Wixson argues that some feminist and gay/lesbian approaches to the theatrical and historical phenomenon of cross-dressing have focused too narrowly or too exclusively on potential gender or sexual subversions without working to unpack the larger social project of each individual play. John Lyly's "Gallathea," while subverting gender and sexual boundaries, also possesses a number of socially conservative elements, each of which can be elided by focusing too closely on the other; the two strains should not be so isolated from each other.

Copyright Studies in English Literature c/o Rice University Spring 2001

A Broadway revival of Blake Edwards's gender-bending comedy Victor, Victoria caps off a flurry of contemporary critical and popular interest in cross-dressing, the most recent expressions of which range from the sensational thrills of The Crying Game to Marjorie Garber's popular exploration of Vested Interests.1 Specifically within the academy, feminist and, more recently, gay and lesbian scholars since the mid- 1980s have seized upon early modern dramatic texts because they seem to highlight gender impersonation and performativity with their all-male casts and frequent narrative incarnations of the "disguise" plot. These kinds of examinations are essential to understanding the concepts of gender and the dynamics of desire as (re)presented on the Renaissance stage. However, there are dangers. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub write that "the political left of critical theory could be said to be in the midst of a long love affair with the subversive potential of gender ambiguity, but this affair has not been an untroubled one."2 They go on to say that critics who champion the lack of gendered clarity run into problems when challenged about the political efficacy of their work, about whether their valorizing of ambiguity sufficiently illuminates or further obscures complex cultural inscriptions and hinders current academic and "real world" political struggles. From a more literary perspective, does the intensive "staking out" of cross-dressing by feminist and gay/lesbian critics partially eclipse other historically contingent associations with cross-dressing that are "foreign" (or perhaps more invisible) within our own cultural anxieties and biases which inform our approaches?

As Garber is careful to explain in Vested Interests, when we examine the anxious concerns about gender and sexuality within Elizabethan (high) culture that were regulated by numerous sumptuary laws about cross-dressing, scholars must keep in mind the complex set of intersecting boundaries that can be variously .crossed" (gender, class, sexuality, national).3 First and foremost, however, sumptuary laws were enacted to "mark out as visible and above all legible distinctions of wealth and rank within a society undergoing changes that threatened to blur or even obliterate such distinctions," distinctions the increasingly public phenomenon of theater brought into ambiguity.4 Yet, within the academy, "discussion of sumptuary laws by scholars of Renaissance literature in the 1970's and early 1980's tended to emphasize the implications of such laws for gender, especially as reflected in the debates about cross-dressing and the English stage. It is worth remembering, however, that sumptuary legislation was overwhelmingly concerned with wealth or rank, and with gender largely as it was a subset of those categories. " More specifically, I would further argue that the relationship of class subversions to gender subversions regarding the narrative and historical incarnations of cross-dressing in John Lyly's Gallathea (1583-85) has still not been worked out thoroughly enough, especially regarding whether or not those subversions can co-exist or how their representational ideologies can be compatible or antagonistic from the perspective of certain schools of criticism. The complexity of the task is similar to current attempts by many gay/lesbian critics to unpack the early modern polysemantics of "sodomy" as both a social and a sexual category. My point in this paper is that some feminist and gay/lesbian approaches to the theatrical and historical phenomenon of cross-dressing have focused too narrowly or too exclusively on potential gender or sexual subversions without working to unpack the larger social project of each individual play. Gallathea, while subverting gender and sexual boundaries, also possesses a number of socially conservative elements, each of which can be elided by focusing too closely on the other; the two strains should not be so isolated from each other.

I

When exploring notions of early modern gender and sexuality, Gallathea proves surprisingly vexing. Consistent with its deceptive and playful language, the play provides evasive and inadequate, yet titillating answers for questions about its sexual ideology: Are these girls-as-boys in love? In lust? Who gets changed into a boy? Is this lesbian sexuality? Judging by the lack of a large body of recent criticism on Gallathea as well as the notable absence of the play from studies of sexual discourse and practice, the play remains a bit of an enigma for theorists and scholars searching for clues to concepts of sexual behavior in early modern England.6 Gallathea is often identified as a progenitor of late Elizabethan plays that utilize the trope of a cross-dressed heroine such as Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (1598), As You Like It (registered in 1599, most likely composed earlier), and Twelfth Night (1601). Undeniably, the cross-dressings in all four plays have much to do with gender concepts and the sexual negotiations of power and desire; indeed, they have much in common textually and stylistically. However, in some ways, the grouping of them runs the risk of eclipsing significant historical and generic divergences between Gallathea and the other three which may inhibit meaningful analysis of Lyly's play in particular.

