Elizabethan England

shakespeares-old-globe-theatre-merrie-england-english-village-nby-417104-fa0f0b.jpg

Theater &
Folklore

Image taken from https://picryl.com/media/shakespeares-old-globe-theatre-merrie-england-english-village-nby-417104-fa0f0b

"The cross-dressed boy/man impersonating a woman on the stage both conceals and un-masks the spoken "woman"" (Rose 2008).

Performing Shakespeare

"...in artistic performance of this kind, there is something going on in the communicative interchange which says to the auditor [listener], "interpret what I say in some special sense; do not take it to mean what the words alone, taken literally, would convey." (Bauman 1975)

"It was illegal for females to perform on stage until 1661."
(Garcia 2018)

Verbal art as folklore

Shakespeare created so many phrases and new words in his works that are still used today, over 400 years later!

Image taken from https://nosweatshakespeare.com/resources/words-shakespeare-invented/

Material Folklore:

Shakespearean plays are known for their fanciful costumes and props, no matter the character or the actor.

Image taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historische_Kost%C3%BCme_im_Globe-Museum.JPG, author Reni002, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED.

Customary folklore:

the "curtain call" is one example of a theater's ritual frame, signifying the end of the performance and the actors being recognized.

Gender blurring:

In 1899, Sarah Bernhardt (pictured here) played the titular role of Hamlet; this was still "against the grain" for a woman to be in a "man's role" at this time.

Photo courtesy of the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division, taken from https://www.writerstheatre.org/blog/gender-shakespeares-stage-history/

Shakespearean theater as spectacle

"...as the major ﬁgure in the Western theatrical canon, is of course the focus of much theatrical experimentation, and performances of his plays for more than a decade have reﬂected a revolution in the ways spectators view gender" (Bulman 2008).