Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity

Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity PDF Author: E. Klett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230622607
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This book examines contemporary female portrayals of male Shakespearean roles and shows how these performances invite audiences to think differently about Shakespeare, the English nation, and themselves.

Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity

Cross-Gender Shakespeare and English National Identity PDF Author: E. Klett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230622607
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This book examines contemporary female portrayals of male Shakespearean roles and shows how these performances invite audiences to think differently about Shakespeare, the English nation, and themselves.

Shakespeare and Feminist Performance

Shakespeare and Feminist Performance PDF Author: Sarah Werner
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415227308
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
In this controversial new book, Sarah Werner argues that the text of a Shakespeare play is only one of the many factors that give a performance its meaning.

Shakespeare and Gender in Practice

Shakespeare and Gender in Practice PDF Author: Terri Power
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137408545
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Cross-gender performance was an integral part of Shakespearean theatre: from boys portraying his female characters, to those characters disguising themselves as men within the story. This book examines contemporary trends in staging cross-gender performances of Shakespeare in the UK and USA. Terri Power surveys the field of gender in performance through an intersectional feminist and queer theoretical lens. In depth discussions of key productions reveal processes adapted by companies for their performances. The book also looks at how contemporary performance responds to new cultural politics of gender and creates a critical language for understanding that within Shakespeare. This book features: - First-hand interviews with professional artists - Case studies of individual performances - A practical workshop section with innovative exercises

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare

Crossing Gender in Shakespeare PDF Author: James W. Stone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136979050
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
In this book, Stone effects a return to gender, after many years of neglect by Twenty-First-Century critics, via a methodology of close reading that foregrounds moments of sexual decentering and disequilibrium within the text and in the interstices of the dialogue between Shakespeare and his critics. Issues addressed range from the cross dressing of Viola and Imogen to the cross gartering of Malvolio, the sound of "un" and the uncanny lyric narcissism of Richard II, Hamlet’s misogyny, androgyny, and the poison of marital/political "union," Othello’s fears of impotence, rumors of Antony’s emasculation versus the militant yet nurturing triumphalism of Cleopatra’s suicide, and Posthumus’s hysterical reaction to the "woman’s part" in himself and his compensatory fantasies of parthenogenesis. Stone unpacks ideologically powerful but unsustainable male claims to self-identity and sameness, set over against man’s type-gendering of women as the origin of divisive sexual difference, discord, and the dissolution of marriage. Men who blame women for the difference that divides and weakens their sense of unity and sameness to oneself are unconscious that the uncanny feminine is not outside the masculine, its reassuring canny opposite; it is inside the masculine, its uncanny difference from itself.

Shakespeare and Costume in Practice

Shakespeare and Costume in Practice PDF Author: Bridget Escolme
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9783030571511
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
What is the role of costume in Shakespeare production? Shakespeare and Costume in Practice argues that costume design choices are central not only to the creation of period setting and the actor’s work on character, but to the cultural, political, and psychological meanings that the theatre makes of Shakespeare. The book explores questions about what the first Hamlet looked like in his mourning cloak; how costumes for a Shakespeare comedy can reflect or critique the collective nostalgias a culture has for its past; how costume and casting work together to ask new questions about Shakespeare and race. Using production case studies of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest, the book demonstrates that costume design can be a site of experimentation, playfulness, and transgression in the theatre – and that it can provoke audiences to think again about what power, race, and gender look like on the Shakespearean stage.

Shakespeare Without Women

Shakespeare Without Women PDF Author: Dympna Callaghan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134633122
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Shakespeare Without Women is a controversial study of female impersonation, and the connections between dramatic and political representation in Shakespeare's plays. In this original and challenging book, Callaghan argues that Shakespeare did not include women, and that his transvestite actors did not represent women, and were not, furthermore, meant to do so. All Shakespeare's actors were, of historical necessity, (white) males which meant that the portrayal of women and racial others posed unique problems for his theatre. What is important, Shakespeare Without Women claims, is not to bemoan the absence of women, Africans, or the Irish, but to determine what such absences meant in their historical context and why they matter today. Callaghan focuses in the implications of absence and exclusion in several of Shakespeare's works: * the exclusion of the female body fromTwelfth Night * the impersonation of the female voice in the original performances of the plays * racial impersonation in Othello * echoes of removal of the Gaelic Irish in The Tempest * the absence of women on stage and in public life as shown in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Shakespeare and Women

Shakespeare and Women PDF 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.

Consent in Shakespeare

Consent in Shakespeare PDF Author: ARTEMIS. PREESHL
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367644345
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
By examining how female characters speak and act during coming of age, engagement, marriage, and intimacy, 'Consent in Shakespeare' will enhance understanding about how and why women spoke, remained silent, or acted as they did in relation to their intimate partners in Early Modern and contemporary private and public situations in and around the Mediterranean. Consent in intimate relationships is front and center in the today's conversations. In this study, how Shakespeare's female protagonists and supporting characters respond verbally and physically in Shakespeare's comedies and sources from which he derived his plays in and around Mediterranean call for a re-examination of women's roles in Early Modern and contemporary cultures. This re-examination of the words that women say or do not say, and actions that women do or do not take, in Shakespeare's Mediterranean plays and his probable sources shed light on how Shakespeare's audiences might have perceived the Mediterranean cultural mores and norms. Assessment of source materials for Shakespeare's comedies set in the Balkans, France, Italy, the Near East, North Africa, and Spain suggests how women of diverse backgrounds communicated in everyday life and peak life experiences in the Early Modern era. Given Shakespeare's impact worldwide, this initiative to shift the conversation about the power of consent of female protagonists and supporting characters in Shakespeare's Mediterranean plays will further transform conversations about consent in class, board and conference rooms, and the international stage.

Shakespeare and the Law

Shakespeare and the Law PDF Author: Bradin Cormack
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022637856X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
"William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law. Legal documents make up most of the records we have of his life; trials, lawsuits, and legal terms permeate his plays. Gathering an extraordinary team of literary and legal scholars, philosophers, and even sitting judges, Shakespeare and the Law demonstrates that Shakespeare's thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law's technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects. Shakespeare and the Law opens with three essays that provide useful frameworks for approaching the topic, offering perspectives on law and literature that emphasize both the continuities and the contrasts between the two fields. In its second section, the book considers Shakespeare's awareness of common-law thinking and practice through examinations of Measure for Measure and Othello. Building and expanding on this question, the third part inquires into Shakespeare's general attitudes toward legal systems. A judge and former solicitor general rule on Shylock's demand for enforcement of his odd contract; and two essays by literary scholars take contrasting views on whether Shakespeare could imagine a functioning legal system. The fourth section looks at how law enters into conversation with issues of politics and community, both in the plays and in our own world. The volume concludes with a freewheeling colloquy among Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Judge Richard A. Posner, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier that covers everything from the ghost in Hamlet to the nature of judicial discretion"--Jacket.

Women of Will

Women of Will PDF 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.