The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage

This book brings together nearly 40 academics and theatre practitioners to chronicle and celebrate the courage, determination and achievements of women on stage across the ages and around the globe. The collection stretches from ancient Greece to present-day Australasia via the United States, Soviet Russia, Europe, India, South Africa and Japan, offering a series of analytical snapshots of women performers, their work and the conditions in which they produced it. Individual chapters provide in-depth consideration of specific moments in time and geography while the volume as a whole and its juxtapositions stimulate consideration of the bigger picture, underlining the challenges women have faced across cultures in establishing themselves as performers and the range of ways in which they gained access to the stage. Organised chronologically, the volume looks not just to the past but the future: it challenges the very notions of 'history', 'stage' and even the definition of 'women' itself.                     

List of contents

1. General Introduction; Jan Sewell and Clare Smout.- 2. Female Performers in the Greco-Roman World: An Introduction; Anne Duncan.- 3. The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome; Anne Duncan.- 4. Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality; Clare Foster.- 5. Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives; Sue Niebrzydowski.- 6. The First Italian Actresses, Isabella Andreini and the Commedia dell'Arte; Margaret Rose.- 7. Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens: Female Agency and Subjectivity in Early Modern English Court Drama; Catherine Clifford.- 8. Margaret Cavendish's Female Fairground Performers; M. A. Katritzky.- 9. Women Performers on English Stages 1660-1740; Jane Milling.- 10. Eighteenth-Century English Actresses: From Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication; Laura J. Rosenthal.- 11. Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture; Laura Engel.- 12. Performing the Nation State: Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre and the American Cultural Imagination; Pam Cobrin.- 13. Death and the Working Woman: Actresses, Illness, and Labour from Rachel to Bernhardt; Roberta Barker.- 14. Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star; Lezlie C. Cross.- 15. Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity; Yamanashi Makiko.- 16. Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage: Personal and Political Rivalries from Paraskevopoulou and Veroni to Kotopouli, Kyveli and Papadaki; Xenia Georgopoulou.- 17. British Actresses, 1900-1950: Professional Transformations; Maggie B. Gale.- 18. Serafima Birman, Sofia Giatsintova, Alla Tarasova and Olga Pyzhova: 'Second Wave' Russian and Soviet Actresses, Stanislavsky's System and the Moscow Art Theatre; Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman.- 19. Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era: Anita Bush, Abbie Mitchell, Rose McClendon, Mercedes Gilbert, Venzella Jones; Cheryl Black.- 20. 'Bad Girls' of 1960s-1990s American Performance: Adrian Piper, Karen Finley and Carolee Schneemann; Dorothy Chansky.- 21. Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre and Performance Practice across Four Decades; Anna Furse.- 22. Feminist Theatre: Putting Women Centre Stage; Sue Parrish.- 23. Theatre of Black Women: A Personal Account; Bernardine Evaristo.- 24. Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984-1994); Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly.- 25. Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation with Clare Smout, February 2018: Gender and Disability; Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout.- 26. Women on the Classical Kerala Stage: The Kutiyattam and Kathakali Traditions; Diane Daugherty.- 27. Negotiating Representations of Coloured Women in Post-Apartheid South African Performance; Amy Jephta.- 28. Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and their Negotiation of Celebrity in the Twenty-First Century; Mary Luckhurst.- 29. Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: Lazarus Theatre Company's Staging of Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam; Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer.- 30. Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe Theatre Company, Milan; Susan Marshall.- 31. Australasian Shakespeare: Race and the Female Star; Anna Kamaralli.- 32. Women Playing Shakespeare's Men: Achieving Equality on the Twenty-First Century British Stage; Jami Rogers.- 33. Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition: Young Women in a Changing World; Tracy Irish.- 34. Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate; Emma Frankland.

About the author

Jan Sewell teaches Humanities at the Open University, UK. She was Assistant Editor of the RSC Complete Works of Shakespeare (2007) as well as the individual editions of Shakespeare’s Plays (2008-2012); she is co-editor of William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (2013) and Plays of Shakespeare’s Company (forthcoming).

Clare Smout is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham. Her current teaching portfolio also includes work on Shakespeare for Staffordshire University, the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, and i-Learner in Hong Kong. She previously spent twenty years as a theatre practitioner specialising in new writing.

Summary

This book brings together nearly 40 academics and theatre practitioners to chronicle and celebrate the courage, determination and achievements of women on stage across the ages and around the globe. The collection stretches from ancient Greece to present-day Australasia via the United States, Soviet Russia, Europe, India, South Africa and Japan, offering a series of analytical snapshots of women performers, their work and the conditions in which they produced it. Individual chapters provide in-depth consideration of specific moments in time and geography while the volume as a whole and its juxtapositions stimulate consideration of the bigger picture, underlining the challenges women have faced across cultures in establishing themselves as performers and the range of ways in which they gained access to the stage. Organised chronologically, the volume looks not just to the past but the future: it challenges the very notions of ‘history’, ‘stage’ and even the definition of ‘women’ itself.                     

Additional text

“I would have looked forward to articles which evaluate the impact of [the] contemporary female theatre practitioners’ work (which is often therapeutic in aim). Nonetheless, these personal narratives contribute richly to the wealth of knowledge in this tome accessible to the general reader, theatre practitioner, or researcher. They extend the discourse so that it interweaves the subject of women in theatre and performance with human rights.” (Dana Rufolo, Plays International & Europe, Vol. 36 (1-3), 2021)

Report

"I would have looked forward to articles which evaluate the impact of [the] contemporary female theatre practitioners' work (which is often therapeutic in aim). Nonetheless, these personal narratives contribute richly to the wealth of knowledge in this tome accessible to the general reader, theatre practitioner, or researcher. They extend the discourse so that it interweaves the subject of women in theatre and performance with human rights." (Dana Rufolo, Plays International & Europe, Vol. 36 (1-3), 2021)

Product details

• Assisted by: Ja Sewell (Editor), Jan Sewell (Editor), Smout (Editor), Smout (Editor), Clare Smout (Editor)
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.01.2020
• EAN: 9783030238278
• ISBN: 978-3-0-3023827-8
• No. of pages: 846
• Dimensions: 163 mm x 239 mm x 54 mm
• Weight: 1456 g
• Illustrations: XXIX, 846 p. 28 illus., 17 illus. in color.
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; Theater, B, Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Actors, Theatre and Performance Arts, Theater—History, Theatre History, Individual actors and performers, Contemporary Theatre and Performance, Contemporary Theatre, Performers and Practitioners, Global and International Theatre and Performance, Global/International Theatre and Performance, Women;Theatre;Stage;History;Acting