Shakespeare and Possibility, Part 8: Cross Dressing and Cross-Casting

Delve into the historical practice of cross-dressing in Shakespeare’s theater, the narrative trope of cross-dressing heroines, as well as the contemporary practices of cross-casting in modern Shakespeare productions. Moderated by Jennifer Birkett ’23 Ph.D., postdoctoral research associate at Shakespeare at Notre Dame, the conversation features Peter Holland, McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies and Associate Dean for the Arts at Notre Dame, and Hannah Hicks, Notre Dame Ph.D. student, in a pre-show appearance from the 2024 Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival production of As You Like It.

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Transcript

1 0:06

Welcome to the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival. My name's Jenny Burkett. I'm the postdoctoral research associate here at Shakespeare at Notre Dame, joining me tonight are two very special people who I adore, one of them being the McNeil Family Professor of Shakespeare Studies. Peter Holland, and my other being my dear friend, Hannah Hicks, who is a PhD student here at Notre Dame, and is focusing her research on the very topics we're talking about tonight. So we've got experts in the room for sure. how tonight's gonna go is we're gonna start off, I'm gonna start off talking with Peter and Hannah for about 20 minutes, 15, 20 minutes, and then I'd like to turn time over to all of you for questions. So be thinking as we're talking. If you have a question about Shakespeare, about the production, about As You Like It generally, about gender, sexuality, all those kinds of things. we'd love to hear them Peter, Hannah, the topic of cross dressing. The topic of cross dressing in Shakespeare is a layered topic. I always think of it as layers because you have on one hand The actual layer of the narrative of the storyline. So in As You Like It, for instance, we have Rosalind, who is a female, and she's cross dressing as a male named Ganymede, who is then pretending to be a female, which is herself. So it's it's layers of performance and gender. But then on top of that, we have a secondary layer with Shakespeare's own company, which was all male. And so you have a boy actor playing a female character, playing a male playing a female.

3 1:34

And

1 1:35

it's funny and it's exciting. and so I want to talk about both of those layers separately, but then the idea that we're recognizing that everyone knew that they were happening at the same time as well. So going back to the idea that in Shakespeare's time, the theater that he was writing for the company was all male and. What we refer to as boy actors, but generally that's 14 to 25 years old. So this isn't, we're not hiring eight year olds, just so everyone knows. young men, typically playing the female roles. But there's a kind of a common misconception, that I think we should address together, that the reason that these Elizabethan, theaters had young men performing the roles was because it was illegal for women to perform on the stage. So Peter, I was wondering if you could tell us, is that true? Is that what was happening? No,

2 2:22

nobody can find the law. It doesn't exist. unless something got lost in the history of Parliament or whatever, there is no record of any such law. it's a convenient or if you watch us i do quite often that wonderful movie six year in love you will find it invoked over and over again there's a law against women on stage no. Why didn't they have women on stage when they didn't think they needed to and. Occasionally people traveled in Europe and they went to Italy where there were women acting on the professional stage and they came back and said, those women, they were actually quite good, but they weren't as good as the boy actors we have. and it was simply a convention. Women performed in all kinds of other things. Indeed, they performed in amateur plays, but they weren't performing in the professional theater. Think about what that culture is like. There are not many draw foreign. Professionally, there's one particularly good job that you didn't have to kind of audition for, and that was being queen. but that apart, women weren't in the workforce in that way. They might be in the workforce because of their husbands. we know about a number of women who, came to own printing houses in Shakespeare's London because their husband was the printer. He died, the wife got the business, she carried it on, it's that kind of reason, rather than that there is a career trajectory for women, which, why doesn't it include acting, because they could do it? No, it just didn't happen. get rid of that myth, and what are we left with? We're left with highly trained, very successful, brilliant performers. and over again, you look at these roles that Shakespeare wrote. For women, and you think there must have been some extraordinary performance to make this possible. You don't write a role like Rosalind as you like it. Unless you can see a performer who could play that role. There must have been somebody who got better and played the first Cleopatra. Who at one point talks about how she doesn't want to be led in triumph through Rome. And see some squeaking Cleopatra, boy my greatness, in the posture of a whore. you have to be a brilliant actor as a boy to be able not only to play Cleopatra, but to mock your own playing of Cleopatra. And that kind of layering is exhilarating. I think we can trace some of these boys who gave Shakespeare opportunities at one stage in his career, and then they matured out of. Boy actor roles, they matured out of female roles. Shakespeare by and large, look at most of the plays, there are at most three female roles. Usually two, just three, occasionally four. There's one thing we do know about these boy actors, and that's very important. They were really technically apprentices. Indeed, quite a few of them were indentured as apprentices to other actors who were members of particular guilds. So if you were in a guild, you could take on an apprentice. Your profession might be acting, but you could be a member of the goldsmith's guild, say, and you could therefore have an indentured apprentice working with you. One of the things that we learned as we started to look at these plays in a very different way. Is that over and over again the boy actor playing a female role is on stage with a senior male actor who can therefore request them separately and work with them and train them and see what's going on. And then occasionally i think they reach such a picture of brilliance rosalind is the classic example of that. Where perhaps they didn't need a guy around to train them. They just had that ability and they could take over. I want that sense of Shakespeare as, somebody who knew exactly every moment who he was writing a role for.

