著者

小野 良子

出版者

桃山学院大学

雑誌

英米評論 (ISSN:09170200)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.15, pp.57-71, 2000-12-20

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The female figures in Shakespeare's comedies, such as Rosalind in As You Like It and Viola in Twelfth Night, are traditionally portrayed as healthily asexual heroines by women actors on the modern stage or screen. The disguised heroine as witty, eloquent, and beautiful boy who is erotically alluring to another female figure in the play reveals in the final act the female body in the female clothes to celebrate her own marriage to a male superior. The cross-dressing of the female figure is simply taken for granted as a theatrical convention and never raises sociopolitical issues concerning sexuality and gender among the modern audience. However, for the critical reader of Shakespeare's plays transvestism and 'the body beneath' of the female figures are of much consequence in speculating on the representation and its reinterpretation of the Elizabethan stage. Every Shakespeare student knows that there were no professional women actors on the English stage before 1660, and that the female roles had been played by young male actors. The taking of female parts by boy actors should not be dismissed as the convention. Indeed, this fact has raised crucial issues of postmodern cultural criticism among Shakespearean readers. From the recent critical point of view, identity, either gendered or sexed, has been seen as a historical production. The human subject is considered the ideological product of the relations of power in the Elizabethan patriarchal society. The theatre then becomes an agent of the absolutist state, reproducing the state's strategies and celebrating and confirming its power. The purpose for my essay is to examine the process by which power is produced and legitimated on the Shakespearean stage and to lead to the argument which explores possibilities of reinterpretation and its cultural production of Shakespeare's comedies on the modern Japanese stage. This paper traces the contemporary anti-theatrical campaign and its discourse which condemned the closs-dressing of the boy actor as the threat to the male identity and hierarchical society itself; and then speculates upon the relation between the boy actor and the woman he plays-the imaginedbody of a woman, a staged body of a boy actor-and how clothes embodied and determined a particular sexual identity and contradictory fantasies of the body beneath.