“Fright the ladies out of their wits”: Gendered passion and the English stage “Fright the ladies out of their wits”: passion et genre sur la scène anglaise
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15 décembre 2022
- handle: 10670/1.7hlbz9
- hal: hal-03992077
- doi: 10.4000/episteme.16165
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Mots-clés
spectatorship Women - Gender William Shakespeare 1564-1616 -- Criticism and interpretationSujets proches
Womyn Wimmin Woman Womon Human females Stage Drama, Modern Plays Drama--Philosophy Women's workCiter ce document
Yan Brailowsky, « “Fright the ladies out of their wits”: passion et genre sur la scène anglaise », HAL-SHS : études de genres, ID : 10.4000/episteme.16165
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This essay discusses female spectatorship from within Shakespeare’s plays as performed in his lifetime. Several plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet or King Lear address the issue of female spectatorship, providing comedic and tragic illustrations of how women reacted to theatrical performances, and how playwrights seemed to address the needs of female spectators. Interpretation of female spectatorship is rendered difficult by the scant evidence pertaining to actual women spectators at the time, pointing to the problem of interpreting how such spectatorship and gendered emotions could be performed and received by Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. The essay shows that gendered constructs of spectatorship rarely followed accepted norms, and that men were as likely as women to be frightened “out of their wits”. The plays are as fictional as the gendered differences between female and male spectators.