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Shahidha Bari: Hello. What a piece of work is a man and a woman and a trans man and a trans woman probably too. If only Hamlet had given it some proper thought, instead of sulking about his new stepdad. Shakespeare's plays, you might know, were originally performed by all male casts on the Renaissance stage. In recent years, though, we've become more familiar with a whole array of female Hamlets and queer Lears in new productions. But maybe there's more to learn about gender and the early modern stage too. In today's Free Thinking, we're exploring cross dressing, queering and gender swapping in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporary John Lyly, as a new production of his surprisingly subversive play, Galatea opens at the Brighton Festival. It's Shakespeare's birthday on April the 23rd, too, so we're celebrating that and the anniversary of the First Folio, which was published 400 years ago, our Shakespeareans today are academics Will Tosh, head of research at Shakespeare's Globe and Emma Whipday, New Generation Thinker from Newcastle University. Emma, what is the First Folio? To what are we referring with that?

Emma Whipday: I mean the simplest way to talk about it is the First Folio is a very big book. It's around 900 pages and it contains almost all of Shakespeare's plays. And if we didn't have it today, then we'd be missing half of them. So there are 18 plays for which the only surviving version comes in the First Folio. So we wouldn't know Twelfth Night, for example, if it didn't exist.听 And it was created as a sort of collaboration between the King's Men, Shakespeare's company, who were still performing his plays years after his death, and a publisher and a printer to create a record of this repertoire that the company had been performing.

Shahidha Bari: How many copies are there extant?

Emma Whipday: I think it's around 236 or no 235 and there were probably around 750 to start with, but obviously many of them have been lost.

Shahidha:听 Wow. Will, why is this important?听

Will:听 So, as Emma says, the Folio contains the only copies of about half of Shakespeare's corpus, but also it represents a kind of change in publishing history, and represents a sort of change in cultural attitudes to drama. So Shakespeare's First Folio wasn't the first big format, large, expensive collection of plays. But it was the second. The first Folio containing drama was Ben Jonson's folio published in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death. Shakespeare's company take that format of the -听 and folios are big 鈥� folio is a size 鈥� a bit bigger than A3 which is folded once to get your little booklet and you put those together and that is your folio. That is expensive, really expensive to produce 鈥� it probably took nine months to print the First Folio. It鈥檚 really expensive to buy. And it suggests something significant about the contents. And here鈥檚 Shakespeare's company saying this is popular commercial drama in Folio format.

Shahidha:听 Well, the First Folio is definitely important for our discussion today. Because of those 18 precious plays are some of the most important cross dressing ones and characters that listeners will be familiar with. Viola, from Twelfth Night;听 Rosalind from As You Like It;听 but have you heard of Galatea and her friend Phillida?

No. Well, let's find out who they are from Andy Kesson of the University of Roehampton and Performance and Theatre artist Emma Frankland. They've been collaborating on a production of John Lily's play Galatea. Emma, Galatea was written in 1588.听 It's a really intriguing story, starting with two young women, Galatea and Phillida, who are disguised as men by their fathers in order to save them from being sacrificed to the wrathful god Neptune, who apparently has an appetite for pretty young things. What happens next? A lot, I think.

Emma Frankland:听听 Sure. I would challenge some of the assumptions around the gender identity of these two young people. I think what we know is that Galatea and Phillida are both living as women within the society that they're in. But what Galatea is -听 is truly a tale of two gender nonconforming people set off with this offer of -听 you鈥檙e seen in one way - you have to disguise yourself in this very gendered other way听 gendered as boys.

Shahidha:听 Galatea and Phillida fall in love with each other

Emma:听 Yeh. They fall in love. And it's a really, it's a very sweet consensual falling in love between two young people.

Shahidha:听 And they're confused because they're not sure.

Emma: They're confused. There鈥檚 like 鈥淥h my God, that boy is really hot, but that boy maybe thinks that I'm a - knows that I'm a girl. But am I a guy? And it's that thing and but actually that's kind of hot as well and they just like, you know, they get all undone and get all hot and bothered and they say let's go into the grove and make much of one another and they do. And then later, when they come out of the woods and their parents meet them and they've had to explain themselves to society, like how are they going to go forwards, in contrast to some of the similar scenes that we see in Shakespeare, this generally gets turned into a cisnormative听 heteronormative ending which is resolved.

Shahidha: It resolves into a marriage.

Emma: There's this offer that allows Galatea and Phillida to remain as they are.

Shahidha: That's because we get the gods, we get Venus and 鈥�.

Emma: Exactly. So Venus and Diana, who have been having a battle over custody of Cupid, you know. Venus is asked 鈥淰enus, what do you think of this match?鈥� and Venus, the goddess of love,听 the ultimate arbiter, says in a play that was performed in front of Queen Elizabeth the First 鈥淚 like it well and allow it.鈥� You know, she doesn't just allow it, she likes it and she allows it. So it's such an endorsement of queer love, of gender nonconformity. And I think that, you know, when you said at the beginning about how we have to queer Shakespeare that I think we're really familiar with needing to do something to a play in order to find ourselves reflected.听 With Galatea, it's just all there already.

