Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England

This 1999 book examines the role of literacy-education in promoting gender difference, as shown in English Renaissance texts.

Eve Rachele Sanders (Author)

9780521056496, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 March 2008

284 pages, 8 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

'A sophisticated analysis of how girls and boys learned gender roles as they learned to read and write and how gender differences were supported or critiqued in the English public theater and in writings by women and men. The book is first-rate literary history and first-rate social and cultural history that confronts the connections between gender theory and historical practice. This is fine scholarship.' Awards Committee for The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women

In early modern England, boys and girls learned to be masculine or feminine as they learned to read and write. This 1999 book explores how gender differences, instilled through specific methods of instruction in literacy, were scrutinised in the English public theatre. Close readings of plays from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost to Thomas Dekker's Whore of Babylon, and of poems, didactic treatises and autobiographical writings from the same period, offer a richly textured analysis of the interaction between didactic precepts, literary models, and historical men and women. At the cross-roads between literary studies and social and cultural history, Eve Sanders' research offers insights into poems, plays, and first-person narratives (including works by women writers, such as Mary Sidney and Anne Clifford) and into the social conflicts that shaped individuals as the writers and readers of such texts.

Preface
1. On his breast writ
2. Enter Hamlet reading on a book
3. She reads and smiles
4. Writes in his tables
5. She writes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG]