Breadcrumbs

• Home »
• Renaissance »
• Shakespeare and the Actress

Shakespeare and the Actress:
Renaissance Women’s Performance and the Dramatic Canon

14-15 July 2010 at the Queen’s House, Greenwich, London.

Jointly sponsored by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, the Society for Renaissance Studies, and and the Centre for Research in Renaissance Studies, Roehampton University London.

The Renaissance theatrical woman offers a fresh context for the interpretation of the productions of the public and private playhouses which have for so long dominated critical interest. This interdisciplinary conference will explore the domestic and European theatrical culture of which female masquers, singers, jesters, foreign actresses, dancers, musicians, writers, orators and theatrical labourers were part and will consider the impact of this alternative performance tradition on familiar dramatic works and on the history of early modern theatre. Exploring the range of early modern women’s theatrical performance and participation, it will assess the ways in which the canonical plays of the public and private city stages (including but not restricted to those of Shakespeare) are changed when we take account of the theatricality of the women of early modern England and Europe.

The conference will be held in the Queen’s House, part of the Greenwich UNESCO World Heritage Site. Designed for the courts of Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria, the House is the architectural expression of a Stuart queenship which fostered a range of female theatricality. The conference itself, though, will range beyond elite culture to discuss the activities of what Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin call ‘the female player’ and to explore the popular, elite, formal, informal, commercial and non-commercial performances of such women as new and important contexts for the theatre of early modern England.

Please send enquiries to: Clare McManus, Roehampton University (c.mcmanus@rus.roehampton.ac.uk).

Call for Papers.