Abstract
From a feminist perspective, initial observations about the history of theatre noted the absence of women within the tradition. Since traditional scholarship has focused on evidence related to written texts, the absence of women playwrights became central to early feminist investigations. The fact that there was no significant number of extant texts written by women for the stage until the seventeenth century produced a rather astounding sense of absence in the classical traditions of the theatre. The silence of women’s voices in these traditions led feminist historians who were interested in women playwrights to concentrate on periods in which they did emerge: primarily the seventeenth century in England, the nineteenth century in America and the twentieth century in Europe and America. These studies produced, beginning in the early 1970s, a number of new anthologies of plays by women and biographies of women playwrights.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Bibliography
Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. O. B. Hardison, tr. Leon Golden (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968).
Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument, tr. and ed. Gerald F. Else (Dambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963).
Arthur, Marilyn, ‘“Liberated” Women: The Classical Era’, in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
Bieber, Margarete, The History of The Greek and Roman Theatre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939).
du Bois, Page, Centaurs and Amazons (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982).
Fetterley, Judith, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).
Granville-Barker, Harley, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), vol. i.
Hartsock, Nancy, Money, Sex and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (New York: Longman, 1983).
Irigaray, Luce. ‘When the Goods Get Together’, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms (New York: Schocken, 1981).
Jardine, Lisa, Still Harping on Daughters (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983).
Kelly, Joan, Women, History, and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Kott, Jan, Shakespeare our Contemporary, tr. Boleslaw Taborski (London: Methuen, 1965).
Lefkowitz, Mary, and Fant, Maureen B., Women’s Life in Greece and Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics (New York: 1970).
Novy, Marianne L., Love’s Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).
Rubin, Gayle, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review, 1975).
Tyrrell, William Blake, Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
Vance, Carole, Introduction to Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds), Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review, 1983).
Wickham, Glynne, Early English Stages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) vol. i.
Copyright information
© 1988 Sue-Ellen Case
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Case, SE. (1988). Traditional History: A Feminist Deconstruction. In: Feminism and Theatre. New Directions in Theatre. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19114-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19114-7_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-39000-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-19114-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)