Women dressing as men - was this illegal?

[Boneman]

As for titillation, I've never seen an all-male production, but I wonder whether it's possible for the audience to suspend disbelief so entirely as to forget that the person playing Rosalind is in fact a boy playing a girl playing a boy? Or even, would that add an extra thrill to it?

Aah, well... at my all-boy boarding school, you saw that all the time (in the theatrical productions I hasten to add!), and it certainly didn't add a thrill to it, I'd rather have seen a woman playing a boy playing a woman anyday.

 

[littlemissattitude]

No idea about different time periods and regions of the world, but I was recently reading a book called Gay L.A.which treated in a scholarly but popularly written the history of gay culture in Los Angeles. According to the authors of that book, men who dressed as women were much more likely to suffer legal consequences there than women dressed in traditionally men's clothes clear up until the 1960s and 1970s.

Which made an interesting contrast to some of the Native American groups living in the region earlier in history. Most of those groups, as well as some Native American groups in other parts of the country, were very accomodating of those and had a specific role in their societies for those who felt the need to dress like and take on the roles of persons of the opposite gender.

It was an interesting book and I wish I could have finished reading it, but it was during the time that I was moving and it came due at the library before I was able to finish it.

EDITED: to delete stray punctuation mark.

 

[J-WO]

Has there ever been a society where both sexes wear the same kind of clothing? I mean where the notion of gender-based wear doesn't exist? There were periods in Egypt where both sexes wore make up, but I think they had differing clothes.

 

[Peter Graham]

Nonetheless, I think there's a difference between laughing at something on the stage and being amused by, or even tolerant of, something in real life. Men dressing as women is a case in point -- cleverly done by Danny la Rue, incredibly funny when it was Les Dawson, a staple of panto for decades

I'm not sure about this. I think there was a world of difference between a character in Shakespeare cross dressing and the music hall antics of Les Dawson and co. In the former case, whilst I accept that there might have been a degree of titillation built in for the entertainment of the groundlings, the cross dressing was usually introduced as a plot device - typically to allow a character to hear or see things they wouldn't otherwise be party to. It was often rather tongue in cheek, but the basic idea was that the cross dressing was understated and the character got away with it.

However, Les Dawon et al derived humour from cross dressing by being grotesque at it, or deliberately over the top in its execution (Dick Emery springs to mind). The humour came from the act of cross dressing rather than from the complications which inevitably arose when a cross dressed Shakespearian character heard that X was in love with them, or accidentally attracted the attention of Y whilst in disguise.

As to the breaches of sumptuary laws, my guess is that social approbation would come equally from one's social superiors ("down goes a bishop, firs, and up ftarts a weaver!") but also one's equals - historically, the British have an ingrained dislike of "swanking" (as they call it in Yorkshire) and "tekkin' on airs an' graces".

Regards,

Peter