A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama

Free Download A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama By Alison Findlay
1999 | 214 Pages | ISBN: 0631205098 | PDF | 48 MB
We know that women made up a significant part of Renaissance theater audiences but how might they have read the plays presented there?’Feminism’s impulse is often, not surprisingly, co make a celebratoryidentification with a rush of women onto the historical stage,’ writes DeniseRiley. L like other feminist critics working on the Renaissance, I am awareof the dangers of eliminating cultural differences between women of thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries and ourselves, yet the desire to uncovera ‘rush of women onto the historical stage’ is still a pressing one. Thehistories we write of the Renaissance shape the way we think now, what ispossible, what is important co know, and how knowledge about the past isconstructed. In the case of English Renaissance drama, though, identificationwith char ‘rush of women’ onto the commercial stage is nor possible. Inprofessional theater companies the actors were all male, nor by law but bya custom which was peculiar co the British Isles.2 Playwrights for thesecompanies were also male: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Marlowe,Webster, Ford, to name the most famous. Women dramatizes and performersdid find ocher arenas in which to stage themselves; some eveninherited shares in commercial theaters. 3 Nevertheless, the names ofprofessional companies like the Admiral’s Men or the lord Chamberlain’sMen indicate all too clearly that drama was written and presented by men,or by boys in the case of the children’s companies.

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