Only at this point does Benserade bring on the deus ex machina to turn the two women into an orthodox couple. Interestingly, Iante’s reaction to her bridegroom’s sex change is extremely muted. Iphis et Iante is an odd play,27 both structurally and tonally; Isaac de Benserade makes fun of his heroines even as he sympathizes with them, presenting their situation as simultaneously romantic and clownish, and casting Iphis as a combination of eunuch and freak and hero.
Four centuries apart, the Ide and Olive author and Isaac de Benserade both doubled Iphis’s dilemma by forcing the Iante figure to realize that, without taking any active steps across the gender line, she has ended up in a same-sex marriage. English playwright John Lyly doubled it another way in his fantastical comedy Gallathea (performed in 1583, published in 1592): his two cross-dressed heroines, Gallathea and Phillida, not only fall in love with each other, but also become objects of desire to various of Diana’s nymphs. (To add to the strangeness, all these roles were written for small boys in a juvenile theater company.)
Cupid states the play’s theme of lesbian love as a cosmic joke: “I will make their paines28 my pastimes, & so confound their loves in their owne sexe, that they shall dote in their desires, delight in their affections, and practise onely impossibilities.” Falling in love with another woman is a “paine,” a state of being “confounded” or confused, of dotage (meaning excessive affection, but also feeblemindedness). It also brings “delight,” even though all these lovers can “practise” together are “impossibilities.” (In this statement of amor impossibilis, “practise” means “do,” but there may also be a hint that practice makes perfect.) At first each of Lyly’s heroines presumes the other is a boy, then they start to suspect otherwise—but remain in a state of romantic uncertainty for much of the play. It is Phillida who takes the initiative, telling Gallathea, “Come let us into the Grove, and make much of one another, that cannot tel what to think one of another.” She suggests they copy the dynamic of a male-female relationship: “Seeing that we are both boyes, and both lovers, that our affection may have some showe, and seeme as it were love, let me call thee Mistris.” She is suggesting that the roles they may adopt are entirely arbitrary. Later, almost sure that her beloved is as female as herself, she soliloquizes: “Poore Phillida, what shouldest thou thinke of thy self, that lovest one that I fear mee, is as thy self is.” (Compared with the speech of agonized self-reproach that Ovid gives Iphis, this is a mild reaction.)
The discovery of the truth only complicates the girls’ passion; it does nothing to reduce it. In a scene which goes further than anything else in Renaissance literature toward an ethical assessment of lesbian desire as such, the two stand before the gods for judgment. They get a stern lecture from Diana, goddess of chastity—“You must leave these fond affections;29 nature will have it so, necessitie must.” The word “fond” here means “loving” but also “imbecilic.” Similarly Neptune calls it “an idle choyce, strange, and foolish, for one Virgine to doate on another; and to imagine a constant faith, where there can be no cause of affection.” But Venus sees it very differently.
VENUS I like well and allowe it, they shall both be possessed of their wishes, for never shall it be said that Nature or Fortune shall over-throwe Love and Fayth. Is your loves unspotted, begunne with trueth, continued with constancie, and not to be altered tyll death?
GALLATHEA Die Gallathea if thy love be not so!
PHILLIDA Accursed be thou Phillida, if thy love be not so!
Like the wife in the medieval Ide and Olive, Lyly’s Venus grants that a love can be “begunne with truth” even if it involves a sartorial trick; she recognizes the sincerity of the girls’ mutual love, its “constancie” in prizing the inner self rather than the gender role. This remarkable scene goes on:
DIANA Suppose all this Venus, what then?
VENUS Then shall it be seene, that I can turne one of them to be a man, and that I will.
DIANA Is it possible?
VENUS What is to Love or the Mistrisse of Love unpossible? Was it not Venus that did the like to Iphis and Ianthes? how say ye? are ye agreed? one to be a boy presently?
PHILLIDA I am content, so I may imbrace Gallathea.
GALLATHEA I wish it, so I may enjoy Phillida.
