Women and mobility on Shakespeare's stage : migrant mothers and broken homes / Elizabeth Mazzola.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mazzola, Elizabeth, author.

Contributor:

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Routledge studies in Shakespeare ; 22.

Routledge studies in Shakespeare.

Routledge Studies in Shakespeare ; 22

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Characters--Women.

Shakespeare, William.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Criticism and interpretation.

Criticism and interpretation.

Women in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

x, 162 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.

Summary:

Long before the economist Amartya Sen proposed that more than 100 million women were missing-lost to disease or neglect, kidnapping or forced marriage, denied the economic and political security of wages or membership in a larger social order-Shakespeare was interested in such women's plight, how they were lost, and where they might have gone. Characters like Shakespeare's Cordelia and Perdita, Rosalind and Celia constitute a collection of figures related to the mythical Persephone who famously returns to her mother and the earth each spring, only to withdraw from the world each winter when she is recalled to the underworld. That women's place is far from home has received little attention from literary scholars, however, and the story of their fraught relation to domestic space or success outside its bounds is one that hasn't been told. Women and Mobility investigates the ways Shakespeare's plays link female characters' agency with their mobility and thus represent women's ties to the household as less important than their connections to the larger world outside. Female migration is crucial to ideas about what early modern communities must retain and expel in order to carve a shared history, identity and moral framework, and in portraying women as "sometime daughters" who frequently renounce fathers and homelands, or queens elsewhere whose links to faraway places are vital to the rebuilding of homes and kingdoms, Shakespeare also depicts global space as shared space and the moral world as an international one.

Contents:

Part I. Mobility and fearless flying

Arden and Eden in As you like it

Going rogue in Othello

Enemy fires in King Lear

Part II. Migration and the wider world

Encrypted genealogies and bloody napkins: missing mothers in As you like it and Othello

Heading out and heading home in The merchant of Venice

"Unpathed waters, undreamed shores" in The winter's tale

Conclusion: how many daughters make a kingdom?

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 145-158) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Horace Howard Furness Memorial Fund.

ISBN:

9781138629608

113862960X

OCLC:

987370214