Cross-Dressing and the Politics of Dismemberment in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s <i>Philaster</i>

Critics often dismiss cross-dressing in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster as a meretricious dramatic trick. In reality, cross-dressing becomes a nexus for the play's pervasive anxieties concerning bodily and vestimentary codes, with major characters staking their conflicting claims to political power on their ability to manipulate these codes and the various inner truths which they inscribe. The divestment of the cross-dressed page, Bellario, dramatizes precisely the inability of signifiers to offer certainty concerning the truth within the casing of clothing or the casing of the body.