BEARDING THE QUEEN
Bearding the Queen:
Male Cross-Dressing
at the New Globe
Jrunes C. Bulman
,,
1 I
WHEN SHAKESPEARE'S GLOBE THEATRE DECIDED TO CAST A MALE AS
Cleopatra in 1999, it took a risk. The Globe, after all, was· a popular
tourist venue whose audiences could not be counted on to respond ap
preciatively to the archaic convention of casting males in female roles;
moreover, the challenge of playing Cleopatra had recently defeated a
number of the most talented actresses on the British stage, including
Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren, and, in Stratford earlier that same
summer, Frances de la Tour.Surprisingly, the Globe's Antony and Cleo
patra became both a popular and a critical success because of Mark
Rylance's performance as Cleopatra.Garbed in a succession of low-cut
dresses in fashions ranging from milkmaid to gypsy, sporting long black
curls, barefoot, and ankle-braceletted, Rylance skipped and flounced,
preened, swooned, and died with a "histrionic excess" that drew at
tention to the role's flamboyant theatricality (Billington, 1999). His
transvestite Cleopatra, as Paul Taylor observed, enhanced one's sense of
the queen "as a fluid and compulsive actress who has enjoyed playing
drunken gender-bending games with her lover and who always, even as
she goes into the final, glorious apotheosis, keeps you guessing about
the exact degree of seriousness behind the role play" (1999).Rylance
performed the queen in all her infinite variety, and his emphasis on per
formance is what critics and audiences applauded most.Where the exag
geratedly "feminine" role play of recent female Cleopatras had some
times come across as a "a toughened drag-act" which "made the queen's
capricious volte-faces look crashingly premeditated" (Taylor, 1999), Ry
lance, because he was not a woman, was praised for the spontaneity
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with which he exhibited the same exaggerated femininity."By showing
an actor shadowing, or paralleling, the role rather than identifying with
it," wrote Robert Smallwood, he demonstrated "the extent to which
Cleopatra is constantly performing ... never identifiable as herself"
(2000, 246).
The success of a male Cleopatra shouldn't have come as a surprise.
By 1999, the idea_t:)!
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