The fact that boys played the female roles in Shakespeare is too often dismissed as a historical quirk. "Conventions" are a vital part of drama's meaning.
Stephen Orgel asked a very good question at the beginning of his book Impersonations – how on earth did they get away with boys playing the female roles in Shakespeare? It’s usually dismissed as simply “convention”, some sort of cultural blindspot which we simply accept and move on to thinking about the female character being portrayed. We aren’t distracted by the fact that the orchestra at the symphony are in evening dress, or worried by the rock band going off the stage when they haven’t played the song the crowd are yelling for – hang on, they’re coming back again...
But dismissing the encore or the dinner jacket as “conventions” misses the point – these may be invisible to the audience, but they say extremely interesting things about the place those performances have in our culture. Why does going to the symphony involve pretending that we’re in all nineteenth century Europe? Why do the crowd have to prove their love for the band by cajoling them back to play the encore everyone knows is coming?
An interest in gender, costume and pretence is obvious in plays such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It – a woman fancies a girl in boy’s clothes, and ends up marrying his twin brother? A girl dressed as a page who pretends she is pretending to be a woman so the man she loves can pretend to make amorous speeches to her?
The so-called “conventions” are a vital part of Shakespearean theatre. I’m certainly not saying we should go back to producing everything in historically “authentic” ways – for a start, our culture doesn’t see women or boys in the same way as Shakespeare’s did - but it blunts our understanding of the plays to write off staging conditions as mere technical “conventions.”
