whore by contamination, and he curses both the passive, corrupted fl esh that he is heir to and his bondage to a treadmill of vainly repetitive denunciations of this state. These circuits of dilatory and effeminizing words prevent him from taking manly action. In febrile words he curses himself that he must pour out his self-mockery in debilitating words:

Must like a whore unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A stallion! (2.2.568-73)

Hamlet is both male and female whore, corrupted on all sides by his mixing with baser matter.