Labors Lost: Women's Work and the Early Modern English Stage - Couverture rigide

Korda, Natasha

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0812243447 ISBN 13 : 9780812243444

Editeur : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011

Synopsis

Labors Lost offers a fascinating and wide-ranging account of working women's behind-the-scenes and hitherto unacknowledged contributions to theatrical production in Shakespeare's time. Natasha Korda reveals that the purportedly all-male professional stage relied on the labor, wares, ingenuity, and capital of women of all stripes, including ordinary crafts- and tradeswomen who supplied costumes, props, and comestibles; wealthy heiresses and widows who provided much-needed capital and credit; wives, daughters, and widows of theater people who worked actively alongside their male kin; and immigrant women who fueled the fashion-driven stage with a range of newfangled skills and commodities.

Combining archival research on these and other women who worked in and around the playhouses with revisionist readings of canonical and lesser-known plays, Labors Lost retrieves this lost history by detailing the diverse ways women participated in the work of playing, and the ways male players and playwrights in turn helped to shape the cultural meanings of women's work. Far from a marginal phenomenon, the gendered division of theatrical labor was crucial to the rise of the commercial theaters in London and had an influence on the material culture of the stage and the dramatic works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Natasha Korda is Professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England, also available from University of Pennsylvania Press.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Date d'édition: 2011
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0812243447
• ISBN 13: 9780812243444
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 360
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible