The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage

The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage traces the transnational connections between Shakespeare’s all-male stage and the first female stars in the West. The book is the first to use Italian and English plays and other sources to explore this relationship, focusing on the gifted actress who radically altered female roles and expanded the horizons of drama just as the English were building their first paying theaters. By the time Shakespeare began to write plays, women had been acting professionally in Italian troupes for two decades, traveling across the Continent and acting in all genres, including tragicomedy and tragedy. Isabella Andreini, Vittoria Piissimi, and Barbara Flaminia became the first truly international stars, winning royal and noble patrons and literary admirers beyond Italy; their artistry enabled mixed companies to expand in foreign markets, especially in France and Spain. Elizabeth and her court caught wind of the Italians’ success, and soon troupes with actresses came to London to perform. Through contacts direct and indirect, English playwrights grew keenly aware of the mimetic revolution wrought by the skilled diva, who expanded the innamorata and made the type more engaging, outspoken, and autonomous. Some Englishmen pushed back, treating the actress as a whorish threat to the all-male stage, which had long minimized female roles. Others saw a vital new resource. Faced with rising demand for Italian-style plays, Lyly, Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare used Italian models from scripted and improvised drama to turn out stellar female parts in the mode of the actress, altering them in significant ways while continuing to use boys to play them. Writers seized on the comici’s materials and methods to piece together pastoral, comic, and tragicomic plays from mobile theatergrams—plot elements, star scenes, roles, stories, and speeches, such as cross-dressing, mad scenes, and spoken and sung laments. Shakespeare and his peers gave new prominence to female characters, marked their passions as un-English, and devised plots that figured them as self-aware agents, not counters traded between men. Playing up the skills and charisma of the boy player, they produced stunning roles charged with the diva’s prodigious theatricality and alien glamour. Rightly perceived, the diva’s star persona and acclaimed performances constituted challenging and timely gifts that provoked English playwrights to break with the past in enormously generative ways.

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

<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>

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

<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>

Rejuvenating Karayala: An Endangered Folk Theatrical Form of Himachal Pradesh

This paper deals with karayala, a folk theatrical form of Himachal Pradesh. This form is basically a ritual, performed in the name of a local deity called Biju/Bijeshwar. It is a night long ritual consisting of minimum three and maximum four episodes (swaangs) and each one is followed by a musical interlude comprising singing and dancing. Karyala is an impromptu theatrical form. There are no women actors and only men play female roles. Surprisingly, till date women are not allowed to play female roles. It deals with range of themes and most of them aim at reforming society by employing techniques like mimicry, caricature, satire, paradox, pun and word play. The paper seeks to introduce karayala to larger audience. In the crisis of the present context and particularly owing to onslaught of media multiplicity, we have lost karayala’s past as none for a long while cared to document it due to urbanization, people’s indifference and media charged environment that has threatened its existence. At present it is alive in people’s memory and is necessitated by rituals to avert divine wrath; nevertheless, its space stands largely invaded by media today. The future of this folk theatrical form seems bleak unless we take effective measures to revive/ retrieve it.

Discussion on the Morphological Characteristics of Dance Performance of "Female Roles" in Gannan Tea-picking Opera

Gannan tea-picking opera is a folk opera popular in the south of Jiangxi, among which "Liangdan Yichou" is the most representative way of performance. "Female roles" can be divided into "Xiao Dan" and "Cai Dan". The relationship of "Liangdan Yichou" in Gannan tea-picking opera can be roughly summarized as "the clown who plays the role of a female is responsible for matching, Zhengchou resembles the female character type in Beijing opera and “Fanchou”makes troubles. Cai Dan gives a beat of person with bad behavior. As the female character type in Beijing opera like three-inch “golden lotuses” (woman's bound feet in feudal age) encounters the exaggerated caricature like clown who plays the role of a female, the distinctive female dance performance style of Gannan tea-picking opera was formed. This paper aims to sort out and summarize the formation of the "female roles" dance performance in Gannan tea-picking opera and its unique character characteristics to have a clearer understanding of the aesthetic norms and artistic value of the dance performance of "female roles" in Gannan tea-picking opera to improve the cultural content of Gannan tea-picking opera and promote the inheritance and development of Gannan tea-picking opera as a whole.

Female Stereotypes in Romanian Advertising: An Interpretative Content Analysis

Advertising, by its accessibility, is incredibly powerful in spreading stereotypical representations. The way women are portrayed in advertising in different countries and cultures has been a subject of research for more decades. The paper aims to examine the way women are portrayed in advertising campaigns in Romania. The study focuses on finding the stereotypes used and their characteristics by qualitatively analyzing ads from brands’ YouTube channels. We identified seven stereotypes and the analysis shows that women portrayals are idealized in Romanian advertising. Although there are some modern approaches to the representations, ads do not reflect contemporary female roles. The most frequent stereotype is the Next-Door Woman, a stereotype that emphasis on the cuteness of the woman, not on her intelligence. Romanian brands’ advertising lacks campaigns promoting women empowerment.

On Studies of Task Bifferentiation between Men and Women in the Scandinavian Iron Age

Reiterated and cursorily criticised generalisations of attributes for male and female in grave goods, have since the first half of the nineteenth century created an oversimplified yet politically intricate image of a specific task differentiation between men and women in prehistory. Ideals of male and female roles and tasks in the interpreter’s contemporary society have been described as universals in terms of binary oppositional pairs, or spheres, such as private/domestic-public. The dichotomies used for analysing and attributing male and female tasks have given preference to stereotypes, and the very formulation of the oppositional concepts for activity areas expresses ideological valuations ofmale and female. This article stresses the need for analysing the origin of concepts, and it seeks new and alternative ways of perceiving task differentiation.

Gender identification in the portrayal of female roles in the remakes of American TV series in Turkey

The transfer of stories across borders in translation, adaptation, or remake is a common phenomenon in the globalized world. In Turkey, translating foreign audiovisual products to enrich the cultural repertoire has been a prominent practice. Focusing on the portrayal of female characters in contemporary remakes of several American TV series aired on primetime national channels in Turkey, this study aims to pinpoint audiovisual norms that guide the “transfer” of these characters for Turkish audience. The analysis seeks to exemplify how remakes deconstruct, reformulate, and thus (re)construct the representations of women’s identities in Turkey. The study initially concentrates on remakes as a genre, moves on to outline the practice in Turkey, and analyzes the reformulation of gender roles in line with Turkish societal norms within the scope of audiovisual translation from the gender perspective. The study singles out a series of norms that seem to guide and color the transfer of female characters in the remakes for the Turkish audience, elaborates on why it is necessary, and suggests the implications of such practices.

Female participation in Colombian metal: An initial approach

Cultural expressions reflect the ways in which a society represents its traditions, its interpretations of the world, and the views of the people that develop within it. Likewise, they are capable of representing a system of gender roles that are reproduced and legitimized through them. Rock and metal music, as artistic expressions, can reproduce differentiated male and female roles that, in turn, reproduce inequality and an uneven access to opportunities. This has been constant in Colombian society; therefore, uncovering these manifestations and seeking ways to question and transform these roles have become increasingly important tasks. In this short article, we describe some characteristics of female participation in Colombian metal, and how this intervention responds to the particularities of its context. We approach this objective by analysing testimonies of women who currently work as metal and rock artists in Colombia.