Shahidha:听 Yeah. The transformation comes with a caveat, though, doesn't it? Well, a couple of caveats.

Emma: It comes with a caveat that yeah, no one can know who it's going to be and it's going to happen off stage.

Shahidha: Either Galatea or Phillida are going to be transitioned in some way, and we won't know.

Emma:听 Exactly. The audience doesn't get to know, and I think we've, I mean, we've been working on this play for eight years now and we've been looking at lots of different iterations of what could the gender identity be of those lovers? You know, what works? And I think without production always being led with the identities of the performers as well, and allowing the play to shift to accommodate them rather than the other way around鈥�

Shahidha:听 Let's find out more about your production in a moment. But can we find out a little bit about Lyly, Andy. Who was he? What kinds of work was he making at that time ?

Andy:听 So Lyly starts writing prose fictions, early kinds of novels, and right from the get go he does something innovative in that field in addressing his female readers and in making unusual amounts of space for female fictional characters within the stories as well. And he then goes on to write at least 8 plays that survive, which become increasingly interested both in their female characters, creating casts, which often have a predominance of female characters over male characters and especially interested in alternatives to assumed heterosexuality. So a lot of the players become about sidestepping and avoiding compulsory forms of heterosexuality, and Galatea is one of those plays.

Shahidha: We know Shakespeare had his favourite players. Lyly too, had a very particular set of actors he was working with.

Andy:听 Yes, he's working with boy players. Unlike the boy players working with Shakespeare, these boys are even younger still, maybe 8 to 13 years old. They are choir boys, they're singing in front of Elizabeth the First. These are a prestigious form of performer. Perhaps now we associate child performances, with apologies to parents listening to the show with going to see your kids show,听 these are the highest status performers in the land when Lyly's working with them.

Shahidha:听 Right. Will - you've written about male friendship in Shakespeare's England, and you know about this troop of boy actors. What is it that Lyly鈥檚 work in particular brings out in their performances? They have a particular name don't they?听

Will: St Paul's Boys. There's also a company called The Children of the Chapel, and by this point, by the time Lyly鈥檚 writing Galatea towards the end of the 1580s, Paul's Boys are the are the ones who are on top.听 They have a sort of huge amount of musical virtuosity. So it's that line of talent that the theatre company draws on. I mean, it's a really open question of what's the manner of performance the boys dealt in and whether we would see it as highly precocious or stilted or very naturalistic. I don't think anyone knows鈥� other than to say that there was a sense at the time that if you wanted to see hair pulling and foot stamping and breast beating, you might go to the adult commercial theatre; if you wanted to see finely crafted rather kind of mannerist and beautifully tinted representations of human action and desire, you went to the boy companies.

Shahidha: Is it homo-erotic?听听

Will: Massively. I mean, yeah, yes. And it's one of those questions about early modern arrangements of desire and sexuality and exploitation that is quite problematic. You know, these were relatively young and fairly exploited and subjected boys, but very much staged within an economy of desire that saw teenage boys as objects of desire.

Shahidha: Lyly was a near contemporary of Shakespeare,听 Andy, and it's possible to see some resemblance between them, isn't it? Here鈥檚 a section from rehearsals of your production which features Femi Tiwo as Galatea and Macy-Jacob Seelochan as Phillida, who meet in the forest, both dressed as boys.

EXTRACT:

Phillida: 鈥淪uppose I were a maiden I blush in supposing so, and that under the habit of a boy were the person of a maid. If I should utter my affection with size, manifest my sweet love by my salt tears, and prove my loyalty unspotted and my griefs intolerable would not, then, that beautiful face pity this true heart.

Gallatea: Admit that I were, as you would have me suppose that you were, and that I should, with entreaties, prayers, oaths, bribes and whatever can be invented in love, desire your favour. Would you not yield?

Phillida: Have you ever a sister?

Galatea: If I had but one, my brother must needs have too. But I pray, have you ever a one?

Phillida: My father had but one daughter and therefore I could have no sister.

Galatea:听 Ay me, he is, as I am, for his speeches be as mine are.

Phillida: What shall I do? Either he is subtle or I am simple. Come, let us into the Grove and make much of one another that cannot tell what to think of one another. 鈥溙� (Laughter)

Shahidha:听 Let's compare that to Shakespeare's 12th night, written a decade or so later, where Duke Orsino meets someone he believes to be his man servant. Cesario. But it's really Viola who is secretly in love with the Duke but disguised in male clothing.

EXTRACT:

Viola: My father had a daughter loved a man. As it might be, perhaps were I a woman I showed your Lordship听

Orsino: And what's her history?

Viola: A blank, my Lord. She never told her love. But let concealment, like a worm in the bud feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought. And with a green and yellow melancholy, she sat like patience on a monument. Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed? We men may say more, swear more, but indeed our shows are more than will, for still we prove much in our vows, but little in our Love.

Orsino: But died thy Sister in her love, my boy?

Viola: I am all the daughters of my father's house and all the brothers too. And yet I know not.