1 6:11

That's fantastic, and I love that you brought up, Rosalind is a unique role in Shakespeare's female characters, she has the most lines of any female character that Shakespeare ever wrote, she gets the epilogue, which doesn't happen for a female character in any other play of Shakespeare's, and you'll notice that She makes the action happen in this entire play, generally, and it's actually why, correct me if I'm wrong, Peter, why in the 18th century, this show wasn't performed very often because a lot of the kind of Big owners of production companies, men like David Garrick, they didn't see this production as, selling tickets for them. I guess you could say that they couldn't put themselves in big starry roles because they weren't playing Rosalind, generally. So it's an interesting point. This is a really, this is a female driven play, but also really a play for a very good boy actor back in the time. So Hannah, I want to ask you a question about it it makes sense given the culture, given, the fact that younger males, pro presumably could be more clean shaven, they may have, higher voices, there's a logical move to say, oh, you'll play the female roles. But I'm wondering if, is there anything more to it? is it simply, this is great acting, or is it, this is comical in some sense, or is there something erotic about it? Is this a culture where We find that always can play women in a way that maybe men can't. what do you think about the kind of motivations for that?

4 7:31

Yeah, I think there's definitely the physical motivation, of course. And I think there is that kind of immediate erotic appeal to, a pretty man on stage that still exists today, for sure. but I think there's also the social element, that Peter refers to the fact that these are apprentices and they're often in subordinate roles, both inside and out of the theater to the men that are performing the male roles. And so they do have this kind of subordinate position to them that kind of creates this hierarchy. I think that really informs the role. They also do have this, like this stereotypical emotionality that is associated with women at this time is associated with adolescent boys. So this kind of emotionality, this kind of like untrained sexual impulse. the kind of physicality of teenage boy adolescence or young man adolescence was associated with adult womanhood or with young womanhood as well. So I think that kind of social stereotyping, but also like social hierarchy. Can together as well on stage and off a bit for the dynamic between boy actors and adult men.

2 8:44

think also part of that is that we have a notion of what men move towards as they move from boyhood to manhood as it were is a notion of a masculinity which is not about beauty. whatever the essences are of masculinity as we culturally create it. It's about muscularity, physicality, and that kind of way, it's not necessarily and just going back to something, Jenny, you were saying about these boy actors perhaps having higher voices. No, there's no indication that as soon as their voices drop, they start playing these roles. No, that's not, it's not that kind of performance, but they are clearly people who on stage catch your eye and are beautiful. When a character talks about the beauty of Rosalind. We have to see that beauty and I don't just mean an inner beauty or something. Rosalind's got an abundance, which is intelligence. Gosh, she's so smart, but it's also just wow. And it's a wow, which has nothing to do with their gender or your sexuality as you are. It's just recognizing some people, male or female, irrespective of what. Who you might want to be with you just look at them and think they're beautiful and there's nothing wrong with that And I think these boy actors had that ability right there are moments Beautifully played in this production where somebody looks at somebody else and just, Oh my gosh, I'm in love with that person. it's the romeo and juliet moment the moment when romeo sees juliet at the capulet ball and Something changes this happens over and over again and it's comical It's funny when somebody does it but deep in it is also something Yeah, you can recognize you catch sight of somebody in a room and you think they are beautiful, and it's not conventional masculinity.

