Engendering the Early Modern Stage

Engendering the Early Modern Stage
Valerie Hegstrom & Amy Williamson, Ed.

Gender, the Canon and Early Modern Theater
• “We cannot accurately comprehend the complexity of the dynamics governing women’s literary participation without considering the everyday realities that defined their lives” (3)
• gender not evenly represented in GAT studies (7)

Women and Secular Theater
• “women participated on all levels of the production and reception of plays” (107)
• Gil Vicente’s daughter Paula was Maria of Portugal’s lady-in-waiting & “performed in his plays and wrote music and some theater of her own” (108)
• private performances in palaces, homes of the nobility & gave noblewomen “the opportunity to sponsor and participate in performance” (111)
• “women audience members made their presence heard and felt, and successful playwrights, directors of theater companies, and actors could neither afford to ignore nor dismiss them” (114)
• women’s “active engagement on all levels of theatrical performances simultaneously supports and subverts the dominant male power structure and ideology” (117)
o they work within the male structure to subvert it

Theater in the Convent
• “Theater may serve to educate and support religious devotion, and it may also lend itself to subversion of patriarchal superstructure and outright rebellion” (211)
o also allows independence/opportunities you don’t get extramuros (212)
• “women spectators and actors alike can participate in the theatrical ritual together without the threat of objectification that can result from the male gaze” (213)
o but sometimes there were “visitors of both genders & various social positions” (213)
• music, dancing, fireworks, parades, etc. (214)
• sometimes convent plays were performed outside the convent by others & in the convent by outside players (215)
• “Convent theater can have many meanings. It can train and educate . . . “ (216)