Title: Gender and performance in Shakespeare's problem comedies /
Authors: McCandless, David Foley.
Publisher: Indiana University Press,
Year: 1997
Subjects: Shakespeare, William,; Shakespeare, William,; Shakespeare, William,; Shakespeare, William,; Feminism and literature England History; Feminism and literature England History; Man-woman relationships in literature.; Sex role in literature; Comedy
Abstract: "Composed at a critical moment in English history, Shakespeare's "problem plays"--All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida - dramatize a crisis in the sex-gender system. They register a male dread of emasculation and engulfment, a fear of female authority and sexuality. In these plays males identify desire for a female as dangerous and unmanly; females contend and confound traditional femininity. Male authority, even male ideas of the heroic, suffers in the face of a female's disruptive sexual power. By resisting comic closure, these plays leave uncontained the subversions of gender that comedies for the most part successfully hold in check." "David McCandless follows the drama of gender enacted in these plays. His approach weds a theoretically engaged textual analysis to the dynamics of performance. He adopts the perspective not of expert spectator but of practitioner, bringing directorial modes of inquiry to his analysis. While drawing upon the performance histories of the problem comedies, he exploits his own experience as a director in dramatizing and theorizing the enactment of gender. The book provides a unique and invigorating example of how performance criticism can illuminate these difficult, sometimes overlooked tragicomedies."--Jacket.
Contents: 1. Introduction: All's Well That Ends Well -- Helena's Femininity: Subject vs. Object -- Bertram's Masculinity: Rite of Passage -- Drama of Difference: Old and New Tales Staging the Bed-Trick -- 2. Final Scenes: Unresolved Tension -- Measure for Measure -- The Duke as Ghostly Father -- Angelo's Sadism: Punishing Claudio -- Speechless Dialect: Isabella's (Lacking) Sexuality -- Angelo's Sadomasochistic Fantasy: Propositioning Isabella -- Isabella's Sadomasochism Gestic Staging -- The Duke's Sadomasochistic Spectacle -- Final Moments: "What Do You Think This Is?" -- 3. Troilus and Cressida The War as Empty Spectacle -- Troilus and Cressida: The Limits of Sexuality -- Seduction -- The Limits of Subjectivity Feminist Gestus -- Between Men: The Homoerotics of War Final Scenes.