Women's Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays

Women's Worlds in Shakespeare's Plays PDF

Author: Irene G. Dash

Publisher:

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13:

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"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

The Women of Shakespeare's Plays

The Women of Shakespeare's Plays PDF

Author: Courtni Crump Wright

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780819188267

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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.

Women of Will

Women of Will PDF

Author: Tina Packer

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2016-03-08

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0307745341

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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.

Women in the Age of Shakespeare

Women in the Age of Shakespeare PDF

Author: Theresa D. Kemp

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2009-12-14

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13:

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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.

Shakespeare and Women

Shakespeare and Women PDF

Author: Phyllis Rackin

Publisher: Oxford Shakespeare Topics

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 0198186940

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'Shakespeare and Women' challenges a number of current assumptions about Shakespeare and women. It argues that the current scholarly emphasis on patriarchal power, male misogyny, and women's oppression may tell us more about ourselves than about the world Shakespeare inhabited and the worlds he created in his plays.

Shakespeare's Women

Shakespeare's Women PDF

Author: William Shakespeare

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13:

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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.

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries PDF

Author: Domenico Lovascio

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-04-06

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1501514202

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Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much has been written on male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, very little attention has been paid to the issues of what makes Roman women ‘Roman’ and what their role in those plays is beyond their supposed function as supporting characters for the male protagonists. Through the exploration of a broad array of works produced by such diverse playwrights as Samuel Brandon, William Shakespeare, Matthew Gwynne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathaniel Richards under three such different monarchs as Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries contributes to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were discussed in literature in the specific context of Roman drama and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which accounts of Roman women were appropriated, manipulated and recreated in early modern England.

Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds

Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds PDF

Author: Carole Levin

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2012-06-15

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0801457718

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In Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds, Carole Levin and John Watkins focus on the relationship between the London-based professional theater preeminently associated with William Shakespeare and an unprecedented European experience of geographic, social, and intellectual mobility. Shakespeare's plays bear the marks of exile and exploration, rural depopulation, urban expansion, and shifting mercantile and diplomatic configurations. He fills his plays with characters testing the limits of personal identity: foreigners, usurpers, outcasts, outlaws, scolds, shrews, witches, mercenaries, and cross-dressers. Through parallel discussions of Henry VI, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice, Levin and Watkins argue that Shakespeare's centrality to English national consciousness is inseparable from his creation of the foreign as a category asserting dangerous affinities between England's internal minorities and its competitors within an increasingly fraught European mercantile system. As a women's historian, Levin is particularly interested in Shakespeare's responses to marginalized sectors of English society. As a scholar of English, Italian Studies, and Medieval Studies, Watkins situates Shakespeare in the context of broadly European historical movements. Together Levin and Watkins narrate the emergence of the foreign as portable category that might be applied both to "strangers" from other countries and to native-born English men and women, such as religious dissidents, who resisted conformity to an increasingly narrow sense of English identity. Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds will appeal to historians, literary scholars, theater specialists, and anyone interested in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age.

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