Cross-gender performance was an integral part of Shakespearean theatre: from boys portraying his female characters, to those characters disguising themselves as men within the story. This book examines contemporary trends in staging cross-gender performances of Shakespeare in the UK and USA. Terri Power surveys the field of gender in performance through an intersectional feminist and queer theoretical lens. In depth discussions of key productions reveal processes adapted by companies for their performances. The book also looks at how contemporary performance responds to new cultural politics of gender and creates a critical language for understanding that within Shakespeare. This book features: - First-hand interviews with professional artists - Case studies of individual performances - A practical workshop section with innovative exercises

This book examines contemporary female portrayals of male Shakespearean roles and shows how these performances invite audiences to think differently about Shakespeare, the English nation, and themselves.

Can there be a virtue in vengeance? Can revenge do ethical work? Can revenge be the obligation of women? This wide-ranging literary study looks at Shakespeare's women and finds bold answers to questions such as these. A surprising number of Shakespeare's female characters respond to moral outrages by expressing a strong desire for vengeance. This book's analysis of these characters and their circumstances offers incisive critical perceptions of feminine anger, ethics, and agency and challenges our assumptions about the role of gender in revenge. In this provocative book, Marguerite A. Tassi counters longstanding critical opinions on revenge: that it is the sole province of men in Western literature and culture, that it is a barbaric, morally depraved, irrational instinct, and that it is antithetical to justice. Countless examples have been mined from Shakespeare's dramas to reveal women's profound concerns with revenge and justice, honor and shame, crime and punishment. In placing the critical focus on avenging women, this book significantly redresses a gender imbalance in scholarly treatments of revenge, particularly in early modern literature.

What is the role of costume in Shakespeare production? Shakespeare and Costume in Practice argues that costume design choices are central not only to the creation of period setting and the actor’s work on character, but to the cultural, political, and psychological meanings that the theatre makes of Shakespeare. The book explores questions about what the first Hamlet looked like in his mourning cloak; how costumes for a Shakespeare comedy can reflect or critique the collective nostalgias a culture has for its past; how costume and casting work together to ask new questions about Shakespeare and race. Using production case studies of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest, the book demonstrates that costume design can be a site of experimentation, playfulness, and transgression in the theatre – and that it can provoke audiences to think again about what power, race, and gender look like on the Shakespearean stage.

How do performances of Shakespeare change the meanings of the plays? In this controversial new book, Sarah Werner argues that the text of a Shakespeare play is only one of the many factors that give a performance its meaning. By focusing on The Royal Shakespeare Company, Werner demonstrates how actor training, company management and gender politics fundamentally affect both how a production is created and the interpretations it can suggest. Werner concentrates particularly on: The influential training methods of Cicely Berry and Patsy Rodenburg The history of the RSC Women's Group Gale Edwards' production of The Taming of the Shrew She reveals that no performance of Shakespeare is able to bring the plays to life or to realise the playwright's intentions without shaping them to mirror our own assumptions. By examining the ideological implications of performance practices, this book will help all interested in Shakespeare's plays to explore what it means to study them in performance.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

By examining how female characters speak and act during coming of age, engagement, marriage, and intimacy, 'Consent in Shakespeare' will enhance understanding about how and why women spoke, remained silent, or acted as they did in relation to their intimate partners in Early Modern and contemporary private and public situations in and around the Mediterranean. Consent in intimate relationships is front and center in the today's conversations. In this study, how Shakespeare's female protagonists and supporting characters respond verbally and physically in Shakespeare's comedies and sources from which he derived his plays in and around Mediterranean call for a re-examination of women's roles in Early Modern and contemporary cultures. This re-examination of the words that women say or do not say, and actions that women do or do not take, in Shakespeare's Mediterranean plays and his probable sources shed light on how Shakespeare's audiences might have perceived the Mediterranean cultural mores and norms. Assessment of source materials for Shakespeare's comedies set in the Balkans, France, Italy, the Near East, North Africa, and Spain suggests how women of diverse backgrounds communicated in everyday life and peak life experiences in the Early Modern era. Given Shakespeare's impact worldwide, this initiative to shift the conversation about the power of consent of female protagonists and supporting characters in Shakespeare's Mediterranean plays will further transform conversations about consent in class, board and conference rooms, and the international stage.

Women of Will is a fierce and funny exploration of Shakespeare’s understanding of the feminine. Tina Packer, one of our foremost Shakespeare experts, shows that Shakespeare began, in his early comedies, by writing women as shrews to be tamed or as sweet little things with no independence of thought. The women of the history plays are much more interesting, beginning with Joan of Arc. Then, with the extraordinary Juliet, there is a dramatic shift: suddenly Shakespeare’s women have depth, motivation, and understanding of life more than equal to that of the men. As Shakespeare ceases to write women as predictable caricatures and starts writing them from the inside, his women become as dimensional, spirited, spiritual, active, and sexual as any of his male characters. Wondering if Shakespeare had fallen in love (Packer considers with whom, and what she may have been like), the author observes that from Juliet on, Shakespeare’s characters demonstrate that when women and men are equal in status and passion, they can—and do—change the world.

"This collection covers a wide range of Shakespeare productions, from Granville Barker and Poel's experiments with cross-gender casting to recent performances by Cheek by Jowl, the National Theatre, and the new Globe; from early twentieth-century performances by women's companies in England and Japan to contemporary stagings by the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company; from Mabou Mines' controversial Lear in New York to a more subtly transgressive Tempest by the Georgia Shakespeare Festival." "These essays are comprehensive in their consideration of cross-gender-cast Shakespeare as it evolved over the past century. Theoretically informed yet grounded in the particularity of individual performances, they forge new connections between performance studies and gender theory and broach issues vital to anyone interested in Shakespeare."--BOOK JACKET.

An anthology of Shakespeare gender criticism from 1976 to the present, reflecting the redistribution of power in Shakespeare studies and charting the recent history of feminist critical practice. Some essays are sustained readings of single plays, while others trace gender concerns across the playwright's work. Topics include the rape in Lucrece, sexual and social tragedy in Othello, containment of female erotic power in Shakespeare's plays, and same-sex love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice. For students of literature and feminist studies. Distributed by routledge, Chapman and Hall. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR