Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England.

Stephen Orgel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 19 pls. + xv + 179 pp. $44.95. ISBN: 0-5215-6056-X.

Orgel begins with the question of why the theater in Shakespeare's England employed only male actors on stage. He retraces the debates over women's involvement in theater before Shakespeare's time, and the extent to which during his era they appeared in dances or masques at court and in public entertainment. Actresses were common among foreign troupes visiting England. Orgel reexamines many premises of standard history, contending, for example, that the period saw little physiological difference between men and women, and that the sexes often dressed similarly. Middle class women, he argues, enjoyed considerable liberty in London, which let them enter the theater. Some writers thought women were excluded from the stage because all craft guilds were male fraternities, but in earlier years women were common in many guilds. If boy actors were apprentices, Orgel asks, why did so few apparently have adult theatrical careers? One possibility he considers is that the rules of the apprenticeship system permitted them to enter any other career after completing their indenture.

Orgel's aim, however, is not to answer questions but to raise them, and to use his central theme as a viewpoint from which to examine gender construction. Drama's major vice was dissolving the boundaries between God-given social roles, and we cannot understand popular acceptance of the theater without examining how gender was constructed in the period.

According to Orgel, the culture did not fear homoerotic behavior. Although sodomy was considered to be an abominable crime, its legal definition was exceedingly narrow and different from what we mean by homosexuality. In fact, homoeroticism was not considered antagonistic to marriage, and sexual anxieties focused instead on women's infidelity. There is considerable evidence that many real women surpassed the stereotypical image of the subordinate sex in a patriarchal system. The transvestite actor, therefore, may have reflected a deep-rooted cultural anxiety concerning powerful women, a nervousness that wished to disarm the supposedly subordinate sex.

The violation of sexual boundaries on the Elizabethan stage may not have been so striking to contemporaries as modern audiences would find it to be. Far more important for the period was violation of social classes. Sumptuary laws strictly regulated the clothing that different classes could wear, and a trades person who dressed like an aristocrat was guilty of a serious violation. For an actor to dress like a king required a greater suspension of disbelief than when a boy actor dressed like a woman. Opposition to tranvestism on stage may have been limited to those who fundamentally abhorred the theater.

Orgel argues that patriarchal societies are primarily concerned with management of the class structure, and keeping women in their place is only a secondary concern. Male supremacy means the dominance of many males by a few, through primogeniture as well as class stratification, even more than it means dominance of women by men. In such a society, each person, male or female, is feminized in relation to someone more powerful.

A major attraction of this book is the many biographical examples, although they might have strengthened the central argument if they had been distributed at appropriate places throughout the text rather than being grouped at the end. Orgel's method of analysis is orthodox and historical, but often more intuitive than pedantic. The references are not extensive but they indicate considerable research with primary sources. Although not taking a radical revisionist stance, he reconsiders many commonly-accepted assumptions to illuminate gender issues of Shakespeare's England. His concluding point is that a man in a patriarchal society, under the domination of other men, could justly identify himself with women.

ERIKA BAINBRIDGE University of Maryland, College Park