1 10:32

Do you think there's something to be said for the choice of Ganymede as Rosalind's name? Which, for those of you who may have knowledge of the classics, Ganymede is the male page lover of Zeus, I believe, in Greek mythology. So there's there is, I think there's some tongue in cheek pointedness about the kind of eroticism of a young boy. And it's subtle, but it's there for those who know it's there too. was there a culture there that was more allowing of kind of fluid sexuality than maybe we have in a modern sense?

4 11:04

Yeah, I think when Rosalind takes on the name of Ganymede, she doesn't know that she's going to encounter Orlando. Yes, true. And so there is this kind of. quality of androgyny that she's tapping into by choosing that name. She really likes the idea of taking on the role of a page and the kind of quasi military aspect of that as well. She does refer to the relationship with Zeus, so there is immediately, for the audience, even drawn that homoerotic quality. Which will come out when she encounters Orlando again as ide.

1 11:35

Absolutely. And something I think that you both brought up, or especially that Hannah, you brought up, was this the sense of kind of a hierarchy of genders or even, that the boys are in a kind of a subordinate place and so they're playing kind of a subordinate role in the hierarchy, in Elizabethan knowledge of patriarchy, you could say. and I think that's very present in all of Shakespeare's plays in the sense that. We don't see, except for Falstaff in Wives a little bit, we don't see male characters cross dressing as females. We see a lot of boy actors playing women, and we see female characters dressing up as men, but we don't see that other direction. So there is something, about the motivation of like, when we do see it happen in Wives, it seems to be a punishment, it seems to be something that's funny, it seems to be something that is Not to be emulated. with Rosalind. We're supposed to find that, really impressive.

2 12:25

One other example of a man dressed as a woman. We don't see it on stage, but in Antony and Cleopatra. Cleopatra talks about when she put her ties, when she dressed Antony up in her clothes and she buckled on his sword. and clearly the cross dressing game, it's a sexy game for them, right? what you do in private and then between consenting adults, et cetera, it's fine. you can see what I'm getting at. It's, we're not shown that moment, but we can also, we're encouraged to imagine that. What if that actor I'm seeing is Antony, and Antony's usually played these days by, an actor, probably in his forties or a little bit more. Imagine that actor dressed in Cleopatra's costume. Imagine her wearing a sword. that's part of another kind of game that's being played, and it's a game of imagination, right? imagination is all over this play, all over as you like it. what does, get Rosalind, does Ganymede do? she says to Orlando, the guy who has fallen for Rosalind, but doesn't know that Ganymede really is Rosalind, i'll create an imagination space in which you can imagine i'm your rosalind. Okay why do you want to do that you want to do that because you want to spend time with the guy she is passionately in love with but she doesn't want to give up that. Distance that's created by her disguise, which also gives her a certain safety. All right. Men are safer than women in a forest, which is strange and comfortable place in which you can fall asleep and suddenly find those around us near you. very strange kind of wood. I didn't know this. onto the game that this place is playing with. If you're asked to imagine on stage, the characters are asking each other to imagine, and then we imagine with them.

