My first stage kiss, given me by Suffolk, I accepted as Margaret awakening to her potential: “That for thyself; I will not so presume/ To send such peevish tokens to a king.” Sander Cooke, Chapter XI, The Secret Player
Near the conclusion of her chapter on boy players, Lisa Jardine argues that the alluring male effeminacy of the “beardless boy’ playing the woman’s part” is an act for a male audience’s appreciation’ (31). The strong theatrical feelings aroused by the boy players comes from their maleness (33: Jardine’s emphasis). Stephen Orgel and others point out that these boys very much appealed to women as well—as we see with the Countess Olivia in Twelfth Night who prefers the youth Caesario (the disguised Viola) to her manly wooer the Count Orsino. Women audience members also found boy actors appealing.
As Coleridge so famously observed, while watching a play audiences willingly suspend their disbelief. In Shakespeare’s day, the stage was “a wooden O” where beneath the costumes of king and villain were actors who learned lines; where women’s parts were played by boys. The community ritual of theatre, with audiences believing, or at least suspending disbelief in the stage appearances, has been central since its religious origins in Greece. The very fact that stage deaths are not real provides the catharsis.
But stage kisses are real. The scene mentioned above comes from Henry VI, Part 1, Sander’s first London stage appearance. She plays Margaret of Anjou, soon to be Queen Margaret. Richard Burbage, playing Suffolk, believes he is kissing the boy Alexander Cooke. In this case the actor happens to be a girl, but that is a closely guarded secret. Burbage is not one of those who guess Sander Cooke’s true identity.
The audience, to feel pity and fear, must believe Margaret is a woman. Suffolk intends her for his own mistress after he delivers her to the king: the scene represents their erotic bond. Margaret, a virgin, agrees to the bargain: “That for thyself.” The kiss she gives him is a “peevish token” not worthy the king: what a coquette! She will never give such a passionate kiss to pious King Henry.
But of course, on Shakespeare’s stage Margaret is ambiguous: under her gown she would expected to be a boy. Stage playing was considered too dangerous for women, but the Puritanical John Rainoldes was not the only one who is aware of the erotic charge brought to stage by “wanton boy actors.”
Kate Collins knows the risks when she becomes Alexander Cooke, not just of being revealed as a girl but of being taken for an alluring boy. Her “effeminacy” is a bigger problem for her than for other boy players: as she moves around London, she must appear to be an anonymous male apprentice.
Playwrights can exploit the seductive potential of transvestism. Julia, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, tells her maid Lucetta that she intends to dress as a “well-reputed page” when she goes in pursuit of her lover as the means “to prevent the loose encounters of lascivious men.” Yet when she speaks of fashion of hair, breeches, and codpiece she intends to adopt, she suggests the seductiveness of her male apparel more than the protection it offers. Codpieces, after all, were decorative covering that emphasized male genitals.
True, the romantic language of the Shakespeare’s plays is more reserved than that found in Elizabethan erotic poetry, his own Venus and Adonis included. But not only do bawdy double entendres and sexual allusions abound in plays: the very presence of boys playing women onstage must have created an ambiguous, transgressive and sexually charged atmosphere. No wonder theatres were relegated to the unregulated suburbs!
To purchase The Secret Player, and or the next installment of Alexander Cooke’s story:
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Player-Jinny-Webber/dp/0998698016
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Venus-Novel-Shakespeares-England/dp/0998698024