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Introduction

Yan Brailowsky
Cet article est une traduction de :
Introduction [fr]

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  • 1 Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, London, Macmillan, 1975. The work was subse (...)

1The French Shakespeare Society was founded in 1975. That same year, Juliet Dusinberre published her book Shakespeare and the Nature of Women.1 In her wake, critics began to question in earnest the notion of gender in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, highlighting its poetic, discursive, political and performative aspects, which make Shakespeare our contemporary still.

  • 2 Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters. Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, Brighton, Harv (...)
  • 3 One can mention, among many others, Penny Gay, As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women, London, (...)

2The list of studies that have left their mark on Shakespearean criticism in recent decades is extensive, embracing a host of critical trends. In the 80s and early 90s, pioneers such as Lisa Jardine, Dympna Callaghan, and Janet Adelman examined the major Shakespearean tragedies from a gender perspective, the first taking a historicist reading of the canon and rejecting readings that made Shakespeare a champion of chauvinism or, conversely, of militant feminism; the second highlighting the problematic links long associated with gender and literary genre; and the third drawing on psychoanalysis to offer compelling re-readings of Shakespeare’s major tragedies.2 These studies were followed by many others, incorporating contributions from performance studies and “presentism”, for example, continuing to bring Shakespeare’s era into dialogue with our own through new critical insights, archival discoveries, or the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations and performances.3

  • 4 Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class, New York, Random House, 1981. In Shakespearean criticism, one (...)
  • 5 Eléonore Lépinard and Sarah Mazouz, Pour l’intersectionnalité, Paris, Anamosa, 2021.
  • 6 Nina Lykke, Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing, New York, (...)
  • 7 Recently, intersectional approaches discussing gender have also encompassed studies on sexuality, q (...)

3This dialogue between historicist studies, rooted in the world and aesthetics of the Elizabethan era, and the present day was also part of a political movement, active in Anglo-American universities, aimed at raising awareness on issues affecting historically marginalized populations, notably women and Black Americans. In the early 1980s, public figures such as Angela Davis published works explicitly linking feminism to issues of race and class, at a time when Ronald Reagan was President in the United States and his Cold War British ally, Margaret Thatcher, was Prime Minister.4 This critical approach, now recognized as “intersectional,” posits that one category cannot be studied in isolation.5 To study gender is to lay the foundations for the study of other minoritized categories: the downtrodden, religious or ethnic minorities, and so on.6 Studying gender is therefore potentially a political act of resistance, dismantling dominant categories and concepts such as patriarchy, binary distinctions between masculine and feminine, or heterosexuality.7

  • 8 In France, language usage pits those using inclusive spelling against traditionalists. The broader (...)
  • 9 Early modern attacks against crossdressing are famously illustrated by an anonymous pamphlet, Muld (...)
  • 10 António Guterres, “Secretary-General’s address to the General Assembly”, 19 September 2023, https:/ (...)

4In the wake of the #MeToo scandal and its French counterpart, #BalanceTonPorc, politicians and commentators have warned us of the danger posed by gender studies, urging governments to ban them. In France, controversies surrounding the culture wars imported from the United States pit politicians and media on the right and far right against those on the left and far left, both anxious to associate gender studies or their subsequent censorship with extremists from the opposing side. For those critical of gender studies and the movements that claim to be inspired by them, gender studies pose a challenge to civilization, threatened by “woke” critics or censored by “cancel culture” constituting existential threats for society and history. Conversely, for those who defend gender studies, this civilization supposedly under threat — invariably portrayed as Western, white, heteronormative, and dominant — is actually uncivilized and in urgent need of transformation. The complaints levelled at gender studies have led to arguments in subjects as varied as language and spelling,8 politics and clothing habits, recalling, mutatis mutandis, the criticisms of those who, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, denounced the practice of cross-dressing, particularly in the theatre, which, in their eyes, blurred divinely instituted distinctions.9 As the UN Secretary General recently pointed out, even today, in many countries, authorities believe that young girls either wear too much or too little clothing.10 In the United States, conservative school boards are seeking to ban mixed-sex toilets or the participation of transgender athletes in sports competitions, going so far as wanting to inspect the bodies of minors suspected on transgressing the natural order. Such moral panic, combined with numerous punitive and discriminatory measures against LGBTQI+ communities, demonstrate the pressing need to further study gender in the 21st century.