4 14:14

Yeah, there's also, I think, the quality of the forest that it allows for this boundary softening, and takes the claws off sexuality in a way where it's like very weaponized with the court that we see at the beginning, whereas it's a lot safer here to experiment and have fun. a lot of, as you like it, Draws from the Arcadia with Sydney, but it is a gender reversal that does feature, male to female crossdressing as a romantic bid instead. but that I think not quite like the Falstaff in Married Wives, but it is still a bit more sexually humiliating rather than sexually empowering. And there does have to be a lot of drawing upon masculinity, despite the fact that you're making this choice to cross dress. The forest always requires you to draw into a masculinity, despite the fact that you're outside of society.

1 15:05

yeah. and that kind of brings us to the narrative. So I want to kind of transition to thinking about Rosalind and As You Like It in the narrative. You both brought up so well that there tend to be, with Shakespeare's heroines who crossdress, there tend to be specific kind of motivations for why they are putting on this disguise. And one of them often is protection. So you will hear tonight, Celia and Rosalind have decided they're going to flee the court, go to the forest, and they have a line about beauty, essentially, the art beauty is more dangerous to us than our riches

3 15:34

in

1 15:35

it when going out into the forest. So there's a sense of violence and the question of the fact that they need a male, they need a male to be with them. And Rosalind's I will be a male and then we will bring touchstone as there is this notion of just safety. There's also, though, as Hannah brought up, there's this notion of wanting to, embrace the authority or the freedom of being a male. I think we see this with Portia, especially when she wants to be a lawyer. she can be a male lawyer and be respected as a lawyer when she could not be as a female. but then also there is this other notion, which is what happens in the narrative. Is the costume allows Rosalind, allows, a Viola, it allows Portia to pursue a lover in a way that she maybe couldn't otherwise, or get to know that person in a different kind of way that the forest allows. So I'm just wondering if You want to talk a little bit, both of you, about, what does that costume mean, or what does that performance of gender for Rosalind, what does that actually allow her in the play of this space? what does it, what does it give her in that moment?

4 16:42

Even before she encounters Orlando, she's allowed this, role as, head of household, which is something that, as a character, she's never been allowed as an outcast in the court. But it also allows her to have kind of this cute little family set up with Eliana and Touchstone. So she does have this sense of authority before she's able to reconnect with Orlando. And that, I think, develops this kind of self confidence and this kind of commanded space that she's never been allowed before. That comes from the environment, but also definitely comes from Yeah, this rejuvenating of herself as a new persona, as someone who's in control of her own destiny in this smaller area.

2 17:19

And some of that is economic power. one of the things that they can do when Rosalind and Celia flee the court and go to the countryside, they meet a shepherd, they find out a particular farm is for sale, they buy it. Just like that. there's something about the economics of this play that endlessly intrigues me. And it's something Shakespeare doesn't follow through on. He plays with it a bit and then withdraws it. He doesn't, he's not quite sure what to do with it. There are people who live all the time in this forest world, the permanent inhabitants of the forest of Arden, and they're economically deprived. They work for other people who may not be very nice. And then there are kind of people who, for whom the Forest of Arden is just a kind of, oh, it's a nice place to go and visit. and at the end of the play, they can leave it again. But they leave behind those who dwell there. And I think that's an intriguing sense of what this world is. Shakespeare calls this space the Forest of Arden. it also seems to be in France. in one sense, it's the forest of the Ardennes, but there was a forest of Ardennes in England, and it was a vast forest, and a vast economy of agriculture, and it is also the area from which Shakespeare's mother comes, as Mary Ardennes, yes, her name signifies that connection to the forest of Ardennes, and it was all over Warwickshire where Shakespeare grew up. In other words, this is both an imaginary space and a French space, little less imaginary, and an English space, far less imaginary. And people have different kinds of relationship with it. So there are people with very conventional names for pastoral characters. Silvius, Phoebe. these are people who, whatever their role in the play is, their names say they belong to a kind of Romantic world. And then there are others that seem very English. what's the name of the priest in this forest? Sir Oliver Martex, right? sir is a conventional term in the period for a priest. Martex, because he makes a mess of things. and he's very much a kind of English vicar. so I'm, I want this sense of, again, of things that you know, and things that you've read about, and things you imagine, and things only Shakespeare has imagined and then offers to you. That's part of the games that this play is playing with you. You think you know this, you're not quite so sure.

