Status Updates From Shakespeare : Antibiographi...

Shakespeare got maximum effect from the gender confusion by constantly having his female characters—Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth
Night—disguise themselves as boys, creating the satisfyingly dizzying situation of a boy playing a woman playing a boy.

For many of a conservative nature, stage transvestism was a source of real anxiety. The fear was that spectators would be attracted to both the female character and the boy beneath, thus becoming doubly corrupted.

This disdain for female actors was a Northern European tradition. In Spain, France, and Italy, women were played by women.

The patron afforded the actors some measure of protection, and they in turn carried his name across the land, lending him publicity and prestige. For a time patrons collected troupes of actors rather in the way rich people of a later age collected racehorses or yachts.

Puritans detested the theater and tended to blame every natural calamity, including a rare but startling earthquake in 1580, on the playhouses. All the female parts were of course played by boys—a convention that would last until the 1660s. In consequence the Puritans believed that the theaters were hotbeds of sodomy—still a capital offense in Shakespeare’s lifetime—and wanton liaisons of all sorts.

The sight of a screeching ape clinging for dear life to a bucking horse while
dogs leaped at it from below was considered about as rich an amusement as public life could offer.

In 1587 a visitor from the country wrote excitedly to his father about an unexpected event he had seen at a performance by the Admiral’s Men: One actor had raised a musket to fire at another, but the
musket ball “missed the fellow he aimed at and killed a child, and a woman great with child forthwith, and hit another man in the head very sore.” It is astounding to suppose that actors were firing live muskets.

The defeat of the Spanish Armada changed the course of history. It induced a rush of patriotism in England that Shakespeare exploited in his history plays (nearly all written in the following decade), and it gave England the confi dence and power to command the seas and build a global empire, beginning almost immediately with North America.

Tensions between Protestants and Catholics came to a head in 1586 when Mary, Queen of Scots, was implicated in a plot to overthrow the queen and Elizabeth agreed, reluctantly, that she must be executed. Killing a fellow monarch, however threatening, was a grave act, and it provoked a response. In the spring of the following year, Spain dispatched a mighty navy to capture the English throne and replace Elizabeth.

“The more Elizabethan literature one reads,” he has written, “the more striking is Shakespeare’s paucity of religious reference.”

At the end of the London bridge the heads of serious criminals, especially traitors, were displayed on poles. The headless bodies were hung above the entrance gates to the city. There were so many heads that it was necessary to employ a Keeper of the Heads. Shakespeare was possibly greeted by the heads of John Somerville and Edward Arden, who were executed in 1583 for a fumbling plot to kill the queen.