Few critical issues in Shakespearean comedy have been discussed more energetically in the last twenty years than the question of what it meant to an Elizabethan audience to see boys playing the roles of women. For modern play-goers it is largely a dead issue (though I shall discuss in chapter 7 some latet wentieth- century productions which attempted to explore the potential of all-male casts); since the mid-seventeenth century the roles of Rosalind and Celia, Phebe and Audrey, have been claimed as their right by actresses who revel in the richness of Shakespeare's language and the potential for complex explorations of gender and sexuality that the roles allow.

There is an important distinction to be made here in the ideas about what it is that the actor/actress does on stage: do they impersonate the character or do they imitate it, standing apart from it a little so that we can see the gap between the actor and the role? Modern Western actors, for the most part, are locked into an ideology of ‘becoming’ the character, an ideology based on the dominance of naturalism in twentieth-century theatre, and particularly on the claim of films to represent ‘reality ‘ and therefore to demand total immersion of actors in the roles they are performing. This was not the theory in Elizabethan theatre, though throughout the history of Western theatre we find audiences praising actors for their ‘natural’ representation of characters. (A glance at any fifty-year-old film, however, will demonstrate that the criteria of ‘natural’ acting change approximately every half-century.)

Elizabethan theatre and acting delighted in the conscious recognition of its own artificiality. Disguise, masks, the performance of plays within plays, and word-play by characters on the notions of acting and theatre, are some of the means by which this consciousness was never allowed to lapse. Moreover, the plays that were performed on Shakespeare's stage almost never purported to represent contemporary life: their worlds were distant in time and place. Further, the characters spoke in blank verse most of the time – an artificially heightened version of the English language that allowed rich use of metaphor and other poetic devices that gave pleasure to audience and readers.