Shahidha: Paul Ready as Orsino and Naomi Frederick as Viola posing as Cesario, taken from Drama on 3鈥檚 2013 production of Twelfth Night. Andy, Emma Whipday - that does resemble something of Galatea, doesn't it?

Andy:听 Yeah, I think Galatea gets into Shakespeare's system very early on in Shakespeare's writing career, it gets deep into the DNA of his playwriting practice, particularly in the in the comedies, right from the start, right to the end.

Emma Whipday:听 Absolutely. And yeah, I think it's true that moment鈥檚 echoing specific moments in Galatea, but also, I mean, throughout Galatea, there are these moments where Phillida and Galatea are both almost telling each other or just about telling each other or very nearly explicitly telling each other that they're both girls. And interestingly, they catch on a lot quicker than Orsino does in Twelfth Night. Like they say 鈥淥h gosh, I think I think this might be a girl鈥� and that doesn't impede their love. It doesn't complicate their love. They just fall in love with that knowledge. And there's another interesting echo, I think, in the endings of both plays, because we've heard about how that, what Andy was referring to as that kind of compulsory heterosexuality happens off stage, mysteriously, we don't really know about it. But what we see on stage is, as Emma was saying, is kind of two gender non-conforming people falling in love, who appear to be both boys. So the kind of stage picture is - it's two boys who are in love, going off to get married and who are born, we believe, and have been living, as far as we know, as two women. So two women who fall in love and go off to get married. And then there's all the possibilities of actually, they're gender non-conforming, so they can't be read in those ways. So it's three different possibilities of queer love at once.

Shahidha: One of the other resemblances between Shakespeare and Lyly is the forest setting, and that's actually really important, isn鈥檛 it Emma? The forest is meaningful in some way.听

Emma Whipday:听 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the forest in Lyly and in Shakespeare is a place of play, of transformation of in between-ness; of not having to live by the rules you live in in the outside world. And the other interesting thing I find about the forest in Lyly is it's really crowded. You know everyone ends up there, there's loads going on and it was making me think of in Midsummer Night's Dream there's an ironic moment where Helena says, 鈥淣or does this wood lack worlds of company鈥澨� So essentially I've gone to the woods to escape the normal civilised world and that听 everyone's here.听

听

Shahidha: Will鈥檚 nodding along鈥�

Will: I mean Midsummer Night's Dream really strikes me as Galatea redux. It's sort of Shakespeare's take on the structure of the play, not only in young women evacuated into the woods because of peril - Helena and Hermia flee because Hermia faces execution or being walled up in a nunnery because she doesn't want to marry her father's choice. But that idea of mortals and immortals crossing paths and mortals being caught up in some sort of conflict. And Shakespeare kind of rewrites a couple of the scenes in Galatea in Midsummer Night's Dream, quite straightforwardly.

Shahidha: Emma Frankland your production of Galatea is also set outdoors. Why is that important?

Emma Frankland:听 Well,听 so we're working with the Cornish landscape theatre company Wild Works and they're brilliant at big outdoor beautiful pictures. And I think there's something about a trans led queer led production like this that we are not usually given this kind of scale to play with.听 It's a play that has 14 characters. One thing that I really wanted was to not put the show on and it be very small and like interesting for the queer community, interesting for academics, but not really to be seen beyond that, because it should be seen with the same kind of enthusiasm that people are like 鈥淵eah, let's go outside. Let's have a picnic. Let's bring the family. Get involved. Come on, let's go.鈥� And that鈥檚 one thing from putting it outdoors is it gives it immediately that scale and that status.

Shahidha: 听Yeah.听 You've also introduced or incorporated a signer into the production, is that right?

Andy:听 It's a dual language production, so we're working through both spoken English and British Sign language.

Emma Frankland:听 Yeah. I mean, it's not just we've incorporated a signer. One third of the company听 we're working with are deaf artists and half the company speak fluent BSL. So rather than bringing one person to interpret a company speaking in spoken English on perhaps one or two performance nights, which is more usual; across the entirety of our production, it will be performed in both languages and with no hierarchy in between as well. You know, I'm one of several directors working with Brian Duffy, who's a deaf director and BSL advisor. So yeah, it's interesting to take this play that already is in Elizabethan English and then to translate it first into BSL, and then you know present it to a modern audience has been fun.

Shahidha: It it's hardly been performed in public since Lyly鈥檚 day. Well, my producer actually found an online Lego version of it, which we recommend. But let's talk about your cast.

Emma Frankland: Oh yeah, it鈥檚 iconic.

Shahidha: Galatea and Phillida are played not by Lego, but by two actors who are trans. How did you come to that decision?

Emma Frankland: I think really early on it felt correct not to go to actors who necessarily were like trained in kind of Western classical tradition, but to go more into actors with lived identities that reflected the people that we were seeing in the play. And so a lot of the artists we're working with have their own performance practice or they work in cabaret or live art and performance and there was a point where we were like, OK, what are the possibilities? Galatea seems totally fine with being a boy. Phillida hates it. Maybe Galatea鈥檚 a trans man. Let's see what that looks like. We looked at that. OK, what is it if Phillida is a trans woman - that opens up a whole load of things. What is it if they're played by non binary people and we have just brought so many different brilliant minds and creatives?

