Aging queens in/and Shakespeare's drama.
Item
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Title
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Aging queens in/and Shakespeare's drama.
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Identifier
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AAI9807917
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identifier
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9807917
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Creator
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Clark, Marlene.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Richard C. McCoy
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English | Women's Studies | Theater
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Abstract
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Although feminist readings of Shakespeare's female characters have proliferated since the 1975 publication of Juliet Dusinberre's Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, studies dedicated to Shakespeare's mature female characters in terms of their mid-life cultural place and power remain relatively scarce. This study explores the ways in which very different women--all of "a certain age"--were imagined by a Renaissance dramatist as having particular potential--at least--of subverting patriarchy.;Reading these mature women as mature women helps to turn interpretations of particular plays to a new light, one that gives new centrality to the female character under scrutiny. No longer young, not yet old, the mature women of Shakespeare's later plays circumvent the relatively easy "containment" of the younger virgins, enveloped in patriarchy through marriage, and the older crones, marginalized through demonization. When married, as are Gertrude and Hermione, the mature woman presents patriarchy with its most insistent challenges. Once free of the youthful constraints of heterosexual marriage, both women take liberties only a mature woman could chance. When anomalously unmarried, as is Shakespeare's Cleopatra, she is perceived as especially dangerous.;That all of these women were stage representations played by crossdressed males is also important. Recent scholarship suggests that Shakespeare's mature women, similar to mature women in other medieval and early modern stage venues, may likely have been played by men, rather than "boy-actors." Historically widening the discussion of early modern stage crossdressing and accounting for changes in the practice wrought by the purpose-built stage allow for the possibilities that mature women were represented in different theatrical modalities, and that both comic and tragic older women were played, in all seriousness, by the older "boys" of the company, if not mature men.;This study suggests that more research into the life-cycle stages of mature Renaissance women should be undertaken in order to understand better their unique relationship to an ever-evolving patriarchy. Continuing to probe the question of their stage representations and the relationship of those representations to the establishment and sustenance of patriarchal institutions should prove equally justifiable and rewarding.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