At the time Gallathea was composed, James Burbage's Theatre was only five years old, and the phenomenon of English public theatergoing was in its infancy. Philip Henslowe's Rose Theatre would be built three years later, and the construction of the first Globe was still over a decade away. Although street musicians and troupes performed in the streets regularly, the center of organized theatrical performance was still the court and the private theater, housing very similar audiences. Lyly wrote plays for both the court and the first Blackfriars, one of the main private theaters in London; his shows played (significantly within city walls) for wealthy, often aristocratic patrons, often with the intention of favors of position and sponsorship.7 The difference in the theatrical economy of London over a mere 30 year period (1580-16 10) was revolutionary, and grouping plays from the early 1580s with those of the late 1590s is problematic, although the temptation is great.

The lumping of Gallathea with Shakespeare's early works to explore notions of gender and sexuality happens quite frequently.8 For example, Phyllis Rackin's recent essay, "Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage," employs Lyly's play as a starting point to map changing early modern conceptions of gender and theatricality. She starts out claiming that "the theater provided an arena where changing gender definitions could be displayed, deplored, or enforced and where anxieties about them could be expressed by playwrights and incited or repressed among their audiences."9 Her assumption that the "theater" (or indeed an "English Renaissance Stage") existed as a holistic concept apart from the court in the early 1580s, or that a rubric like it exists in contemporary criticism in which plays such as Gallathea and Ben Jonson's Epicoene (1609) can unproblematically stand side by side, seems risky.10 Unlike the popular stage, which was not as subject to censorship or to editing and not as confined to members of a certain social class, the court stage was much less a site for "competing ideologies,11 less a "field of contention" than an Althusserian site of representation." In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England, the court and the private stage were one of the most prominent sites for the maintenance, legitimization, and celebration of authority. In social practice, court plays could manipulate the response of audience members, allegorizing and solidifying monarchical power through Roman mythological figures. As a space for sustaining authority, the court stage was clearly an ideological state apparatus. This is not to say the stage was not simultaneously a site for the subversion of the very royal power it sought to reinforce. Indeed, as Anne Lancashire makes clear, a degree of light criticism of Elizabeth exists in the representation of Diana in the play and, I would argue, also in Hebe; however, Lyly's overall intent and desired effect was not mockery. 12 Rather, Gallathea is a more conservative play than subsequent popular successes, conceived in a different theatrical and social context than later professional plays.

II

The differences between texts written specifically for the popular stage at the turn of the century and those composed for the court in the mid- 1580s demand consideration and also provide a more satisfying way to approach the gender and sexual subversions of Gallathea. As much as Shakespeare owes to Lyly for laying the groundwork for subsequent prose dramas such as I Henry IV (1598) and for theatrically exploring stylistic modes and thematic tropes on which the former would build his early career, Lyly owes to his predecessors, most notably the humanist court dramas of John Heywood in the earlier part of the century. Court plays were essentially extended metaphors full of mythological characters with allegorical significance, typically legitimating the power, wisdom, and benevolence of a ruling figure as a thinly veiled tribute to the actual head of state. Generally, they dramatize some kind of dispute (Heywood's Play of the Weather [ 1525-331) or debate (John Redford's Wit and Science [ 1530-48]) among human or personified characters that must be solved by a ruling figure. 13 In legitimating the "essential" attributes that distinguish ruling figures from others, these plays often rely upon a predetermined social order that follows a Calvinistic plan for justifying aristocratic rule, sometimes involving the "education" of a character who aspires to change his social class. Finally, all court plays possess a teleology toward a sense of balance and contentment among the characters within their predestined class level."4 Lyly struggled during the last stage of humanist influence on the court as the popular stage rose to prominence and the masque replaced the rhetorical Latinate styles and themes of the court drama. While Gallathea is certainly not as schematic as these early plays, their influence on Lyly is undeniable, and I would argue that Gallathea possesses all of the above characteristics. As such, analyzing the play as an attempt to gain favor with Elizabeth, to solidify her authority during a turbulent decade marked by economic distress and religious disputes, and to try and reconcile her femininity with her very masculine authority may make the presence of cross-dressing in the play more clear.

