Book contents
- Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare’s English History Plays
- Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare’s English History Plays
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Facts Disfigured
- Chapter 2 From the Margins
- Chapter 3 History as Exclusion
- Chapter 4 Blurring the Boundaries
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - Blurring the Boundaries
Effeminacy and Feminine History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2023
- Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare’s English History Plays
- Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare’s English History Plays
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Facts Disfigured
- Chapter 2 From the Margins
- Chapter 3 History as Exclusion
- Chapter 4 Blurring the Boundaries
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chapter four argues these processes of marginalisation represent a feminine, not solely female, mode of storytelling by demonstrating that male characters who are disempowered in explicitly feminine terms are endowed with the same historiographical powers as female characters. I first explore characters like Hotspur and Richard II, who explicitly have their legacies relegated to the histories disseminated by women, thus posthumously becoming the stuff of feminine history. This chapter argues that Falstaff and Henry IV also trace a parallel pattern of feminised disempowerment across the course of the second tetralogy. In contrast are Henry V and Henry VIII, both of whom affirm their masculinised legacies by explicitly avoiding entrusting their histories to female voices. Turning to earlier history plays, shifting gender positions of Queen Margaret and King Henry VI complicate a clear correlation between dramaturgical gender and character gender and demonstrate how certain characters continually renegotiate their relationship to masculine history. Finally, I consider the malleable and unstable position of boy characters, whose ability to shift between identification as young men and feminine boys, and the parallels their embodied presence draws to the boy players in female roles around them, renders them particularly vulnerable to feminised erasure by history.
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- Information
- Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare's English History Plays , pp. 137 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023