Shakespeare's Representation of Women | Lorraine Helms (essay date 1989)
Lorraine Helms (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Playing the Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism and Shakespearean Performance," in Theatre Journal, Vol. 41, No. 2, May, 1989, pp. 190-200.
[In the following essay, Helms explores the possibilities of feminist reinterpretation to transform the Shakespearean text in performance.]
Feminist film theorists have revealed ways cinematic representation constructs the female as the object of the male spectator's gaze. Their analyses have raised parallel questions for theatrical and specifically Shakespearean representation: to what extent and through what strategies does Shakespearean performance also construct female characters for the spectator's eye, and, since Shakespearean theatre is as verbal as it is visual, for the auditor's ear? Kathleen McLuskie argues [in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, 1985] that the representational...
[The entire page is 4715 words long]
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