Feminist Shakespeares: Adapting Shakespeare for a Modern Audience in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Etman
Keyword(s):  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Adaptation Theory ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Female Characterization

The Hogarth Shakespeare Project presents a way to view Shakespeare’s plays through a different lens. These books allow for a feminist reading of Shakespeare, looking at some of Shakespeare’s ill-treated female characters to construct a new idea of female characterization. Three of the plays adapted, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Taming of the Shrew, were adapted by female authors. By investigating how these plays are being adapted for a more contemporary audience, with modern conceptions of feminism and gender roles, we can gain insight as to how these concepts have changed since Shakespeare’s time. By looking at these modern adaptations, we can interrogate how modern audiences as a whole conceptualize and, potentially, idealize Shakespeare, as well as understanding the progression of treatment of women in contemporary culture since Shakespeare’s time. The novels addressed in this project are The Gap of Time by Jeannette Winterson, Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, and Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler. The project concludes that, of the three, Vinegar Girl does the most effective job addressing the problematic aspects of its adapted play in a new way, distinguishing it from previous adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew. This project also investigates the role that adaptation theory plays in addressing Shakespeare adaptations, particularly the Hogarth Shakespeare Project.

Relevant Context, Genuine Relation: Genre, Form, and Gender in Twenty-First Century The Winter's Tale Criticism

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Thomas L. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Physical Space ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Relevant Context ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Late Modern

A resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's late romances has scholars once again asking what kind of work is The Winter's Tale. After The Tempest, it has occupied critics over the first two decades of the twenty-first century more than any other in this group of late plays. Besides a variety of new themes, dramatic material, staging challenges, and interpretive cruxes, the question of genre among these plays still puzzles late modern critics as much as it did early Enlightenment critics. What was Shakespeare doing experimenting with genre so late in his career, where elements of tragedy and comedy seem to flow together to create a hybrid form or introduce something new on the stage? This article considers how new approaches to The Winter's Tale parallel new speculations about its genre and decisions about its performance on stage. Considering how the issue of genre operates as a kind of regulative principle over new interpretations in much the same way that stage productions must make the play coherent in a limited physical space for an evening's entertainment, the article makes a case for preserving the work's central and traditionally celebrated wonder.

Maritime Fantasies and Gender Space in Three Shakespearean Comedies

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Wai Fong Cheang
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Gender Space ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender And Space

Abstract Laden with sea images, Shakespeare‘s plays dramatise the maritime fantasies of his time. This paper discusses the representation of maritime elements in Twelfth Night, The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice by relating them to gender and space issues. It focuses on Shakespeare‘s creation of maritime space as space of liberty for his female characters.

‘Time is chasing us’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Scott
Keyword(s):  
Central Question ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Tempest

Moving into the late plays or romances, Chapter 5 engages the book’s central question: why are children so important and so unique to Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination? Focusing on the extraordinary collection of plays, including The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Pericles, this chapter considers the formative impact of the child on Shakespeare’s stage. Thinking about memory and grief, loss and childhood, the section on The Winter’s Tale attends to the child as a young body but also as an adult’s memory of its former self. The focus in TheTempest is on servitude and teaching and the narratives of love through which parents justify power. In the section on Pericles, the chapter studies anxieties about incest and desire, redemption and hope. In all the plays under discussion here, the child becomes a unique and staggeringly assertive character of redemption as well as loss.

scholarly journals The Dramaturgy of Female Gender  in Early Modern English Theatre:  An Investigation of the Theatrical Expression of Gender in Selected Jacobean Plays, Their Restoration/Early Eighteenth-Century Adaptations, and Their Original and Contemporary Staging

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lori Beth Leigh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
Gender Boundaries

<p>The adaptations of Shakespeare‘s plays that were written and staged during the English Restoration and eighteenth century form an important part of the performance history of Shakespeare; yet they have never been employed in research on the female characters in the original plays. This thesis analyzes four late Shakespeare plays and their adaptations: The Two Noble Kinsmen (with Fletcher) and Davenant's The Rivals; The Tempest and Davenant and Dryden's The Enchanted Island; The Winter's Tale and Garrick's Florizel and Perdita; and the lost Cardenio (also with Fletcher) and Theobald's Double Falsehood. Investigating the dramaturgy of the female characters from a theatrical point-of-view that includes both a close-reading and imagining of the text with a "directorial eye" and practical staging work, this study examines not only language but the construction and representation of character through emotional and physical states of being, gestures and movement, sound (music and the sound of speech), props, costumes, spectacle, stage directions, use of space and architecture, and the audience. The adaptations have been used as a lens to encounter afresh the female characters in the original plays. Through this approach, I have discovered evidence to challenge some traditional interpretations of Shakespeare's female characters and have also offered new readings of the characters. In addition, I have demonstrated the danger of accepting the widely held critical view that the introduction of actresses on the Restoration stage prompted adaptors to sexualize the female roles in a demeaning, trivial, and meretricious manner. In fact, female roles in the Restoration had some power to subvert gender boundaries just as they did in the Renaissance when played by boy actors. This work explores the treatment of themes and motifs that recur around the staging of women in the early modern period such as madness, cross-gender disguise and cross-gender casting, rape and sexual violence, and the use of silence by female characters. Each chapter draws individual conclusions about the female characters in the plays, often drawing parallels between two central women in particular play. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of the ways the women in Shakespeare's plays express their agency and desire.</p>

Dead Likenesses and Sex Machines

2016 ◽  
pp. 610-627
Author(s):  
Jennifer Waldron
Keyword(s):  
Media Theory ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conceptual Shift

Media theorists have recently sought to challenge traditional conceptions of a ‘medium’ as a passive means for human ends, or an exterior supplement to an essential human core; however, they have not yet fully investigated the implications of this conceptual shift for the history of gender. This essay focuses on two key Shakespearean scenes in which female characters become tightly associated with the theatrical medium: the awakening of Queen Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale and the bed-tricks of All’s Well That Ends Well. While these scenes link theatrical devices with qualities conventionally gendered feminine (artificiality, exteriority, and embodiment), they also transvalue the traditionally negative associations of that feminization, in part by reimagining the workings of mediation itself. Shakespeare’s plays thus offer nascent forms of media theory that are deeply relevant to our contemporary world.

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