In today’s culture, people don’t think too terribly much of it when women dress like men or men like women. Not to say that women want to be men or men want to be women – though at times that is the case – rather that one gender will wear the pants or clothes of the opposite gender. And it doesn’t seem to really bother people in today’s society. However, back in the day of Shakespeare, women were expected to wear their gowns and petticoats while it was the men who could prance freely in their hose and doublets. Shakespeare the playwright used women dressing in drag several times throughout his works to both amuse the audience and further the play in a plethora of ways ranging from allowing the women to carry on with their journey un-accosted to their destination while playing cupid (as with Roslind in “As You Like It”), or freeing their lords and husbands from some crazy contract (like Portia in “The Merchant of Venice”).
These, it should be noted, are just two examples of places where Shakespeare has his female characters dress as males. The most noted and longest stretch for female-to-male drag is Viola in the play “Twelfth Night” where she spends most of the performance dressed as a man. However, because the roles of Roslind and Portia are no less important, they are smaller and easier to deal with.
The fact that this enables the female characters to move freely and show their intelligence is widely overlook and/or taken for granted. The time of Shakespeare was when women should be “seen and not heard”, regardless of the fact the monarch was, herself, a woman – hence the most powerful woman in all of England. The opinions of women were still thought less of. Had Portia not come up with the idea to dress as men in “The Merchant of Venice”, she would have probably been laughed out of court, her husband’s friend destitute or dead, and the whole lot of them might have been banished. Instead, she says to her maid:
They shall, Nerissa; but in such a habit
That they shall think we are accomplished
With that we lack. I’ll hold thee any wager
When we are both accoutered like young men,
I’ll prove the prettier fellow of the two,
And wear my dagger with the braver grace,
And speak between the change of a man and boy… (MoV: III.v.60-66)
Portia is able to see the benefit of dressing as a man to go into the court and save both of their husband’s and Antonio, the friend of her husband. It was a very risky thing to do, impersonating a professional of the law as well as a man, but it paid off. When it comes to love, perhaps Shakespeare is saying, no risk is too big and inventive ideas will get one far.
Roslind, likewise, is actually facing banishment from her uncle, the Duke. It is her cousin Celia who is the one who comes up with the idea of heading into the woods, yet Roslind is hesitant, and rightly so, for she says, “Alas, what danger will it be to us,/ Maids as we are, to travel forth so far!/ Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold” (AYLI, I.iii.108-10). And Roslind is right: the men they encounter, when they see that the women are without companions, will be more likely to take their virginity than their gold and gems. But, of course, her gentle coz has yet another idea: they’ll dress as men! (AYLI I.iii.111-14) But Roslind, ever sensible, thought it would be better if she dressed the man, for “I am more than common tall,/ That I did suit me all points like a man?” (AYLI I.iii.115-16). And so, dressing as men, they’re able to make their way through the forest without be accosted, encounter Orlando, Roslind’s crush, and see Celia’s uncle, Duke Senior, who lives there in the forest.
Shakespeare, it’s fair to say then, uses women dressing as men both as a plot device and for comic reasons. While the comic reasons are more prevalently seen in “Twelfth Night” with Viola, “Merchant of Venice” and “As You Like It” utilize female-to-male drag to move the story along and allow the female characters, Portia and Roslind, to move freely in their actions, intelligence, and personality.
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