Shahidha:听 It is really interesting that there is a difference between Galatea and Phillida鈥檚 experiences. Galatea is quite happy in male drag, as it were, but Phillida is anxious, she says about keeping company with boys and committing follies unseemly for my sex. She almost seems to express a kind of dysmorphia听听 about being dressed up, I thought.

Emma Frankland:听 And I think with the casting of Phillida that is being played by a trans feminine actor and one thing that really opened up there is like the violence of a father saying to their trans daughter who is living out as a woman in their society - I'm going to disguise you. How? says Phillida In attire, says her dad. Phillida knows exactly what's coming next. What kind of attire shall it be? Man's attire? No way, says Phillida. And so it brings a whole other dimension to it. And then what we see is this trans feminine person in the woods, as Galatea does, both of them freeing up their gender. I think for trans women in particular there's a real pressure to conform to certain stereotypical notions of womanhood, and you can be accused of not doing that enough or doing that too much. It鈥檚 a very difficult line to cross and one of the joys of working on this with a trans feminine actor has been being able to push past that and through that.

Shahidha:听 There are other changes you've made, too. There's a a character called Peter who's part of a sub-plot who describes himself as black but鈥�and you've altered their part a little bit too.

Andy:听 Oh, we wanted to embrace both the identity of the person playing Peter at the same time also embrace the blackness of the character. And there are places in the play in which that identity triggers racist language, and we didn't want to embrace that aspect of the of the play in our production. And again to think about how to open up space for those performers. And I'm seeing a really interesting line or thread here, talking about Shakespeare and Lyly and these recurrent plot lines, which are about who doesn't belong here and who can be safe over there? And I guess it's about asking how we do that in contemporary theatre too, how we ask those questions. Who is currently not being given voices and roles and the ability to exist in these kinds of stories?

Shahidha:听 Can we talk about the ending of the players, as Lyly writes it.听 Diana's offer to resolve the dilemma between Phillida and Galatea by transforming one of them into a man, it is an uncomfortable ending as it stands, isn't it, Andy?

Andy:听 It's an ending which has confounded and confused scholars. Once people started to become interested in this play in the 1990s, in particular, queer scholars wanted to find queer affirmative endings in the play, like Galatea, and instead found what seemed to be a sort of straightening out heterosexual solution to the play.

Shahidha: Yes, because听 if we read them as two women with feelings for each other, it seems to deny their lesbianism. And otherwise, we read it as a suggestion of forced heterosexuality or forced transition, as it were.

Andy:听 I feel like the text does so many interesting things there because it doesn't show us this. It's a proposal from Venus and it's left hanging. And even if what we think happens is that one of the characters accepts some sort of gender transition, that still leaves us with a gloriously transgender relationship, the idea that that's heteronormative in any kind of old fashioned way, just seems bizarre to me.

Emma Frankland: So we are working to an adaptation, so there's places where we've also brought our own voices into the play. And one of the things that we're having fun with is this moment where Venus makes this offer 鈥淥hh, I see what's going on here, right? Maybe one of you would like to be a man鈥�, but I think it's an offer rather than something reductive. And as Andy says, there's nothing heteronormative about what Venus is proposing.

Shahidha:

Well, we'll look forward to seeing it in Brighton. You're listening to Free Thinking on 麻豆约拍 Radio 3 and the Arts and Ideas Podcast on 麻豆约拍 Sounds.听 Happy Birthday, Will. Not you Will Tosh in the studio, step away from the cake. But William Shakespeare, whose anniversary we often like to mark in a special way. You can find more of our discussions about Shakespeare on the Free Thinking programme website听 /programmes/p06406hm

There's also the Shakespeare sessions on 麻豆约拍 Sounds, which offers an array of plays for your listening pleasure.听 /programmes/p0655br3/episodes/downloads

听

Emma Whipday and Will Tosh, let's swing our conversation back to the Bard for a moment. Emma, there's a new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream being staged at the Glyndebourne听 Festival in July and August, and it's the adaptation by Benjamin Britten.听 What does he make of it?

Emma Whipday: Well, it's interesting because Benjamin Britten seems to really like the fairy plots and that's where he focuses a lot of his energy. So most of the opera takes place in the woods and he very specifically becomes interested in the fact that Titania and Oberon are quarrelling over a changeling boy. So, in the Shakespeare's text, an awful lot of that quarrel is to do with jealousy. They听 think that the other might be in love with someone else. Oberon calls Titania proud. She calls him jealous, but in the Britten it's just about what, I mean I was interested that Emma earlier referred to a custody battle for Cupid in Galatea and I think there's something similar in Midsummer Night's Dream, that Titania loved the mother of this changeling boy and wants to kind of love him for her听 sake; and Oberon wants him as an attendant, and they're fighting over that.听 And that becomes the real originary moment of the plot for Britten. When interviewed about it, he talked about how he feels it's a very young man's play, regardless of when Shakespeare actually wrote it. So he's really going for that and youthful energy and has a very youthful Puck as well.