When glimpsed from the perspective of its predecessors rather than from those of its descendants, Gallathea becomes an elaborate illustration of social stratification and privilege that, via a complex manipulation of audience sympathy and persuasion, legitimates the power of the ruler and the order of the realm.15 The primary image of divine authority in Gallathea is Neptune, and the play works to legitimate him as a ruler and ideologically to devalue the unnatural defiance of patriarchal and monarchical authority. Each of the three plots revolves around notions of aspiration, of trying to rise above one's social degree, an action that results in either punishment or ridicule and, in all cases, failure. The first scene of the play is devoted entirely and undramatically to relating the originary event of the human plot, fittingly retold by a Prospero-esque authority figure to a female subordinate. The myth establishes Neptune's great physical power and constructs an ethical model, guiding the audience's perception of essentially the same story with the same moral told in three different plots. It appears as a lesson articulated by Gallathea almost as a warning to her father: "Destiny may be deferred, not prevented, and therefore it were better to offer myself in triumph than to be drawn to it with dishonor ... Nature hath given me beauty, virtue, courage; nature must yield me death, virtue honor. Suffer me therefore to die, for which I was born, or let me curse that I was born, sith I may not die for it."16 Gallathea's rhetoric is charged with Calvinistic doctrine as well as notions of the divine right of kings, naturalizing the social order and preaching honorable submission to "destiny," which, in the play, is associated with the will of the ruling figure, Neptune.

The opening description of Neptune's wrath is preceded by an account of rebellious Danes who bring punishments upon themselves by defying authority and destroying temples. The description of the god's vengeance demonstrates Neptune's power, and the "unnatural" state of Nature that results mirrors the "unnatural" acts of the Danes: "[The Danes] enraged so the god who binds the winds in the hollows of the earth that he caused the seas to break their bounds, sith men had broke their vows ... Then might you see ships sail where sheep fed, anchors cast where ploughs go, fisherman throw their nets where husbandmen sow their corn, and fishes throw their scales where fowls do breed their quills" (Li.29-37). Clearly, the Danes' arrogance, their failure to respect the lines of social division, results in a "monstrous" breach of the natural order (Li.39). If the goal of the play is to cast the defiance of authority and the resistance to one's prescribed social level in a bad light, Neptune's destructive power and his establishment of the cruel virgin sacrifice must be justified, legitimized so he appears to have been wronged. Because these men began "to swell as far above their reach" and "swerved beyond their reason" (Li.32-3), they were punished for their aspirations. The culpability for Neptune's retribution is placed on the men and their selfish desires.

However, an audience might still be repelled by Neptune's retaliatory violence. The barbaric nature of the virgin sacrifice still remains and, considering its overtones of bestial sexuality, could potentially make Neptune seem a monster. Cleverly, this associative possibility is obscured, though not eliminated, by the inclusion of the Agar who is, literally, a "monster" and a "horror" (Li.56, 59-60). Mystifying the workings of power, the introduction of this figure blurs the connection between Neptune and the brutalized virgin for both the audience and the characters themselves: "Whether she be devoured of him [the Agar] or conveyed to Neptune or drowned between both it is not permitted to know and incurreth danger to conjecture" (Li.62-3).

The story line regarding the virgin sacrifice reappears in act IV with a different twist that further distances Neptune from the horror of human sacrifice. Auger's words to the populace in IV.i transform the initial private predicaments of Tityrus and Melebeus. Sounding like some kind of military recruiter, Auger recasts the central conflict between personal desire and divine will (the Danes and the fathers versus Neptune) into patriotic, social terms: "If you think it against nature to sacrifice your children, think it also against nature to destroy your country ... Therefore, consult with yourselves, not as fathers of children but as favorers of your country ... in losing one to save all" (IVi.420). Besides depersonalizing the sacrifice, the speech has redefined the terms of the play's antagonisms into private good versus the commonweal. The blame for the cruelty of the sacrifice is thrown back in the faces of the human characters: "If you imagine Neptune pitiless to desire such a prey, confess yourselves perverse to deserve such a punishment" (IV.i.6-8). Auger's meager twenty-one lines perform a powerful transformation in which the defiance of divine will is cast as selfish, unpatriotic, and socially destructive.

