Sexual Disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night

Summary

In dealing with the female page disguise in Renaissance drama, one is invariably struck by the complexity of the double sex reversal implied by the presence of the boy actor. Lamb’s remarks are typical: ‘What an odd double confusion it must have made, to see a boy play a woman playing a man: one cannot disentangle the perplexity without some violence to the imagination.’ Perhaps because most of us share Lamb’s perplexity, not much work has been done on the subject other than a general acknowledgement that the device is both interesting and complex. Recently, however, sexual disguise has begun to attract attention from feminist critics because it seems to offer a way to combine Shakespearian criticism with contemporary social concerns. Although more work is needed, and welcome, on this complex dramatic device, the tendency to regard it solely in terms of social and sexual roles seems to me misguided. While some aspects of the disguise are common to all the plays in which it appears, its dramatic function is shaped by the particular design of each play; and the differences are fully as important as the similarities in understanding the complexity of the device in Shakespeare’s hands.