Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages - Softcover

Shapiro, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472084054 ISBN 13: 9780472084050

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 1996

Synopsis

Cross-dressing, sexual identity, and the performance of gender are among the most hotly discussed topics in contemporary cultural studies. A vital addition to the growing body of literature, this book is the most in-depth and historically contextual study to date of Shakespeare's uses of the heroine in male disguise--man-playing-woman-playing-man--in all its theatrical and social complexity.

Shapiro's study centers on the five plays in which Shakespeare employed the figure of the "female page": The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline. Combining theater and social history, Shapiro locates Shakespeare's work in relation to controversies over gender roles and cross-dressing in Elizabethan England.

The popularity of the "female page" is examined as a playful literary and theatrical way of confronting, avoiding, or merely exploiting issues such as the place of women in a patriarchal culture and the representation of women on stage. Looking beyond and behind the stage for the cultural anxieties that found their way into Shakespearean drama, Shapiro considers such cases as cross-dressing women in London being punished as prostitutes and the alleged homoerotic practices of the apprentices who played female roles in adult companies. Shapiro also traces other Elizabethan dramatists' varied uses of the cross-dressing motif, especially as they were influenced by Shakespeare's innovations.

"Shapiro's engaging study is distinguished by the scope of interrelated topics it draws together and the balance of critical perspectives it brings to bear on them." --Choice

Michael Shapiro is Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Shapiro is Professor of English, University of Illinois, Urbana.

Review

"Shapiro's engaging study is distinguished by the scope of interrelated topics it draws together and the balance of critical perspectives it brings to bear on them."
—Choice
(Choice 1999-04-08)

". . . provides an interesting and valuable departure from recent historicist treatments of early modern crossdressing. . . . Shapiro's formalist approach to the study of crossdressing corrects some of the more problematic claims of historicist critics, including the new-historicist tendency to conflate the playtext and the sociopolitical context. . . ."
—Shakespeare Quarterly
(Shakespeare Quarterly 1999-04-01)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0472084054
• ISBN 13: 9780472084050
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 296