Shahidha: Will your new book coming out next year, I think, is about Queer Shakespeare where you detect the homoeroticism in plays like As You Like It.

Extract:

Celia: 鈥� You have simply misused our sex in your love prate. You must have your tablet and hose plucked over your head and show the whole world what the bird hath done to own nest.

Rosalind: Oh coz coz coz. My pretty little coz. That thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love, but it cannot be sounded. My affection has an unknown bottom like the Bay of Portugal.

Celia: Or rather bottomless, that as fast as you pour affection in, it runs out

Rosalind: No, that same wicked bastard of Venus, who was begot of thought, conceived of spleen and born of madness, that blind, rascally boy that abuses everyone's eyes because his own are out. Let him be judge how deep I am in love. I tell thee, Aliena, I cannot be out of the sight of Orlando. I'll go find a shadow and sigh till he come.

Shahidha:听 That was Pippa Nixon as Rosalind and Ellie Kendrick as Celia from Drama on 3鈥檚 production of As You Like It in 2016. Will, I think I've got the gist of it. But tell us what we've just heard.

Will:听 I will. I'll also just say that conveniently for this conversation Midsummer Night鈥檚 Dream and听 As You Like It are appearing at the Globe this summer. So catch them when you can. So we caught the end of a really sort of central scene in As You Like It, where Rosalind, who has gone in disguise into the woods as Ganymede, which is a resonantly queer name in the Early Modern period, along with her cousin Celia, whose non disguise is Aliana, to meet the man that she loves Orlando and dressed as Ganymede, has prompted him to woo her and then strong-armed Celia into performing a wedding ceremony between Rosalind as Ganymede and Orlando, so as Emma Whipday described in Galatea, this sort of extra-ordinary queer presentation on Lyly's stage of two male-presenting young people wooing each other visibly in front of the audience happens again in As You Like It, and we sort of get that wedding that is deferred in Galatea, staged in front of us. And it's something that gives great joy and some emotional torment to Rosalind as we heard. Celia has a kind of different response to it. She's kind of made to stand forward and say the words 鈥淚 marry Rosalind and Orlando or Ganymede and Orlando鈥� and then when Orlando leaves, she turns on Rosalind to accuse her of behaviour unbecoming her sex, and that extraordinary line when she says 鈥渨e must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head to show the world what the bird hath done to its own nest.鈥澨� Which is, is sort of as explicit as it sounds. She's saying something along the lines of 鈥渨e will see what this sort of behaviour has done to your body鈥�. Whether that means she bears signs of a kind of insatiable love making, or whether that means she's somehow undergone some kind of change or metamorphosis is unclear, but it means something. Celia thinks her behaviour has affected her identity.

Shahidha: Yeah. Emma, do you? Do you have a sense of whether the cross dressing and the gender swapping is a comic device? Is it being played for laughs or it seems like the stakes are high in the way that Will is describing it.

Emma Whipday:听 Absolutely. Yeah. I wouldn't say it's being played for laughs. I think the fact of it is always available to any playwright as something that can be used comically. And I think we're seeing that, you know in the Phillida and Galatea being confused about each other's gender or in, you know, in As You Like It and in Twelfth Night there are moments where the fact that there's a boy actor being performing a woman performing masculinity becomes comic. But I think it was just taken for granted as a theatrical convention. Women did have a theatrical presence, just not quite on-stage. And one of example of that is that at court women could perform silently in court masks, and one anti-theatrical writer William Prynne, writing in the 1630s, wrote that women performing it was terrible and boys playing women was terrible. And he said that boys playing women could effeminate the whole audience.

Shahidha:听 Will, I was going to ask you well is the practice of men playing women and then sometimes playing women pretending to be men like Viola -听 is that a cause for concern among audiences at the time?

Will: So it's a cause for concern among some audiences at the time. I suppose that the question of what audiences more generally thought of it is a really hard one. And I would suggest that someone like Lyly is innovating in the 1580s in drawing theatrical attention to the bodies of the actors on stage. He鈥檚 asking his audience, I think, to think about the material reality of the performers taking听 his roles and that's an invitation to the audience. It's an invitation to get interested in that kind of emotional exchange, that there's something layered and complex and nuanced and appealing about it.

Emma Frankland:听 And at the same time, I think making space for the cis and non-binary characters that we're seeing within the stories and it's that really complex blend of what we're seeing on stage, how we're having our attention called to us what鈥檚 happening on stage and at the same time the sheer radicalness of giving this amount of dramatic weight to characters who are otherwise so often marginalised in the theatre at this time.

Will:听 We should say that Lyly's doing it in a much more adventurous way than Shakespeare. You know, in this conversation, Shakespeare emerges as by far the more conservative writer.

Shahidha: 听He鈥檚 the conservative there.听 Will, it's worth us pointing out that all of this is happening within the context of the sumptuary laws in Early Modern England. Tell us what that entailed.

