goneril-and-regan:“Two popular pamphlets, titled Hic-Mulier and Haec-Vir, both published in 1620 and
goneril-and-regan:“Two popular pamphlets, titled Hic-Mulier and Haec-Vir, both published in 1620 and both with illustrated title pages, were very much part of this outcry. The first of the pamphlets to appear, Hic-Mulier; or, The Man-Woman, is directed against cross-dressing women. The woodcut on the title page depicts a woman having her hair cut short (left) and admiring her new masculine hat in a mirror (right). The answer to this pamphlet was Haec-Vir; or, The Womanish-Man, which turns around and accuses men of having, since Elizabeth’s day, indulged in gender confusion by affecting womanish dress and ornaments. This pamphlet is staged as a dialogue between the man-woman, who on the title page holds a pistol and wears a sword and spurs, and the womanish-man, who appears in tights holding a battledore and shuttlecocks. Hic-Mulier and Haec-Vir, with their condemnation of gender-counterfeiting, are in a sense antitheatrical pamphlets; at the very least they show how closely the English preoccupation with costume was related to concerns about the stage. […] The theater was a place where actors of low social status could put on the finest clothes and counterfeit gentlemen, lords, and kings; where boys regularly dressed as women; in short, it was a place where actors had the license to flaunt, temporarily, the very strict sumptuary laws of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The theater was in this sense dangerous, but of course it was also exciting; audiences were drawn to it not least of all because it allowed this play with identity.”—Michael Gaudio, The Truth in Clothing: The Costume Studies of John White and Lucas de Heere -- source link
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