In addition to the virgin sacrifice plot, the two other plots share a similar thematic trajectory. Like Neptune, Cupid feels wronged and seeks retribution, but forgets his place in the social order, vowing that "Diana and thou and all thine shall know that Cupid is a great god" (I.ii.35-6). His ego-driven rebellion and destructive wrath are similar to those of the Danes yet have less serious consequences. "Whilst . . . truant from [his] mother" (II.ii. 10-1), Cupid intends to "so confound [the virgins'] loves in their own sex that they shall dote in their desires, delight in their affections, and practice only impossibilities" (II.ii.8-10). In contrast to the tempest and the destruction which resulted from the Danes' rebellion, Cupid's small rebellion has comedic effects, namely the appearance of each lovesick virgin one after another in act III, a gag Shakespeare also employs in one of his earliest pastoral plays, Love's Labour's Lost (1593). Cupid is eventually caught and punished, becoming the object of a dispute that must be settled, ultimately, by Neptune.

However, Cupid's defiance of the social order does not go unnoticed by Neptune, who emerges from the bushes after Cupid's speech detailing his own intentions. Neptune clearly is driving the narrative, aware of both unnatural disguises: "Do silly sheperds go about to deceive great Neptune ... Neptune cannot be overreached by swains, himself is subtle ... I will into these woods and mark all, and in the end will mar all" (II.ii. 18-29). Here Neptune makes clear he will punish all those who attempt to defy authority or to resist their social position, forecasting the restoration of order at the conclusion of the play.

The masterless men of the third plot are brought into the play by Neptune and are ultimately harmoniously absorbed into the reconstituted social order at the end of the play.17 In the meantime, Rafe encounters a number of human characters who also make pretensions to divinity and divine power. With each figure he successively meets, Rafe is witness to gradually expanding claims of divine power by human beings. The Mariner says he can tame the seas; the Alchemist maintains he can change the elements; the Astronomer states he can order the cosmos. None of these men prove to be successful in their vocations, and Rafe makes each an object of ridicule for their foolish aspirations beyond human capacity. The young men are absorbed in the social order reconstituted at the end of the play, and their voices, harmonized in three parts, an allegory for the balanced cosmic order, conclude the play (as Lancashire suggests) with a marriage hymn. Neptune, like Jupiter in Heywood's Play of the Weather, has solved all disputes, demonstrated his essential wisdom and benevolence over the folly of his subordinates, and (as in all court plays) all are "satisfied" and "content."18

III

Despite all of the cross-dressed figures in the texts Rackin includes, the trope in the early 1580s seems to have been a relatively rare one. In Appendix B of his book Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage, Michael Shapiro documents only five plays between 1570 and 1590 that contain heroines in a male disguise; between 1590 and 1604, the number increases to nineteen, four times as many plays in roughly half as many years (allowing for the period between June 1592 and May 1594 when the theaters were closed because of the plague).19 As Shapiro notes, Lyly's use of the "cross-gender disguise is rare for the mid-1580s and does not recur in his later works." He identifies Galathea as an early appearance of this trope in English drama but stresses that "such [a] duplication [does not] occur in the . . . first plays of adult troupes [which] use the heroine in male disguise."21 Characteristic of Lyly's rhetorical playfulness, the two girls who fall in love as boys may have been quite a novel gimmick. The almost undifferentiated personalities and situations of the two girls relate strongly to the text's extreme sense of balance. The play presents a social cosmos in which everything from gods to unemployed boys exists in the same plane of reality, thrown out of balance since the Danes' affront. The play moves toward the harmonizing of disputes and social balance, as all court plays do.

In terms of language, the rhetorical balance achieved within the lines belongs to an educated and timed way of speaking (see, for example, Li.59-60) and falls into a general pattern which corresponds to the Renaissance style of learned debate, balancing opposing ideas (see Li and V.iii).21 Perhaps intended to emphasize more flippant metatheatricality than subversion, the symmetry of the two female lovers as characters and as boy actors is, in one sense, a playful extension of the play's ideology about the value of balance. Finally, Shapiro claims in Children of the Revels that "unlike adult plays, where even passages of metadramatic self-reference `can sometimes strengthen the illusion created by the dramatic action,' plays written for the children's troupes were generally designed 'to make the dramatic action seem artificial.11,22 In other words, much of the play was self-consciously phony, suggesting that the situation of the two girls was a cheeky recognition of two boy actors-as-girls-as-boys that might account for much of the overstated humor of the girls' endless exchanges and monologues about each other.23

