Enter Nell Gwyn
On April 3, 1665, the redoubtable diarist Samuel Pepys attended a play, Mustapha , at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London. He did not care much for the play, but he was delighted to find King Charles II himself attending the performance in his private box. With his typical penchant for gossip, Pepys reports that the king held company with his mistress Barbara Palmer, the Duchess of Cleveland, along with a young actress named Eleanor Gwyn, or “pretty, witty Nell” as Pepys called her.1 Gwyn was one of the first generation of professional English actresses; by the spring of 1665, Gwyn had appeared in a few minor parts at the rival King’s Theatre, but had yet to land a major stage role. She was only a teenager, likely still largely illiterate, and just recently promoted from an orange seller to an actress at the King’s playhouse. Yet there she was, holding a private audience with the king and his mistress—an unlikely opportunity for any young woman of her low birth rank and status.2
In some ways this tale is familiar for us today: a teenage girl of humble origins is thrust into the spotlight by a closed-door meeting with a rich and powerful state official. On the one hand, this could be a crucial point for many dramatic plots—the musical Evita at once comes to mind; on the other hand, it could just as well be the headline for an exposé on the latest political scandal, or a story on the grim frequency of child sexual exploitation. But in fact, such encounters between aristocrats and young actresses were neither scandalous nor uncommon during the Restoration era.3 That said, Gwyn profited more than any other actress of her time from her connections to the privileged classes, namely through her relationship with none other than the king himself. She became the second in a trio of pensioned royal mistresses, gave birth to two ennobled sons, and ended her life as a very wealthy woman. History does not record when Gwyn first caught the eye of the king, but we do know that near the start of her career she was cast in one of the “pants roles” especially provocative to Restoration audiences. The first entry for Gwyn in the comprehensive London Stage catalog places her in a small part in The Siege of Urbin by William Killigrew.4 The premiere production was scheduled for the 1664–1665 season, but the theaters were closed early due to an outbreak of plague, so the actual performance dates are uncertain. Still, the 1666 publication of the play suggests that it offered Gwyn a model for the future pants roles that were to make her famous.
Gwyn was cast in the supporting role of Melina, the confidante of the heroine Celestina, a young noblewoman of Pisa. In order to avoid a forced marriage, Celestina flees Pisa for the city of Urbin in the transvestite guise of the privateer Florio, and Melina accompanies her under the name Pedro. Melina, of course, is a minor character; the play, after all, belongs to Celestina. Disguised as Florio, Celestina proves to be a valiant warrior on the battlefield; she learned combat at a young age because, for obscure textual reasons, she was raised in a forest and trained to fight wild beasts for her survival. Eventually Celestina is revealed as a true noblewoman and is happily married to the Duke of Urbin himself. As for Melina, she never undergoes a similar reveal and remains in pants for the rest of the play. In that guise she serves as comic relief and engages in humorous banter with the naïve maidservant Clara, who, besotted with Pedro, believes him when he tells her that “sacking the city” means that “all the Mayds above fifteen years old, by the Enemy found in Towne, must be put in Sacks, and thrown into the River.”5
So from her earliest days on stage, Gwyn was cast as a clever and flirtatious young woman who took to wearing pants. Over the course of her career, she would win her greatest praises in such transvestite roles, all the while winning increasing affection and privileges from the king. And since Gwyn appeared onstage at the dawn of the stretch of history I will examine in this study, it seems only right to reference Gwyn as a point of entry into the question that prompts my entire project: what might we learn, not only about Gwyn but also about the theater history of the Modern West, by considering how her cross-dressed attire and her class preferment actually intersected with one another? I think the question is cogent for the present day, because some landmark studies of transvestite actresses have focused more upon their capacity to contest sexual norms, than their intervention into the class dynamics of their eras. Two texts from the end of the last century, both admirable in their depth and scope, demonstrate how the politics of sex, rather than class, came to dominate discussions of the transvestite actress.
For instance, in The Changing Room, a comprehensive history of global transvestite performance traditions, Laurence Senelick offers ample evidence to support his claim that a powerful and longlasting attraction of the cross-dressed actress on the Western stage was the allure of shapely female legs encased in tightly fitted male attire. Tracing this tradition to the Restoration era, Senelick denies that donning breeches granted actresses the masculine privileges that typically accompanied masculine dress: “For all the critical attempts to interpret the plethora of breeches roles on the Restoration stage as a token of female empowerment and confiscation of male prerogatives, the breeches role was first and foremost an effective means of sexual display.”6 True, Senelick locates exceptions to the eroticization of breeches parts; apparently, nineteenth-century American actress Charlotte Cushman, famous for her Shakespearian heroes, was seen as so ugly that few reviewers granted her any erotic appeal whatsoever.7 Yet for Senelick such exceptions prove the rule, and the slow decline in popularity of breeches roles occurred partly in response to the loosening of formerly fitted male attire: “By the mid-nineteenth century, trousers had become less revealing and would continue to increase in capaciousness until they ballooned into the ‘Oxford bags’ of the 1920s. Consequently, the costume of the cross-dressing actress became increasingly out of touch with sartorial reality.”8
Yet in her equally comprehensive study Vested Interests, Marjorie Garber offers a very different view of the cross-dressed actress. Garber argues that transvestite performances not only disturb conventional gender expectations, but also surrogate disturbances in a range of other regulated modes of sexual interaction; for Garber, “transvestism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself.”9 Central to her argument is the changeling boy, a figure Garber first links to cross-dressed young men of the Elizabethan stage, then to cross-dressed women of later eras. For Garber, it is through the transvestite actress that the changeling boy still appears in the theater of the present day, most notably in the persistent casting of women in the role of Peter Pan. Here the erotic allure of a woman in tights surrogates a currently taboo but historically common attraction to young boys; the happy tone of the tale itself only imperfectly dissimulates the anxieties generated by its category crises: “Transgression without guilt, pain, penalty, conflict, or cost: this is what Peter Pan… is all about. The boy who is really a woman; the woman who is really a boy; the child who will never grow up.”10
Taken together, then, Garber and Senelick locate the transvestite actress at opposing ends of a sexual political spectrum. For Senelick, the actress in pants is subjected to a regime of cultural constraint, largely incapable of freeing herself from her designation as a sexual object. Yet for Garber she is the very epitome of cultural transgression, one who disrupts all manner of sanctioned sexual relations. Here I do not propose to revisit all the many instances of cross-dressing that Garber and Senelick rally to support their arguments; Still less do I seek to resolve their two arguments with one another. I do wish to note, however, the ways in which their classic studies on transvestite actors might usefully be revisited and inflected by more recent critical thought on trans-identities. Perhaps this newer work will open the study of Gwyn and her cross-dressed career to more intersectional modes of academic inquiry.
Consider, for instance, the 2008 article by C. L. Cole and Shannon L. C. Cate, “Compulsory Gender and Transgender Existence.” The authors draw both their title and the basis of their argument from the 1980 publication by Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Cole and Cate recall that Rich was “devoted to denaturalizing heterosexuality” and...