William de Longchamp was notorious at the end of the twelfth century as a hugely powerful man, chancellor of England, but one who was hated by many for having abused his power. The account of his downfall and ludicrous humiliation on Dover Beach as he tried to escape to France is recorded by a number of contemporaries. Here the version recorded by Hugh Nonant, bishop of Coventry, is given. The writing is of a high quality and the text provides both humour and historical detail.

This chapter demonstrates how, whilst classical theatre was largely side-lined by the necessities and appetites of a new wartime culture, Shakespeare, followed an entirely opposite trajectory, rising even higher following a century of increasing British bardolatry. In considering the popularity of Shakespeare during the war the chapter considers the context of the Tercentenary, the Shakespeare Hut, and the use of Shakespeare for fundraising. It shows how throughout the war Shakespeare was used as a patriotic tool in performances both at home and at the front. In examining these performances the chapter also emphasises how Shakespeare would mix with comedy skits, and classical themes of royal demise or the rise and fall of empires would appear in snappy one act-ers. In considering classical theatre more broadly, the chapter shows how classical themes and narratives were drawn on to make sense of war. It focuses in particular on new plays which took up classical themes or modes such as Drinkwater’s X=0 and Masefield’s Philip the King and shows how the use of the classics changed as the war progressed. Overall the chapter shows how the war catalysed already changing attitudes to the divisions between high and low culture

This chapter analyses cross-dressing in Restoration Shakespeare – in the main, female characters dressed in male attire – exploring the key question of how this theatrical device was influenced by the advent of the professional actress on the English stage. The approach is twofold. Firstly, the chapter examines the use of cross-dressing in specific Restoration-era adaptations of Shakespeare. One of the earliest of these, Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest (1667), provides additional opportunities for transvestite performance as the play’s new male role of Hippolito was performed as a travesty part by an actress (either Mary Davis or Jane Long) and the female part of Sycorax (also added to the play by the adapters) was likely played by a man. Furthermore, it explores how other adapters treated the cross-dressing already inherent in the Shakespearean texts they chose to rewrite, considering, for example, George Granville’s The Jew of Venice (1701) and Charles Burnaby’s Love Betrayed (1703), a version of Twelfth Night. Secondly, the chapter investigates the Restoration performance history of Shakespearean ‘originals’ that feature transvestism, including Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The chapter nuances our understanding of gender in Restoration Shakespeare through a detailed consideration of cross-dressing.

An abiding concern throughout Molière’s works, masculinity is a more multivalent, complex and nuanced phenomenon than one might expect. Focussing primarily on various external signifiers coded as masculine – particularly elements of appearance and dress such as swords, hairstyles, and beards – this chapter outlines the various forms that seventeenth-century masculinity can take when it intersects with other variables of age, social class, biological sex and so forth. For example, while the barbons of the older generation regard their beards as an unassailable symbol of male authority, they are troubled by their younger blondin rivals, whose gallantry and blond wigs strike them as effeminate. An even more affected mode of masculinity can be found in the bodily stylisations and verbal uncouthness of the aristocratic petits marquis. As this chapter demonstrates, masculinity in Molière emerges as something largely performed or asserted in relation to others – through domination of women or competition with other men (in duels, warfare or seduction). Such issues are starkly flagged up when cross-dressing or cross-casting are involved: in many of Molière’s plays, women’s success at passing as men, and men’s failure to pass as women, can often demonstrate the fragility of both social gender roles and men’s authority.

The new century’s radical songwork takes in the victims of the Triangle Factory fire, Mother Jones, and the bards of the Industrial Workers of the World (with Joe Hill at their pinnacle). The IWW’s Italian songwriters – Arturo Giovannitti and Efrem Bartoletti – emerge as important voices, as do the Finnish songwriters of the Italian Hall Disaster in Calumet, Michigan, and the multinational corridistas of the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado. Other revolutionary arenas include the vaudeville stage and the drag club, where the cross-dressing of Julian Eltinge and Bothwell Browne challenges the tyranny of heterosexual norms. Charlotte Perkins Gilman emerges as a leading songwriter for women’s suffrage and joins the ranks of those opposing US entry into the coming European war. As the government clamps down on the proliferation of antiwar activism, Tin Pan Alley leads the shift from antiwar to prowar songwriting. With the US now at war, Black soldiers produce a powerful body of song reflecting the outrages of segregation in the ranks. Black composers James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle turn their wartime service into pioneering art-song, and Lakota warriors –formerly forbidden to sing – lend their voices to the war effort. The Armistice produces a wealth of song celebration, but a new musical menace arises in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and its vicious songs.

For some, part of the attraction of lust killing is the opportunity to pose wearing the clothes of their victims. For the two discussed here, this would seem to be a dominant paraphilia. Both men showed evidence suggesting a role of stress in their killing. Commander of the largest military base in Canada, Colonel Russell Williams would seem to be a most unlikely sexual serial killer, particularly since his victims were women under his command. Williams graduated to killing via breaking into homes and stealing pairs of underwear. He built an enormous collection of these, all carefully curated. It is possible that the drug Prednisone played a role in his aberrant trajectory. Dennis Rader appeared similarly to be a respectable family man. There were several early experiences that he recalled (e.g. seeing his mother trapped) which might have played a role in his development.

