Shreds of Gender

In "'Shreds of holinesse': George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England," Adam Smyth argues against critics who view the early modern practice of cutting and rearranging texts as a destructive or even desecrative act. Although most modern readers would never dream of cutting up a book, Smyth points out that early modern readers saw the cutting up of books as another way to interact with words and text and to create new ideas through rearrangement. In John Lyly's Gallathea, cutting and rearranging can also be used as metaphors for the way in which the play understands and transforms sex and gender.

Smyth begins his discussion of cutting by examining the shrinking words at the end of the lines of George Herbert's poem "Paradise":  "This act of cutting suggests a conception of words, or at least a conception of these words, as units which may be broken to reveal other words within. Reaching the end of line three, we read “OW” as having emerged from “ROW,” and before this from “GROW” (453). Smyth suggests that these groups of three words have their own little thematic narratives. The same can be seen in Gallathea's theme. Though Lyly does not include such a cutting down of words in the play itself, thematically, the plot moves from the troubles of two virgins--WOMAN--to the catastrophes that the community will face as a result of not procuring a sacrifice--O, MAN (using the archaic definition of "O"  as a warning)--to the resolution found in changing one of the virgins' genders--MAN. In short, the "breaking" of the word "woman" can contain the entirety of the play.

The masculine apparel that Gallathea and Phillida don to hide their femininity also echo the idea of a text that can be cut apart and rearranged to create new meaning. Indeed, as Smyth points out, the printed text (and I would argue, the concept of gender in Gallathea) does not accidentally fall into rearrangement, but rather is meant to change and metamorphose: "Print culture asserts not its stability and permanence, but rather the possibility of blades reworking a page" (473).  By "cutting away" female attire and "pasting on" male attire, Gallathea and Phillida are effectively transformed into new beings, just as the Ferrars transform bibles into new harmonies. Although their clothes--created by a process of cutting and joining, just like the works that Smyth has examined--do not transform their biological bodies into "youths," the gender reassignment that Venus promises at the end of the play would also involve cutting and "pasting" in its modern surgical counterpart. Unless Gallathea and Phillida have excellent health insurance, let's hope for their sakes that Venus's gender reassignment is more magical than surgical.

Smyth closes his article with a series of points encouraging new ways for readers to view a culture that thought nothing of cutting up and rearranging texts. According to Smyth "generally, the early modern printed book was not treated with the reverence with which later cultures approached it.The book was not yet the exclusive or perhaps even principal medium for carrying text, and it was a material form that might easily be reworked" (468-69). This lack of reverence for the printed book can also be read in the lack of reverence that Melibeus and Tityrus have for their daughters' genders. When Venus suggests that one of the virgins be transformed into a youth, Melibeus and Tityrus begin to bicker about which of their daughters will become a son. Both fathers are reluctant to have their daughters change gender--but this is not because, as a modern reader might assume, of modern religious/conservative conceptions of the body as a sacred creation that ought not to be changed. Instead, their concerns are primarily economic:

Melibeus: Tityrus, let yours be a boy, and if you will; mine shall not.
Tityrus: Nay, mine shall not; for by that means my young son shall lose his inheritance.
Melibeus: Why then, get him to be made a maiden, and then there is nothing lost.
Tityrus: If there be such changing, I would Venus could make my wife a man. (5.3.164-71)

Once Tityrus and Melibeus realize that the transforming of gender can work in their favor, they begin to see the human body as early modern culture viewed the printed book, as "a material form that might easily be reworked." There is no inherent sacredness in the text--whether print or human--that is lost when it is rearranged. Indeed, I believe that the ability for a text to rearrange and rework itself is a type of play that keeps the text vibrant, fresh, and alive.