Staging female characters in Shakespeare's English history plays / Hailey Bachrach.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bachrach, Hailey, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

Shakespeare, William.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Histories.

Women in literature.

Literature and history.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vii, 198 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Summary:

Hailey Bachrach reveals how Shakespeare used female characters in deliberate and consistent ways across his history plays. Illuminating these patterns, she helps us understand these characters not as incidental or marginal presences, but as a key lens through which to understand Shakespeare's process for transforming history into drama. Shakespeare uses female characters to draw deliberate attention to the blurry line between history and fiction onstage, bringing to life the constrained but complex position of women not only in the past itself, but as characters in depictions of said past. In Shakespeare's historical landscape, female characters represent the impossibility of fully recovering voices the record has excluded, and the empowering potential of standing outside history that Shakespeare can only envision by drawing upon the theatre's material conditions. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Contents:

Introduction

1. Facts Disfigured: Reading History through Female Characters

2. From he Margins: Reading Female Characters into History

3. History as Exclusion: Shakespeare's Feminine Historiography

4. Blurring the Boundaries: Effeminacy and Feminine History

Conclusion: 'This Is What You Came To See'

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 28 Nov 2023).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781009356145

1009356143

9781009356152

1009356151

9781009356121

1009356127