Networked Cross-Dressing: A Digital Refashioning of Shakespearean Gender Subversion

This paper uses network theory and network analysis to propose a new approach to analyzing cross-dressing in Shakespearean drama, specifically the key questions driving much of the scholarship on that topic in recent decades: What kind of disruption to the social order did cross-dressing represent in Early Modern England, and what did it mean to shift that disruption from the street to the stage? We know that the laws and customs of the age emphasized clothing that matched the outward appearances of people to their places in the social order. Network analysis allows us to analyze how characters become gendered through a non-linear, non-hierarchical lattice of social relationships. As the characters interact and social relationships change, the individual’s gendered subjectivity also transforms. We find that cross-dressing protagonists propel themselves from isolated social worlds into a complex web of relationships through cross-dressing, and that entry into sociability follows predictable patterns. By following those patterns, the characters combine roles--the broker and the heroine--that are normally separate in Shakespearean comic plots, creating a hybrid type that becomes visible through network analysis.