1 19:45

That's true. and as you're seeing the play tonight, I think something that might come to your brain now to watch well after this conversation is, Rosalind speaks a lot more when she's dressed up as a boy than she does at the court. But Celia, who never dresses up as a boy, but dresses up as a shepherdess, Becomes more silent in the forest and perhaps now that Rosalind's a male you might notice Celia takes on a lot of the Domestic role things you'll see her doing she's hanging up laundry and Rosalind is lounging around And talking about Orlando and not to say that's what men and women do and they have to do but there's something interesting about Celia gets a little upset in the forest and I sometimes wonder if Part of that upset is the fact that Rosalind has now become, this male persona. And it's just like, why do I have to do everything? And now you're all, in love and free to do whatever. And I'm still me, but I've lost authority that she had in the court. So it's an interesting thought about the way that gender gives you power or not. and who takes that when they're performing it. I want to end with one further question. and that's, part of the sexual tension and the comedy of As You Like It and all of the cross dressing plays generally is that, of course, of same sex desire within the narrative. once again, Rosalind's dressed up as a boy and she's pretending to be Rosalind as a boy, but Orlando is, in love with her, but is he, and as he's falling in love with her, is he in love with, The idea of Rosalind, the female Rosalind, who is somehow inside this male, being performed by this young boy. Is he maybe also in love with this young boy, who actually is, in fact, a woman? and then of course we have Phoebe, who is a female character who falls in love with Ganymede, mistakenly thinking she's a male. And so is it, is she in love with Ganymede, the boy, or is she in love with Rosalind playing Ganymede? And the question, of course, is We don't know. The question has to be answered by the production, right? so we won't necessarily spoil that for you, but that is a question that every production of As You Like It has to decide what they're going to play with. But this production specifically, and this is the question I have for both of you, is bringing up a lot of kind of, New productions. They are the water can do a lot more of what's called cross cast it. So we're going to reach under characters. We're going to do that in order to allow more and more diversity of actors on the stage. and so we'll see some same sex relationships in this in the storyline. And that can complicate, accentuate, Differentiate from the Rosalind tension with Orlando or the Phoebe tension with Annamie. So I'm curious, do you see the moves now in modern theater? Now that we have, more often than not, a female playing Rosalind, for instance. This kind of move to now re gender characters or to cross cast of actors. As the new cross dressing of our time period, and if that's the case, do we accept that as the new way of like brava and display of theatricality? and does it maybe hide the layering of Shakespeare's cross dressing that was in the text? that's a hard question. Sorry, that's a lot.

2 22:51

I'm answering three words or less.

4 22:52

I think something that is really interesting in the way that this production focuses on relationships is where they originate and how, where you fall in love. matters maybe just as much with who you fall in love with. I think the thoughtfulness of where you're situating your play, at what time you're situating your play really does matter. And I think that is something that I've seen considered a lot more in recent production. We were talking very recently, we've seen a lot more Malvolia's, in Twelfth Night. as the new trends, which is often really delightful. but it really, I think originates more from the character and the decisions you make with levels of sympathy, how it changes, how it feels in a modern audience to see. Like a woman playing a villain who is traditionally male, how it feels to see, like a adolescent romance that is now a same sex romance where it wasn't before. What that kind of changes about the dynamic, if it changes anything, I think, is really exciting to see as like an off, like a frequent theater goer, but I would be really intelligible to someone who is seeing maybe a gay Romeo and Juliet for the first time. I think the wider it is, and the more common it is, the more accessible it is and more exciting it becomes.

