“Rich Like a Lady”: Cross-Class Dressing in the Brothels and Theaters of Early Modern London

Abstract

Studies of cross-dressing in early modern London have tended to focus on cross-gender, rather than cross-class, dressing. Archival evidence from the Bridewell Court Books and literary depictions of the practice on the early modern stage reveal cross-class dressing as a popular erotic practice. London citizens could use luxurious clothing to invent alternate identities for themselves or their partners in a single relationship, to create class parity between unequal partners, to satisfy fantasies of class ascendancy or of altered power relationships, or to imagine access to otherwise inappropriate or inaccessible sexual partners. There remained, however, a strong conceptual association between female cross-class dressing and whoredom. While theater audiences reveled in cross-class dressers’ abilities to dupe unwitting victims in early modern comedies, the same behaviors outside the theater prompted harsh censure.

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