Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579 1642

Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579 1642

Levine, Laura
Orgel, Stephen
Barton, Anne

Paperback

Series: Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Book 5

Literary CriticismPlays

ISBN10: 052146627X
ISBN13: 9780521466271
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: Oct 13 1994
Pages: 196
Weight: 0.58
Height: 0.46 Width: 5.98 Depth: 8.95
Language: English
In 1597 anti-theatricalist Stephen Gosson made the curious remark that theatre 'effeminized' the mind. Four years later Phillip Stubbes claimed that male actors who wore women's clothing could literally 'adulterate' male gender and fifty years after this in a tract which may have hastened the closing of the theatres, William Prynne described a man whom women's clothing had literally caused to 'degenerate' into a women. How can we account for such fears of effeminization and what did Renaissance playwrights do with such a legacy? Laura Levine examines the ways in which Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson addressed a generation's anxieties about gender and the stage and identifies the way the same 'magical thinking' informed documents we much more readily associate with extreme forms of cultural paranoia: documents dedicated to the extermination of witches.

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