2 24:12

We want to differentiate between two kinds of choice. Yes. One is. a woman playing a role that is conventionally played by a man, but playing it without reference to the gender of the performer. A woman playing Hamlet doesn't make Hamlet female. It's a woman playing the role masculine or Hamlet when Glenda Jackson, the English actor, played King Lear. She played King Lear, she didn't play Queen Lear. the character was not re gendered. The other possibility is when you change the gender of the character, and then something very different happens. Some of it, sorry. More spoiler, the character of jayquiz in this play is played by a female actor, but the gender of the character is almost irrelevant, right? It's not that jayquiz becomes a jacquenet or something, because the characters Gender is not crucial to playing the role, but in other cases, the gender is changed. it's part of a playfulness with the possibilities of text, and as you like, it seems to me to encourage this. the first all male Shakespeare production I can remember seeing, pretty sure it is the first I saw, but my memory is fallible these days, was an all male, as you like it, at the National Theatre in London, when it was still at the Old Vic, with Ronald Pickup playing Rosalind Unquestionably, he was the most beautiful person on that stage. I mean everything you wanted. the character playing Audrey was a kind of large, awkward performer, with a long blonde wig. so very young at that stage. he did quite well for himself. That was Anthony Hopkins. it was a production that was delighting in playing with Ideas about how gender is performed and how gender reflects desire and what's going on in the production tonight is playing differently with the same questions. What does it mean act as a woman does it mean certain kinds of things or does it also mean anything i mean, women are very different men are very different from each other we think we have ideas of gender definition. And yet they keep changing for us one of the things i have watched in my lifetime has been a really substantial change in how we think female behavior is enabled and what it means to be a woman. ask that question over and over again what does it mean to be a woman what does it mean to be a man and this production it even more intensely who is the object of your desire. Who is the person you most feel attracted to? Is that defined by something that is fixed in your sexuality? Or is it open? Is it something you don't know about in yourself and you discover? Are you always moving in the same direction of desire? Or does your object of desire change at different moments? All of that seems to me very modern here. I think we've opened that, and yet, these plays open up that possibility for us.

1 27:09

Absolutely. Sam, you have a question?

5 27:11

I'm very interested in the social dynamics and the social situation in which these plays Were first performed and, the theater company that Shakespeare was writing for to what extent knowingly or unknowingly did the theater companies at the time bring forward the relationship between older men and younger women from Greece and from the Athenian idea, including a sexual relationship between the mentor and the mentee to what extent was that there? And then maybe Is that part one of the reasons you didn't find women in the theater companies because, a woman having extramarital sex was really wrong. just wrong, right? So to what extent was all that? And then the follow on question was, did they use anything which we would call method acting? Because I found that method actors are at more risk in my personal experience with losing the boundary between who you really are and replay.

4 28:11

in terms of your first question, I would say this notion of the kind of mentor mentee dynamic, that has a very like erotic connotation from Reese was definitely, subliminally present, in the theater community, and it was vocally present in anti theatrical tracks. There was, a lot of concern outside of the theater for how present this was, especially because, as we said, There was the acknowledged dynamic of apprentices to masters, the presence of the guild when it was present, but, the theater guild didn't exist. So this was across several different disciplines.

5 28:48

so really exists, though, or did people make it up because a lot of times critics of a given culture see things that aren't actually that

4 28:56

I would say it was certainly exaggerated to, condemn the theater. The theater had a lot of detractors, certainly, whether or not that meant it wasn't present, I can't say I think it would be silly to say that it never occurred.

