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Full-Text Articles in Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory
Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc
Strict Restraints: Abstinence's Gender Problems In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc
History Honors Papers
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure poses questions about sexual coercion and governmental corruption that resonate today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context regarding Isabella. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the value of abstinence. I put these characters’ claims into dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and extensive scholarship on Shakespearean England. I argue that abstinence is the axis around which Measure’s main characters revolve, and that Measure locates these characters’ abstinences as competing performances of manhood and …
Monstrous!: Actors, Audiences, Inmates, And The Politics Of Reading Shakespeare, Matt Kozusko
Monstrous!: Actors, Audiences, Inmates, And The Politics Of Reading Shakespeare, Matt Kozusko
English Faculty Publications
This essay considers the use of Shakespeare as marker of authenticity and as a therapeutic space for performers and audiences across a number of genres, from professional actors in training literature to prison inmates in radio and film documentaries. It argues that in the wake of recent academic trends—the critique of "Shakespeare" as an author figure; the privileging of the text as a source of multiple, potentially conflicting readings—Shakespeare's function as cultural capital has shifted sites, from "Shakespeare" to the playtexts themselves.