«Come muovermi nel mio corpo da uomo»: il corpo maschile travestito nel teatro inglese, dai ragazzi attori a Caryl Churchill

Among the many traditions of cross-dressing in performing practices, English Renaissance theatre plays a central symbolic role, especially considering the Shakespearean canon; however, only through the disruptive reading of gender and queer studies Shakespeare’s theatre has been studied as a transvestite theatre in which all female parts were played by boy actors. This article intends to show how this transvestite body opens a diachronic perspective on those theatrical practices of the second half of the twentieth century that rediscover the Elizabethan stage as a locus of artifice. Renaissance and twentieth-century theatre thus share the transvestite male body, not following a linear dynamic of model and imitation, but in a much more complex interweaving of echoes and returns. Through an analysis of two works by the playwright Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine (1979) and A Mouthful of Birds (1986), the essay explores the transvestite male body as a place of dialogue between the Shakespearean and the contemporary scene, which share effeminacy -here understood as the staging of femininity on a male body- as a detonator for a wider crisis of binary categories.

Boys Should be Girls: Shakespeare's Female Roles and the Boy Players

Recent performances of female roles in Shakespeare's plays by adult males help to perpetuate the myth that this was the practice of Shakespeare's time. This article attempts to reinforce the view that all female roles were played by boys – i.e., young males with unbroken voices – by analyzing the demands made by the plays. Shakespeare regularly had available to him up to four boy actors, perhaps more. Yet some plays have as few as two female roles, and few have more than four. The conclusion is that Shakespeare would have been highly unlikely to waste the resources of his company by calling upon adult males to play parts that make use of the talents of his boys. Stanley Wells is Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham. A former editor of Shakespeare Survey and director of the Shakespeare Institute, he is author of numerous books on Shakespeare, general editor of the Penguin and Oxford editions of Shakespeare, and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare.