Cross-Dressing in Shakespeare: The Women Who Disguised as Men

Blur's 1994 single "Girls & Boys" built its chorus on a deliberately scrambled chain of who fancies whom, the genders folding back on each other until the words stop making literal sense. Damon Albarn wrote it as a joke about package-holiday romance. A near-identical gag was running on the London stage 400 years earlier, except that one had a practical cause built into it.

Watch As You Like It in 1600 and the disguise stacked four layers deep. A boy actor played Rosalind. Rosalind disguises herself as a young man, Ganymede. Ganymede then offers to playact as "Rosalind" so that Orlando can practise his wooing. A boy, playing a woman, playing a boy, playing a woman.

That stack was not a one-off trick. Disguise across the sexes runs through Shakespeare's comedies, and the reason starts with who was allowed on stage at all.

Why men played all the women

No woman acted on the professional English stage in Shakespeare's lifetime. Every Juliet, every Lady Macbeth, every Cleopatra was a boy or a young man in a dress and a wig.

The Royal Shakespeare Company makes one point worth keeping straight: no actual law banned women from acting. It was custom, not statute, and nobody with the power to break it did.

That custom held for decades. The first woman known to act professionally in England stepped on stage on 8 December 1660, playing Desdemona in Othello. A royal patent made the change official two years later, in 1662. By then Shakespeare had been dead for 44 years.

So when an Elizabethan playwright wrote a heroine who disguises herself as a man, he was layering a fiction on top of a fact the whole audience already knew. The "boy" on stage really was a boy.

Rosalind, the deepest disguise

Rosalind is banished from court and decides to travel hidden. Her height, she reasons, suits the plan: she will "suit me all points like a man" (As You Like It, I.iii).

Then she picks her name. "I'll have no worse a name than Jove's own page," she tells her cousin Celia, "and therefore look you call me Ganymede" (I.iii).

The choice carries a charge. In Greek myth Ganymede is the beautiful youth Zeus abducts to Olympus to serve as cupbearer to the gods. By the Renaissance his name had become shorthand for homoerotic desire; the English word "catamite" comes straight from the Latin form of it. Shakespeare's audience would have heard the wink.

Once she is Ganymede, Rosalind gets room that Rosalind never had. She teases Orlando, runs rings around him, and quietly directs her own courtship while pretending to be a boy who is pretending to be her.

She keeps pointing at the body under the costume, too. "Dost thou think," she asks Celia, "though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?" (III.ii). The clothes are male. The disposition, she insists, is not.

The play's final joke lands on the same nerve. Rosalind delivers the epilogue and tells the crowd, "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me" (Epilogue). The character is a woman. The actor saying the line was not. That "if" is the whole gag.

Viola and Portia do it too

Rosalind is the most elaborate case, not the only one.

In Twelfth Night, shipwrecked and stranded, Viola disguises as a young man called Cesario to find work in Duke Orsino's household. "Conceal me what I am," she asks the sea captain (I.ii). The disguise then boxes her in. Olivia falls for Cesario. Viola falls for Orsino. She can say nothing true to either. "I am not that I play," she tells Olivia (I.v), and alone she calls the whole thing out: "Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness" (II.ii).

Portia's disguise in The Merchant of Venice carries the highest stakes. She dresses as a male lawyer named Balthasar, walks into a Venetian courtroom no woman could have entered, and wins the case that saves Antonio's life. From inside that disguise she delivers the most famous lines in the play: "The quality of mercy is not strained" (IV.i).

The pattern is hard to miss once you see it. Male clothes buy these women a freedom the plays never hand them in skirts.

What the disguises actually mean

Here is where the agreement ends, and it is worth being plain that this part is interpretation, not record.

Jean Howard, in a 1988 Shakespeare Quarterly essay, reads the disguises as finally conservative. The plays let a woman play at being a man for a few acts, then marry her off and take the freedom back at the curtain. Order is restored. In Howard's reading, Viola never truly threatens that order, because her feelings stay recognisably female under the costume.

Stephen Greenblatt argues something less tidy. In his essay "Fiction and Friction" he says the comedies do two opposite things at once: they prod at Elizabethan ideas about sex and gender, and they reassure the audience those ideas are safe.

Stephen Orgel, in his book Impersonations, asks the question sitting underneath all of it. Why was England the only country in Europe that kept women off the public stage entirely? He treats the all-male theatre as a genuine historical puzzle rather than a neutral default.

My own read, offered as opinion: the disguises work as drama precisely because the freedom is borrowed. The audience knows the dress comes back. The pleasure is watching a character get to be someone the world would never normally allow, while the clock runs down.

The people who wanted it banned

Not everyone was charmed. A strand of Puritan writers loathed the sight of boys dressed as women.

Philip Stubbes set out the case in The Anatomie of Abuses (1583). Clothing, he argued, exists to mark the difference between the sexes, so wearing the other sex's dress was a kind of lie about your own nature. Writers in his camp reached for Deuteronomy 22:5, the Old Testament verse forbidding a woman to wear men's clothing or a man to wear a woman's.

Their objection went past scripture. Boys playing women, painted and costumed in front of paying crowds, looked to them like an open door to exactly the desire the Ganymede joke was playing with.

Four hundred years before a Britpop chorus made a punchline of tangled desire, a boy in a dress stood on a London stage, playing a woman who was pretending to be a boy, and asked the crowd to keep up. They did.

Common questions

Why did men play women in Shakespeare's plays? Women did not act on the professional English stage during his lifetime. It was custom rather than law, but it held firm, so boys and young men played every female role.

What name does Rosalind take when she disguises as a man? Ganymede, after the beautiful youth in Greek myth whom Zeus carried off to Olympus. The name carried a homoerotic charge for Shakespeare's audience.

When did women first act on the English stage? On 8 December 1660, when a woman played Desdemona in Othello. A royal patent made the change official in 1662.

Which Shakespeare characters cross-dress? The best-known are Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth Night, and Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Imogen in Cymbeline and Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona also disguise themselves as men.

Sources and further reading

• Folger Shakespeare Library — Full play texts
• Royal Shakespeare Company — Women on stage
• Folger Shakespeare Library — The First English Actresses
• Ganymede in Greek myth (cupbearer, abduction, and the origin of "catamite")
• Jean E. Howard, "Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England", Shakespeare Quarterly (1988)
• Stephen Greenblatt, "Fiction and Friction", in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988)
• Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge University Press, 1996)