Time and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Time and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Author: Sarah Lewis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-09-24

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1108842194

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An original study of the ways in which temporal concepts and gendered identities intersect in early modern theatre and culture.


Time and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Time and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Author: Sarah Lewis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-09-24

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1108901697

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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.


The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage

Author: Stanley Wells

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-05-30

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780521797115

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This 2002 Companion is designed for readers interested in past and present productions of Shakespeare's plays, both in and beyond Britain. The first six chapters describe aspects of the British performing tradition in chronological sequence, from the early staging of Shakespeare's own time, through to the present day. Each relates Shakespearean developments to broader cultural concerns and adopts an individual approach and focus, on textual adaptation, acting, stages, scenery or theatre management. These are followed by three explorations of acting: tragic and comic actors and women performers of Shakespeare roles. A section on international performance includes chapters on interculturalism, on touring companies and on political theatre, with separate accounts of the performing traditions of North America, Asia and Africa. Over forty pictures illustrate peformers and productions of Shakespeare from around the world. An amalgamated list of items for further reading completes the book.


Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage

Author: Mary Floyd-Wilson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-07-11

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1107276845

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Belief in spirits, demons and the occult was commonplace in the early modern period, as was the view that these forces could be used to manipulate nature and produce new knowledge. In this groundbreaking study, Mary Floyd-Wilson explores these beliefs in relation to women and scientific knowledge, arguing that the early modern English understood their emotions and behavior to be influenced by hidden sympathies and antipathies in the natural world. Focusing on Twelfth Night, Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, All's Well That Ends Well, The Changeling and The Duchess of Malfi, she demonstrates how these plays stage questions about whether women have privileged access to nature's secrets and whether their bodies possess hidden occult qualities. Discussing the relationship between scientific discourse and the occult, she goes on to argue that as experiential evidence gained scientific ground, women's presumed intimacy with nature's secrets was either diminished or demonized.


Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages

Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages

Author: Tanya Pollard

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0198793111

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"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.


The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage

The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage

Author: Pamela Allen Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0198867832

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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.


The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre

The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre

Author: Deborah Payne Fisk

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-05-11

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780521588126

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Fourteen specially commissioned essays provide essential information about staging, playwrights, themes and genres in the drama of the Restoration.


The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy

Author: Alexander Leggatt

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780521779425

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An accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, dark comedies and romances, first published in 2001.


The First English Actresses

The First English Actresses

Author: Elizabeth Howe

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1992-06-04

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780521422109

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This book describes how and why women were permitted to act on the public stage after 1660 in England.