Questions about the meaning of womanhood and femininity loomed large in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French culture. In Playing Cleopatra, Holly Grout uses the theater—specifically, Parisian stage performances of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra by Sarah Bernhardt, Colette, and Josephine Baker—to explore these cultural and political debates. How and why did portrayals of Cleopatra influence French attitudes regarding race, sexuality, and gender? To what extent did Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker manipulate the image of Cleopatra to challenge social norms and to generate new models of womanhood? Why was Cleopatra—an ancient, mythologized queen—the chosen vehicle for these spectacular expressions of modern womanhood? In the context of late nineteenth-century Egyptomania, Cleopatra’s eroticized image—as well as her controversial legacy of female empowerment—resonated in new ways with a French public engaged in reassessing feminine sexuality, racialized beauty, and national identity. By playing Cleopatra, Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker did more than personify a character; they embodied the myriad ways in which celebrity was racialized, gendered, and commoditized, and they generated a model of female stardom that set the stage for twentieth-century celebrity long before the Hollywood machine’s mass manufacture of “stars.” At the same time, these women engaged with broader debates regarding the meaning of womanhood, celebrity, and Frenchness in the tumultuous decades before World War II. Drawing on plays, periodicals, autobiographies, personal letters, memoirs, novels, works of art, and legislation, Playing Cleopatra contributes to a growing body of literature that examines how individuals subverted the prevailing gender norms that governed relations between the sexes in liberal democratic regimes. By offering employment, visibility, and notoriety, the theater provided an especially empowering world for women, in which the roles they played both reflected and challenged contemporary cultural currents. Through the various iterations in which Bernhardt, Colette, and Baker played Cleopatra, they not only resurrected an ancient queen but also appropriated her mystique to construct new narratives of womanhood.

William Shakespeare has reached middle age. England is at a critical point in its history: Queen Elizabeth is dead, James I is waiting to claim the English throne, and the plague menaces once again. William Shakespeare is a much-changed man. Returning to London from Stratford, he is struggling with his own personal crises - not least the death of his son, Hamnet. He no longer wants to write comic plays and his mind is obsessed with the story of a beautiful Egyptian queen and her Roman lover? This compelling and evocative sequel to 'Sweet Will' is a magnificent portrayal of life in and around London's Globe Theatre.

The fifth volume in this popular series of essays by actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre.

Cleopatra. Sexy, sultry, political, and racially ambiguous. Moving fluidly from Shakespeare's England to contemporary LA, Francesca Royster looks at the performance of race and sexuality in a wide range of portrayals of that icon of dangerous female sexuality, Cleopatra. Royster begins with Shakespeare's original appropriation of Plutarch, and then moves on to analyze performances of the Cleopatra icon by Josephine Baker, Elizabeth Taylor, Pam Grier (Cleopatra Jones) and Queen Latifah (in Set It Off ). Royster argues that Cleopatra highlights a larger cultural anxiety about women, sexuality, and race.

Shakespeare, Theory and Performance is a groundbreaking collection of seminal essays which apply the abstract theory of Shakespearean criticism to the practicalities of performance. Bringing together the key names from both realms, the collection reflects a wide range of sources and influences, from traditional literary, performance and historical criticism to modern cultural theory. Together they raise questions about the place of performance criticism in modern and often competing debates of cultural materialism, new historicism, feminism and deconstruction. An exciting and fascinating volume, it will be important reading for students and scholars of literary and theatre studies alike.

"Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility begins with a moment in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in which Cleopatra says to Antony, "Not know me yet?" With these four words Cleopatra poses a simple but fundamental human problem: What can we know? She and Antony have known each other for years, at times gloriously - emotionally, mentally, and in the archaic sense of the word, physically - but still the challenge of knowing hangs in the air. Cleopatra's question reminds us that knowledge is not simple: that it is as likely to create yearning as satisfaction; that it is not confined to any one part of the self; that it is far from intellect alone. It reminds us as do most great plays - that life is part wonder, part terror." "What we can know? This study - aimed at students, teachers, and theater artists - suggests that he attempt to know the dramaturgy of a play is little different from the attempt to know another person for whom we care."--BOOK JACKET.

Containing over a hundred interviews conducted over the last fifteen years with leading directors, actors and writers at the National Theatre, Buzz Buzz! is a fantastic compendium that offers unrivalled insight into the work and practice of the best theatre talent. In these illuminating interviews playwrights such as Michael Frayn, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Rebecca Lenkiewicz, David Hare, Pam Gems and Tony Kushner and many others talk about the roots of their work, their methods of research, and how they collaborate with their directors, while actors from Fiona Shaw to Kenneth Branagh, and directors from Peter Hall to Marianne Elliott, contribute fascinating insights into their ideas and ways of working. The book covers plays by the Greeks and Shakespeare, English and European classics, and the best of modern English, Irish and American drama. Theatre writer and commentator Jonathan Croall draws on the vast wealth of interviews he's conducted at the National Theatre in this fascinating and wide-ranging book.