Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage

by Sarah Werner

How do performances of Shakespeare change the meanings of the plays?In this controversial new book, Sarah Werner argues that the text of a Shakespeare play is only one of the many factors that give a performance its meaning. By focusing on The Royal Shakespeare Company, Werner demonstrates how actor training, company management and gender politics fundamentally affect both how a production is created and the interpretations it can suggest.Werner concentrates particularly The influential training methods of Cicely Berry and Patsy RodenburgThe history of the RSC Women's GroupGale Edwards' production of The Taming of the ShrewShe reveals that no performance of Shakespeare is able to bring the plays to life or to realise the playwright's intentions without shaping them to mirror our own assumptions.By examining the ideological implications of performance practices, this book will help all interested in Shakespeare's plays to explore what it means to study them in performance.

144 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 12, 2001

Reviews

[Ulrika · Rating 2 out of 5]

Intressant men lite virrig, inte helt lätt att ta till sig.

[Candy Wood]

This short book emphasizes the importance of performance as a way of understanding Shakespeare. While Sarah Werner does not proclaim the universality of the Bard, she does insist on his continued relevance. She looks at the difficulties of feminist performance by focusing on the Royal Shakespeare Company: considering that the female roles in the plays were written for males, it’s not surprising that female actors are frustrated in a company dedicated to those plays, but it’s more surprising that the company has been slow to include women in positions of authority. Werner points out that even celebrated voice coaches like Cicely Berry have been seen as subordinate to male directors, and women have rarely directed the most popular Shakespeare tragedies on the main RSC stage. The chapter on Gale Edwards’s 1995 Taming of the Shrew neatly demonstrates how dependent performance criticism is on the critic’s awareness of her own biases.