Will:听 So sumptuary laws were a series of proclamations put out through the 16th century to regulate who was permitted to purchase and wear certain fabrics and garments and accessories and other sorts of clothing. And mostly this was to do with regulating trade and regulating the passage of of cloth into and out of the country. But it's also a way of ensuring that social distinctions are听 marked and people don't get confused about sort of who exists at what level of society. What sumptuary laws don't really have that much to do with is in terms of gender presentation. So those are laws or kind of conventions that come out in various rather broader prohibitions, largely promulgated through the ecclesiastical courts about acceptable social behaviour. And it's not something that is widely prosecuted. So we don't really know the range of gender non-conforming behaviour at the level of clothing on the streets of London or elsewhere other than at various points in the broad Shakespearean era, it becomes an issue that people talk about.

Shahidha:听 Isn't that interesting that the stage is maybe hinting at maybe what is happening in the culture? Emma, you wanted to come in?

Emma Whipday:听 Yeah, absolutely. I think that question of who is prosecuted for it and the idea that actually clothing was seen as a marker of gender, but actually lots of people were sort of being less straightforwardly gender conforming than we might assume from reading the anxieties of the anti- theatrical writers about clothing. So for example, Stephen Gosson wrote that sex should be 鈥榓 sign distinctive鈥�. So this idea that there should be an outward, visible, easy way to tell someone's, I guess gender he's meaning. And then there were pamphlets in the 1620s called things like 鈥渢he man- woman and the womanish man鈥� complaining that actually there isn't a sign distinctive that people are confusing them, so there's this kind of complaint in the womanish man that men are stealing women's distinctive signs, they're stealing their fans and feathers and their curlings of their hair and their powdered hair. And women are too weak to fight and get these back. And so the men are confusing things. And then the man-woman similarly complains that women are wearing, for example, men's large hats and that this is making them monstrous and sort of inhuman because they can't be easily discovered to be women.

Shahidha: It's a bit like wearing boyfriend jeans now or something. There is evidence of well-known figures wearing clothes of the opposite sex at the time, isn't there?

Emma Whipday:听 Yeah, absolutely. So one of those examples would be Mary Fritzh, who was also known as Moll Cutpurse who was a thief and that was how she came to fame. And she was dramatised in a play by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton called The Roaring Girl in around 1611. And she's a really interesting character because she wears men's clothes, but she's not straightforwardly living as a man. So there are scenes in the play where she disguises herself as a man in order to duel men who've accused her of being essentially a loose woman, but she also wears both male and female clothing. And sometimes other characters refer to her as a man-woman, and she refuses to be put into a single straightforward label, and she has a scene that's quite amazing where she tries to go to a shop and buy the kind of clothing she wants to wear, and they refuse her service in what I think of as a kind of Pretty Woman scene鈥�.

Shahida: Yeah, that鈥檚 breaking my heart.

Emma Whipday: 鈥�. it鈥檚 kind of we're not serving you here, but she constantly has to fight against the assumption that听 she鈥檚 a sex worker because of the way she dresses. And actually some of the records we have of people being prosecuted for cross dressing relate to sex workers, so someone called Dorothy Clayton in the 1570s who was accused of living an incontinent life and wearing men's clothes. But she was also punished by being displayed in the pillory, wearing men's clothes. And I find that fascinating because it's what you're doing is transgressive but it's so shameful what you've done, that you'll be punished by being forced to do it.

Shahidha: Did you want to come in, Emma?

Emma Frankland:听 Yeah, I would. I mean, there's something deeply uncomfortable sitting and listening and being a trans person, trans woman sitting here as part of this discussion. And I think that's something that is interesting listening is the assumptions we're making about the gender identity of all of the people we're talking about that I've heard man, woman, boys dressing as men when of course we know that trans people have always existed and that some proportion of the people we're talking about would have not been men and would have not been women. And so the idea that it's an all-male stage is inherently flawed because it doesn't again leave space for trans identity, and I think that, you know, when we're asking about conflating comedy with any kind of gender nonconformity immediately that is also quite a violent assumption. And I think that there's something in Galatea, which I think you know, as we say, is the first play we have playing with these ideas, which is completely played straight between the lovers, that it's not played for laughs. It's this beautiful consensual, as I said, kind of undoing your gender and falling in love, whereas in the play you have Cupid cross dressing in a much more like for laughs way.

Shahidha:听 But I think you're pointing to a difficulty in our language and our ability to talk about it. And in fact, the ways that we talk about Shakespeare's comedies, As You Like It, Twelfth Night and we talk about them as comedies conventionally and you鈥檙e challenging that, I think. Emma, do you have a sense of why all this is happening the gender play, the subversions. Is there a social and contextual reason for it, do you think?听听

Emma Whipday:听 That's a really big question. I mean I suppose there's a lot of gender anxiety in the period in general. I think some of it you could link to Elizabeth the First, having ruled over such a patriarchal culture that she sort of reinforced in terms of sermons she calls to have preached, where she reinforced that patriarchal system of women should obey their husbands, masters, fathers. So it was, you know, she was very much the exception rather than the rule. And then the shift to James, the First, it was interesting. I mean, this is a massive overgeneralisation - that some scholars have suggested that female characters who are murderous and dangerous and rebellious were a lot more prevalent during the Elizabethan period, and then when we get to the Jacobean period there start being plays about tyrannous men. So this is particularly true in a true crime genre known as domestic tragedy. So you could say that there are kind of these large political shifts, but I think it also comes back to something about the idea that if you're having to constantly reinforce things by rules about clothing and conventions about clothing鈥�

Shahidha:听听 And about听 marriage.

