“Go To: You Are a Woman”

What is a woman in Shakespeare? In the all-male Elizabethan theater, the women are played by boys; moreover, many plots involve women disguising themselves as men, and this disguise is almost invariably presented as impenetrable. The assumption is that in all social and public contexts—in most of what constitutes life—women can become boys and boys women entirely successfully: there is nothing distinguishing male from female except the costume and the manner; and short of undressing the subject, there is no way of telling the difference. The introduction of actresses, oddly, made the romance plots significantly less romantic, even as it essentialized the attractiveness of women.