Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England

Description

Why was England the only country in Europe to maintain an all-male public theater 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. At once provocative and witty, lucid and stylish, Impersonations will reshape our understanding of the Renaissance theater, and make us rethink our own inadequate categories of gender, power and sexuality.

'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