Oxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) provide students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, including some general anthologies relating to Shakespeare. Richard III, Romeo, Prince Harry, Malvolio, Hamlet, Lear, Antony, Coriolanus, Prospero: Shakespeare's roster of male protagonists is astonishingly various. Shakespeare and Masculinity juxtaposes these memorable characters with the medical beliefs, ethical ideals, and social realities that shaped masculine identity for Shakespeare, as for his fellow actors and their audiences. At the same time it explores the process of male self-definition against various sorts of 'others' - women, foreigners, social inferiors, sodomites. Reflecting the truth that the plays' principal existence is in the live theatre, the book finishes with a transhistorical, multicultural survey of how masculinity has been performed in productions of Shakespeare's plays - in France, Germany, Hungary, Iraq, Japan, and elsewhere - and with a challenge to imagine masculinity in fuller and more satisfying ways.
| ISBN: | 9780198711896 |
| Publication date: | 7th September 2000 |
| Author: | Bruce R Professor of English, Professor of English, Georgetown University, Washington, DC Smith |
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Pagination: | 192 pages |
| Series: | Oxford Shakespeare Topics |
| Genres: |
Literary studies: plays and playwrights Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800 Classic and pre-20th century plays |