Shakespeare's Women
Performance and Conception

A study assessing the treatment of women in the plays of Shakespeare, his predecessors and his contemporaries.

David Mann (Author)

9780521882132, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 February 2008

304 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.62 kg

'The study is strongest where it discusses dramatic history and performative technique. … the broad treatment offers interesting challenges and useful materials towards our thinking about the cross-dressed boy actor on the early modern stage.' Theatre Research International

In this book, David Mann examines the influence of the Elizabethan cross-dressed tradition on the performance and conception of Shakespeare's female roles through an analysis of all 205 extant plays written for the adult theatre. The study provides both an historical context, showing how performance practice developed in the era before Shakespeare, and a comparative one, in revealing how dramatists in general treated their female characters and the influence their characterisation had upon Shakespeare's writing. The book challenges many views of the sexual ethos of Elizabethan theatre, offering instead a picture of Shakespeare which pays less attention to his supposed gender politics and more to his ability to exploit the cross-dressed convention as a dramatic medium. By challenging the gay and polemical feminist accounts that currently dominate the treatment of Elizabethan cross-dressing, the book restores its importance as a mainstream performance topic for academics and students.

Preliminary: the persistence of all-male theatre
Introduction: the significance of the performer
1. Age and status
2. Erotic ambience
3. Stage costume and performer ethos
4. Male didacticism and female stereotyping
5. Dramatic empathy and moral ambiguity
6. Sexual violence
7. Positive representations of young women
Appendix: female characters in the adult repertory 1500–1614.

Subject Areas: Shakespeare studies & criticism [DSGS], Literature & literary studies [D], Theatre studies [AN]