Acting Women

Did the Elizabethans really accept a boy actor playing Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Hamlet's mother or the Duchess of Malfi just as we accept painted scenery as 'real'? Acting Women places this question in the context of the theatrical convention that excluded women from the stage for 2000 years. In a wide-ranging study that examines the social, cultural and theatrical changes that occurred when women were first allowed in the seventeenth century to play their own roles, Lesley Ferris identifies the construction - by male writers and performers - of a symbolic female. The effect of this was to present actresses not as inventors of roles but as women who merely played themselves - a patriarchal trick that conveniently and skilfully removes women from the domain of cultural creativity. Nor did the matter end in the seventeenth century. The second half of Acting Women traces the theatrical legacy of the male-generated female by exploring a range of stage female archetypes from 'The Penitent Whore' and 'The Speechless Heroine' to 'The Wilful Woman' and 'The Golden Girl'. And it returns full circle at the end to look at what it means now for women to act as men.

(Source: Acting Women blurb)