근대 초기 영국 희곡의 국외 연구동향: 여성과 극장을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper surveys recent studies in early modern English drama with a focus on women’s active involvement in the seventeenth-century dramatic production and theater culture. Questioning the powerful cultural paradigm of “the English all-male stage,” critics of the late 1990s called for a need to revise the literary and theater history that had largely excluded women. While feminist critics have brought to our attention how early modern women’s literary activities were neglected in the literary criticism, their revisionist projects of discovering women writers comparable to Shakespeare or Jonson fail to account for the women’s more extensive contribution to early modern drama and theater culture. In the recent scholarship, the notions of women’s dramatic production and theatricality have been considerably expanded to include non-commercial dramatic genres and women’s diverse roles and their work in and out of the theater. Pointing out how women thrived in some dramatic genres such as translation, closet drama, and household drama, critics have emphasized the interconnectedness between women’s “private” drama and a variety of theatrical traditions and dramatic forms in commercial, public theater. Early modern women’s theatricality has also been broadly expanded to reexamine the significance of women’s court and street performances, French and Italian actresses in London streets, and women’s off-stage or on-page contributions to early modern dramatic literature and performance. Such interdisciplinary efforts have uncovered a diverse range of female theatrical activities beyond the single-sex playhouse stages, which has changed our understanding of early modern drama including the plays of Shakespeare and other canonical authors.