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Plays are no Images of trueth.... in Stage Playes for a boy to put one the attyre, the gesture, the passions of a woman; for a meane person to take vpon him the title of a Prince with counterfeit porte, and traine, is by outwarde signes to shewe them selues otherwise then they are, and so with in the compasse of a lye.
Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in fiue Actions
IN 1579 AND 1582, STEPHEN GOSSON, A PLAYWRIGHT-TURNED-CLERGYMAN, published his contributions to an increasingly virulent antitheatrical tradition. Running through Gosson's attacks is a concern with the epistemological status of a spectacle in which clowns played kings, and boys dressed as women. Gosson and his antitheatrical compatriots subjected plays to the same Platonic accusations that plagued poetry: their accusations of equivocation presuppose a familiar concept of representation as the husk, or appearance, and truth as the kernel, or real, the danger lying in representation's seductive occlusion of truth.2 Perhaps more than any other early modern theatrical practice, reliance on the boy-actor provoked questions about the epistemology of spectatorship and its libidinal economy. Despite these questions, however, the epistemological status of the crossdresser is rarely the focus of most recent work on crossdressing. For example, in her encyclopedic treatment of the topic, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie Garber critiques the tendency "to look through rather than at the cross-dresser, to turn away from a close encounter with the transvestite, and to want instead to subsume that figure within one of the two traditional genders."3 But if one sees a crossdresser who "passes," one must know that one is looking at a crossdresser in order not to look through. As a disguise, crossdressing is in part an attempt to trick others and thus necessarily posits a spectator, if only an ignorant spectator. It may be difficult, even impossible, to map what Harry Berger Jr. might call the "virtual spectator"4 onto more sociological models of early modern playgoing. But the spectator's relation to the crossdresser becomes crucial when we turn to plays in which crossdressing is a significant plot device and in which the split between ignorant spectators (within the play) and spectators-in-the-know both forwards the narrative and produces aesthetic and erotic pleasure.
One reason why...