In any case, it is risky to read too hastily onto 1580s incarnations of cross-dressing conceived within a different theatrical tradition and dynamic what may have been only emergent anxieties that found a convenient theatrical expression in the 1590s and/ or cultural visibility in the 1990s. When he emerges from the bushes in act II, Neptune is indignant at the clear defiance of his authority and the order of his realm by the "silly sheperds" and Cupid, who both attempt to prevent divine will (destiny) or to aspire to divine status and, oddly enough, who both adopt gendered disguises to do so. Neptune is particularly miffed at the disguise ploy: "Do silly sheperds go about to deceive great Neptune, in putting on man's attire upon women, and Cupid, to make sport, deceive them all by using a woman's apparel upon a god? Then, Neptune, that hast taken sundry shapes to obtain love, stick not to practice some deceit to show thy deity, and, having often thrust thyself into the shape of beasts to deceive men, be not coy to use the shape of a shepherd to show thyself a god" (II.ii. 18-26). Clearly, what enrages Neptune has little to do with gender but more with social status. Not only are the disguises a breach of class distinction, unnaturally signifying social rank, but the adoption of each disguise is a rebellious act, substituting the will of the individual, in this case, that of Cupid and the two fathers, for the divine will of Neptune. Neptune almost sees the acts as an imitation of his own power, a theatrical display of power similar to an actor playing the "role" of a king on the popular stage. Like the numerous sumptuary laws passed during this period, the threat of cross-dressing is social, its attendant anxieties focused around notions of social position.

This is not to say that Gallathea has nothing to offer regarding concepts of gender. Rather, alongside its more conservative elements, the play's entire ideology of power is centrally concerned with gender and sexuality, especially when Lyly is allegorizing, at least partially, Elizabeth's court and the ideologies through which she constructs and maintains her royal authority. For example, Hebe embodies a strong contradiction between the position of women as powerful heirs (such as Elizabeth) in terms of aristocratic distinction and the ideology of the submissive woman, a condition very much informed by, and informing, concepts of gender. Exploring notions of patriarchal colonialism, Peter Stallybrass writes of the "contradictory formation of woman within the categories of gender and of class":

To emphasize gender is to construct women-as-the-same: women are constituted as a single category, set over against the category of men. To emphasize class is to differentiate between women, dividing them into distinct social groups. Insofar as women are differentiated, those in the dominant social classes are allocated privileges they can confer (status, wealth). In societies where heterosexuality and marriage are prescribed, those privileges can only be conferred back on men, so the differentiation of women simultaneously establishes or reinforces the differentiation of men. The deployment of women into different classes, then, is in the interests of the ruling elite, because it helps to perpetuate and to naturalize class structure.24

Indeed, the larger project of the play is patronage, appealing to Elizabeth as a female in a dominant social position with privileges of rank she can confer on male courtiers such as Lyly. Within the text, the dominant female characters are both in positions of patriarchal "check," insuring perhaps that their privileges will be used in the service of men (or masculine authority) and of bringing to the surface a possible anxiety about Elizabeth's clever manipulation of her favors and virginity.25

In addition, although Gallathea contains two sets of seemingly undifferentiated women (the daughters, the nymphs), the play clearly emphasizes the differences between women, setting them against a boy (Cupid) and each other (Venus and Diana, the daughters and Hebe) but never against anyone above their position of rank or of gender in the play's social cosmos. In this way, social antagonism can work in concert with misogyny when gender functions as a signifier of class differentiation. Femininity becomes an outward expression of subordination (i.e., Venus and Diana to Neptune, daughters to fathers) as much as age (Cupid to Diana and Venus, daughters to fathers). Gender has little meaning between Gallathea and Phyllida in their disguises because there is no power difference between them, and at the end of the play, neither is in an immediate position of inheritance where gender would be an issue.26 Yet, because the play formulates subordination in one sense based on gender in that the main female characters are always under the control of a father or male ruler, the social ideology becomes patriarchal, intertwining the relationship between rank (privilege) and gender.

