Rethinking Gender and Genre in the History Play | Rethinking Gender and Genre in the History Play
Rethinking Gender and Genre in the History Play
Martha A. Kurtz, Southampton College of Long Island University
Two concepts that have exercised considerable influence over criticism of Elizabethan drama in the past fifteen years are what might be called the hegemony of genre—that is, the idea that the ideological content of a play is predetermined and controlled by the dramatic genre to which the play seems to belong—and the Lacanian dualistic theory of gender in which masculine and feminine are seen as discrete and oppositional identities, the boundaries of which are never blurred and which can never overlap or unite. These two assumptions coalesce in the frequently reiterated premise that the history play as a genre is fundamentally antagonistic to women and the "feminine":
The myth of the history plays involves fathers and sons. It does not involve mothers, daughters, or wives.
Antagonists and consorts, queens...
[The entire page is 9110 words long]
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