  • 11 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge, 1990.
  • 12 Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama, London & New Y (...)

5If the notion of gender is political and cultural, so too are the works of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. Nearly half a century after pioneering studies on Shakespeare and gender, the question is still highly topical, as the playwright never ceases to question this complex and shifting notion. The stage is both a place for confronting different models and representations of gender portrayed by characters, and the perfect locus for playing with and reinventing gender(s). Through cross-dressing (Twelfth Night, As You Like It), misogynistic discourse (Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello) and maternal tragedies (King Lear, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale), Shakespeare demonstrated the permeability of gendered differences and questioned their role in the construction of identity on stage, anticipating Judith Butler’s notion of gender “performativity.”11 Elizabethan theatre practice invited spectators to conceive of such gender performativity, since all roles were played by men or boys, and the sexual puns found in many plays show the extent to which early modern playwrights were able to take advantage of the latent homoeroticism present in the plays’ plots.12

  • 13 Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg, Durham, Duke University Press, 1994; Queer Shakesp (...)

6The fluidity of gender is also present in Shakespeare’s poems: the Sonnets seem to be addressed at times to a man, at times to a woman, with a reversibility and/or confusion between what seems to correspond culturally to the masculine or the feminine; in Venus and Adonis, the poet depicts a conquering, aggressive feminine desire. Hermaphroditic and androgynous figures (such as Ganymede in As You Like It), common throughout Europe at the time, appear in both poems and plays. Shakespeare’s work often seems to challenge heteronormativity and foreshadow queer theory.13

  • 14 The royal proclamation attempted to put an end to excesses associated with crossdressing: “[F]or as (...)

7In many ways, Shakespeare’s play with gender would become unintelligible a few decades later for Restoration audiences, influenced by Continental poetics. After 1660, the monarchy in Britain even required female actors to take on female roles and promoted the adoption of neo-classical aesthetics and morality, intended to guarantee public decency by separating what is masculine from what is feminine (two notions that were starting to be essentialized). This was the purpose of the royal proclamation issued by Charles II in 1662, who during his exile had attended continental performances where female roles were played by actresses, and for whom the ban on cross-dressing was a moral imperative, a prerequisite for the reopening of theatres in London.14

8Finally, the gender confusion of the topsy-turvy world, evoked by the reference to Hercules and Omphale in Antony and Cleopatra, is also at the root of a redefinition of masculinity. In Henry V and Coriolanus, where war takes on homoerotic connotations, the male hero is undermined when confronted by women. More generally, many of the characters struggle to conform to the expectations of wives, fathers and mothers who pass on to them a certain idea of what their identity should be and thus stand in the way of its appropriation by the characters involved (Henry V, Coriolanus, as well as Juliet, Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Katherine the “shrew,” Lady Macbeth provoking her emasculated husband, etc.). While Shakespeare blurs the boundaries between genders, he also offers many forms of masculinity and femininity, virility and effeminacy, which can be linked to age as well as sex, suggesting that gendered identities change over time and over lifetimes.

  • 15 “Écrire pour elles. Dramaturges et spectatrices en Europe”, ed. Véronique Lochert, Clotilde Thouret (...)
  • 16 Sophie Duncan, Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin de Siècle, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016.
  • 17 The film, available online (https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/hamlet-gade-svend-1920/) was chosen (...)
  • 18 One thinks of attacks against women in Hamlet as well as of women performing male roles; see Evelyn (...)
  • 19 Miranda Fay Thomas, “Re-defining the Shakespearean Actor: Casting and Diversity at Shakespeare’s Gl (...)
  • 20 To accompany the festivities surrounding the Shakespeare 450 conference, it is precisely this work (...)