The particular importance of this play to lesbian critics interested in the representation of the workings of female desire can be elided with a reading that keeps differences in rank as a primary ideological thrust of the text in mind. The specter of lesbian eroticism and sexual activity within the play lurks around the two sets of "undifferentiated" women, identical in rank and gender. Heterosexuality in the play seems to have a negative valence, associated with class aggression and unnatural aspiration. The bestial overtones of the sexual ravishment of a virgin by the monstrous Agar is a punishment for defying divine will. To "show the power of a mighty god" (II.ii.2), Cupid makes Diana's nymphs all fall for the disguised Phyllida and Gallathea, and there is no indication the nymphs realize the two are actually girls. So, the expression of their love in act III takes a decidedly heterosexual, courtly form, behavior for which Diana sharply scolds them, stressing the "shame . [in using] the pen for sonnets. . . upon pelting boys" (III.iv.23-60). Besides mentioning their gender, she also stresses their unworthiness as love objects, speculating on their "baseness of birth," underscoring how the play's heterosexual desire operates along a dynamic concerned with differences in power.

In contrast, the presence, or at least the knowledge, of female homoerotic relationships exists in Gallathea as an expression of class and gender solidarity and a subversive self-consciousness of compulsory heterosexuality." Equal rank seems to allow for free flowing eroticism between the female characters, hinted at between the nymphs as well as the disguised daughters. While the change in clothes is, as Neptune claims, only a superficial change, it affords the two women and the text itself the opportunity to examine various social configurations of heterosexual desire while pointing to the strong presence of sexual and/or romantic desire between them. Their rhetoric of attraction simultaneously denies and points to the possibility of female homoeroticism:

Gall. I would not wish to be a woman, unless it were because thou art a man.

Phyl. Nay, I do not wish thee to be a woman, for then I should not love thee, for I have sworn never to love a woman.

Gall. A strange humor in so pretty a youth, and according to mine, for myself will never love a woman.

(III.ii.9-15)

In revealing the intensity of their love, they illuminate the cultural constrictions around its explicit expression. Similar to Jean Howard's analysis of an encounter in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's The Roaring Girl, the banter between the two daughters in Lyly's play "is absolutely riveting in the way it acknowledges, insists upon, female erotic desire, while making clear the cultural imperatives that operate to shape, channel, and control that eroticism."28 The two girls are able to "escape" from the text and perhaps elude the imprisoning discourse of heteroeroticism at the end of III.ii when Phyllida provocatively suggests: "Come, let us into the grove and make much one of another, that cannot tell what to think one of another" (Ill.ii.65-7).

In the end, the two female lovers are seemingly rewarded for their desire that does not transgress class boundaries. Although the potential destabilization does not offer liberation from social constraint because the two female lovers are magically "made" heterosexual subsequent to the end of the play, their presence highlights the discursive prescriptions of gender and "compulsory" heterosexuality. More importantly, a lesbian alternative is glimpsed within the forest among Diana's nymphs (and perhaps by extension Elizabeth's female court) and the two daughters, even if only pointed to in its "not" form (IV.ii.21-65). For critics exploring early modern notions of lesbian identity and behavior, what emerges from the cross-dressing between Gallathea and Phyllida is what Diana Fuss identifies as the "tension . . . between a view of identity as that which is always there (but has been buried under layers of cultural repression) and that which has never been socially permitted (but remains to be formed, created, or achieved)."29 This self-consciousness in the text is potentially quite subversive, at odds with the patriarchal social structure of the play but not with its ideology of essentialized, immobile class position.

IV

In contrast to The Roaring Girl's "urban landscape of friction and of difference, in which desire, especially woman's desire, finds no easy fulfillment," the world of Gallathea is the "green world of laughter and fulfilled desire" for which Howard seems to long in her essay on Dekker and Middleton's play.30 Indeed, all are "content" on the banks of the Humber at the end of the play, and, before that point, though only alluded to in the text, lesbian desire seems to flow unconstrained between like partners. Clearly, the articulation of gender, sexuality, and class involves complex interactions which, when examined together, can illuminate more fully the material and historical anxieties of the period via its drama. As Fuss suggests, the "delimiting of boundaries or mapping out of critical terrains is not a problem in and of itself (especially if it allows us to devote serious attention to previously ignored or trivialized issues); however, it becomes a problem when the central category of difference under consideration blinds us to other modes of difference."31 Offering a brief examination of how ideologies of gender, rank, and sexuality overlap and play off of each other in Gallathea, my aim in this paper is not to criticize the examination of cross-dressing in order to highlight gender performativity and the subversion of discursive categories of desire. Instead, I want to argue that expressions of cross-dressing in dramatic texts should not be separated from their theatrical context, and that cross-dressing (like "sodomy") can signify a range of subversions and ideologies simultaneously and sometimes oppositionally, and it needs to be explored holistically as well as separately to offer a fuller picture of the historical semiotics of the cross-dressed figure.