Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre: Women's Comedy and the Theatre FROM THE PUBLISHER
Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre studies the representation of gender in four of the most important plays by the leading professional women playwrights of the late Stuart period. Behn's The Rover (1677) and The Luckey Chance (1686) and Centlivre's The Busie Body (1709) and The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) are first placed in their original theatrical and cultural contexts and then studied through subsequent productions and adaptations extending from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. The detailed analysis of these plays is framed by a discussion of the cultural position of the playwrights and the kind of comedy they wrote. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of dramatic literature, theatre, and women's studies.
SYNOPSIS
Copeland (U. of Toronto) examines the representation of gender in the staging of four late-Stuart plays by women playwrights Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre—Behn's The Rover (1677) and The Luckey Chance (1686); and Centlivre's The Busie Body (1709) and The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714). A central aspect of Copeland's study is Bratton's notion of "intertheatricality," in other words, the ways plays in their performance contexts are presented in a "theatrical code shared by writers, performers, and audiences which consists not only of language, but of genres, conventions, and memory—shared by the audience—of previous plays and scenes, previous performances, the actor's previous roles and their known personae on and off stage." Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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