9Some authors felt that Shakespeare and his contemporaries, although they only cast men, knew how to write for women and “spoke” to them, and could be emotionally rousing. These stereotypes have not gone unchallenged.15 In the United Kingdom, actresses established a link between the roles they played and the political and cultural debates of their time.16 In France, the issue was also debated as more women seized upon the works of Shakespeare, particularly after Sarah Bernhardt played the role of Hamlet at the end of the 19th century, followed by other famous actresses such as Asta Nielsen in a silent film Hamlet directed by Sven Gade in 1921.17 In the last quarter of the 20th century, a director like Ariane Mnouchkine also experimented with gender in her Shakespeare productions (Richard II, Twelfth Night, Henry IV...), toying with an oriental aesthetic in which transvestism plays a structuring role; in recent decades, numerous theatrical performances and film adaptations have questioned traditional gender distinctions.18 In the United Kingdom, for example, companies and theaters producing Shakespeare’s works have deliberately taken up the question of gender, with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Globe Theatre, for example, resorting to gender-blind casting in many recent productions.19 The number of Romeos played by women and Juliets by men has multiplied, not only reviving certain aspects of Elizabethan practice, but also echoing other traditions, notably the numerous adaptations of Shakespeare for the opera, as in Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (1830), where the role of Romeo is played by a transvestite mezzo-soprano, replacing the now-banned 18th-century castrati.20

  • 21 John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, [Printed in Gen (...)

10Of course, Shakespeare was not alone in exploring gender issues in early modern literature. Many of his contemporaries staged the dialogue and conflict between the sexes, such as John Ford in Pity She’s a Whore, John Webster in The Duchess of Malfi or The White Demon, Elizabeth Cary in The Tragedy of Mariam, or Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton in Moll Cutpurse, among many others. In this cultural context, these works resonate with and illuminate each other, as in the intertextual interplay between Mary Sidney’s Antonius and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. More generally, these works extend and comment on the querelle des femmes, while highlighting the particular context of the British Isles, where several queens succeeded one another on the thrones of Scotland and England, arousing the ire of misogynist pamphleteers such as John Knox, the founding father of the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland, who in 1558 published a scathing attack against female rule while in exile in Geneva.21

11Thus, the 2022 conference organized by the French Shakespeare Society looked at what Shakespeare and early modern English authors have contributed to our thinking on gender, and how their works, as well as the various productions and adaptations of these works through the ages, continue to inform current research on this notion.

Language and the role of women

12The appeal of censorship and the problems posed by “cancel culture” are tackled head-on in this collection by Dympna Callaghan in her contribution on women’s speech. She shows how the violence inflicted on women in Shakespeare’s drama and poetry, and their forced silence, is paradoxically highly eloquent. Nothing can “cancel” or deny the contribution of Shakespeare’s most problematic works to the debate on these issues. In their joint contribution, Aurélie Griffin and Sophie Lemercier-Goddard engage in a dialogue with D. Callaghan’s analysis, while addressing separate, slightly later works, by John Webster and Elisabeth Cary in the early 17th century, in addition to Shakespeare’s Othello. They describe how, in The Duchess of Malfi and The Tragedy of Mariam, Stuart-era playwrights used rhetoric, grammar and syntax to shape the tragedy that befalls their heroines, in a genre inspired by Stoic aesthetics. Then Sue Wiseman, like D. Callaghan, tackles the extreme case of The Taming of the Shrew, locating the play in the context of early modern pedagogical treatises, particularly aimed at girls. Drawing on these treatises on gendered pedagogy, Wiseman shows how education, or rather training, was entirely geared towards girls’ preparation for marriage. Women were expected to serve their future husbands.

