As She Likes It is the first attempt to tackle head on the enduring question of how to perform those unruly women at the centre of Shakespeare's comedies. Unique amongst both Shakespearian and feminist studies, As She Likes It asks how gender politics affects the production to the comedies, and how gender is represented, both in the text and on the stage. Penny Gay takes a fascinating look at the way Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Measure for Measure have been staged over the last half a century, when perceptions of gender roles have undergone massive changes. She also interrogates, rigorously but thoughtfully, the relationship between a male theatrical establishment and a burgeoning feminist approach to performance. As illuminating for practitioners as it will be enjoyable and useful for students, As She Likes It will be critical reading for anyone interested in women's experience of theatre.
Ziegler, Dolan, and Roberts' "attention is directed specifically to the representations of Shakespeare's women in the Victorian era, rather than on the Elizabethan stage ... [They have] culled from the [Folger] Library's vast holdings a remarkably varied and illuminating array of books, manuscripts, and illustrations which provide a new understanding of how Shakespeare's heroines came to embody, reflect, and refract the values and assumptions of nineteenth-century English society."--Foreword, p.7.
The first sustained study of girls and girlhood in early modern literature and culture. Jennifer Higginbotham makes a persuasive case for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system. She challenges the widespread assumption that the category of the 'girl' played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. And she demonstrates that girl characters appeared in a variety of texts, from female infants in Shakespeare's late romances to little children in Tudor interludes to adult 'roaring girls' in city comedies. This monograph provides the first book-length study of the way the literature and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constructed the category of the 'girl'.
One of the best loved of Shakespeare's 'middle comedies', As You Like It has rarely been out of the theatrical repertoire. Centering on the cross-dressed figure of Rosalind, the play both celebrates and questions the state of being in love. This study attempts to recreate the Elizabethan audience's experience of the play - its awareness of issues that have been elided in subsequent, simply 'romantic' readings. Using an innovative theory of the significance of the Globe's stage space, Penny Gay examines the play's presentation of issues of power, sexuality, gender and genre.
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
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.
Shakespeare and the Nature of Women was the first full-length feminist analysis of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, ushering in a new era in research and criticism. Its arguments for the feminism both of the drama and the early modern period caused instant controversy, which still engrosses scholars. Dusinberre argues that Puritan teaching on sexuality and spiritual equality raises questions about women which feed into the drama, where the role of women in relation to authority structures is constantly renegotiated. Using a critical language which predates Foucault and other major theorists, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women argues that Renaissance drama highlights ways in which the feminine and the masculine are socially constructed. The presence of the boy actor on stage created an awareness of gender as performance, now crucial to contemporary feminist thought. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women claimed for women a right to speak about the literary text from their own place in history and culture. The author's Preface to the second edition traces contemporary developments in feminist scholarship, which still wrestles with the book's main thesis: Renaissance feminism, feminist Shakespeare.
This is a comprehensive reference guide examining the language employed by Shakespeare to represent women in the full range of his poetry and plays. Including over 350 entries, Alison Findlay shows the role of women within Shakespearean drama, their representations on the Shakespearean stage, and their place in Shakespeare's personal and professional lives.
