FEMALE AUDIENCE AND CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF THE BOY HEROINE IN EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH DRAMA

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The issue of boy actors playing female roles in English Renaissance drama has been widely discussed in recent years; the boy heroine's sexual ambiguity, in both homoerotic and androgynous terms, has been much explored, particularly in the case of female characters in male disguise. Nevertheless, little attention has been drawn to changing conceptions of representations of women by male actors in seventeenth-century English drama. Women's bodies as created by boy actors seem to have started to have a different meaning in the second decade of the seventeenth century, a time when women's fashion of donning men's clothes began to raise public interest and anxiety in society. The women's bodies fabricated by boys in the plays written in this period, in particular in the second decade of the seventeenth century, tend to embody female resistance to social assumptions about womanhood, rather than female submission to them; the woman's body created through the body of the boy actor in these plays often indicates the impossibility of female subjectivity being contained in the fictional female figure on the stage, rather than functioning as an embodiment of social assumptions about womanhood. This change in the conceptions of women's bodies as created by boy actors coincides with the historical moment when a real woman in male clothes, Mary Frith, was attracting Londoners' curiosity. This essay attempts to discuss the significance of the change in dramatic representations of womanhood through male bodies in the second decade of the seventeenth century both in relation to the response of the female audience to such representations and with reference to the contemporary pamphlet debate on gender. The issue of women had been debated in England since the late sixteenth century, but came to a climax with the publication of Swetnam's notorious pamphlet, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and vnconstant women (1615) and of three responses to it, one of which at least was written by a woman, as well as with the 'Hic Mulier'fashion among women. Social concern about sex-gender ideology came to a head when King James disseminated an injunction against this fashion in 1620, the same year that the pamphlets Hic Mulier and Haec-Vir were published. The change in the conceptions of the representation of women by boy actors on the stage may have functioned as a spur to some women writers to publish their own works in this period, notably Aemilia Lanyer (Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 1611), Elizabeth Cary (The Tragedy of Mariam, 1613), and Lady Mary Wroth (The Countesse of Montgomery's Urania, 1621). The change in the meaning of the fictitious women on the stage created through the medium of male bodies can have an entirely different effect when located in a different cultural context in a different period. In order to see an example of cultural mobility made possible by male actors playing women's roles, the paper finally glances at the relationship between the audience and the female impersonations by male actors in a Kabuki version of Twelfth Night, directed by Yukio Ninagawa in July 2005.

著者

楠明子
東京女子大学

FEMALE AUDIENCE AND CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF THE BOY HEROINE IN EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH DRAMA

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