2 29:10

And then i'd add to that we can see in other Parts of early modern English culture, those older men, young women, younger men relationships in academic circles, the teacher and pupil relationships and in within the church and elsewhere, which were clearly able to have kind of erotic charges around them that call forth exactly the same critique. The answer is, it's there. It's not exclusive to the theater, but the theater is the place where it is most publicly being displayed in front of other people, right? performance has an awful lot of PDAs. and, if you're performing that kind of space, yes, you're a locus in which that becomes visible as it is elsewhere and is accepted elsewhere. one of the books I read this summer that, that I, most enjoyed, I think of all my summer reading, a brand new book by Will Tosh. Will Tosh is part of the research group at Shakespeare's Globe in London, and Will has written a book called Straight Acting. Subtitled the many queer lives of William Shakespeare, and he's trying to explore how in early modern culture and in Shakespeare's life and in other things going on at the same time that notion of performing straight, but perhaps not being straight. is being played out. and I thoroughly recommend it just because it's an enjoyable read. Will writes well. it's not a scholarly book. There's a lot of scholarship behind it. But it's not written as it were for other scholars. and he's trying to say, explore for us how our notions of where erotic attachment might be doesn't work when you put it back into shakespeare's time where it's more freely available and where it's valued as it appears to have been valued in classical greece. and is borrowed from that knowingly because that's part of the culture of education and becomes part of this world too. we know there were, of course, laws against certain kinds of male, male sexual activity. What's striking is not the presence of the law, but the infrequency with which those laws are ever invoked. one of the things we Discovered in the last while, people have gone back into the records of prosecutions and so on, that the prosecutions of men for acts of sodomy are always acts of rape of minors.

5 31:39

Never a consented pair.

2 31:40

Never a consented pair. We can't find any examples of prosecutions of consenting adult males having a sexual relationship. As far as I'm concerned, rape of a minor, whether male or female, is a crime that needs punishment, right? I don't have any question about this. Nobody's suggesting we change this. But having grown up in a world in which I watched the change in the law in England, When homosexual relationships between consulting males were decriminalized, I watched how that changed our culture in all kinds of ways. in a world in which there is a law that people knew was not being invoked, how you explore and express relationships and desire. It's more open. There may still be power dynamics that we would not approve of, right? It's not that. but that, a young Adult male can give consent to something different, even if they're in a power relationship, in which they're subordinate.

1 32:35

Another question?

5 32:35

I wanted to ask the film State Beauty with Millie Crudup when there are these boy actors, he was probably a little older than they may have actually been, but this very, Presentational kind of playing of woman, when he talked about and things like that, I've always wondered, there, there must have, as you are talking about been these boy actors who specialized in playing women, was that different than our conception of. this beautifully, fully realized female character with all of the nuance. Was it more stylized in that time, versus the modern conception of these powerfully, fully realized women

2 33:15

and for those of HP is set that the restoration after the English, civil War, at the point of which women are about to be professional actors. and it's exploring that moment of social change, in 1660, not 60 years earlier. The answer for earlier is, we don't know, right? we did have descriptions of how these actors actually acted these roles? Nope, it's not there. what I can't see any evidence of it being in the writing of those roles is a kind of campiness. that I think is there in stage beauty and I'm not sure was ever there. Did you see what I mean? I think that the film is based on a play, needed to explore that, but I'm not sure that is anything other than what happens at the time when that film is made. Rather than something that is seeking a kind of historical authenticity, that's very different.

4 34:06

Yeah, I think our connotation now of a kind of drag performance, definitely has at least some roots in the kind of stereotypical performance of gender that we think of now. Like Peter said, it's impossible to know, but I think when you watch a character like Rosalind, it's really hard to imagine, I think a stereotypical performance or a kind of can't be your overdraft or drag performance, because it's so nuanced and like you said, they would have these kind of specific actors in mind who would be prepped for this role, who would be suited for it ahead of its writing, and in that way would be, I think perfectly nuanced for it.

2 34:44

Modern actors, male and female, talk about Shakespeare's characters as people they love to play because of the density of the character they create. It doesn't mean that they play them as if they're real people. No, they're not. They're characters in a play. But they have a kind of, Distinctiveness that doesn't depend on stereotype. It plays with stereotype. It mocks stereotype. Shakespeare's characters are often, as it were, set against a stereotype. But they wouldn't be such rewarding roles to play if they were simply stereotypical. and Rosamund is one of the great roles in Fiesta. who would not, male or female, want to play Rosamund? Wow.

1 35:25

Tell that to David Garrett. No, I'm just joking. thank you both so much for joining us. And thank you to all of you for joining this pre show event. We love performing for you and we want to keep doing these kinds of events. We want to keep doing this Shakespeare Festival for as long as we can, but we can't do it without an audience. So we really appreciate all of you coming.