• Trans* Historical Drama:Bodily Congruence in Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger's Love's Cure and Taylor Mac's Hir
• Huw Griffiths (bio)

"The more your beard grows in, the more literal you get."

Taylor Mac, Hir¹

Love's Cure, first printed in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio but first performed in its existing state either around 1615 or in the early 1630s, is a striking addition to the comic repertory of the King's Men.² The repertory and, no doubt, the reputation of the King's Men and, before that, of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, was largely established through comedy.³ While the nature of those comedies took various turns—Shakespearean romantic comedy; city comedy; humoral comedy; Fletcherean tragicomedy—Love's Cure is founded on quite different comic assumptions from many of their earlier plays. The script for Love's Cure, whether adapted by Massinger from an original play by Beaumont and Fletcher or worked on as a collaborative play by Massinger and Fletcher, presents not only a conspicuous shift in direction but also something of an implied critique of Shakespeare's romantic comedies in particular.

One of the standard tropes of Shakespearean comedy is performative transvestism, associated with the playwright's famous cross-dressing heroines: Portia, Rosalind, and Viola. The comedy of these performances depends upon a playful suspension of the relationship among actor, character, and costume in which the body of the young male actor does not so much provide sure grounds for the ironic play of transvestite comedy as become a phantasmagorical screen upon which are projected multiple images of variously gendered personae. As Peter Stallybrass argues, it is [End Page 201] the vacillation between invitations to access the body of the player and performances that are, in fact, derived from costume, that the particular effects of the early modern stage are produced:

The interplay between clothing and undressing on the Renaissance stage organized gender around a process of fetishizing, which is conceived both as a process of fixation and as indeterminable. If the Renaissance stage demands that we 'see' particular body parts (the breast, the penis, the naked body), it also reveals that such fixations are inevitably unstable.⁴

Love's Cure is different. Given that this is a play from the early seventeenth century, the underlying practice of transvestite performance remains but the direction of the play's narrative advances an implied critique of the assumptions upon which the comedy of transvestite performance is based. In place of Shakespeare's capacity to draw on the performative resources of transvestism, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger feature a brother and sister who have been purposely raised as though they really are members of the opposite sex. During the course of the play, they are variously educated, threatened, and violently bullied ("cured") into adopting the gender of their birth-sex rather than that into which they have been brought up. The happy ending of the comedy is, then, dependent on both brother and sister assuming what are seen as the appropriate gender roles. The traditional comic ending of heterosexual marriage now reinforces the gender conformity of the two protagonists rather than, as is the case with Shakespeare's transvestite comedies, providing a platform for continuing ambiguities. Love's Cure seems rather to pose the question: what happens when the disguises of the cross-dressing plot are adopted in earnest?

Because of this, some of the frameworks within which we have tended to construe constructions of gender in early modern dramatic comedy are not applicable to Love's Cure. Where earlier transvestite comedies seem particularly amenable to being theorized through the lens of gender performativity, Love's Cure tests the limits of those interpretations. A typically generative reading of Shakespearean transvestite comedy that takes its cue from theories of gender performativity and, particularly, from Judith Butler's early work on gender-as-performance would be Casey Charles's reading of Twelfth Night. Charles writes that "both Butler and Shakespeare rely upon performance as a theoretical means of shaking the foundations of the metaphysics of binarism and gender hierarchy."⁵ Butler, in her later work, and as Charles in part acknowledges, falls away from the implications of...

• Trans *历史剧：博蒙特的身体一致，弗莱彻，马辛格的爱之治愈和泰勒·麦克的希里
• 休·格里菲思（生物）

“胡须越长，您得到的字面越多。”

泰勒·麦克，继承人¹

Love's Cure最早印制于1647年的Beaumont和Fletcher作品集中，但首先在1615年前后或1630年代初以其现有状态演出，这是对《国王大帝》漫画作品集的一个惊人补充。²国王的男人，以及之前的张伯伦勋爵的男人的曲目，以及毫无疑问的声誉，很大程度上是通过喜剧确立的。³这些喜剧的性质发生了不同的变化-莎士比亚的浪漫喜剧；城市喜剧 幽默喜剧 Fletcherean悲喜剧-Love 's Cure建立在与许多早期戏剧完全不同的喜剧假设基础上。Love's Cure的剧本无论是由Massinger改编自Beaumont和Fletcher的原创剧本，还是由Massinger和Fletcher合作制作的剧本，都不仅显示了方向上的明显转变，而且特别暗示了对莎士比亚浪漫喜剧的批评。

莎士比亚喜剧的标准对白之一是表演异装癖，与剧作家著名的异性装扮女主角Portia，Rosalind和Viola相关。这些表演的喜剧取决于演员，角色和服装之间的嬉戏悬挂，其中年轻男演员的身体并没有为异装癖喜剧的讽刺性扮演提供可靠的基础，反而成为了幻象般的银幕。投影了多种性别角色的多个图像。正如彼得·史塔瑞布拉斯（Peter Stallybrass）所言，正是进入服装的邀请和实际上是服装产生的表演之间的摇摆不定[End Page 201]产生了现代早期的特殊效果：

在文艺复兴时期，服装与脱衣服之间的相互作用将性别围绕着迷恋的过程进行了组织，该过程既被视为固执的过程，又被视为无法确定的过程。如果文艺复兴时期要求我们“看到”特定的身体部位（乳房，阴茎，裸露的身体），那么这也表明这种注视不可避免地是不稳定的。⁴

爱的治愈是不同的。鉴于这是一部十七世纪初的剧本，异装癖表演的基本做法仍然存在，但该剧的叙事方向却暗示了对异装癖喜剧所基于的假设的批判。代替莎士比亚的能力来利用易装癖的表演资源，博蒙特（Beaumont），弗莱彻（Fletcher）和马辛格（Massinger）的兄弟姐妹被故意抚养长大，好像他们确实是异性一样。在表演过程中，他们受到各种教育，威胁和暴力欺负（“治愈”），以采用其出生性别，而不是其所养育的性别。那么，喜剧的圆满结局是 取决于哥哥和姐姐都承担着适当的性别角色。异性恋婚姻的传统喜剧结局现在加强了两位主角的性别一致性，而不是像莎士比亚的异装癖喜剧那样，为持续的歧义提供了平台。Love's Cure似乎提出了一个问题：认真采用更衣情节的伪装会发生什么？

因此，我们倾向于在早期现代戏剧喜剧中解释性别建构的某些框架不适用于Love's Cure。在早期异装癖喜剧似乎特别适合通过性别表现视角进行理论化的地方，Love's Cure检验了这些解释的局限性。凯西·查尔斯（Casey Charles）的《十二夜》（Twelfth Night）是莎士比亚异装癖喜剧的典型创世读本，该喜剧取材自性别表演理论，尤其是朱迪思·巴特勒（Judith Butler）早期关于性别即表演的工作。。查尔斯写道：“巴特勒和莎士比亚都依靠表演作为动摇二元论和性别等级制的形而上学基础的理论手段。” ⁵巴特勒在后来的工作中，正如查尔斯在某种程度上承认的那样，摆脱了……的影响。