Introduction

Abstract

The “embodied heroine” on the Shakespearean stage sounds oxymoronic, a figure of speech without a figure. Arguably, the one element Shakespearean heroines unequivocally lack is a body—a female body that is. Boy actors usurped the position of gender-appropriate casting in the professional theatre troupes of Renaissance England. This use of boy players is fuel for critics to suggest the essential identity of Shakespearean “women” is male and that their identification is as men to men. Lisa Jardine states that women on the Shakespearean stage “reveal nothing of ‘real’ womanly feelings” (29, 33). Such a perception, however, seems to narrowly locate the female roles decisively in the historical context in which the plays were first performed while disregarding the fictive world of the play (that which captures audience’s imaginations as they are watching), female audience members, and over four centuries of performance history. This performance history, where female characters were literally embodied by women, begins with the Restoration, a period which launches from Shakespeare’s own theatrical milieu. Can these Restoration adaptations be used as a way of shedding light backwards on the handling of female roles by Shakespeare? Can they suggest ways in which these roles may have performatively been embodied?