Masculinity, Corporality and the English Stage 1580–1635

Combining analysis of early modern anatomical science, social phenomena such as cross dressing, examples of proto-feminist cultural agency and close readings of English professional theatre texts, the author presents an original investigation into shifting dramatic representations of the sexed and gendered body, together with the ways in which early modern English professional playwrights used carefully-constructed versions of human corporality to inflect their interventions into the gender politics of the period.

The significance of human anatomy to the most physical of art forms, the theatre, has hitherto been an under-explored topic. Filling this gap, Christian Billing questions conventional wisdom regarding the one-sex anatomical model and uses a range of medical treatises to delineate an emergent two-sex paradigm of human biology. The impact such a model had on the staging of the human form in English professional theatre is also explored in appraisals of: (i) the homo-erotic significance of a two-sex paradigm; (ii) social and theatrical cross-dressing; (iii) the uses of theatrical androgyny; (iv) masculine corporality and the representation of assertive women; and (v) the theatrical poetics of human dissection. Billing supports cultural and scientific study with close-readings of Lyly, Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Ford. The book provides a sophisticated and original analysis of the early modern stage body as a discursive site in wider debates concerning sexuality and gender.