“Acting is too dangerous a life for a woman, traveling about, meeting all sorts, wearing costumes, pretending and lying.” Jack Wilson in Chapter II, The Secret Player
In his book Impersonations (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Stephen Orgel raises the question of why in Elizabethan England, alone of European countries, only boys were permitted to play women’s roles onstage.
It’s not as if sexual complications were thereby eliminated: quite the opposite. It was said that female actors in France, Spain and Italy were little better than whores—but even if true, so what? They performed onstage; they conducted their private lives as they chose. There was no lack of women of loose morals in London either.
Preachers inveighed against the theatre in Shakespeare’s day for its pretense and lying, with lowly actors playing noblemen and kings, but chiefly for its sexual immorality. Not only could theatregoers procure illicit sex with the shady ladies of Bankside near or even in the theatres, they argued, but boy actors playing women’s roles caused all sorts of sexual disruption. Boys became objects of lust to both women and men.
During the rule of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans in the seventeenth century, preachers prevailed. London theatres were shuttered from 1648 until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Boy actors were only one reason; the entire theatrical enterprise was regarded as morally corrupt. In Shakespeare’s day, public theatres were relegated to the suburbs outside London proper, the relatively lawless areas of Shoreditch and Bankside.
Little is known about the reality of the boy players. Nor do we know the answer, beyond Virginia Woolf’s speculations about Shakespeare’s sister: what if a female had theatrical aspirations? In Woolf’s imagining, she would come to a bad end. In England in Shakespeare’s day, she might play music at country faires if she were Italian and part of an Italian traveling troupe: the line between music and theatre wasn’t clearly drawn. But if she were English-born, among the many doors closed to her was the canvas entrance to the players’ wagon.
We don’t know what risk a woman actor would have endured, as we don’t actually know to what extent boys on stage were sexual objects. Did they indeed provoke the lusts of women and of men? We merely have the horrified preachers to go by, and our own imaginations. The few theatregoers who wrote their reactions to plays they watched speak of Desdemona and other heroines as “she”, with no hint that a boy played the role.
Lisa Jardine in Still Harping on Daughters (Columbia University Press, 1983) argues that boys and women shared a state of dependency which was erotic. But boy actors were “dependent” only in their status as apprentices (which, in theatre, was rather different from apprentices to other trades): they performed in front of thousands of people as Katerina the shrew or Juliet, a profoundly independent, virtuoso action.
We know the names of just a handful of players who began their careers as boys, among them Alexander Cooke. Sander, as he was known historically, went on to become a sharer in Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and later, under King James, the King’s Men. Sander Cooke, thus, was my taking-off point into a fictional exploration of the status of boy actors on Shakespeare’s stage.