Learning Thisby's Part-or-What's Hecuba to Him?

Every schoolchild knows that there were no women actors on stage; female parts were taken by men But schoolchild also learns that this fact is of little consequence for twentieth-century reader of Shakespeare's plays. Because taking of female parts by boys was universal and commonplace, we are told, it was accepted as 'verisimilitude' by audience, who simply disregarded it, as we would disregard creaking of scenery and accept backcloth forest as 'real' for duration of play. Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, 9 1. What Every Schoolchild Knows? I begin by citing opening paragraph of opening chapter--Female Roles and Eroticism--in Jardine's groundbreaking book of 1983, a study followed six years later by Stephen Orgel's even more widely influential article, Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did English Stage Take Boys for Women? (1) Separately (Orgel doesn't seem to have known Jardine's work--or didn't cite it) but also together (since subsequent scholarship frequently cited them both), these two set agenda for academic re-investigation over next two decades of that most common of theater commonplaces, what every schoolchild knows: that Shakespeare's company, like other Early Modern English playing company, was an all male company, and that his parts for women were cross-dressed. Of course, Jardine's opening flourish doesn't so much engage with history as strike a rhetorical pose. (Every schoolchild? I think not.) And once struck, pose immediately starts to wobble. It's not just that, proposing to write about performance and theater, Jardine's own viewing (which recruits to her we, making her point of view ours) seems oddly stranded in a bye-gone era. Creaking scenery? A backcloth forest taken for real? One has to wonder whether Jardine had seen any Shakespeare in theater since, say, John Barton's Troilus and Cressida (RSC, 1968) or Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream (RSC, 1970). (This is crucial. For questions we know to ask about Shakespeare on his own are conditioned by what today's Shakespeare teaches us to expect. If we look with wrong eyes, we'll ask wrong questions. Jardine's gaze is narrowed, it appears, to proscenium arch thinking and by aesthetics of verisimilitude.) Worse, however, is drift of argument. In her opening sentence they are young men actors. Two sentences later, they've become boys. Further along, framing terms of Elizabethan eroticism, she first cites John Rainolds in 1590s (although he, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was, in any case, engaged in a controversy about academic, not professional, playing) then Thomas Randolph in 1634, with no sense of forty-odd years separating them (10). In comparable cultural terms, that's like making J. M. Barrie's 1904 Peter Pan and John Osborne's 1956 Look Back in Anger (or Osborne's Anger and Sarah Kane's 1995 Blasted) contemporaries. Orgel's hold on theater history was similarly problematic. Republishing Nobody's Perfect in Impersonations, he repeated his original argument, its premise that playhouse was regulated by a repressive (and, compared to rest of Europe, anomalous) cultural regime: the appearance of women on was forbidden (1); England actresses from public stage (1); England proscribed women from public stage (2). But he knows this is wrong--and says so on 72: Standard history implies that until Restoration women were banned from stage, but in fact this is not case; there were no statutes whatever relating to matter. By page 72, however, damage had been done; Orgel himself was part of machine making standard history. The 1980s was no time, however, to allow awkward historical facts to get in way of discursive theoretical argument. …

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