Until this point, it might seem as if Gallathea’s doubling of the Iphis situation is less interesting than that found in Ide and Olive or Benserade’s Iphis et Iante: after all, Gallathea and Phillida are going through exactly the same thing. But this mirroring becomes an asset now, because there is no obvious candidate for the miraculous sex change. Both girls are content to leave it up to Venus to decide who will be turned into the husband; all they want is to be married, either way. And Lyly seems to share their indifference: he ends the play with everyone walking offstage to the church door where the transformation will take place, a decision that keeps his heroines in a state of blissful suspension in which their only fixed identity consists of desire for the other. If the Ide and Olive version of Ovid’s story focuses on the meaning of love, and Benserade’s on the meaning of innocence, then what Lyly offers is a playful meditation on selfhood.
But the most common female bridegroom storyline is not that of a mutually devoted pair such as Olive/Ide or Phillida/Gallathea, but a cross-dressed woman who accidentally attracts other women. She may react with embarrassment, amusement, panic, sympathy, guilt, fondness, or a muddy mixture of all these emotions. Sometimes the deceived woman30 is clearly being punished by means of this unfulfillable desire—perhaps for stupidity or her callous treatment of her male suitors, as in the case of Phebe in As You Like It (performed in 1600). Shakespeare allows his cross-dressed Rosalind to rebuff Phebe’s hapless desire with merciless satire, but in his Twelfth Night (performed in 1601) he treats a similar situation in a much more poignant and romantic spirit. One difference is that the haughty, enamored one in Twelfth Night is a lady rather than a shepherdess; another is that her beloved, Viola (cross-dressed as the page “Cesario”), is a much gentler character than Rosalind. Sent by Orsino to court the heiress Olivia on his behalf, Viola displays an anxious tenderness in a famous speech about how “he” would court Olivia if “he” were his master:
Make me a willow cabin31 at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Holla your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out, “Olivia!” O! you should not rest,
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me.
This is a declaration full of action, but frozen in the conditional tense. Olivia, overwhelmed, murmurs, “you might do much,” already losing her heart to the eloquent page.
Viola is no cynical role-player; she is expressing a kind of hypothetical desire, an if-only-I-could yearning that is common among female bridegrooms. This note is audible in several subplots of Amadis de Gaule, a French chivalrous romance cycle published in twenty-four volumes between roughly 1540 and 1595 (an expansion of an equally famous Spanish source, Amadis de Gaula), which has been called the most influential prose work of the sixteenth century. Oronce, a woman disguised as a man, is just as entranced with the lady Lucence as vice versa: “The virtuous Oronce32 found her so beautiful and congenial that she could not avert her eyes from her, taking in all her royal countenance and saying to herself, ‘If I were a knight and my heart was free, I would not want to have any lady but her.’”
In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare keeps the emphasis, according to stage custom, on the fruitlessness of attraction between women, but puts it in financial rather than botanical terms: realizing that the Lady Olivia is falling for her, Viola laments, “What thriftless sighs33 shall poor Olivia breathe!” This is typical of Renaissance texts that describe a woman who desires a woman as sighing—not just wistful, but frustratedly aroused. Here “thriftless”
means spendthrift or unprofitable; it is a pointless outlay of affection for Olivia to desire “Cesario,” because her investment will fail to pay off.
Amor impossibilis was the official version, then: the punch line of the joke. But we should not assume that authors, readers, and audiences all actually believed that it was impossible for women to give each other pleasure. In fact, many of Shakespeare’s predecessors, peers, and successors were less cautious on the topic than he was. One example of a play that alludes to amor impossibilis in a playful, tongue-in-cheek way is Abraham Cowley’s lastingly popular Love’s Riddle (1638). The cross-dressed Callidora enjoys the kisses of two rival women, Hylace and Bellula, and tells them:
I pitty both of you,34 for you have sow’d
Upon unthankful sand, whose dry’d up wombe…
Nature denies to blesse with fruitfulnesse
And I protest I love you both. Yet cannot,
Yet must not enjoy either.