Emma Whipday: 听听Yeah, then maybe they're not as fixed as you'd like them to be. And that's true of both class and gender. And just to come back to Emma's point, I mean, I think what Emma was saying about gender and pronouns and the way we talk historically about these real people is so true because I was very aware as I was talking about Mary Frith, I don't know what pronoun to use. You know I think the closest way to describe her now would be as a non- binary person in terms of what we see in the play but is that accurate? Would they be a more appropriate pronoun and I think it's really tricky to uncover these histories.

Shahidha:听 What do you think?

Emma Frankland:听 Yeah. And I think you know also that a lot of the surviving documents that we have that talk about these things, as you've alluded to, are court documents or are documents written by people who felt strongly enough because they were so outraged that they wrote things down rather than people who were living their lives, you know, I come back to what does Venus say 鈥� I like it well, and I allow it鈥�, you know, that's what's on the stage. The outrage is happening in a, as you say, in a small religious led minority, then much as now, and so I think what isn't said is very loud.

Shahidha: So I wonder for you, Emma, as a trans performer and theatre deviser when you watch and read these plays, are you detecting a continuity? Is this evidence of a longer history of trans identity and gender experimentation?

Emma Frankland: I think what's exciting for me as a white English trans person is that no one can contest that trans people have existed as long as there have been people. Right. And but often what happens is we have to look at other cultures to have that example because of the way that trans-ness has been so effectively erased within English and European history, so something like Galatea is super exciting, because here's something that's 500 years old from my own culture that I can point to rather than having to, you know, steal or borrow or point at elsewhere. So I think that's why it's really important.

Will: One of the things I find fascinating about the era we're talking about is a sort of plethora of material to talk about and investigate and research. But that doesn't necessarily mean we're looking at the emergence of something. It just so happens this is a period that, for reasons of a kind of boom in print culture or survival of records in a certain density, we are able in a language we understand, to begin to see the experiences of past lives. It was happening 100 years before and 1000 years before.

Emma Frankland:听 I mean, I've been writing about Eleanor Rykener who's a trans sex worker from the 1300s. As you say, it's always present, but what we have here is people starting to write the fiction down and not just the court documents.

听

Andy: And the joy and the joy that Galatea gives us a story of joy rather than a story of trauma and of policing and of censorship.听 And Lyly does open up spaces for other ways to think about identity and agency and love, sex and consent and gender. Lyly writes the longest role for a female character in the Early Modern cannon in a play called the Woman in the Moon, in which God is female and she creates the earth at the beginning of the play, and she makes the first ever woman and the woman is made on stage and that becomes then the largest role in the play. It's a completely wonderful, extraordinary play. In some ways it's sort of a sex farce. The central character Pandora beats everyone up in the play, has sex with multiple people, is not particularly shamed for doing that in any way. And so yeah, consistently Lyly鈥檚 really interested in opening up these sorts of stories.

Shahidha:听 I want to see you stage that next. I guess we have become more used to gender swapped Shakespeare productions. Emma recently we've had Phyllida Lloyd's all female Julius Caesar in 2012. You know, my first Lear was Catherine Hunter, we鈥檝e had Cush Jumbo and Maxine Peake鈥檚 Hamlet recently. It's not entirely modern. Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet in 1899. What do these productions achieve? Are they doing something different with the material?

Emma Whipday:听 I think that's a really interesting question and probably a hard one to generalise about because I feel each production is doing something specific and interesting. I mean, I wish I'd seen all of those productions. The one that I did see was Phyllida Lloyd鈥檚 Julius Caesar, and indeed also her Henry the IV and The Tempest so the full trilogy. So what I found really interesting about that was it brought gender and how gender鈥檚 performed in the plays into the room because of the way that she used a fictional construct of the idea that these were all female performers performing mostly male roles that are distinct to their own identity, and so there's a kind of interplay or moments where those, the two fictions rub up against each other and I think that that does draw our attention to, yeah, what gender is doing in the plays and how femininity and masculinity are being constituted. But I also think that's exciting that increasingly there's not such a need for a frame narrative, like, casts can just, you know, be really rich in how people are being cast without the need for a sort of explanation of 鈥渢his is why that听 I've kind of had the excuse in this production to cast this role differently.鈥�

Shahidha:听 Well, the Globe at the moment has A Midsummer Night's Dream with your very own artistic director, Michelle Terry as Puck.

