Selection

Throughout the history charted by The Antitheatrical Prejudice, Barish notes connections between cross-dressing, gender play, sodomitical sex, and theatrical performance that have been made by theatre’s antagonists. William Prynne’s Histriomastix (1632), for example, links together the following catalogue of evils:

effeminate mixt Dancing, Dicing, Stage-playes, lascivious Pictures, wanton Fashions, Face-painting, Health-drinking, Long haire, Love-lockes, Periwigs, womens curling, pouldring and cutting of their haire, Bone-fires, New-yeares-gifts, May-games, amorous Pastoralls, lascivious effeminate Musicke, excessive laughter, luxurious disorderly Christmas-keeping, [and] Mummeries

as “wicked, unchristian pastimes.” This example linking effeminacy, stage-playes, and face-painting comes to us from a particularly conservative strain of Christianity in the Restoration England of the 17^th century, but Barish finds something similar as far back as 2^nd century Rome.

Tatian, the Syrian philosopher and Christian pedagogue, writing (in Greek) circa 160, attacks acting, dancing, and mime by describing an unnamed performer as “a one-man accuser of all the gods, epitome of superstition, disparager of heroism, actor of murders, demonstrator of adultery, repository of madness, [and] teacher of perverts [κιναίδων].” The term “κιναίδων” might also be translated catamites or even faggots, but in any case, it implies a non-specific range of possible activities, all of them sodomitical. To make the threat of these actors more specific, however, Tatian follows this by noting, “They blow through their noses and use foul language, they posture obscenely and demonstrate on the stage how to commit adultery in full view of your daughters and boys.”

Barish dismisses both Tatian and William Prynne out of hand. The former, for Barish, is “an unbalanced spirit, exponent of a heretical asceticism that viewed all sexual activity as impure and the eating of meat as a sin—the first, then, in a long succession of Christian moralists to denounce the theater mainly because, like sexual activity and the eating of meat, it gave pleasure.” The latter Barish rejects as a “megalomaniac.” As the author of the Prejudice sees it, complaints about effeminacy, makeup, and the donning of wigs, are a staple of antitheatrical sentiments as far back as Tatian, and “The Puritans […] rehearse, ad nauseam, and with endless wrangling and remonstrating, the supposed scriptural injunction against men in women’s dress, with its implicit threat to the proper division between the sexes.” But these two complaints about theatre and gender, fifteen centuries apart, are not so much about a simple dislike of pleasure per se or even the “proper division of the sexes” as they are quite specifically objections to the pleasures of effeminacy and sodomy.

In other words, although it is true that both critics here are invested in the division of the sexes, the threat to that division in both cases is a trans-feminized subject performatively transformed by the transmisogynist critic into a threat to children. In her Short History, Gill-Peterson repeatedly notes the way trans misogyny reads gender expression as a sexual act, and she uses “the phrase trans-feminized to describe what happens to groups subjected to trans misogyny though they did not, or still do not, wish to be known as transgender women.” I am using the phrase here to describe how those hostile to the theatre describe the actors against whom they warn.

One finds something similar in Barish’s description of Tertullian’s 3^rd century critique of theatre. Barish puts it this way: “One’s identity, for Tertullian, is absolutely given, as one’s sex is given; any deviation from it constitutes a perversion akin to the attempt to change one’s sex. The wearing of feminine clothes by actors playing women thus becomes as sinister as the castration of the pantomimists.” Barish understands Tertullian to be complaining about any modification to the body as the work of the Christian devil (“Nam quis corpus mutare monstraret, nisi qui et hominis spiritum malitia transfiguravit?”), and this includes men who shave their beards, athletes who shape their muscles out of proportion, women who use makeup and other adornments, and actors who wear women’s clothes. Here Barish highlights what will becomes, in his argument, one of the central pillars of the Prejudice: false representation and a wicked, deceptive “transformation” of what is “natural” and “god-given.” This is very similar to the much older complaint about women as tricksters and deceivers, and we might note the way that (male) actors here are linked with the traditional accusations—found in Shakespeare and elsewhere—aimed at the “falseness” of women.

This strain of trans-feminization and imputed sodomy runs nearly the entire length of the Prejudice. Barish even quotes the protagonist of Léon Bloy’s 1887 novel Le Désespéré saying:

Je regarde l’état de comédien comme la honte des hontes. … La vocation du théâtre est, à mes yeux, la plus basse des misères de ce monde abject et la sodomie passive est, je crois, un peu moins infâme. Le bardache, même vénal, est, du moins, force de restreindre, chaque fois, son stupre […]. Le comédien s’abandonne, sans choix, à la multitude, et son industrie n’est pas moins ignoble, puisque c’est son corps qui est l’instrument du plaisir donné par son art.

Not only is the theatre in this diatribe linked to sodomy [sodomie passive], the word Barish translates here as “male whore” is bardache, which perhaps means “passive sodomite” or “male (homosexual) prostitute” but which had already by 1887 been used by French colonists in the Americas to describe Indigenous two-spirit persons or “third-sex” individuals as part of what Jules Gill-Peterson calls “the global trans panic” of the late 19^th century.

The trans-feminized actor haunts the pages of the Prejudice, insistently recurring as society’s antagonist in theatrical drag. But Barish’s own approach to this trans-feminized figure is dismissive. For the author of the Prejudice, it’s truly nonsensical to think of something as wonderful as the theatres of Æschylus or Shakespeare or Racine as the same as the world of the bardache or the κίναιδος, but I confess to delighting in every appearance of this figure, fashioned as they are by theatre’s enemies. Each time a hater trans-feminizes an actor in the ancient, medieval, or early modern theatre, I see in those accusations or invocations expanded possibilities for the existence of queer life worlds. It seems to me that the theatre, with its costumes and face-paint may have been more than a cover or alibi for those queer life worlds. It may very well have been more like C.S. Lewis’s wardrobe, a passage to those worlds—instead of a closet, a flight of stairs.