This chapter critically examines two long-held beliefs with regards to Thecla, the first Christian heroine to take on male dress: 1) that she is the forerunner of Byzantine transvestite saints and 2) that her tale is a reference point for their narratives (fourth to seventh centuries). Arguably, these claims are usually based on hasty assumptions or insufficient evidence built on one particular transvestite saint’s Life, the Life and Martyrdom of Eugenia. In this chapter, I discuss Thecla’s literary legacy both in the wider tradition of Greek hagiography and specific cross-dressers’ Lives. I demonstrate that the Life of Eugenia is an exception among cross-dressers’ tales in terms of its frequent referencing and evident modeling of the APT. This point is especially salient considering the APT’s many echoes in certain Greek hagiographies that are not concerned with cross-dressers. Finally, I propose some new perspectives on how the motif of cross-dressing traveled from the APT until it appeared in later hagiographical accounts. I argue that the Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena, Life and Miracles of Thecla, and Life of Eusebia called Xenê represent important intermediary steps both in the interpretation of Thecla as a cross-dresser and in the development of this literary theme.

The Epilogue considers anonymous pamphlets printed in the later part of King James’s reign that deploy the female voice as a form of political critique: Ester Hath Hang’d Haman, Hic Mulier, Haec Vir, and Muld Sacke. Of the cross-dressing pamphlets, Haec Vir in particular recruits the female voice for its association with militant Elizabethan values and the freedom of the subject, while the pseudonymous author Esther Sowernam ventriloquizes Esther, the biblical heroine who confronts the king. The female voice occupied a unique position in the seventeenth-century political landscape, allowing women writers to critique abuses of male power without compromising their position as dutiful subjects. Unlike the freedoms achieved by male citizens at the expense of women later in the seventeenth century, the “reasonable libertie” sought by men and women in early Stuart England authorized the voice of the wife/subject as a powerful political tool.

Chapter Five explores the early modern phenomenon of girls “putting on” the minds of others. It argues that, when they engaged in these acts of cognitive play, girls were able to try on alternative perspectives and experiences — not necessarily male ones, but those that belonged to sexually active females: the lover, the harlot, the pregnant woman. It focuses on the girls from John Lyly’s Gallathea, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, all of whom costume their bodies and put on the minds of sexually experienced females. Their performances allow them to project themselves into these roles without actually becoming “women” in a heteronormative sense that would require their bodies to transform through penetrative intercourse, pregnancy, or birth. The girls who dress up in these plays do so under different levels of duress, but they all share an ability to use their brainwork to manipulate the Protestant girl-to-woman script they were expected to follow — to resist, revise and, in some cases, reject it.

Chapter 4 focuses on the dynastic rise and fall of Razia Sultan to political leadership in thirteenth-century India. Daughter of Iltutmish, the founder of the Delhi Sultanate, Razia was favored by her father to succeed him. But at his death the contestation of the transition of power was rapid, relentless, and ruthless. It all happened in less than a year after the sultan’s death. His son Rukh al-Din wore the crown for only six months and twenty-eight days before being defeated and dethroned by his sister Razia. At the age of thirty-one and unmarried, Razia became the first and only female sultan of the Delhi Sultanate, preceded and succeeded by her half-brothers. Razia Sultan ruled a little over three years, during which time she was able to expand the state’s territory, bring a certain level of peace and prosperity to her people, patronize the arts, and support educational institutions. She was toppled through the treachery of some of her close advisers and her jealous brothers. The alleged Prophetic hadith was never invoked and there was no institutional religious opposition to her leadership.

Mark Twain often transgressed the sexual limits of his Victorian era, pushing the boundaries of sex and sexuality in his writing. Although he generally was more reticent in his public writing, deferring to the taste of his age, he had private writings that explored sexual and taboo topics. Throughout his writing career, he played with themes of cross-dressing, often couched in comedy, but revealing an interest in the fluidity of gender roles. In his later unpublished writings, he wrote more frankly about sex and sexuality, topics that clearly fascinated him.

Actresses performing as Irish characters on the eighteenth-century London stage embodied the contradictions of national identity during the Irish Enlightenment. Playwright and actress Kitty Clive was the first to claim an ‘Irish-English’ identity and to turn topsy-turvy the notion of Irish inferiority. The chapter argues that more than their male counterparts, these actresses and the characters they played often served as intermediaries across gender, class, national and religious divides. The various parts for Irish women, largely comic, ranged from peasants and labourers to boisterous widows and would-be aristocrats. The most notable recurrent Irish characters are the cross-dressed and travestied women who perform roles that reveal fixed assumptions about gender and national identity and often expose English hypocrisy. Examples include Ann Barry in Garrick’s Irish Widow cross-dressed as her soldier brother; Margaret Doyle as Patrick in Holcroft’s Seduction; and Maria Macklin’s several roles playing a man or dressed as one, especially in her father Charles Macklin’s The School for Husbands. These women employed popular stereotypes but also attempted on occasion to empty them of their power. They are thus exemplary of the plight of immigrants who seek to assimilate while maintaining a distinct identity.

Actresses performing as Irish characters on the eighteenth-century London stage embodied the contradictions of national identity during the Irish Enlightenment. Playwright and actress Kitty Clive was the first to claim an ‘Irish-English’ identity and to turn topsy-turvy the notion of Irish inferiority. The chapter argues that more than their male counterparts, these actresses and the characters they played often served as intermediaries across gender, class, national and religious divides. The various parts for Irish women, largely comic, ranged from peasants and labourers to boisterous widows and would-be aristocrats. The most notable recurrent Irish characters are the cross-dressed and travestied women who perform roles that reveal fixed assumptions about gender and national identity and often expose English hypocrisy. Examples include Ann Barry in Garrick’s Irish Widow cross-dressed as her soldier brother; Margaret Doyle as Patrick in Holcroft’s Seduction; and Maria Macklin’s several roles playing a man or dressed as one, especially in her father Charles Macklin’s The School for Husbands. These women employed popular stereotypes but also attempted on occasion to empty them of their power. They are thus exemplary of the plight of immigrants who seek to assimilate while maintaining a distinct identity.