Gallathea and Cross-Dressing Virgins

This paper focuses on Gallathea written by John Lyly in 1591. Gallathea was one of the first English plays to use the heroines in male disguise. On the English Renaissance stage, women's roles were played by boy actors, who were considered to be immature as their gender/sex had not yet developed fully to adulthood. I will highlight the multiple gender identities of boy actors and female characters and also the confusions of gender/sex created by Lyly's duplication of cross-gender disguise. In Gallathea, the two heroines disguised as boys fall in love with each other and their tangled sexual relationship shows aspects of the polymorphously perverse. The paper is divided into three parts. I will first illustrate the setting of the world of Gallathea and Lyly's design. The second part examines the relationship between male attire and constructions of male gender. In the third, I would like to explore the representation of women in breeches, which has been symbolized as invasion of the sexual norm. My focus is on the fabrication of the male gender/sex created by male clothing. The ambiguities of gender identity crea ted by cross-gender casting and cross-gender disguises show the plasticity and multiplicity of gender/sex and sexuality