Actresses, Artists, Authors: Women Shakespeareans in the Nineteenth Century

Introduction

Authors

  • Christy Desmet University of Georgia

Keywords:

19th Century, Performance Studies, 20th Century

Abstract

This Introduction analyzes the rise of twentieth-century Shakespeare as a reaction against not only Romantic versions of Shakespeare, the usual target of academic analysis after T. S. Eliot, but also feminine, and often feminist, approaches to Shakespeare produced by women actors, artists, and authors in the nineteenth century. These women, in turn, engage not just with the nationalist figure of King Shakespeare, as epitomized by Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, but also with one another in networks that are sometimes personal, sometimes dispersed.

Author Biography

Christy Desmet, University of Georgia

Christy Desmet is Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia. The author of Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Reading, Ethics, and Identity (Massachusetts 1992), she is also editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (with Robert Sawyer, Routledge 1999), Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (with Robert Sawyer, Palgrave 2001), Shakespearean Gothic (with Anne Williams, Wales 2009), and Helen Faucit (Pickering and Chatto 2011). With Sujata Iyengar, she founded and co-edits Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.

Issue Cover text: B&L, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2013. Image: 19th century actress Sarah Bernhardt dressed as Hamlet poses holding Yorick's skull.

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Published

2013-05-01

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2013): Spring/Summer

Section

Articles