Men in Women's Clothing
Men in Women's Clothing
£32.00
GBPIn 1597 anti-theatricalist Stephen Gosson made the curious remark that theatre 'effeminized' the mind. Four years later Phillip Stubbes claimed that male actors who wore women's clothing could literally 'adulterate' male gender and fifty years after this in a tract which may have hastened the closing of the theatres, William Prynne described a man whom women's clothing had literally caused to 'degenerate' into a women. How can we account for such fears of effeminization and what did Renaissance playwrights do with such a legacy? Laura Levine examines the ways in which Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson addressed a generation's anxieties about gender and the stage and identifies the way the same 'magical thinking' informed documents we much more readily associate with extreme forms of cultural paranoia: documents dedicated to the extermination of witches.
- Develops the idea of anti-theatricality to embrace controversial areas of women's studies and gay studies, and links with witchcraft
- Challenging new readings of Shakespeare, Jonson and Marlowe
- Latest in prestigious CUP series
Reviews & endorsements
'… cleverly brings together three areas of Renaissance anxiety: the longing for truth, a suspicious attitude to representation, and an identification of masculinity as performance.' The Times Literary Supplement
'… a work of critical brilliance.' New Theatre Quarterly
Product details
October 1994Paperback
9780521466271
196 pages
228 × 152 × 12 mm
0.289kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. Men in women's clothing
- 2. Troilus and Cressida and the politics of rage
- 3. 'Strange flesh': Antony and Cleopatra and the story of the dissolving warrior
- 4. Theatre as other: Jonson's Epicoene
- 5. The 'nothing' under the puppet's clothing: Jonson's suppression of Marlowe in Bartholomew Fair
- 6. Magic as theatre, theatre as magic: daemonology and the problem of 'entresse'
- 7. Magic as theatre, theatre as magic: the case of Newes from Scotland
- Epilogue.
