She Takes a Wife: The Knots of Sex and Gender from Ovid’s Iphis to the Boy Actor on Shakespeare’s Stage

The story of Iphis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses should be better known among scholars of cross-dressed theater of early modern England, in which boy actors played the parts of women. Iphis is a girl, raised as a boy so as to elude a cruel death sentence by her father, and mutually in love with another girl, Ianthe. The tale proper begins on the eve of her marriage, when the heroine is in a quandary about how to think about her female body and male social presentation. Her story has obvious relevance to the cross-dressing heroines of Shakespearean comedy. In fact, Ovid’s story of Iphis and her mutual love for Ianthe is embedded in the very nucleus of Shakespeare’s boy heroines, whose attractiveness as theatrical figures and agents is universally acknowledged but whose specifically gendered and sexual appeal contains and at times merely patches over a history of dissent and arbitration between feminist and queer interests in the exceptional status of the English Renaissance stage, in which talented boy actors play the roles of charismatic girls. Iphis is a vital part of the make-up of the transgressing boy heroines of Shakespeare’s stage—perhaps qualifying as her own “theatergram,” in Louise George Clubb’s helpful term.