Shakespeare's Representation of Women | Kathleen McLuskie (essay date 1992)
Kathleen McLuskie (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "'Nay, Faith, Let Me Not Play a Woman, I Have a Beard Coming': Women in Shakespeare's Plays," in Critical Survey, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1992, pp. 114-23.
[In the following essay, McLuskie maintains that Shakespeare exploited a shift in dramatic convention from the symbolic to the representational to portray women characters both emblematically—as idealized or stereotyped symbols—and mimetically, with as much realism and naturalism as was available to him within Elizabethan dramatic conventions.]
In the mechanicals action of A Midsummers Night's Dream Shakespeare presents for us the problems of staging a play at a time when the conventions of dramatic production were shifting from a symbolic to a mimetic form of action. The abstract figures of morality drama were replaced by characters with fully realised histories and relationships: where the morality plays fulfilled a...
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