Playbill

This lively and engaging study offers fresh readings of some of Shakespeare's most canonical plays, illuminating the ways stagecraft and language of movement create meaning for us as playgoers. Including discussions of other plays, the book carefully explores A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard II, Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest to develop a better understanding of how implicit stagecraft elements work in concert with explicit rhetorical patterns in the plays. The discussions engage with materials from Shakespeare's time, present revelatory close readings of Shakespeare's language, and demonstrate how these continually popular texts engage all of us in making meaning.

Term Paper, MA Shakespeare Studies, King's College London, 2018

In this essay, I will evaluate the evidence critics supply in order to address the question: did adult men ever play any of Shakespeare’s female roles on the early modern stage? I will consider the issue of modern day ‘Original Practices’ casting that exclusively utilizes adult male actors, keeping in mind the drive in creators and consumers of theatre to access a “pleasure” derived from experiences they understand to approximate, as Virginia Mason Vaughan puts it, “Shakespeare’s original” intentions. In particular, I will examine Mark Rylance's casting as Cleopatra in the Globe’s 1999 all-male production of Antony and Cleopatra, which several critics heralded as a triumph for authenticity in line with the Globe's self-styled ‘Original Practices’ casting--that is, the choice to populate all of a play’s roles with male actors. This paper investigates historical records and extant scholarship in the field, and asks: if standard early modern practices suggest no evidence of adult men playing female roles, why is this practice embraced as 'authentic' in modern performance? This paper argues that, if historicity is invoked to invalidate women’s claims to Shakespeare’s female roles in modern performance, adult men’s performances ought to be challenged on those same terms.

2014

Human Nature-an Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective, 2003

2017

Theater, 2002

Early Music, 2008

Reading this collection brings to mind the words of the melancholic Jacques in As you like it because the 'cultural performances' of its title include virtually anything on the whole world's stage: the musical and poetic performances of recited or sung texts, the visual presentation of texts on the page, the design and use of artefacts (ivory reliefs and silk alms purses), and even the performance of 'the vice of pride in the theater of society'(p. 197). Shakespeare's text works at the level of an extended metaphor, which is effectively how the various ' ...