SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Imagery of Gender and Gender Crossing," in Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare, The University of North Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 188-202.

In the following excerpt, Novy explores Shakespeare's changing use of gender imagery in his comedies, later tragedies, and romances.

In an earlier chapter I connected the fact that Shakespeare's female characters were played by males on the Elizabethan stage with affinities between actors and women; now it is time to make explicit the more general analogy that his plays suggest between gender and theatrical role. The kings in Shakespeare were played by commoners; that fact, like the use of boy actors, gave rise both to moralists' complaints about the disorder of the stage and to Shakespeare's dramatization of the theatrical nature of social roles—in this case, of kingship. Just as Shakespeare found his imagination struck by the stage's transformation of subject to king and...