Overview

This is the first scholarly study devoted to Shakespeare's girl characters and conceptions of girlhood. It charts the development of Shakespeare's treatment of the girl as a dramatic and literary figure, and explores the impact of Shakespeare's girl characters on the history of early modern girls as performers, patrons, and authors.

Full Product Details

9781137024756

Table of Contents

Reviews

e Performance of Girlhood offers an original approach and an important contribution to the existing literature on Shakespeare and woman's history... The findings in this study help enrich the notion of (young) women as participants in and contributors to their local and national cultures in relation and at times in contrast to the representation of girls in plays written by male authors. The study of Jacobean girl dramatists who staged and performed images of family life in the contexts of their own households will be of particular interest to scholars and students of early modern drama and social history. Nadia T. van Pelt, Journal of the Northern Renaissance Richly researched and persuasively written... [Williams] opens up fresh perspectives for further research in 'the rich history of girls on stage' that she so elegantly explores in this volume. Janice Valls-Russell, Cahiers Elisabethains

Deanne Williams ventures into largely unexplored territory in this fascinating and important study of girlhood and its implications in Shakespeare. The book is challenging, well argued and continuously interesting, and reveals something genuinely new about Shakespeare. - Stephen Orgel, J. E. Reynolds Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University, USA With great lucidity and authority, yet a nicely light touch, Williams draws together an immense amount of research into the cultural history of pre-modern girlhood to frame original and insightful arguments, which are developed with impressive clarity. This outstanding book gave me a fresh perspective on ways of reading Shakespeare's girls and a new appreciation of some familiar works. - Kate Chedgzoy, Newcastle University, UK Deanne Williams provides the first sustained account of girlhood in Shakespeare's plays, one that is performative rather than essentialist. Girl characters performed by boy actors, performances by girls in masques and other private theatricals, and girls as writers and performers inspired by Shakespeare's girls, are surveyed to show compellingly how girlhood emerged as a significant formation in the early modern period. From la Pucelle to the birth of baby Elizabeth at the close of Henry VIII, from Macbeth, who describes himself as a baby of a girl, to the thirteen-year-old masque writer Lady Rachel Fane, Williams excavates a history that has long been ignored but has come into its own. - Karen Newman, Brown University, USA

With great lucidity and authority, yet a nicely light touch, Williams draws together an immense amount of research into the cultural history of pre-modern girlhood to frame original and insightful arguments, which are developed with impressive clarity. This outstanding book gave me a fresh perspective on ways of reading Shakespeare's girls and a new appreciation of some familiar works. - Kate Chedgzoy, Newcastle University, UK

Author Information

Deanne Williams is Associate Professor of English at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her previous books include The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2004), Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, edited with Ananya Jahanara Kabir (2005), and The Afterlife of Ophelia, edited with Kaara Peterson (2012).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available