“Cannot” or “must not”? Physical impossibility or just cultural taboo? Cowley’s play35 is a pastoral comedy; in the more worldly seventeeth-century genre of city comedy we hear occasional heavy hints (in plays by Brome, Middleton, and Webster) that a female bridegroom and another woman might be able to “enjoy” each other after all. But it remains the convention, in plays, poems, and novels about cross-dressing, to keep these thrilling possibilities hovering outside the story.
Most playwrights and romance writers place great emphasis on the moment of revelation, when the cross-dresser drops the disguise, whether willingly or otherwise, verbally or sartorially. (Or even physically: in the fifth act of Jean de Rotrou’s Célimène [1633], the stage direction instructs the actress to bare her breast.) As Joseph Harris points out,36 the revelation is usually a conservative moment, in which the baroque elements of deception and disorder are cleared away to expose a bedrock of reality.
In the case of female bridegroom plots, typically the other woman recoils in embarrassment, anger, or grief. “If sight and shape be true,”37 Shakespeare’s Phebe laments in As You Like It, looking at Rosalind-in-skirts, “why then, my love adieu!” Since the beloved’s female “shape” is “true,” then the desire must have been untrue, so Phebe says “adieu” to it. Or perhaps “my love adieu” means that she is obliged to say goodbye to “Ganymede”/Rosalind, whom she still loves but now has no hope of marrying? Cannot or must not, again: this ambiguity is a common one in female bridegroom plays.
This moment of recoil, or adjustment to the news that the beloved is a fellow female, is generally a quick tying-up of loose ends, a return to the status quo. But there are interesting exceptions. In the twentieth volume38 of the Amadis de Gaule cycle, for instance, the Infanta Licinie is so traumatized by the discovery of the sex of her beloved Chevalier that she cannot trust her next suitor in case he too is a woman. In some plays,39 such as John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy (1629), the deceived woman expresses a deep sexual shame.
And it may go further than this, leading to protracted ambiguities on both sides. In the twenty-first volume of Amadis de Gaule, for instance, when La Belle Sauvage has been revealed as female, she softens the blow by telling the enamoured Lucence,
“Madame,40 you should know that your beauty and good grace so much pleased me that in my deepest being I became fond of it. And therefore I found it to be true what the queen has said, namely that often a lady is so fond of the beauty of another lady that she falls in love with her. I always want to be known to love you.” The gracious lady [Lucence] answered smiling, “Although you are a young lady, I will not stop loving you, for I will remain content only to contemplate your beauty. Nonetheless, I ask that you allow me always to stay with you.”
As Winfried Schleiner comments, “Surely this dialogue is a profession of love, but just as surely it is a renunciation, or, from Lucence’s point of view, a redefinition.” Both parties insist that, although no heterosexual relationship can exist, the homosocial one can be just as passionate and important.
Lucence manages to smile, but this conversion of desire into friendship can be a painfully difficult one, as in Robert Greene’s history play James the Fourth (1598). Lady Anderson struggles to tame her desire for the “squire” who she has just learned is really the “deceitful beauty” Queen Dorothea.
LADY ANDERSON (to herself)
Blush, greeve and die41 in thine insaciat lust!
DOROTHEA Nay, live and joy that thou hast won a friend That loves thee as his life by good desert.
LADY ANDERSON I joy, my Lord, more than my tongue can tell, Allthough not as I desir’d, I love you well: But Modestie that never blusht before Discover my false heart. I say no more.
Lady Anderson’s transition is so sudden that her claim of “joy” rings false; her jerky “tongue” is having difficulty catching up with reality, as shown by the fact that she is still addressing Dorothea as “my Lord” (just as Dorothea is still using male pronouns such as “his”). Lady Anderson will force herself to make do with a nonerotic form of “love,” but with gritted teeth: was her heart “false” when it tricked her into insatiable “lust” for a woman, or is it being “false” in its performance of mere affection now? “Say no more,” indeed. The desire sparked by a pair of breeches smolders on after the breeches are packed away; illusory emotions prove to have a lingering half-life.
