Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage

Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage PDF Author: Michael Shapiro
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472084050
Category : Child actors
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Cross-dressing in Shakespeare: a context for Elizabethan gender studies

Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage

Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage PDF Author: Michael Shapiro
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472084050
Category : Child actors
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cross-dressing in Shakespeare: a context for Elizabethan gender studies

Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage

Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage PDF Author: Michael Shapiro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780472904242
Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cross-dressing, sexual identity, and the performance of gender are among the most hotly discussed topics in contemporary cultural studies. A vital addition to the growing body of literature, this book is the most in-depth and historically contextual study to date of Shakespeare's uses of the heroine in male disguiseman-playing-woman-playing-manin all its theatrical and social complexity. Shapiro's study centers on the five plays in which Shakespeare employed the figure of the "female page": The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline. Combining theater and social history, Shapiro locates Shakespeare's work in relation to controversies over gender roles and cross-dressing in Elizabethan England.

When Romeo was a Woman

When Romeo was a Woman PDF Author: Lisa Merrill
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472087495
Category : Actors
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Examines the life of the androgynous nineteenth-century American actress and her work on the Anglo-American stage

The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage

The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage PDF Author: Pamela Allen Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198867832
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage traces the transnational connections between Shakespeare's all-male stage and the first female stars in the West. The book is the first to use Italian and English plays and other sources to explore this relationship, focusing on the gifted actress whoradically altered female roles and expanded the horizons of drama just as the English were building their first paying theaters. By the time Shakespeare began to write plays, women had been acting professionally in Italian troupes for two decades, traveling across the Continent and acting in allgenres, including tragicomedy and tragedy. Some women became the first truly international stars, winning royal and noble patrons and literary admirers beyond Italy, with repeat tours in France and Spain.Elizabeth and her court caught wind of the Italians' success, and soon troupes with actresses came to London to perform. Through contacts direct and indirect, English professionals grew keenly aware of the mimetic revolution wrought by the skilled diva, who expanded the innamorata and made the typemore engaging, outspoken, and autonomous. Some English writers pushed back, treating the actress as a whorish threat to the all-male stage, which had long minimized female roles. Others saw a vital new model full of promise. Faced with rising demand for Italian-style plays, Lyly, Marlowe, Kyd, andShakespeare used Italian models from scripted and improvised drama to turn out stellar female parts in the mode of the actress, altering them in significant ways while continuing to use boys to play them. Writers seized on the comici's materials and methods to piece together pastoral, comic, andtragicomic plays from mobile theatergrams - plot elements, roles, stories, speeches, and star scenes, such as cross-dressing, the mad scene, and the sung lament. Shakespeare and his peers gave new prominence to female characters, marked their passions as un-English, and devised plots that figuredthem as self-aware agents, not counters traded between men. Playing up the skills and charisma of the boy player, they produced stunning roles charged with the diva's prodigious theatricality and alien glamour. Rightly perceived, the diva's celebrity and her acclaimed skills posed a radicalchallenge that pushed English playwrights to break with the past in enormously generative and provocative ways.

A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare

A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare PDF Author: Dympna Callaghan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118501268
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 581

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Book Description
The question is not whether Shakespeare studies needs feminism, but whether feminism needs Shakespeare. This is the explicitly political approach taken in the dynamic and newly updated edition of A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare. Provides the definitive feminist statement on Shakespeare for the 21st century Updates address some of the newest theatrical andcreative engagements with Shakespeare, offering fresh insights into Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and gender dynamics in early modern England Contributors come from across the feminist generations and from various stages in their careers to address what is new in the field in terms of historical and textual discovery Explores issues vital to feminist inquiry, including race, sexuality, the body, queer politics, social economies, religion, and capitalism In addition to highlighting changes, it draws attention to the strong continuities of scholarship in this field over the course of the history of feminist criticism of Shakespeare The previous edition was a recipient of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award; this second edition maintains its coverage and range, and bringsthe scholarship right up to the present day

The Place of the Stage

The Place of the Stage PDF Author: Steven Mullaney
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472083466
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Probes English society in the age of Shakespeare

Time and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Time and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage PDF Author: Sarah Lewis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108901697
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This book analyses the cultural and theatrical intersections of early modern temporal concepts and gendered identities. Through close readings of the works of Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, Heywood and others, across the genres of domestic comedy, city comedy and revenge tragedy, Sarah Lewis shows how temporal tropes are used to delineate masculinity and femininity on the early modern stage, and vice versa. She sets out the ways in which the temporal constructs of patience, prodigality and revenge, as well as the dramatic identities that are built from those constructs, and the experience of playgoing itself, negotiate a fraught opposition between action in the moment and delay in the duration. This book argues that looking at time through the lens of gender, and gender through the lens of time, is crucial if we are to develop our understanding of the early modern cultural construction of both.

Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender

Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender PDF Author: Shirley Nelson Garner
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253210272
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
While considering Shakespeare's earliest attempts at tragedy in Richard III and Titus Andronicus, this volume covers the major tragic period, giving special attention to Othello.

Women and Revenge in Shakespeare

Women and Revenge in Shakespeare PDF Author: Marguerite A. Tassi
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 1575911310
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Can there be a virtue in vengeance? Can revenge do ethical work? Can revenge be the obligation of women? This wide-ranging literary study looks at Shakespeare's women and finds bold answers to questions such as these. A surprising number of Shakespeare's female characters respond to moral outrages by expressing a strong desire for vengeance. This book's analysis of these characters and their circumstances offers incisive critical perceptions of feminine anger, ethics, and agency and challenges our assumptions about the role of gender in revenge. In this provocative book, Marguerite A. Tassi counters longstanding critical opinions on revenge: that it is the sole province of men in Western literature and culture, that it is a barbaric, morally depraved, irrational instinct, and that it is antithetical to justice. Countless examples have been mined from Shakespeare's dramas to reveal women's profound concerns with revenge and justice, honor and shame, crime and punishment. In placing the critical focus on avenging women, this book significantly redresses a gender imbalance in scholarly treatments of revenge, particularly in early modern literature.

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages PDF Author: Tanya Pollard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198793111
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
"The book argues that rediscovered ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on sixteenth-century England's dramatic landscape, not only in academic and aristocratic settings, but also at the heart of the developing commercial theaters."--Introduction, p. 2.