Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jean E. Howard

Critical Essay by Jean E. Howard

SOURCE: "Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4, Winter, 1988, pp. 418-40.

In the following excerpt, Howard contends that cross-dressing, while destabilizing the "notion of fixed sexual difference" in Shakespeare's plays, is nevertheless part of a conservative process in which inverted gender roles are ultimately restored to their "proper" positions.

As a way of placing dramas of female crossdressing within larger gender struggles, I am going to look briefly at three Shakespearean comedies, beginning with what I consider to be the most recuperative: Twelfth Night. Undoubtedly, the crossdressed Viola, the woman who can sing both high and low and who is loved by a woman and by a man, is a figure who can be read as putting in question the notion of fixed sexual difference. For Catherine Belsey that blurring of sexual difference opens the liberating possibility of undoing...
(read more)