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The most anxious and confrontational political statement in the 1647 folio of the plays of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher is a blank space. In one of many prefatory poems by many authors, Thomas Peyton expresses his fear that his praise of Fletcher will "raise a discontent / Between the Muses and the ____________." (1) The rhyme, of course, makes clear the missing word is "Parliament"; the royalist affiliations of the folio are an open secret. But as Philip J. Finkelpearl shows, the folio's royalism is in fact at odds with the more complex politics of the plays themselves--plays that Finkelpearl argues are more aligned with the "country" than the "court." (2) Anxiety does not forestall praise, and some of the praise is strongly but curiously gendered. The royalist propagandist John Berkenhead seems to have trouble deciding whether he admires these writers for their masculine or for their feminine qualities. Berkenhead concludes his poem.
What strange Production is at last displaid, (Got by Two Fathers, without Female aide) Behold, two Masculines espous'd each other, Wit and the World were born without a Mother. (sig. E2v)
Berkenhead praises the two authors for a creative power analogous to that of the Deity: Beaumont and Fletcher create "Wit" as God created "the World." Their creative act, ostensibly male gendered and "without a Mother," nonetheless calls for an espousal of the two fathers. It is not clear what "Masculines" means. Moreover, the decorum Berkenhead admires is gendered female:
All's safe, and wise, no stiffe-affected Scene, Nor swoln, nor flat, a True Full Naturall veyne; Thy sense (like well-drest Ladies) cloath'd as skinn'd, Nor all unlac'd, nor City-startcht and pinn'd. (sig. E2v)
But even this "female" decorum slides into androgyny:
No savage Metaphors (things rudely Great) Thou dost display, not butcher a Conceit; Thy Nerves have Beauty, which Invades and Charms; Lookes like a Princesse harness'd in bright Armes. (sig. E2v)
For Berkenhead, the beauty of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays is like the beauty of a cross-dressed heroine.
Beaumont and Fletcher's plays indeed imitate Shakespeare's cross-dressed heroines. (3) However, the echoes of Shakespeare in Beaumont and Fletcher change the subject from gender to power. In the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, cross-dressing often enacts anxiety about political authority as well as gender roles, as though gender served as a discussible surrogate for a less discussible topic, royal absolutism. Perhaps such surrogacy was no longer necessary for playwrights, audiences, or readers in 1647, but circumstances were very different under James I. Under James, the Beaumont and Fletcher plays reworked the materials of Twelfth Night and redeployed the conventions of theatrical cross-dressing. Sometimes the plays that do so sharpen gender distinctions to the disadvantage of women, and sometimes they explore eroticism in ways that adumbrate the eventual emergence of a new and deviant category, homosexuality. (4) While cross-dressing in Shakespeare is often a strategy for enhancing a woman's ability to discover her own mind, cross-dressing in Beaumont and Fletcher sometimes enacts a male fantasy about women's unthreatening devotion to men and sometimes enacts a parallel fantasy--really an anxiety--about the instability of gender identity. Both fantasies, I suggest, reveal anxiety about the nature of power itself. Playful self-awareness, the very thing at which Shakespeare's cross-dressed heroines are best, seems, by its suppression, to be incompatible with absolutism. (5)
Self-aware, skillful women seem to have been both alluring and threatening to Shakespeare and his audience. While The Merchant of Venice empowers Portia when she dons male clothing, the bawdy joking about "fingers" and "rings" at the end of the play defines women as sexual property. As You Like It, the least unstable of Shakespeare's cross-dressed comedies, gives us a Rosalind clearly brighter and more self-aware than any other character in the play. However, by play's end she invokes the magic of Hymen to restore a patriarchal ideal. (Jonathan Goldberg writes of the epilogue, "What Rosalind does at the end of As You Like It is a model for royal power.") (6) Twelfth Night intensifies both allure and anxiety by its attention to same-sex attraction as well as to female empowerment. But while Viola is wise enough to recognize a knot too hard for her to untie, she has none of the manipulative skills of Portia or Rosalind. That the play is relatively modest in its challenge to received gender roles may have enhanced its appeal to Beaumont and Fletcher. Twelfth Night is also modest in its claims for patriarchal authority: neither Orsino nor Sir Toby holds much promise of redeeming a linkage between authority and good judgment. (Malvolio--authoritarian, inept, and lecherous--can be seen as the "absent father.")
Twelfth Night differs from Shakespeare's other comedies because Viola-Cesario has in Sebastian a look-alike double of stable sex (although, like Viola, Sebastian is an object of desire for both women and men). Beaumont and Fletcher, or their audiences, may have found this brother-sister pairing attractive for several reasons. Pairing brother and sister heightens a play's opportunity to distinguish male and female gender roles. (7) A brother is potentially another kind of patriarchal constraint on a young woman and her aspirations. Furthermore, the family connection helps reinforce the idea that both sex and gender are natural phenomena, not fluid social constructions. If Shakespeare opened the door to a constructivist view, Beaumont and Fletcher were chief among those who tried to push that door shut. However, the fluidity of gender in Twelfth Night clearly had allure even for playwrights who found female power more threatening than did Shakespeare. I suggest that one anxiety-producing innovation--women with some capacity to make their own choices--offered Beaumont and Fletcher a way of figuring another innovation their culture had a hard time fully assimilating: Jacobean absolutism. Unstable gender roles--or female unruliness--serve as markers for anxieties or conflicted ideas about royal power. (8) Indeed, unstable gender roles and kings professing absolutist principles often test the shaping power of traditional genres; this fact may in turn help explain the new and puzzling genre particularly associated with the Beaumont and Fletcher plays, tragicomedy.
I
Love's Cure reworks the brother-sister plot to celebrate maleness, honor, and the naturalness of male-female desire. Initially mocking a link between effeminacy and pacifism, the play eventually implies that biological maleness guarantees valor, and thus perhaps offers a reassuring message about King James. Finkelpearl dates this King's Men play between 1606 and 1610. (9) The main plot is virtually a "nature vs. nurture" experiment, in which Clara is a martial maid dressed as a man and her brother, Lucio, is disguised as a woman. When the father of these siblings, Alvarez, was exiled from Seville, he carried with him his daughter disguised as a boy and called her by her brother's name. Meanwhile, his wife Eugenia stayed at home and dressed their son as a girl. During their time in exile, Alvarez...
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