Will:听 Absolutely and as you know, we're discovering today the notion that Shakespeare writes characters with stable or binary gender identities is sort of a bit bogus, given that the context that the plays emerged from. From my experience, certainly watching plays the past couple of years has been that the release of meaning and vividness that comes with casting choices that aren't necessarily conventional can be really profound. I'm remembering a production of Henry V at the Globe a couple of years ago, I think it was 2019, with a woman actor playing Henry V, Sarah Amankwah, and a male actor Colin Hurley playing Princess Catherine. And that allowed that final scene in Henry V, where the king, inverted commas, 鈥渨oos鈥� the French Princess to emerge, not as the sort of Beatrice and Benedict would-be rom-com, but to be what it is, which is a sort of unsettling scene of a kind of war prize negotiation. There are lots of other examples of places where similar things happen, but I think that the choices that directors make can really help to activate meaning in the plays.

Emma Whipday:听 Yeah. And I think that's a really interesting point because I think it was true for the majority female cast of Taming of the Shrew that the RSC did a few years ago 鈥�

Shahidha: With Janet McTeer

Emma Whipday: Yeah exactly, where they chose to kind of cross cast it and then use dramatically over-exaggerated female Early Modern costumes so that the women were the powerful people - they had the money, they had the power to marry people off, and they also just took up a massive amounts of space with their massive costumes. And it was a really interesting kind of counter narrative reimagining what costume and what kind of that particular performance of gender means. But also because I think, as Will said, that drew attention to things in the play where I think we take for granted so sometimes in Taming of the Shrew productions, that there's a lot of implied domestic violence and that it's a rom-com and we kind of accept those two things sitting side by side and so cross gendering it drew attention to those really uncomfortable elements.

Shahidha:听 We started the programme talking about the First Folio. Can we end by thinking about collections again? You've got a grumpy view of it, haven't you, Andy?

Andy:听 The First Folio is of course, incredibly important, and it's become almost omnipresent in Western culture. But one of the reasons that contemporary theatre companies often find themselves working against it is its own gender politics, and you open it up, and one of the first things you see is a table of contents. You see these 38 plays, none of which are named after a single female character and here Emma and I are talking about John Lyly's Galatea, and a quarter of which are named after King Henry.听 This is a playwright who's not just fixated on grumpy men, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, et cetera, but has a real thing about kings called Henry. It's a partial cannon that's come down to us, which has now come to be seen as the great way of doing playwriting. But in some ways, perhaps some of the conversation we'll have today is being framed by the need to work against exactly the worlds, the limited worlds that Shakespeare gives us.

Shahidha:听 Yeh. Will, Lyly鈥檚 works were eventually collected together as well weren't they?

Will:听 Well, they were. They were published in individual volumes in the 1590s, but then pulled together in the 1630s into a compact, very attractive little volume called Six Court Comedies, which is听 an odd kind of time to do it in some ways and perhaps goes some way to explain why Lyly has suffered some neglect. His collected work emerged during the grim years of Stuart personal rule, when lots of subsequent scholarship told us was dominated by decadent and effete literature, all of which is being challenged at the moment, I should say. And I think Lyly, although he's a 1580s playwright, and as we are learning had an astonishing impact on Shakespeare, he came to be seen as a sort of not very important court artist we could brush aside.

Shahidha:听 Emma Frankland. You've collected a book of your performances. It's called None of Us is Yet a Robot.

Emma Frankland:听 That's right, yeh.

Shahidha:听 I'm not comparing it to the First Folio, how could you?

Emma Frankland: Well why not!

Shahidha: Why not? Exactly. What does it feel like for you, as a living writer,听 to have your live body of work put together like that.

Emma Frankland: I think I mean that was a really extraordinary thing that happened to collect those five pieces, which were five pieces that spanned a decade, really, and quite a wild decade in terms of trans politics. And so one of the things that we lack is trans history and trans performance archived. And so that becomes a snapshot of what a trans artist - me - was making over that period, so I think it was really remarkable from that point of view. I'm also really excited that our adaptation of Galatea is going to be published as well, so as well as the production, that's going to exist, you know, in perpetuity. And I do think that when we're having these discussions and we're trying to make assumptions and we're looking for things that I think there's such an exciting time for trans art at the moment with, you know, people like Travis Alabanza, Sabah Choudry, their book came out this year, Shon Faye, Juno Dawson鈥� We're rich in trans authors and I think that bodes well for the future, for people to have things to look back on.

Shahidha:听 Yeah. And it's wonderful to have learned about the trans past, too, it seems like. Thank you so much Emma Frankland,听 Will Tosh, Emma Whipday and Andy Kesson. Galatea previews at the Brighton Festival on the 5th of May at the Adur Recreation Ground and runs until the 21st. Thank you also to producer Harry Parker and studio manager Phil Lander, and you might be interested to know that a new production of Henry IV Part 2 is available on 麻豆约拍 Radio 3 and in the Shakespeare Sessions podcast, too, Coming up, Free Thinking takes you to Scotland for tartan and writing from the Highlands. I'll be back, too, taking you to the Georgian court and concert halls of England. Do join us again, won't you? Goodbye.