Title: Women's worlds in Shakespeare's plays
First published: 1997
Description: Focusing on five Shakespeare plays, this book offers a fresh approach to the complex choices and decisions the women characters must face. Author Irene G. Dash scrutinizes stage productions over the centuries. Her exciting discoveries show the subtle ways the characters have been changed. By comparing promptbook versions from the eighteenth century to the present with the texts, Dash reveals how contemporary attitudes, spilling over into the theater, skew the works and diminish their breadth.

Questions multiply as women attempt to understand relationship between the power of others over their lives and their own decisions about the moral responsibility for action. Shakespeare dramatizes these ideas.

Dash shows how frequently such subtleties are lost on stage where roles are cut or reshaped, scenes transposed, or lines added. The author deftly analyzes the result of such changes. Lady Macbeth, for example, diminishes in complexity when the witches are transformed into dancing, singing choruses, or when Lady Macduff's murder disappears from the tragedy or when ironic lines are transformed.

Comparing the seventeenth-century Davenant version and the twentieth-century Orson Welles film, Dash shows how these works illuminate Shakespeare's dramatic art.
Subjects: Characters, Domestic drama, English, English Domestic drama, History, History and criticism, Sex role in literature, Social conditions, Women, Women and literature, Conditions sociales, Théâtre bourgeois anglais, Femmes, Drama, Rôle selon le sexe dans la littérature, Personnages, Histoire, Histoire et critique, Frau, Femmes et littérature, Women in literature
Places: England
People: William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Time periods: 16th century, 17th century
LC classification: PR2991 .D26 1996