THE WORLD OF TRAGEDY
  • Syllabus
  • Unit One
    • Aristotle's Poetics
    • Ancient Greek Theater
    • Oedipus the King
    • Antigone
    • Medea
    • Playing the Other
    • The Birth of Tragedy
    • The Mourning Voice
    • Lars von Trier's Medea
    • Cherrie Moraga's The Hungry Woman
    • A Theory of Adaptation
  • Unit Two
    • Early Modern Theater
    • Richard III
    • THEATER EXCURSION
    • Original Practices
    • Women of Richard III
    • Hamlet
    • Notorious Identity
    • Shakespeare's Ghost Writers/King in the Car Park
    • Mock Hamlet Exam
    • Hamlet 2
  • ASSIGNMENTS
    • Student Website Assignments
    • MEDEA ESSAY SAMPLES
    • THEATER REVIEW GUIDELINES
    • THEATER REVIEW MODEL
    • FINAL PAPER HAMLET
    • TIPS FOR FINAL PAPER
  • Resources
    • WHAT WE LEARNED
    • Glossary
    • Further Reading
    • Professor Walsh Recommends
    • Places and Projects
    • The World of Tragedy
    • FINAL PAPERS
  • TECH
    • A History of Hamlet
    • Paul
    • Estella
    • Estella
    • Estella
  • FINAL PAPERS
    • Hamlet: Jedi Knight
    • The Lion King
    • Game of Thrones
    • House of Cards
    • Shakespeare's Hamlet
    • Sopranos
    • Tragic Women
    • Waiting for Godot
    • Films of Tim Burton
    • Miley Cyrus
The following notes are based on the Folger Shakespeare Library Introductions, "Shakespeare's Life" (p. xxv-xxxiv) and "Shakespeare's Theater" (p. xxxv-xliii) found in William Shakespeare, Richard III, Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, eds.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Women and the Early Modern Stage
"in Shakespeare's England the roles of women were played by boys....There were no women in the acting companies, only in the audience.  It had not always been so in the history of the English stage.  There are records of women on English stages in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, two hundred years before Shakespeare's plays were performed.  After the accession of James I in 1603, the Queen of England and her ladies took part in entertainments at court called masques, and with the reopening of the theaters in 1660 at the restoration of Charles II, women again took their place on the public stage" (p. xli-xlii).




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