When adapting Shakespeare's comedies, cinema and television have to address the differences and incompatibilities between early modern gender constructs and contemporary cultural, social, and political contexts. Screening Gender in Shakespeare’s Comedies: Film and Television Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century analyzes methods employed by cinema and television in approaching those aspects of Shakespeare's comedies, indicating a range of ways in which adaptations made in the twenty-first century approach the problems of cultural and social normativity, gender politics, stereotypes of femininity and masculinity, the dynamic of power relations between men and women, and social roles of men and women. This book discusses both mainstream cinematic productions, such as Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice or Julie Taymor's The Tempest, and more low-key adaptations, such as Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It and Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, as well as the three comedies of BBC ShakespeaRe-Told miniseries: Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. This book examines how the analyzed films deal with elements of Shakespeare's comedies that appear subversive, challenging, or offensive to today's culture, and how they interpret or update gender issues to reconcile Shakespeare with contemporary cultural norms. By exploring tensions and negotiations between early modern and present-day gender politics, the book defines the prevailing attitudes of recent adaptations in relation to those issues, and identifies the most popular strategies of accommodating early modern constructs for contemporary audiences.

Women of Will is a fierce and funny exploration of Shakespeare’s understanding of the feminine. Tina Packer, one of our foremost Shakespeare experts, shows that Shakespeare began, in his early comedies, by writing women as shrews to be tamed or as sweet little things with no independence of thought. The women of the history plays are much more interesting, beginning with Joan of Arc. Then, with the extraordinary Juliet, there is a dramatic shift: suddenly Shakespeare’s women have depth, motivation, and understanding of life more than equal to that of the men. As Shakespeare ceases to write women as predictable caricatures and starts writing them from the inside, his women become as dimensional, spirited, spiritual, active, and sexual as any of his male characters. Wondering if Shakespeare had fallen in love (Packer considers with whom, and what she may have been like), the author observes that from Juliet on, Shakespeare’s characters demonstrate that when women and men are equal in status and passion, they can—and do—change the world.

One of the most provocative writers on women's performances of Shakespeare on stage and film in Britain today, Rutter speculates on how the theatre `plays' women's bodies and how audiences read them.

Shakespeare Without Women is a controversial study of female impersonation, and the connections between dramatic and political representation in Shakespeare's plays. In this original and challenging book, Callaghan argues that Shakespeare did not include women, and that his transvestite actors did not represent women, and were not, furthermore, meant to do so. All Shakespeare's actors were, of historical necessity, (white) males which meant that the portrayal of women and racial others posed unique problems for his theatre. What is important, Shakespeare Without Women claims, is not to bemoan the absence of women, Africans, or the Irish, but to determine what such absences meant in their historical context and why they matter today. Callaghan focuses in the implications of absence and exclusion in several of Shakespeare's works: * the exclusion of the female body fromTwelfth Night * the impersonation of the female voice in the original performances of the plays * racial impersonation in Othello * echoes of removal of the Gaelic Irish in The Tempest * the absence of women on stage and in public life as shown in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Osnabr ck, 26 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Compared to other writers of his time, Shakespeare introduces an unusual amount of deep female characters in his comedies. His representation of women, in particular the ways in which his female roles are interpreted and put on stage, have become topics of scientific interest. Especially the young women often show vitality, great intelligence, and a strong sense of personal independence, which marks them as "queen s] of comedy" (Palmer 72). Therefore, they are often referred to as Shakespeare's heroines. In the following, I want to show their importance and point out that each heroine, although they all share character traits, has distinct and unique qualities. In doing so, I will occasionally refer to a secondary literature and involve positions of different critics. Though, my attention will be focussed on the plays treated in this research paper: A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night. On the basis of these romantic comedies, I will analyse how the young women are presented and subsequently compare them among one another. In the first part I will look at each heroine individually and introduce their plays. Then I will develop possible similarities between them: Beautiful but unworldly Miranda seems to be totally controlled by her father Prospero, but she shows a strong will in planning a shared future with Ferdinand and she is aware of her superiority to the savage Caliban. Hermia's father similarly chooses her husband. With magic help, however, she and Helena manage to come together with the right partner. Moreover, Helena reveals that she believes in the transformative power of love (MND I.2, 233-4). Viola in Twelfth Night is in a way almost the opposite of Rosalind in As You Like It, although both plays