DRAMA QUEENS: PART 3: 16TH CENTURY GAY THEATRE

16TH CENTURY GAY THEATRE

David McGillivray’s new history series continues this week…

 

 

SODOMY BEFORE SHAKESPEARE

When we think of cross-dressing and other camping about during this period we think of Shakespeare. But the Bard didn’t come along until the end of the 16th century. Buggery was big in the theatre years before. So much so that John Bale’s The Three Laws of Nature, Moses and Christ (1530) is an anti-sodomy piece with a character called Sodomy, who, says historian Carl Miller, has ‘a show-stopping number.’ Nicholas Udall’s famous comedy Ralph Roister Doister (1553) features a character called Merrygreek, whom Miller thinks ‘may be one of the first camp characters on the English stage.’ Merrygreek: ‘I mourn for another thing.’ Roister Doister: ‘What is it, Merrygreek, wherefore dost thou grief take?’ Merrygreek: ‘That I am not a woman myself for thy sake.’

Udall may have been a bender himself, but we’re not sure. He had a 1541 conviction for what was thought to be buggery. But this might be a misprint for burglary! Miller also has his suspicions about Richard Edwardes, ‘Master of the Singing Boys’, whose only extant play, The Excellent Comedy of Two of the Faithfullest Friends Damon and Pythias, was first performed in 1564 by Queen Elizabeth’s choirboys. Miller also calls John Lyly (c. 1553-1606) ‘the great playwright of Elizabethan same-sex friendship, both male and female.’ He refers to Lyly’s Campaspe (1580?) as ‘the first closet play.’ It concerns Alexander’s affair with a woman, Campaspe. But is she really Alexander’s long-term boyfriend Hephaestion?

For an younge man attending the theatre for the first time, the sight of Boyes in costume will be quite enough to inflame Lust.

London’s first modern theatre, called appropriately enough The Theatre, opened in 1576. And this is where our story of Gay Men and the Theatre really begins. Londoners immediately loved professional theatre. But we loved it most of all. Why? Because of the boy actors. Francis Lenton warned, ‘For an younge man attending the theatre for the first time, the sight of Boyes in costume will be quite enough to inflame Lust.’ Only months after the Curtain Theatre opened in 1577, it was notorious for prostitution. Moralist Stephen Gosson was appalled. He wrote, ‘Not that any filthynesse in deede is committed within the compasse of that grounde, as was doone in Rome, but…every knave and his queane are there first acquainted and cheapen the Merchandise in that place, which they pay for elsewhere as they can agree.’

It wasn’t long before Elizabethan theatre produced its first great writer, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). He’s supposed to have said, ‘All thei that love not tobacco and Boyes are Fooles.’ But was he gay? His writing suggests he was. Dido Queen of Carthage (1587?) begins with Jupiter dandling Ganymede on his knee. ‘Here’, Miller points out, ‘is a married man with his sulking boyfriend on his knee.’ Marlowe’s best-known play, Edward II (1592?), seems even gayer. It’s about a gay king and his boyfriends and it has many other gay references, for example Alexander and Hephaestion again. There’s no proof that Marlowe ever had gay sex. ‘It is however beyond dispute,’ says Miller, ‘that the subjects of sodomy, heresy and treason interested him.’ Marlowe was followed swiftly by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), married with children, but in his writing so openly awe-struck by beautiful young men that almost every historian now accepts that he was at least bisexual. By the turn of the 17th century, as we’ll see next week, London theatre was as gay as Above the Stag 400 years later.

 

THE UNKINDEST CUT

Women were generally banned from the stage throughout the world at this time. Italy came up with the most bizarre way of replicating femininity. Boys were castrated before puberty so that their voices remained high-pitched throughout adulthood. Common by 1588, castrati first took female roles in opera in Monteverdi’s Orfeo in 1607. By the mid-1700s thousands of boys were castrated annually. Many grew up gay. In History of My Life Volume 2 Casanova records meeting the castrato Beppino della Mammana in 1762:  ‘He gives me a bold look and says that, if I will spend the night with him, he will serve me as a boy or a girl, whichever I choose.’ The practice was made illegal in 1861. In the film Misfit (1996) Kylie Minogue mimes to the voice of Alessandro Moreschi, the only castrato to be recorded (in 1904).

 

GREAT GAY PLAYS

 

 

 

Edward II (c. 1592)
It appears to us that this is the first play with a sympathetic depiction of a gay man. Edward II has loving relationships with Gaveston and Spencer. This disturbs the King’s wife and enemies, who first murder Edward’s lovers then the King himself. Nowadays when the play’s performed, the gay relationships are almost always made explicit. Gay actors who’ve played Edward include Ian McKellen (pictured) and Simon Russell Beale.

George-a-Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield (c. 1592)
This comedy about Robin Hood and several equally familiar characters is believed to have been written by Robert Greene (c.1558-1592). George has to disguise his young servant, Willy, as a girl so that he can deliver a message to a woman named Bettris. When Willy arrives in drag  – wait for it – Bettris’ father falls in love and wants to marry him. Willy reveals he’s a boy and all ends happily.

DRAMA QUEENS: PART 4: 17TH CENTURY GAY THEATRE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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