Original scientific paper
To be or not to be a woman: That is the question! a woman’s place / women’s places in Shakespeare’s world and on stage
Ana Penjak
; Faculty of Kinesilology in Split
Abstract
When Francoise Lionnet wrote in her study ‘’Postcolonial Representation: Women, Literature, Identity’’ that ‘’a body has double function: to present the real, and to own the possible’’ (Lionnet, 1995: 92), she had something particular in mind. In other words, the role of sexuality in arts, or in visual representation of a female body as a sexually predetermined body of the Other, is an issue of heated debate among feminist critics today. The analysis of female character representation in the dramatic opus of William Shakespeare from the end of the16th and the beginning of the 17th century when female characters were played by boy actors, points out an extremely important phenomenon. Female bodies are concealed by other entities and identities, ideological beliefs and cultural values, and burdened with numerous meanings and interpretations like gender and psychoanalytical interpretation. Thus, female bodies, and bodies in general as symbolic places, become a text in which social-historic facts of a certain period are written. Therefore, the author’s intention in this article is twofold: on the one hand to display the social-historic overview of conventions and values thus indicating the ideological adaptability of the body metaphor, and on the other to introduce the variety of body mal-treatments, especially referring to female bodies, but also those of boy actors which attempted to imitate them.
Keywords
Elizabethan theatre; values; bodies; transvestism; entities and identities
Hrčak ID:
81727
URI
Publication date:
28.12.2011.
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