Performance and transgenderism

13Historically, of course, gendered constructs were a fiction on the professional Elizabethan stage, occupied only by male actors. Alison Findlay looks at today’s transgender casts, and the parallels that can be drawn with Elizabethan practice. Focusing on the young actors of old, she finds evidence in the plays of what it meant to play the role of a woman, and what young actors lost when they were no longer old enough to play them. This reflection, which builds bridges between past and present, continues with a transcript of an interview with Perry Mills, artistic director of the King Edward VI school company of young actors in Stratford-upon-Avon. Mills addresses the practical aspects of the staging choices made by the all-boys company he directs. In a wide-ranging conversation, richly illustrated with snapshots of his company’s productions, he discusses the effects of costuming, age and gender, and the 21st-century cultural references that have been integrated into Elizabethan plays for today’s audiences. This interview with a stage practitioner was accompanied by another event organized by the French Shakespeare Society with François Rostain, who specializes in training actors for stage fights. While the question of gender was not part of his topic, initially planned for the 2021 conference but postponed as a result of COVID, his experience of almost half a century calls into question certain assumptions about the use of swords on stage, a traditionally masculine prop.

Decentering and marginalization

14As noted earlier, gender is not a fixed concept, and Elizabethan and Jacobean theater was already grappling with essentialist discourses, the better to subvert them. This is what Chantal Schütz brings to light in her analysis of Thomas Middleton’s city comedies which call gender distinctions into question through characters with shifting and problematic genders like Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl, Mistress Low-water, or Dick Follywit in other plays. In another playful spirit, a joint contribution by Ladan Niayesh and Louise Roszak studied a video game, Elsinore, released in 2019 and produced by Golden Glitch, which allows players to live in Hamlet’s world through the character of Ophelia, portrayed as an outcast in at least three different ways. In this video game, Ophelia is not only a woman in a patriarchal and misogynistic world, she is also represented as mixed-race and bisexual, doubling her gendered marginal status with racial and sexual ones, recalling the notion of intersectionality discussed earlier in this introduction. The two contributors examine the effects produced by the ability provided by the video game of giving this tragic character, often reduced to the role of a passive victim of a world of toxic masculinity, a new form of agency.

Foreign traditions, decentering gender

15Novelty can also be discovered through geographical and cultural decentering. Several contributions in this issue look at the cultural differences in gender issues in other countries around the world. Madalina Nicolaescu and Oana-Alis Zaharia examine the case of a Romanian artist, Aristizza Romanescu, who was famous in the 19th century for her adaptations of Shakespeare and Western drama. Murat Öğütcü, for his part, introduces us to a rich overview of Shakespearean actresses in Turkey, largely unknown in Western criticism, to highlight their influence on Turkish theatrical tradition. Finally, moving further east, Roweena Yip looks back at two contemporary adaptations of Othello and Macbeth, the former in Japan, with a ghostly Desdemona, the latter in South Korea, depicting Lady Macbeth through her memories. Yip’s analysis draws on these adaptations to take a different, non-Western look at constructions and discourses on gender, proposing innovative and “intercultural” ways of embodying, in the strongest sense of the word, the “feminine” on stage.

  • 22 Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, Emilia, ed. Elizabeth Schafer, London, Methuen Drama, 2023, (“Student edition (...)
  • 23 Kate Wilkinson, “Girls and boys: The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2014 summer season”, Shakespeare, (...)
  • 24 Online: https://www.rsc.org.uk/miss-littlewood/.
  • 25 Arifa Akbar, “Hamnet review – slick adaptation captures Shakespeare’s horrified unravelling”, The G (...)

