SOURCE: "Bringing the Page Onstage: The Two Gentlemen of Verona" in Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages, The University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 65-92.

In the following essay, Shapiro examines Shakespeare 's use of cross-gender disguise in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Although heroines in male disguise are a common feature of medieval and Renaissance narratives, Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1593) is one of the earliest English plays to bring the motif onstage.¹ It is also the first in which a heroine disguised as a page pretends to be a "saucy lackey," the kind of precociously witty boy servant who had already become a stock character on the Elizabethan stage, probably because of the close fit between these cheeky pages and the assumed personalities of boy actors. As a theatricalized page, Julia, the cross-dressed heroine of The Two Gentlemen of...