Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 267
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781107046306
ISBN-13 : 1107046300
Rating : 4/5 (06 Downloads)

Synopsis Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century by : Fiona Ritchie

This book establishes the significance of actresses, female playgoers and women critics in shaping Shakespeare's burgeoning reputation in the eighteenth century.

Citoyennes

Citoyennes
Author :
Publisher : University of Delaware
Total Pages : 273
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781611493559
ISBN-13 : 1611493552
Rating : 4/5 (59 Downloads)

Synopsis Citoyennes by : Annie Smart

Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women – the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue, and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere. Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sphere. According to this perspective, a discourse of “Rousseauean” domestic motherhood stripped women of an active civic identity, and limited their role to breastfeeding and childcare. Eighteenth-century France marked thus the division between a male public sphere of political action and a female private sphere of the home. Citoyennes challenges this position and offers an alternative model of female identity. This interdisciplinary study brings together a variety of genres to demonstrate convincingly that women were portrayed as civic individuals. Using foundational texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education (1762), revolutionary gouaches of Lesueur, and vaudeville plays of Year II of the Republic (1793/1794), this study brilliantly shows that in text and image, women were represented as devoted to both the public good and their families. In addition, Citoyennes offers an innovative interpretation of the home. Through re-examining sphere theory, this study challenges the tendency to equate the home with private concerns, and shows that the home can function as a site for both private life and civic identity. Citoyennes breaks new ground, for it both rectifies the ideal of domestic Rousseauean motherhood, and brings a fuller understanding to how female civic identity operated in important French texts and images.

Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 469
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780521898607
ISBN-13 : 0521898609
Rating : 4/5 (07 Downloads)

Synopsis Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century by : Fiona Ritchie

This book examines Shakespeare's influence and popularity in all aspects of eighteenth-century literature, culture and society.

She Hath Been Reading

She Hath Been Reading
Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Total Pages : 256
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780801464690
ISBN-13 : 0801464692
Rating : 4/5 (90 Downloads)

Synopsis She Hath Been Reading by : Katherine West Scheil

In the late nineteenth century hundreds of clubs formed across the United States devoted to the reading of Shakespeare. From Pasadena, California, to the seaside town of Camden, Maine; from the isolated farm town of Ottumwa, Iowa, to Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf coast, Americans were reading Shakespeare in astonishing numbers and in surprising places. Composed mainly of women, these clubs offered the opportunity for members not only to read and study Shakespeare but also to participate in public and civic activities outside the home. In She Hath Been Reading, Katherine West Scheil uncovers this hidden layer of intellectual activity that flourished in American society well into the twentieth century. Shakespeare clubs were crucial for women’s intellectual development because they provided a consistent intellectual stimulus (more so than was the case with most general women’s clubs) and because women discovered a world of possibilities, both public and private, inspired by their reading of Shakespeare. Indeed, gathering to read and discuss Shakespeare often led women to actively improve their lot in life and make their society a better place. Many clubs took action on larger social issues such as women’s suffrage, philanthropy, and civil rights. At the same time, these efforts served to embed Shakespeare into American culture as a marker for learning, self-improvement, civilization, and entertainment for a broad array of populations, varying in age, race, location, and social standing. Based on extensive research in the archives of the Folger Shakespeare Library and in dozens of local archives and private collections across America, She Hath Been Reading shows the important role that literature can play in the lives of ordinary people. As testament to this fact, the book includes an appendix listing more than five hundred Shakespeare clubs across America.

Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 259
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781316477892
ISBN-13 : 1316477894
Rating : 4/5 (92 Downloads)

Synopsis Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel by : Kate Rumbold

The eighteenth century has long been acknowledged as a pivotal period in Shakespeare's reception, transforming a playwright requiring 'improvement' into a national poet whose every word was sacred. Scholars have examined the contribution of performances, adaptations, criticism and editing to this process of transformation, but the crucial role of fiction remains overlooked. Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel reveals for the first time the prevalence, and the importance, of fictional characters' direct quotations from Shakespeare. Quoting characters ascribe emotional and moral authority to Shakespeare, redeploy his theatricality, and mock banal uses of his words; by shaping in this way what is considered valuable about Shakespeare, the novel accrues new cultural authority of its own. Shakespeare underwrites, and is underwritten by, the eighteenth-century novel, and this book reveals the lasting implications for both of their reputations.

Women's Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays

Women's Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 304
Release :
ISBN-10 : OCLC:762153918
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (18 Downloads)

Synopsis Women's Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays by : Irene G. Dash

Focusing on five Shakespeare plays, this book offers a fresh approach to the complex choices and decisions the women characters must face. Author Irene G. Dash scrutinizes stage productions over the centuries. Her exciting discoveries show the subtle ways the characters have been changed. By comparing promptbook versions from the eighteenth century to the present with the texts, Dash reveals how contemporary attitudes, spilling over into the theater, skew the works and diminish their breadth. Questions multiply as women attempt to understand relationship between the power of others over their lives and their own decisions about the moral responsibility for action. Shakespeare dramatizes these ideas. Dash shows how frequently such subtleties are lost on stage where roles are cut or reshaped, scenes transposed, or lines added. The author deftly analyzes the result of such changes. Lady Macbeth, for example, diminishes in complexity when the witches are transformed into dancing, singing choruses, or when Lady Macduff's murder disappears from the tragedy or when ironic lines are transformed. Comparing the seventeenth-century Davenant version and the twentieth-century Orson Welles film, Dash shows how these works illuminate Shakespeare's dramatic art.

The Woman's Part

The Woman's Part
Author :
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Total Pages : 364
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0252010167
ISBN-13 : 9780252010163
Rating : 4/5 (67 Downloads)

Synopsis The Woman's Part by : Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz

Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century

Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 252
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780199642373
ISBN-13 : 0199642370
Rating : 4/5 (73 Downloads)

Synopsis Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century by : Michael Caines

Surveys the critical and creative responses of 18th-century actors, audiences, critics, editors, artists, and philosophers to Shakespeare's work and traces how those responses influenced subsequent responses.

Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine

Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine
Author :
Publisher : Springer
Total Pages : 224
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781137465993
ISBN-13 : 1137465999
Rating : 4/5 (93 Downloads)

Synopsis Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine by : L. Leigh

Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine is a bold new investigation of Shakespeare's female characters using the late plays and the early adaptations written and staged during the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

The Public’s Open to Us All

The Public’s Open to Us All
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages : 345
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781527561366
ISBN-13 : 1527561364
Rating : 4/5 (66 Downloads)

Synopsis The Public’s Open to Us All by : Laura Engel

“The Public’s Open to Us All”: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England considers the relationship between British women and various modes of performance in the long eighteenth century. From the moment Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, the question of women’s status in the public world became the focus of cultural attention both on and off the stage. In addition to the appearance of the first actresses during this period female playwrights, novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, theatrical managers and entrepreneurs emerged as skillful and often demanding professionals. In this variety of new roles, eighteenth-century women redefined shifting notions of femininity by challenging traditional representations of female subjectivity and contributing to the shaping of eighteenth-century society’s attitudes, tastes, and cultural imagination. Recent scholarship in eighteenth-century studies reflects a heightened interest in fame, the rise of celebrity culture, and new ways of understanding women’s participation as both private individuals and public professionals. What is unique to the body of essays presented here is the authors’ focus on performance as a means of thinking about the ways in which women occupied, negotiated, re-imagined, and challenged the world outside of the traditional domestic realm. The authors employ a range of historical, literary, and theoretical approaches to the connections among women and performance, and in doing so make significant contributions to the fields of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies, theatre history, gender studies, and performance studies.