Author: Courtni Crump Wright
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780819188267
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
This book analyzes, through easy-to-follow play synopses, the strengths and weaknesses of the female protagonists as they impact not only the plot of Shakespeare's plays but the male protagonist. Selected, condensed one-act versions of the plays are provided in order to enrich the discussion of the play, to stimulate in reading the play in its entirety, and to provide a springboard for group discussion of the play and the impact of the women. Contents: William Shakespeare: His Art, Life and Times; The Women of Shakespeare's Plays: An Overview; The Comedy of Errors; Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Julius Caesar; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Macbeth; Much Ado About Nothing; Othello the Moor of Venice; The Taming of the Shrew; Antony and Cleopatra; Twelfth Night or What You Will; Romeo and Juliet; The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Bibliography.
Author: Tina Packer
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307745341
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Women of Will is a fierce and funny exploration of Shakespeare’s understanding of the feminine. Tina Packer, one of our foremost Shakespeare experts, shows that Shakespeare began, in his early comedies, by writing women as shrews to be tamed or as sweet little things with no independence of thought. The women of the history plays are much more interesting, beginning with Joan of Arc. Then, with the extraordinary Juliet, there is a dramatic shift: suddenly Shakespeare’s women have depth, motivation, and understanding of life more than equal to that of the men. As Shakespeare ceases to write women as predictable caricatures and starts writing them from the inside, his women become as dimensional, spirited, spiritual, active, and sexual as any of his male characters. Wondering if Shakespeare had fallen in love (Packer considers with whom, and what she may have been like), the author observes that from Juliet on, Shakespeare’s characters demonstrate that when women and men are equal in status and passion, they can—and do—change the world.
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
Serves both as a script for performance and as a text for high school and college theater and English classes. This self-contained script brings together different scenes from Shakespeare's plays to portray women "in all their infinite variety." Two narrators, a man and a woman, introduce and comment on these scenes, weaving together the different characters and situations. This book combines literary and theatrical techniques in examining Shakespeare's women. Its promptbook format provides clear, helpful stage directions on pages facing each of the scenes. Also helpful are concise glosses and footnotes to define difficult words and phrases plus a commentary to explain each scene in its dramatic context. Other features include sheet music for each song in the play, a bibliography on the topic of women in Shakespeare's plays, and suggestions for directors who wish to stage the play.
Author: Charles George
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 9780822212393
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 28
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Book Description
THE STORY: Imagine the fun when six of Shakespeare's heroines get together to discuss the universal topic-love. That's what happens in this thirty-minute playlet. Juliet has just fallen in love with Romeo and the other ladies of the Bard's imagination convene to enlighten her on the best method of conducting a romance.
Author: Phyllis Rackin
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198186940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
Shakespeare and Women situates Shakespeare's female characters in multiple historical contexts, ranging from the early modern England in which they originated to the contemporary Western world in which our own encounters with them are staged. In so doing, this book seeks to challenge currently prevalent views of Shakespeare's women-both the women he depicted in his plays and the women he encountered in the world he inhabited. Chapter 1, "A Usable History," analyses the implications and consequences of the emphasis on patriarchal power, male misogyny, and women's oppression that has dominated recent feminist Shakespeare scholarship, while subsequent chapters propose alternative models for feminist analysis. Chapter 2, "The Place(s) of Women in Shakespeare's World," emphasizes the frequently overlooked kinds of social, political, and economic agency exercised by the women Shakespeare would have known in both Stratford and London. Chapter 3, "Our Canon, Ourselves," addresses the implications of the modern popularity of plays such as The Taming of the Shrew which seem to endorse women's subjugation, arguing that the plays--and the aspects of those plays--that we have chosen to emphasize tell us more about our own assumptions than about the beliefs that informed the responses of Shakespeare's first audiences. Chapter 4, "Boys will be Girls," explores the consequences for women of the use of male actors to play women's roles. Chapter 5, "The Lady's Reeking Breath," turns to the sonnets, the texts that seem most resistant to feminist appropriation, to argue that Shakespeare's rewriting of the idealized Petrarchan lady anticipates modern feminist critiques of the essential misogyny of the Petrarchan tradition. The final chapter, "Shakespeare's Timeless Women," surveys the implication of Shakespeare's female characters in the process of historical change, as they have been repeatedly updated to conform to changing conceptions of women's nature and women's social roles, serving in ever-changing guises as models of an unchanging, universal female nature.
Author: Theresa D. Kemp
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 429
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Book Description
This book offers a look at the lives of Elizabethan era women in the context of the great female characters in the works of William Shakespeare. Like the other entries in this fascinating series, Women in the Age of Shakespeare shows the influence of the world William Shakespeare lived in on the worlds he created for the stage, this time by focusing on women in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras in general and in Shakespeare's works in particular. Women in the Age of Shakespeare explores the ancient and medieval ideas that Shakespeare drew upon in creating his great comedic and tragic heroines. It then looks at how these ideas intersected with the lived experiences of women of Shakespeare's time, followed by a close look at the major female characters in Shakespeare's plays and poems. Later chapters consider how these characters have been enacted on stage and in film, interpreted by critics and scholars, and re-imagined by writers in our own time.
Author: Mrs. Jameson (Anna)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Women in art
Languages : en
Pages : 480
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Book Description
Author: Cristina León Alfar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134773455
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeare’s Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina León Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female sexuality that recur in the form of a slander narrative throughout William Shakespeare’s work. She argues that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. While men’s accusations are built on a foundation of political, religious, legal, and domestic discourses about men’s superiority to, and rule over, women, whose weaker natures render them perpetually suspect, women’s bonds with other women animate defenses of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of patrilineal power that undergirds masculine privileges in marriage, and signify a discursive shift that constitutes the site of agency within a system of oppression that ought to prohibit such agency. That women’s agency in the early modern period must be tied to the formations of power that officially demand their subjection need not undermine their acts. In what Alfar calls Shakespeare’s cuckoldry plays, women’s rhetoric of defense is both subject to the discourse of sexual honor and finds a ground on which to “shift it” as women take control of and replace sexual slander with their own narratives of marital betrayal.
Author: Irene G. Dash
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
"Focusing on five Shakespeare plays, this book offers a fresh approach to the complex choices and decisions the women characters must face. Author Irene G. Dash scrutinizes stage productions over the centuries. Her exciting discoveries show the subtle ways the characters have been changed. By comparing promptbook versions from the eighteenth century to the present with the texts, Dash reveals how contemporary attitudes, spilling over into the theater, skew the works and diminish their breadth." "Questions multiply as women attempt to understand relationship between the power of others over their lives and their own decisions about the moral responsibility for action. Shakespeare dramatizes these ideas." "Dash shows how frequently such subtleties are lost on stage where roles are cut or reshaped, scenes transposed, or lines added. The author deftly analyzes the result of such changes. Lady Macbeth, for example, diminishes in complexity when the witches are transformed into dancing, singing choruses, or when Lady Macduff's murder disappears from the tragedy or when ironic lines are transformed. Comparing the seventeenth-century Davenant version and the twentieth-century Orson Welles film, Dash shows how these works illuminate Shakespeare's dramatic art."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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.
