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The Convention of the Boy Actor in Early Modern Tragedies
Bilal Hamamra
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"Young Boys and Girls are Level Now with Men": Men Playing Women in Shakespeare's Plays, in His Time and Our Own
Stephanie Donowho
Term Paper, MA Shakespeare Studies, King's College London, 2018
In this essay, I will evaluate the evidence critics supply in order to address the question: did adult men ever play any of Shakespeare’s female roles on the early modern stage? I will consider the issue of modern day ‘Original Practices’ casting that exclusively utilizes adult male actors, keeping in mind the drive in creators and consumers of theatre to access a “pleasure” derived from experiences they understand to approximate, as Virginia Mason Vaughan puts it, “Shakespeare’s original” intentions. In particular, I will examine Mark Rylance's casting as Cleopatra in the Globe’s 1999 all-male production of Antony and Cleopatra, which several critics heralded as a triumph for authenticity in line with the Globe's self-styled ‘Original Practices’ casting--that is, the choice to populate all of a play’s roles with male actors. This paper investigates historical records and extant scholarship in the field, and asks: if standard early modern practices suggest no evidence of adult men playing female roles, why is this practice embraced as 'authentic' in modern performance? This paper argues that, if historicity is invoked to invalidate women’s claims to Shakespeare’s female roles in modern performance, adult men’s performances ought to be challenged on those same terms.
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Findlay 'If I were a woman' the performativity of gender in Shakespeare
Alison Findlay
Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 2023
This article discusses the performativity of gender in Shakespeare's theatre from the perspectives of boy actors, and the texts' references to the tragic experience of imminent loss
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Shakespeare's Genders, Then and Now
Jonathan Shandell
Theater, 2002
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Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare
Terri Bourus
This essay argues that Q1 Hamlet represents the earliest version of Shakespeare’s play, written in the late 1580s. The argument builds upon, and for the first time combines, evidence in Terri Bourus, Young Shakespeare’s Young Hamlet: Print, Piracy and Performance (2014) and Zachary Lesser, Hamlet After Q1 (2015). It concentrates on differences between Q1 and the later, expanded, canonical texts of the play, specifically in relation to the age of Hamlet and the Queen. It emphasizes that Hamlet’s age crucially affects the age, sexuality, and political importance of his mother (an issue ignored by male critics). Hamlet’s age has been a factor in performances of the play from Burbage and Betterton in the seventeenth century to 2015 productions of Q1. Why then did Harold Jenkins in 1982 dismiss the importance of Hamlet’s age? To contextualize Jenkins’ dismissal (founded on the principles of both New Criticism and New Bibliography), this essay traces scholarship on the age difference back to the 1870s. It focuses particularly on the conflict between two influential texts: A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) and L.C. Knight’s “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (1933). It also calls attention to neglected details of Thomas Nashe’s 1589 allusion to “whole Hamlets of tragical speaches”: these point to Shakespeare as the author of the 1580s play, and also to specific details found in Q1 but not present in Belleforest’s story of Amleth in Histoires Tragiques.
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The Elizabethan Era and Shakespeare’s Women Characters in the Public Arena
Aadil Muzafar, Ajda Baştan
The Criterion, 2019
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Not One Thing Exactly’: Gender, Performance and Critical Debates over the Early Modern Boy-Actress
Roberta Barker
Literature Compass, 2009
Coined by Harley Granville Barker, the term ‘boy-actress’ describes young male actors, probably aged between 10 and 22 years, who appeared in women's roles on the early modern stage of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. These boys, their techniques, and their cultural meanings have recently become the subjects of heated critical debate. In our time as in their own, the impact of their onstage cross-dressing on their gender identities and on the sexual desires of their spectators has proved particularly controversial. This essay outlines key early modern sources for our knowledge of the boy-actress before considering the conflicting ways in which scholars have interpreted this evidence. Critical debates about the early modern boy-actress may have as much to teach us about our own era's constructions of gender, sexuality and performance as about the realities of the Shakespearean stage.
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Phenomenal Presence of Women in Shakespeare - Pervasive and Vigorous: A Critical Appraisal of Shakespeare's Plays
Samir Dey
Vidyasagar University, 2019
It is a most significant matter and aspect of Shakespeare's artistic genius in presenting his women character, that I'm now going to deliberate and contemplate through my paper and thereby bring out a social picture of Shakespeare's time: it's patriarchy, women's condition and their social importance. In our way of discussing women character in Shakespeare's plays, we have to cast a view upon social condition of women, Queen Elizabeth's influence, its stage plays and many others. In this very paper I am going to project three different types of woman and try to determine them socially during Queen Elizabeth's reign. Amongst the other huge number of women character, few important characters are categorized and discussed briefly. And mostly Shakespeare's intelligence and skill in fitting them in a right place and in a right manner is also a central theme of my paper. The various characters with their fluency, their obstacles, their dealings with men and above all Shakespeare's managing of them is purposefully presented on my discussion. In a word, Shakespeare's view upon his female characters, weather it is glorious, jovial or timid investigated argumentatively.
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Performative Language and Social Status in Shakespeare's Plays
Roderick McKeown
2013
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'"If I were a Woman" the performativity of gender in Shakespeare' Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare
Alison Findlay
Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 2023
The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are "All rights reserved", unless otherwise stated.
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