To start with, historically, “In terms of theatrical background, it is a tradition that boy actors played women’s roles in Shakespeare’s time. Women had little or no part in the English theatrical history before the restoration of King Charles II in 1660, when it became possible for women to pursue a theatrical career”(Liu 79). Disallowing women from the stage was the rule for a very long time almost worldwide. So despite any subversive elements of cross-dressing in Shakespeare’s stories like the Viola/Cesario situation in Twelfth Night, historically it would have been allayed by the fact of being recursive cross-dressing which strays more into the comedic side of having a man playing a woman pretending to be man. This cultural baggage makes doing a production of a Shakespearian play with an all female cast even more recursive in that it then becomes a woman who is trained to play a man, who is, in the plot, playing a woman cross-dressing as a man who is trained to play a
To start with, historically, “In terms of theatrical background, it is a tradition that boy actors played women’s roles in Shakespeare’s time. Women had little or no part in the English theatrical history before the restoration of King Charles II in 1660, when it became possible for women to pursue a theatrical career”(Liu 79). Disallowing women from the stage was the rule for a very long time almost worldwide. So despite any subversive elements of cross-dressing in Shakespeare’s stories like the Viola/Cesario situation in Twelfth Night, historically it would have been allayed by the fact of being recursive cross-dressing which strays more into the comedic side of having a man playing a woman pretending to be man. This cultural baggage makes doing a production of a Shakespearian play with an all female cast even more recursive in that it then becomes a woman who is trained to play a man, who is, in the plot, playing a woman cross-dressing as a man who is trained to play a