16This issue shows the vitality of criticism of the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, a vitality which produces novel artistic works as well. While Shakespeare may seem to embody the canon and a “masculine” authority, his work has also given rise to a number of rewritings that have challenged the binary opposition between “masculine” and “feminine,” as in Emilia, a play about the author Aemilia Lanyer written in 2018 by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, and premiered by an all-female cast at the Globe Theatre the same year.22 The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has also featured proto-feminist plays from the Elizabethan and Jacobean era, notably in 2013 in a series entitled “Roaring Girls” curated by Erica Whyman, then the RSC’s new Deputy Artistic Director, with plays by Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and an anonymous work, Arden of Faversham;23 a few years later, the RSC staged new plays highlighting the inventiveness of women in theater, as in the musical Miss Littlewood (2018), written by Sam Kenyon.24 More recently still, Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet (2020) was adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti and directed by Erica Whyman, again, in 2023.25 It examines the role of Shakespeare’s wife in the couple’s life; provocatively, the poet’s name is carefully avoided, mentioned only by circumlocutions… A revenge of sorts for a woman who is barely mentioned by theatre historians. Early modern drama is indeed more diverse than is often believed.

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Notes

1 Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, London, Macmillan, 1975. The work was subsequently revised and expanded two decades later, in 1996. I would like to thank Aurélie Griffin, who helped to draft the call for papers for the conference on ‘Shakespeare and Gender’, of which this introduction is a development, as well as the reviewers for their comments.

2 Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters. Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1983; Dympna Callaghan, Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A study of King Lear, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi, and The White Devil, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, Humanities Press International, 1989; Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest, New York, Routledge, 1992.

3 One can mention, among many others, Penny Gay, As She Likes It: Shakespeare’s Unruly Women, London, Routledge, 1994; Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories, London and New York, Routledge, 1997; Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage, London & New York, Routledge, 2000; Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000 (“New Casebooks”); Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter The Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage, London & New York, Routledge, 2001; Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005; Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007; Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare, ed. Evelyn Gajowski, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; Alison Findlay, Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary, London, Continuum, 2010; Women Making Shakespeare, eds. Gordon McMullan, Lena Cowen Orlin and Virginia Mason Vaughan, London and New York, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013; Kate Aughterson and Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Shakespeare and Gender: Sex and Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Drama, London, The Arden Shakespeare, 2020.

4 Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class, New York, Random House, 1981. In Shakespearean criticism, one can quote pioneer (and feminist) works by Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995, or a collection edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, Women, ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, London & New York, Routledge, 1994.

5 Eléonore Lépinard and Sarah Mazouz, Pour l’intersectionnalité, Paris, Anamosa, 2021.

6 Nina Lykke, Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing, New York, Routledge, 2010, p. 67.

7 Recently, intersectional approaches discussing gender have also encompassed studies on sexuality, queer theory, ecocriticism, religion, disability studies, etc. Among recent publications one can mention Terri Power, Shakespeare and Gender in Practice, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015; Valerie Traub (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016; and Jennifer Drouin (ed.), Shakespeare / Sex: Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.

8 In France, language usage pits those using inclusive spelling against traditionalists. The broader question of modernizing the French language was the subject of a recent publication by a group of linguists, Les linguistes atterrées, Le Français va très bien, merci, Paris, Gallimard, 2023 (“Tracts”). See https://www.tract-linguistes.org/ The risks of ignoring the unconscious effects of grammatical genre in literary criticism have also been highlighted. On grammatical genre and Shakespearean criticism, see for instance Yan Brailowsky, “La nuit genrée, ou l’obscure clarté des scènes anglaises”, Scènes de nuit dans les arts du spectacle vivant (France-Angleterre, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles), Arrêt sur scène / Scene Focus, 2015, no 4, p. 60–61.

9 Early modern attacks against crossdressing are famously illustrated by an anonymous pamphlet, Muld sacke: or The apologie of Hic Mulier […], London, Printed [by William Stansby] for Richard Meighen, 1620.

10 António Guterres, “Secretary-General’s address to the General Assembly”, 19 September 2023, https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2023-09-19/secretary-generals-address-the-general-assembly.

11 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, Routledge, 1990.

12 Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama, London & New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 117–144; Peter Stallybrass, “Transvestism and the ‘body beneath’: Speculating on the boy actor”, in Erotic Politics: The Dynamics of Desire in the Renaissance Theatre, ed. Susan Zimmerman, New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 64–83.

