All-male Stage Research Articles

근대 초기 영국 희곡의 국외 연구동향: 여성과 극장을 중심으로

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.

Sex differentiation in grayling (Salmonidae) goes through an all-male stage and is delayed in genetic males who instead grow faster

Fish populations can be threatened by distorted sex ratios that arise during sex differentiation. Here we describe sex differentiation in a wild grayling (Thymallus thymallus) population that suffers from distorted sex ratios. We verified that sex determination is linked to the sex determining locus (sdY) of salmonids. This allowed us to study sex-specific gene expression and gonadal development. Sex-specific gene expression could be observed during embryogenesis and was strong around hatching. About half of the fish showed immature testes around eleven weeks after fertilization. This phenotype was mostly replaced by the “testis-to-ovary” or “ovaries” phenotypes during development. The gonads of the remaining fish stayed undifferentiated until six months after fertilization. Genetic sexing revealed that fish with undifferentiated gonads were all males, who grew larger than the genetic females during the observational period. Only 12% of the genetic males showed testicular tissue six months after fertilization. We conclude that sex differentiation starts before hatching, goes through an all-male stage for both sexes (which represents a rare case of “undifferentiated” gonochoristic species that usually go through an all-female stage), and is delayed in males. During these juvenile stages males grow faster than females instead of developing their gonads.

Afterword

Natasha Korda’s Afterword addresses this Special Issue’s contribution to the now considerable body of scholarship documenting female performance at every level of society across early modern England and Europe. In the wake of such scholarship, originating over a century ago, Korda asks why the case for the canonical significance of female performance practices still needs to be made. Tracing the “separate, but not equal” status conferred on female performance by the first wave of scholarship in the field, Korda then turns to the revisionist, second wave of scholarship, emerging in the 1980s and 90s and influenced by feminist and performance studies, which sought to establish that the “all-male stage” was more the exception than the rule in light of the heterogeneous landscape of female performance found outside of London and on the European continent. Building on this recovery and inclusion of a broad range of female performance practices, this volume seeks to make the case for their canonical significance, and in the process defines new lines of inquiry indicative of a third wave of scholarship in the field. The essays collected here not only demonstrate the profound and transformative influence of female performance on both canonical and (hitherto) non-canonical plays and on the performance styles of boy-actors, but illuminate the gendered ideologies underlying the process of canon-formation itself. In so doing they point the way toward a newly conceived canon defined by unexpected lines of influence that range across periods, geographic boundaries, generic divisions, and genders.

Anatomy of an Actress: Bel-imperia as Tragic Diva

Bel-imperia is a star player in The Spanish Tragedy , using bravura theatricality as she drives the plot forward and seeks revenge for the deaths of two lovers. With this novel role Kyd invokes the virtuosic performances of professional actresses, who first emerged in the commedia dell’arte in Italy in the 1560s. Their scenes of pathos and passion extended the arte’s reach beyond comedy to tragicomedies and tragedies. Playwrights and actors began to create new female-centered plays to showcase the actress’s presence and skills. This trend eventually affected the all-male stage, nowhere more clearly than in The Spanish Tragedy . Kyd refers explicitly to the Italian troupes, which gained international fame and royal patrons performing both improvised plays based on scenarios and fully scripted and memorized five-act plays. He built an innamorata in the Italian mode, translating her to the English stage with spectacular scenes mingling witty eroticism and tragic violence. Kyd stresses her virtuosity and multi-generic range while spinning a web of allusions to far-flung spheres featuring royal women and courtly politics, mixed-gender players and playing, and dramatic innovations in Italy, France, and Spain. The Spanish Tragedy shows that English playwrights used models forged abroad to fashion Italian-style leading “women” just as the commercial stages were striving to expand the repertory, attract paying audiences, and satisfy courtly tastes. Bel-imperia, played by a boy, is Kyd’s bold attempt to answer Hieronymo’s question: “For what’s a play without a woman in it?”

Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage by Pamela Allen Brown , Peter Parolin (review)

Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage by Pamela Allen Brown , Peter Parolin (review)

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Women and English Renaissance Drama: Making and Unmaking ‘The All-Male Stage’

We can no longer refer to ‘the all-male stage’ of Renaissance drama without a qualifying remark about the many performing women of early modern England. Over the past decade or so the combined efforts of feminism, gender studies and historicised archival work have shown that Shakespearean theatre was by no means an all-male pursuit in which women were represented only by transvestite boy actors. Recent research has uncovered a diverse and energetic range of female performers beyond the single-sex playhouse stages of Shakespearean London and has shown women to have a crucial role in early modern theatre. This article considers how the emergence of the woman player as a subject of study has changed the way that we think and write about Shakespearean drama. In particular, women's performance challenges the central critical paradigms of ‘the all-male’ and ‘the English stage’, while the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and other canonical authors are changed by our new understanding of women's theatricality.

Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage (review)

Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage (review)

Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Pamela Allen Brown, Peter Parolin, eds.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsWomen Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Pamela Allen Brown, Peter Parolin, eds.Meg PearsonMeg Pearson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal Volume 1Fall 2006 Published for the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/EMW23541466 Views: 22Total views on this site © 2006 Center for Renaissance & Baroque StudiesPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Women players in England, 1500-1660: beyond the all-male stage

Players in England, 1500-1660: All-Male Stage, Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, eds. Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama, edited by Helen Ostavich. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. xvii + 329. Cloth $99.95. Reviewer: SHEILA T. CAVANAUGH Players in England, 1500-1660: All-Male Stage offers a number of valuable essays concerned with role of in performance during years noted. Unfortunately, title of collection is misleading. Only a few of essays in question actually address what title suggests is central issue: female in early modern England. The other pieces in collection discuss related topics, including drama produced on Continent during this period. While many of these essays serve as eloquent and erudite contributions project, discontinuity with purported topic of collection is disconcerting. Readers are advised, therefore, that this series of essays is well worth perusal despite unfortunate title that promises something different than volume actually provides. The previous caveat notwithstanding, Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin have gathered essays from an impressive range of scholars, who help illuminate role of in performative events during this period. As they judiciously note, they are focused on female rather than actresses since this term acknowledges that for both male and female performers, their art encompassed many mimetic forms, such as singing songs and ballads, dancing jigs, cross-dressing, miming, jesting, and masking (4). They also offer an appropriately capacious understanding of calling it any act of embodied display or representation intended for an authence (5). Although justification for including continental players is less convincing namely, to assess ways that [Italian and French] performances intersected with, and affected, English scene (5) they rightly seek open up our conceptualization of numerous early modern performative activities thriving outside professional stage. They also highlight many avenues of research that will be supported by Records of Early English Drama (REED) project. This collection, moreover, helps identify fruitful areas for future research by these scholars and others. The first section, Beyond London contains essays that best exemplify ways that REED and other archival sources can invigorate our understanding of activities of early modern female performers. James Stokes, for instance, in Women and Performance: Evidences of Universal Cultural Suffrage in Medieval and Early Modern Lincolnshire, details how REED documents make visible in ways that much twentieth-century theater history did not. As Stokes acknowledges, this essay marks only beginning of work that can be done on socioreligious guilds in this period, but he convincingly demonstrates that women participated as players, sponsors, producers, and audiences in revels; in customary mimetic games, processions, and enactments blending worship and play; in mimetically conceived ceremonies publicly enacting rituals of power, authority, and life's passages (41). Similarly, Gweno Williams, Alison Findlay, and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright offer a jointly authored essay entitled Payments, Permits and Punishments: Performers and Politics of Place that considers evidence about female offered by REED for York, Lancashire, and Gloucestershire. This essay also highlights importance of religious ceremonies in history of female performance, but concurrently urges scholars look more closely at the importance of women's role as producers rather than performers (64). …

Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage (review)

Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, eds. Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Get access Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Edited by Pamela Allen BROWN and Peter Parolin.Alder-shot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Illus. Pp. xviii + 329. $99.95 cloth. Theodora A. Jankowski Theodora A. Jankowski Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 57, Issue 4, Winter 2006, Pages 478–482, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2006.0090 Published: 01 December 2006

Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Edited by PAMELA ALLEN BROWN and PETER PAROLIN.

Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Edited by PAMELA ALLEN BROWN and PETER PAROLIN.

Joseph as Mother, Jutta as Pope: Gender and Transgression in Medieval German Drama

Joseph as Mother, Jutta as Pope: Gender and Transgression in Medieval German Drama* Stephen K. Wright (bio) I It is one of the fundamental axioms of performance theory that there is always a dialectical relationship between a fictional character and the living actor who represents him or her upon the stage. As Peter Thomson formulates it, the disembodied dramatic character imagined by the playwright must always contend with the bodily presence of the indispensable actor who brings the role to life. 1 The sacred drama of the Middle Ages provides an especially interesting case in point. Because women were prohibited from acting in German religious drama throughout the Middle Ages, all female roles were played by men. 2 Under these circumstances, two closely related questions become particularly acute: How were women embodied on the all-male stage? And how was the notion of gender itself perceived by a diverse audience comprising both women and men? On the one hand, some historians have adopted the view that the conventions governing female impersonation in the early European theatre were so ubiquitous and so deeply ingrained that the male actor simply disappeared within the role he played. As the Kabuki theatre still demonstrates, even non-illusionistic stage conventions can be so powerful as to cause spectators to suspend their disbelief and thus minimize the [End Page 149] distinction between character and actor to the point where it becomes inconsequential. 3 The maleness of the actor becomes invisible as the audience perceives only the female character that his costumed body represents. Conversely, other critics contend that the discrepancy between the actor’s own anatomy and his cross-gendered role could never be completely obscured. Stephen Orgel’s analysis of the effects of boys playing women’s parts on the Elizabethan stage, for example, considers theatrical cross-dressing to be “virtually identical to transvestism” and takes this customary stage practice as a point of departure for “investigations of sexual identity and misogynistic and homoerotic tendencies in Elizabethan society.” 4 According to this view, spectators always perceive at least a residual dissonance between character and actor, resulting in either pleasure or anxiety as the case may be. In what follows, I hope to shed new light on this vexed problem by approaching the representation of gender in medieval German religious drama from a somewhat different point of view. This essay reformulates the traditional question of what happens when male actors impersonate women in order to ask what happens when dramatic characters on the stage, whether they be portrayed as male or female, imitate the behavior of the opposite sex. Do male characters who imitate women and women characters who imitate men disappear within the fictive roles that they choose to play, or is the audience expected to perceive the tension between the identity of the original character and the cross-gendered role which the character temporarily adopts? At the same time, the essay also poses a second question that is necessarily entailed by the first: To what extent does the deliberate transgression of traditional gender categories on stage indicate an awareness of the social construction (and hence the mutability) of gender roles in everyday life? In the end, I wish to argue that the success of at least some medieval plays must have depended upon the audience’s ability to recognize that principal characters (whether male or female) could re-invent themselves by imitating aspects of the stereotypical behavior of the opposite sex. For the plays to have worked at all, spectators must have been able to conceive of a gender role (be it masculine or feminine) as something provisional, that is to say, as a kind of per-formance in its own right. In this respect, public performances of church-sponsored drama could pose destabilizing alternatives to the prevailing conceptions of gender-appropriate social behavior for both women and men. [End Page 150] I take as my starting point two separate but complementary dramatic traditions intended for broad popular audiences in pre-Reformation Germany, both of which feature a principal character who successfully mimics the behavior of the opposite sex. The first is the role of Joseph in the so-called Kindelwiegen (cradle-rocking) episode...

"A Strange Fury Entered My House": Italian Actresses and Female Performance in "Volpone"

Previous articleNext article No Access"A Strange Fury Entered My House": Italian Actresses and Female Performance in "Volpone"PETER PAROLINPETER PAROLIN Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 291998Dramas of Hybridity: Performance and the Body Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.29.41917348 Views: 11Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 2000 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Natasha Korda Women's Involvement in Theatrical Production, (May 2017): 282–295.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118824016.ch21Clare McManus Women and English Renaissance Drama: Making and Unmaking ‘The All-Male Stage’, Literature Compass 4, no.33 (May 2007): 784–796.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00451.x