Sometimes the flame cannot be extinguished by any means. Ludovico Ariosto’s epic Orlando Furioso (published in Italian in 1516–32 and translated into English beginning in 1591) was an instant and lasting hit with readers, but it troubled many critics with its admixture of the romantic and the lyric, its jumble of high and low characters, its broken narrative threads and parodic undercutting of its own chivalric material. One of its most startling episodes is that of the Princess Fiordispina—a mature, confident woman at the point where the man she has fallen for owns up to being an Amazon warrior called Bradamante. This much is borrowed from an early epic, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1483–94), but Ariosto pushes through the apparent narrative impasse. When the Amazon tries to talk her out of her passion, Ariosto’s Fiordispina resists: her “fansie” may be “uncouth,” she admits, but it is “firmely fixt.” She asks Bradamante to change into women’s clothes, to see if that will put out the fire—but no. In Ovid’s story of Iphis and Ianthe, it is the cross-dresser who feels that her desire for another woman makes her a freak, but here it is Fiordispina—the feminine one—who echoes that famous speech of Iphis’s (though without acknowledging she has ever heard of Ovid’s story), crying out to Cupid and Nature about her dilemma:
In passed times42 I think there hath beene none,
In time to come it will not be believed,
That love should make by such a strong infection
One woman beare another such affection.…
I sole am found in earth, aire, sea, or fire,
In whom so strange a wonder thou hast donne.
On me thou showst the power of thine ire
And what a mighty conquest thou hast wonne…
No Dedalus could not remedie my bale,
Nor art can frame nor sence imagin how:
This knot dame nature hath so firmly knit
It cannot be dissolv’d by any wit.
It is interesting that Fiordispina describes the “knot” of lesbian desire as being tied by Nature, rather than (as Iphis saw it) being against Nature. Bradamante rushes to contradict her on this point, insisting that Nature is not to blame for Fiordispina’s fault of “will”:
And wisht her this unbridled will to tame,
Sith nature could not suffer it prevaile,
And that she would let that desire be daunted
Which possiblie by no meanes could be graunted.
But Fiordispina will not “let that desire be daunted,” even though, unlike her sophisticated author, she seems ignorant of any way of satisfying it. Ariosto has her describe her longing with the highly erotic image of an open wound: “Nought could salve
that sore nor swage her woes.” What she lacks in information she makes up for in determination. Unlike Iphis in the myth, Fiordispina seems almost to glory in her fate; despite being repeatedly told that she is in despair, we hear in her speeches more than a hint of perverse pride that nothing can “remedie” her “infection.” The only solution she considers, during a long night tossing and turning in bed beside Bradamante, is Ovid’s:
That little sleepe straung dreames and fansies bred:
She thought the gods and heav’n would so assist her
Into a better sex to chaung my sister.
The narrator here is Bradamante’s identical brother, Ricciardetto. Ariosto can achieve the traditional resolution only by another disguise: Ricciardetto will disguise himself as his sister to get into bed with Fiordispina, then announce that by means of a miraculous sex change, courtesy of a river nymph, “she” is now male and can “asswage your care,” i.e., satisfy the overheated princess. The age of miracles is over; this is the sixteenth-century Italian author’s sly, secular homage to the pagan or Christian deus ex machina that resolves earlier versions of the female bridegroom story. The episode is handled playfully, which is not to say unseriously; while Fiordispina’s position as the butt of Ricciardetto’s joke might seem a humiliating one, the length, eloquence, and courage of her speeches express her passion for the Amazon with memorable force. More than any other heroine in her position in Renaissance literature, she insists on the undeniability of her desire for another woman.
The substitute-brother ending43 of the Fiordispina episode in Orlando Furioso was perhaps its most influential aspect. Often, as in the case44 of the anonymous Sienese play Gl’Ingannati (1537), it is the sister rather than the brother who arranges the swap. In fact, at times the brother has all the agency of a dildo: “I lov’d you well,45 though I could never ease you, / When I fetch’d in my brother thus to please you,” Kate tells Lady Goldenfleece fondly in Thomas Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (performed c. 1611).
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