Cross-Dressing Ladies: Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter

DARING: Give me thy hand, Widow, I am thine--and so entirely, I will never--be drunk out of thy company--Dunce is in my tent--prithee let's in and bind the bargain.
RANTER: Nay, faith, let's see the wars at an end first.
DARING: Nay, prithee, take me in the humour, while thy breeches are on--for I never liked thee half so well in petticoats.
RANTER: Lead on, General, you give me good encouragement to wear them.
--Act IV, Scene iii, Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter; or, the History of Bacon in Virginia

Behn’s tragicomedy The Widow Ranter was her last play, and it was produced posthumously, in 1689. At the time, it was not a success on the stage. The dedicatory letter with which it was published in 1690 complains that “the Play had not that Success which it deserv’d, and was expected by her Friends; The main fault ought to lye on those who had the management of it. Had our Authour been alive she would have Committed it to the Flames rather than have suffer’d it to have been Acted with such Omissions as was made."
   Recent scholarship has suggested that the mis-production of the play, or even the fact that it hit the stage at the time of Williamite-Jacobite War in Ireland, does not completely account for its lack of success. Adam Beach suggests instead that it is Behn’s overly positive portrayal of the New World and the colonies, rather than the standard negative view of them at the time, that doomed the play. We might attribute, however, still other reasons for the play’s failure in the theater: its confusing plot, its romanticization of monarchical authority, its mis-representation of the real history of Nathaniel Bacon in Virginia, or even its somewhat misleading title, as the Widow Ranter gets very little stage time. This last fact is quite a shame, actually, as the Widow is a fascinating character: a smoker and heavy drinker who curses, fights and, as the quote above indicates, cross-dresses during the course of the play.
    Female cross-dressing was par for the course on the Restoration stage--and throughout the eighteenth century in England. The change in laws in the 1650s that allowed for women to take the stage altered the dynamics of performance. The idea of putting female characters into men's clothes was nothing new; after all, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night or The Merchant of Venice are only two or many examples of Early Modern plays that relied on this premise. The change in the Restoration, however, of having actual women play these parts meant that the female body could now be displayed in the scanty dress of tight breeches and waistcoat rather than covered up with bulky petticoats and dresses. Thus, the breeches part became an important component of the stage culture in the long eighteenth century. Aphra Behn's play exploits this trend--and complicates it.

Ann Bracegirdle as Semernia.

   For, in addition to the Widow's cross-dressing, which, in many ways, is quite conventional (she cross-dresses as a soldier in order to go searching for the man she loves, Lieutenant-General Daring, during the dangerous, final battle of the play), the play also contain the cross-dressing of another woman--the New World Indian Queen, Semernia (a fictionalized version of a real-life Indian queen who lived in Virginia at the time of the rebellion). Semernia cross-dresses as an Indian warrior (though how she achieves this is left to modern-day reader's and dramatists' imaginations) during the latter half of the play as a disguise so that she and her followers can elude the English. She, like Ranter, is initially so well-disguised that no one, not even her lover, can recognize her, and when Bacon and his men come upon her, (spoiler--sorry!) Bacon wounds her mortally. 
   Behn sets up these two women as foils for one another. Ranter, though low-born and coarse, finds money and love in the colonies. Her cross-dressing serves the purpose of literalizing her manly ambitions and mannerisms, while also, as we might surmise by Daring's desire to wed her while she is still in breeches, showing off the actress's body to advantage on stage. The figure of Semernia, by contrast, suffers through her contact with the English and her ultimate fate stands in for the fate of most of the New World Indians in the 17th and 18th centuries. Cross-dressing becomes not only the way to make these women mirrors of each other, but also to question issues of gender normativity, race, class, and imperialism. 
    Thus, while many Restoration and eighteenth-century plays put actresses in breeches either in breeches roles or in travesty parts (where an actress would play a male role), Behn's is one of very few (perhaps the only?) to portray a woman of color cross-dressing. One of the play's central themes is that of identity, and while cross-dressing proves one avenue for changing or asserting one's identity, the conclusion seems to suggest that the clothes one wears can never truly change one's essence.