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.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Loughlin, M. H., (2025), "Cross-Dressing and the Politics of Dismemberment in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Philaster", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Loughlin, Marie H. "Cross-Dressing and the Politics of Dismemberment in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s Philaster." Renaissance and Reformation 33 (2): 2010. 23-44. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v33i2.11342. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.