Staging trans*formations: Gendered embodiment and drag theatricality 1585-1714

Gross, Hilary J

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125793 Copy

Description

Title

Staging trans*formations: Gendered embodiment and drag theatricality 1585-1714

Author(s)

Gross, Hilary J

Issue Date

2024-07-11

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Stevens, Andrea Ria

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Stevens, Andrea Ria

Committee Member(s)

• Markley, Robert
• Newcomb, Lori Humphrey
• Pollock, Anthony

Department of Study

English

Discipline

English

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• theatre
• theatre history
• early modern
• Restoration
• actress
• drag
• history of drag
• gender
• affect
• comedy
• gender trick
• gender reveal
• trans*
• queer
• fashion
• disguise
• costume
• materiality
• embodiment
• repertory
• original practice
• staging
• performance
• travesty

Abstract

This project, “Staging Trans*formations: Gendered Embodiment and Drag Theatricality 1585-1714,” centers the experiential nature of early modern inter-gender performance, focusing on theatrical applications of embodied gender performance and affective response. I reconceptualize the usually distinct early modern (1585-1642) and Restoration (1660-1714) English theatrical traditions as a continuum, tracing insular inter-gender and drag performance across the Interregnum. Treating the Commonwealth era as a complete break in theatrical tradition risks supporting a narrative where gender ‘accurate’ casting appears to be a ‘necessary’ development in the progression towards naturalistic mimesis, as well as towards the modern gender binary. The advent of the professional actress on the English stage was undoubtedly transformative, and Charles II did take steps to move England away from its early modern drag tradition, requiring his patent companies to cast women exclusively in female roles in 1662. The tradition, however, did not end, it transformed, living on in the intensely laminated gendered performance of the actress, who continued the professional performance of drag on the English stage, and added her own complicated, embodied, gender-pastiche to its legacy. Queer and trans studies, and feminist studies as well, all lay claim to the historical drag figure, especially investing in continuities of queer and trans experience by exploring the pre-history of modern identities. Truly, the figure rightfully belongs in between, to the dynamic tension between what is trans, what is queer, and what is feminist. I choose to use the presentist term ‘drag’ which refers to the shared material history of the professional performance of gender across and between genders, while resisting the directional and binary limitations of terms like ‘cross-dressed.’ I also use the Boolean asterisk of trans*, not just as the contemporary term for trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer/genderfluid identities, but to include transition and transformation, as well as transvestite (despite its fraught history) in its association. Drag necessarily destabilizes set theories of gender, but it can also reinforce gendered assumptions about identity and legibility. Both characteristics make it an indispensable site of analysis. The following study considers how diegetic drag is used as a theatrical device on stage in the long seventeenth century in England. These characters dress in drag within the play rather than in the theatrical modality of performance (as with the assumed all-male cast). The drag plays explored express intense admiration for the genderfluid drag hero(/ine) both before and after the Interregnum, but as binary essentialism comes to dominate conceptions of gender in the eighteenth century, the more complex genderfluid and gender non-conforming characters are often reduced to camp caricatures and elided from repertoires, revealing that what we think of as the canon may have been profoundly shaped by this under-theorized continuity of gender performance. Had these plays hedged more, mitigated their admiration, ceded more to binary norms and values, would their history have changed? Would Moll be as recognizable today as Viola from Twelfth Night, or the Restoration’s Sir Anthony Love as well-known as The Country Wife? The performance of genderfluidity didn’t just provide an alternate possibility of gendered embodiment; it threw into crisis the audience’s own ability to read gender at all. Knowing a figure’s gender one moment by no account guaranteed you would know it the next, as the gender performance of the actor, their persona, and their character moved in and out of variously coded performance, putting explicit pressure on any assumed stability. Seventeenth century drag performance reflected contemporary cultural debates, but it also multiplied the destabilizing impact of that debate to ask its own questions, forcing the audience to grapple with their affective response to the performance and to the failure of legibility these figures find such power in, even while balancing an ambiguous reception. Drag performance is a site of power, of intelligence and wit, and affective manipulation, playing with the theatrical magic of illusion and revelation, and constantly displacing a stable gendered ‘truth.’ These roles express what Marjorie Rubright calls a “transgender capacity.” They are celebrations of potential, rather than parodies of limitations. Comedy in particular is polysemous, a way of playing with, and reveling in, seeming contradiction. The historical association of drag and comedy in this era plays out across the repertory, establishing two distinct traditions of drag, one which celebrates success, and one which laughs at failure. Often, comedic camp travesty is never meant to succeed, its comedy is its failure, and though it can present a potentially powerful critique, it does not resist a binary understanding of gender; it depends on it. The studies included here represent a cross-section of traditions and conceits from the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Carolinian theatres, focusing on how diegetic drag evolved on the early modern stage before considering how it was transformed for the Restoration context. Some of the plays featured are less well known than others, and though Shakespeare is featured, his work is by no means the only tradition considered. Starting with the surprise gender reveal in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, Thomas Middleton’s The Widow, and Francis Beaumont’s and John Fletcher’s Philaster, before considering the diegetic drag featured in the works of William Shakespeare and John Shirley as a productive comparison. The focus then moves towards masculine drag, to consider Shakespeare’s ‘drag heroine,’ and connect the traditions explored in each of the previous chapters to three expressions of the infamous Restoration ‘breeches role’ from Thomas Southerne’s Sir Anthony Love, Aphra Behn’s The Rover, and William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. Each study considers the specific after lives of its performance, in revival and adaptation, particularly in the eighteenth century, alongside the transformation of theatrical praxis. Traditions of diegetic drag reveal how drag was deployed for particular effect and affect in entertainment, and how we, especially in an Anglo-American cultural context, have then inherited the genres, modes, and representative trends the seventeenth century introduced to the stage. Exploring the history of drag’s evolution, and the possibility of alternate modes of gendered performance, reveals the stakes of our current cultural engagement with drag, especially within communities who are questioning the challenges and affordances of both spectrum and binary models of gender. These early modern modes of performing gender-instability and non-conformance highlight the limitations of our modern expectations in comparison to the fluidity of the premodern, even of those within queer and trans communities. But these plays have also shaped our cultural understandings of drag and its affordances in ways which have had long standing, and often harmful, effects as well. The legacy of early modern drag is a story of suffering and prejudice as much as it is a story of empowerment and freedom.

Graduation Semester

2024-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125793

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Hilary Gross

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