13 Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg, Durham, Duke University Press, 1994; Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality, ed. Goran Stanivukovic, London & New York, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017 (“The Arden Shakespeare”); Coppélia Kahn, “Family Quarrels: Feminist Criticism, Queer Studies, and Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century”, in Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality, eds. Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez, London & New York, Routledge, 2016, p. 43–57; Melissa E. Sanchez, Shakespeare and Queer Theory, London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019 (“The Arden Shakespeare”).

14 The royal proclamation attempted to put an end to excesses associated with crossdressing: “[F]or as much as many plays formerly acted do contain several profane, obscene and scurrilous passages, and the women’s parts therein have been acted by men in the habit of women, at which some have taken offence, for the preventing of these abuses for the future…”, Killingrew’s patent, 25 April 1662, quoted in Restoration and Georgian England, 1660-1788, ed. David Thomas, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 17.

15 “Écrire pour elles. Dramaturges et spectatrices en Europe”, ed. Véronique Lochert, Clotilde Thouret, Florence d’Artois, Lise Michel and Patrizia de Capitani, Études Épistémè 42, December 2022 (online DOI: 10.4000/episteme.15230, accessed 2 October 2023).

16 Sophie Duncan, Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin de Siècle, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016.

17 The film, available online (https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/hamlet-gade-svend-1920/) was chosen by the French Shakespeare Society for the Shakespeare 450 conference organised in April 2014, during which an original score by Robin Harris was commissioned for the Society, available online at http://www.shakespeareanniversary.org/shake450/cultural-events/#hamlet .

18 One thinks of attacks against women in Hamlet as well as of women performing male roles; see Evelyn Gajowski, “‘Frailty, thy name is woman’: Hamlet’s repudiation of the ‘feminine’,” in Hamlet in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Victoria Bladen and Yan Brailowsky, Paris, Belin éducation / CNED, 2022 (“Agrégation d’anglais”), p. 165–175; Katharine Goodland, “From Prospero to Prospera: transforming gender and magic on stage and screen”, in Shakespeare and the Supernatural, eds. Victoria Bladen and Yan Brailowsky, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020, p. 218–241.

19 Miranda Fay Thomas, “Re-defining the Shakespearean Actor: Casting and Diversity at Shakespeare’s Globe under Emma Rice and Michelle Terry”, “Shakespeare and les acteurs / Shakespeare and Actors”, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 39, January 2021 (online DOI: 10.4000/shakespeare.6048, accessed 2 October 2023).

20 To accompany the festivities surrounding the Shakespeare 450 conference, it is precisely this work that was chosen by the Opéra de Paris to commemorate the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. See: http://www.shakespeareanniversary.org/shake450/cultural-events/#opera .

21 John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, [Printed in Geneva: J. Poullain and A. Rebul], 1558, (“Early English Books Online, 1475-1640 / 253:09”); Armel Dubois-Nayt, “‘La différence des sexes’: construction et fonction du ‘genre’ dans la pensée politique de John Knox”, Cités, vol. 34 / 2, September 2008, p. 157–169.

22 Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, Emilia, ed. Elizabeth Schafer, London, Methuen Drama, 2023, (“Student editions”).

23 Kate Wilkinson, “Girls and boys: The Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2014 summer season”, Shakespeare, vol. 11 / 3, July 2015, p. 241–246. See also the official press release, which underscores the role played by women on that anniversary year: https://web.archive.org/web/20141212101514/http://www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/press/releases/summer-14-season.aspx (a recent technical update of the RSC website has, ironically, removed all traces of this press release).

24 Online: https://www.rsc.org.uk/miss-littlewood/.

25 Arifa Akbar, “Hamnet review – slick adaptation captures Shakespeare’s horrified unravelling”, The Guardian, 13 April 2023.

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Yan Brailowsky, « Introduction »Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare [En ligne], 41 | 2023, mis en ligne le 19 décembre 2023, consulté le 22 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/8451 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/shakespeare.8451

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