Product Description

Why was England the only country in Europe to maintain an all-male public theatre in the Renaissance? Stephen Orgel uses this question as the starting point of a fresh and stimulating exploration of the representation of gender in Elizabethan drama and society. Why were boys used to play female roles in drama, and how did such cross-dressing impact on the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries? What was the place of women in the Renaissance theatre, either on the stage or in the audience? And what did society make of those women who significantly and successfully violated accepted gender boundaries? At once provocative and witty, lucid and stylish, Impersonations will reshape our understanding of the Renaissance theatre, and make us rethink our own inadequate categories of gender, power and sexuality.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #660629 in Books
• Published on: 1996-02-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 196 pages

Review
‘In [this] brilliant short book ... Orgel writes with unfailing clarity and authority, laying bare the steps of his own thinking step by step, encouraging us to entertain objections to his argument, each of which he carefully answers, while never losing sight of the central theme of his book.’ New York Review of Books

‘Orgel’s strength is in the sharp local perception - the scholarly insistence, for example, that despite the fantasies of critics and directors the text of Edward II does not call for an on-stage poker. Such rigour is a useful corrective to critical orthodoxies which abjure the unfashionably empirical.’ New Theatre Quarterly

Customer Reviews

seminal study but beware it's polemical bent
Although Impersonations is unimpeachable in terms of critical reputation I think it has some flaws in argument even if it is a beautifully executed book: the evidence Orgal sites is often quite slight for the weight of argument placed on it and he can be infuriatingly inconsistent for example on the issue of the status or existence of female actors in Elizabethan theatre - seeming to both revise the common assumption there were any but then endlessly qualifying this. I think what I'm saying is he can meander a bit - which is fine in 'exploration' type studies but this book is intentionally polemical where this habit is less easy to tolerate - he spoils the strength of his own argument.
However! much on the level of information is very valuable even if it is sometimes used in a debatable way.