Boys will be Girls: Cross-Casting in School Drama

Abstract

Although we have seen, cross-casting was only rarely a ughfeature of traditional theatre in seventeenth-century France, it persisted out of necessity in the school drama of the period.¹ Drawing on the great theatrical tradition of the Jesuits at the Collège de Clermont in Paris (which became the Collège Louisle-Grand in 1683) and on the performance history of Racine’s two plays written for Saint-Cyr, I shall examine how the question of cross-casting was received in these two very different performance contexts. It will be seen that the all-male productions at the Collège de Clermont provoked quite different responses from the all-female productions at Saint-Cyr. In Jesuit drama, cross-casting was inextricably bound up with debates regarding the inclusion of female roles and love plots in their drama, while the performances at Saint-Cyr highlighted wider questions regarding the role of women in society.