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of others and we understand, again without thinking about it, that he or she is not heard by the figures on the stage (the aside); a character alone on the stage may speak (the soliloquy), and we do not take the character to be unhinged; in a realistic (box) set, the fourth wall, which allows us to see what is going on, is miraculously missing. The no-nonsense view, then, is that the boy actor was an accepted convention, accepted unthinkingly—just as today we know that Kenneth Branagh is not Hamlet, Al Pacino is not Richard II, and Denzel Washington is not the Prince of Aragon. In this view, the audience takes the performer for the role, and that is that; such is the argument we now make for race-free casting, in which African-Americans and Asians can play roles of persons who lived in medieval Denmark and ancient Rome. But gender perhaps is different, at least today. It is a matter of abundant academic study: The Elizabethan theater is now sometimes called a transvestite theater, and we hear much about cross-dressing.
    Shakespeare himself in a very few passages calls attention to the use of boys in female roles. At the end of As You Like It the boy who played Rosalind addresses the audience, and says, “O men, . . . if I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me.” But this is in the Epilogue; the plot is over, and the actor is stepping out of the play and into the audience’s everyday world. A second reference to the practice of boys playing female roles occurs in Antony and Cleopatra , when Cleopatra imagines that she and Antony will be the subject of crude plays, her role being performed by a boy:
    The quick comedians
    Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels: Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.
    (5.2.216-20)
    In a few other passages, Shakespeare is more indirect. For instance, in Twelfth Night Viola, played of course by a boy, disguises herself as a young man and seeks service in the house of a lord. She enlists the help of a Captain, and (by way of explaining away her voice and her beardlessness) says,
    I’ll serve this duke
Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him.
    (1.2.55-56)
    In Hamlet , when the players arrive in 2.2, Hamlet jokes with the boy who plays a female role. The boy has grown since Hamlet last saw him: “By’r Lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine” (a lady’s thick-soled shoe). He goes on: “Pray God your voice . . . be not cracked” (434-38).
    Exactly how sexual, how erotic, this material was and is, is now much disputed. Again, the use of boys may have been unnoticed, or rather not thought about—an unexamined convention—by most or all spectators most of the time, perhaps all of the time, except when Shakespeare calls the convention to the attention of the audience, as in the passages just quoted. Still, an occasional bit seems to invite erotic thoughts. The clearest example is the name that Rosalind takes in As You Like It , Ganymede—the beautiful youth whom Zeus abducted. Did boys dressed to play female roles carry homoerotic appeal for straight men (Lisa Jardine’s view, in Still Harping on Daughters [1983]), or for gay men, or for some or all women in the audience? Further, when the boy actor played a woman who (for the purposes of the plot) disguised herself as a male, as Rosalind, Viola, and Portia do—so we get a boy playing a woman playing a man—what sort of appeal was generated, and for what sort of spectator?
    Some scholars have argued that the convention empowered women by letting female characters display a freedom unavailable in Renaissance patriarchal society; the convention, it is said, undermined rigid gender distinctions. In this view, the convention (along with plots in which female characters for a while disguised themselves as young men) allowed Shakespeare to say what some modern gender critics