The least certain of boundaries: gendered bodies and gendered spaces in Early Modern drama

Abstract

Ben Jonson’s Epicoene uses repeated symbolic reference to doors, windows, walls and thresholds as part of its discourse of gender and the transgression of gender boundaries, thereby interrogating received ideas of gender and thematising its circumstances of performance by the boy actors. This article suggests that this definition of gender through spatial boundaries is the most consistent and inventive of the period, but not different in kind from other domestic plays. It enters into the debate about the gendering of public and private spheres in the early modern period, and also sees strategies with gendered space as part of a strategy of reconciling two apparently incompatible Jacobean formulations of gender difference, which was considered as both substantial and innate, and also unstable and performative.

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