Travesti (theatre) - Men in Female Roles

Men in Female Roles

Until the late 17th century in Europe, women were conventionally portrayed by male actors (usually adolescents) in drag because the presence of actual women on stage was considered immoral. As a boy player, Alexander Cooke, is thought to have created many of Shakespeare's principal female roles, as well as Agrippina in Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, women began to appear on the English stage, although some female roles continued to be played by boys and young men, including romantic leads. Edward Kynaston, whose roles included the title role in Ben Jonson's Epicoene and Evadne in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, was one of the last of the era's boy players. London's Shakespeare's Globe theatre, a modern reconstruction of the original Globe Theatre, continues the practice of casting men in female Shakespearean roles. Toby Cockerell played Katherine of France in the theatre's opening production of Henry V in 1997, while Mark Rylance played Cleopatra in the 1999 production of Antony and Cleopatra. Travesti roles for men are still to be found in British pantomime, where there is at least one humorous (and usually older) female character traditionally played by a male actor, the pantomime dame.

Castrati, adult males with a female singing voice (usually produced by castration before puberty), appeared in the earliest operas – initially in female roles. In the first performance of Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1607 the roles of Eurydice and Proserpina were both sung by castrati. However, by 1680 the castrati had become the predominant singers for leading male roles as well. The use of castrati for both male and female roles was particularly strong in the Papal states, where women were forbidden from public stage performances until the 19th century. An exception to this practice was in 17th and 18th century French opera where it was traditional to use uncastrated male voices both for the hero and for malevolent female divinities and spirits. In Lully's 1686 opera Armide the hero (Renaud) was sung by a haute-contre (a type of high tenor voice) while the female spirit of hatred (La Haine) was sung by a tenor. In Rameau's 1733 Hippolyte et Aricie, the hero (Hippolyte) was sung by a haute-contre, while the roles of the three Fates and Tisiphone were scored for basses and tenors. The remaining female roles in both operas were sung by women. The title role of the vain but ugly marsh nymph in Rameau's Platée is also for a 'haute-contre'. Female roles in opera sung by men can still be found, although they are not common. The role of the witch in Humperdinck's 1890 opera Hänsel und Gretel was originally written for a mezzo-soprano, but was sung by the tenor Philip Langridge in the Metropolitan Opera's 2009 production directed by Richard Jones. Azio Corghi's 2005 opera Il dissoluto assolto, which incorporates story elements from Mozart's Don Giovanni, casts a counter-tenor in the role of Donna Elvira's mannequin.

The portrayal of women by male dancers was very common in Renaissance court ballet and has continued into more modern times, although primarily restricted to comic or malevolent female characters. The use of male dancers for all the female roles in a ballet persisted well into the 18th century in the Papal States, when women dancers had long been taking these roles elsewhere in Italy. Abbé Jérôme Richard who travelled to Rome in 1762 wrote: "Female Dancers are not permitted on the stages in Rome. They substitute for them boys dressed as women and there is also a police ordinance that decreed they wear black bloomers." Another French traveller that year, Joseph-Thomas, comte d'Espinchal, asked himself: "What impression can one have of ballet in which the prima ballerina is a young man in disguise with artificial feminine curves?" In the original production of The Sleeping Beauty in 1890, a male dancer, Enrico Cecchetti, created the role of the evil fairy Carabosse, although the role has subsequently been danced by both men and women. In Frederick Ashton's 1948 choreography of Cinderella, Robert Helpman and Ashton himself danced the roles of the two stepsisters. Ben Stevenson later continued the practice of casting male dancers as the stepsisters in his own choreography of the ballet. Other female ballet characters traditionally performed by male dancers are Old Madge, the village sorceress in La Sylphide and the Widow Simone in La fille mal gardée.