Women's Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays

Women's Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays
Author: Irene G. Dash
Publisher:
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1997
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

"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."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Women in the Age of Shakespeare

Women in the Age of Shakespeare
Author: Theresa D. Kemp
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2009-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

This book offers a look at the lives of Elizabethan era women in the context of the great female characters in the works of William Shakespeare. Like the other entries in this fascinating series, Women in the Age of Shakespeare shows the influence of the world William Shakespeare lived in on the worlds he created for the stage, this time by focusing on women in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras in general and in Shakespeare's works in particular. Women in the Age of Shakespeare explores the ancient and medieval ideas that Shakespeare drew upon in creating his great comedic and tragic heroines. It then looks at how these ideas intersected with the lived experiences of women of Shakespeare's time, followed by a close look at the major female characters in Shakespeare's plays and poems. Later chapters consider how these characters have been enacted on stage and in film, interpreted by critics and scholars, and re-imagined by writers in our own time.

Women of Will

Women of Will
Author: Tina Packer
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2016-03-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0307745341

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.

Shakespeare and Women

Shakespeare and Women
Author: Phyllis Rackin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2005
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198186940

Shakespeare and Women situates Shakespeare's female characters in multiple historical contexts, ranging from the early modern England in which they originated to the contemporary Western world in which our own encounters with them are staged. In so doing, this book seeks to challenge currently prevalent views of Shakespeare's women-both the women he depicted in his plays and the women he encountered in the world he inhabited. Chapter 1, "A Usable History," analyses the implications and consequences of the emphasis on patriarchal power, male misogyny, and women's oppression that has dominated recent feminist Shakespeare scholarship, while subsequent chapters propose alternative models for feminist analysis. Chapter 2, "The Place(s) of Women in Shakespeare's World," emphasizes the frequently overlooked kinds of social, political, and economic agency exercised by the women Shakespeare would have known in both Stratford and London. Chapter 3, "Our Canon, Ourselves," addresses the implications of the modern popularity of plays such as The Taming of the Shrew which seem to endorse women's subjugation, arguing that the plays--and the aspects of those plays--that we have chosen to emphasize tell us more about our own assumptions than about the beliefs that informed the responses of Shakespeare's first audiences. Chapter 4, "Boys will be Girls," explores the consequences for women of the use of male actors to play women's roles. Chapter 5, "The Lady's Reeking Breath," turns to the sonnets, the texts that seem most resistant to feminist appropriation, to argue that Shakespeare's rewriting of the idealized Petrarchan lady anticipates modern feminist critiques of the essential misogyny of the Petrarchan tradition. The final chapter, "Shakespeare's Timeless Women," surveys the implication of Shakespeare's female characters in the process of historical change, as they have been repeatedly updated to conform to changing conceptions of women's nature and women's social roles, serving in ever-changing guises as models of an unchanging, universal female nature.

Shakespeare's Women

Shakespeare's Women
Author: William Shakespeare
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1986
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

Serves both as a script for performance and as a text for high school and college theater and English classes. This self-contained script brings together different scenes from Shake­speare's plays to portray women "in all their infinite variety." Two narrators, a man and a woman, introduce and com­ment on these scenes, weaving together the different characters and situations. This book combines literary and theat­rical techniques in examining Shake­speare's women. Its promptbook format provides clear, helpful stage directions on pages facing each of the scenes. Also help­ful are concise glosses and footnotes to define difficult words and phrases plus a commentary to explain each scene in its dramatic context. Other features include sheet music for each song in the play, a bibliography on the topic of women in Shakespeare's plays, and suggestions for directors who wish to stage the play.

Onstage and Offstage Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays

Onstage and Offstage Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays
Author: Anthony Brennan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000350142

Originally published in 1989, this book focuses on the handling of the relationship between the onstage world and the offstage world, between the world that Shakespeare shows us and the one he tells us about. It is developed in two parts. Initially examined is the way reports are used in Shakespeare to relate the offstage and onstage worlds, building from simple examples within individual scenes in various plays to related sequences of reports which can be evaluated as part of broader strategies effecting the structure of a whole play. In the second part the author examines the ways in which several, or all, of these strategies work in individual plays, and what combined effect the prominent employment of them has in shaping the effect of the plays. In all cases the author is concerned to indicate why Shakespeare chose to handle matters as he does rather than in other ways available in the sources or in the speculative alternative methods which can be imaginatively constructed.

The Woman's Part

The Woman's Part
Author: Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1980
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780252010163

Women and Revenge in Shakespeare

Women and Revenge in Shakespeare
Author: Marguerite A. Tassi
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2011
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1575911310

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.

The Women of Shakespeare's Plays

The Women of Shakespeare's Plays
Author: Courtni Crump Wright
Publisher: University Press of America
Total Pages: 206
Release: 1993
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780819188267

This book analyzes, through easy-to-follow play synopses, the strengths and weaknesses of the female protagonists as they impact not only the plot of Shakespeare's plays but the male protagonist. Selected, condensed one-act versions of the plays are provided in order to enrich the discussion of the play, to stimulate in reading the play in its entirety, and to provide a springboard for group discussion of the play and the impact of the women. Contents: William Shakespeare: His Art, Life and Times; The Women of Shakespeare's Plays: An Overview; The Comedy of Errors; Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; The Merry Wives of Windsor; Julius Caesar; A Midsummer Night's Dream; Macbeth; Much Ado About Nothing; Othello the Moor of Venice; The Taming of the Shrew; Antony and Cleopatra; Twelfth Night or What You Will; Romeo and Juliet; The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Bibliography.