Shakespeare's Women and the Fin de Siècle

Shakespeare's Women and the Fin de Siècle illuminates the most iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare's heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and wider careers of the actresses who played them. By bringing together fin-de-siècle performances of Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian drama for the first time, this book illuminates the vital ways in which fin-de-siècle Shakespeare andcontemporary Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other. Actresses' movements between Shakespeare and fin-de-siècle roles reveal the collisions and unexpected consonances between apparently independent areas of the fin-de-siècle repertory. Performances including Ellen Terry's Lady Macbeth, Madge Kendal's Rosalind, and Lillie Langtry's Cleopatra illuminate fin-de-siècle Shakespeare's lively intersections with cultural phenomena including the 'Jack the Ripper' killings, Aestheticism, the suicide craze, and therise of metropolitan department stores. If, as previous studies have shown, Shakespeare was everywhere in Victorian culture, Sophie Duncan explores the surprising ways in which late-Victorian culture, from Dracula to pornography, and from Ruskin to the suffragettes, inflected Shakespeare.Via a wealth of unpublished archival material, Duncan reveals women's creative networks at the fin de siècle, and how Shakespearean performance traditions moved between actresses via little-studied performance genealogies. At the same time, controversial new stage business made fin-de-siècle Shakespeare as much a crucible for debates over gender roles and sexuality as plays by Ibsen and Shaw. Increasingly, actresses' creative networks encompassed suffragistactivists, who took personal inspiration from star Shakespearean actresses. From a Salome-esque Juliet to a feminist Paulina, fin-de-siècle actresses created cultural legacies which Shakespeare-in-performance still negotiates today.

Shakespeare's Woman and the Fin De Siècle will be required reading for anyone working on Shakespeare's reception in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and vital for those wanting to understand the New Woman more fully. It is a thorough work of theatre history. And it will satisfy those for whom the cults of Terry and Langtry never die., There is still little crossover between Shakespeare scholars interested in performance and theatre/drama studies researchers working on the performances of a particular historical period. Sophie Duncan's Shakespeare's Women and the Fin de Siècle recognizes this puzzling lack of interaction and provides an important model for a more productive engagement between these fields., Duncan draws on an extraordinary range of archival material in relation to each of her subjects...The book provides a welcome antidote to prevailing assumptions surrounding some of these celebrated actresses., Duncan's book is an energetic and greatly illuminating study of everything that orbited the world of Shakespeare's women and theatre within the discourse and context of the fin de siècle. Duncan brilliantly handles the domestic and theatrical roles of performing women, all the time balancing these opposing realms against the commercial, moral and social expectations thrust upon the women of theatre. Her attention to detail in the reconstruction of performances and their reception is commendable, and while impeccably learned, Duncan's narrative style is accessible, engaging and a meaningful contribution to both theatre history and Victorian Shakespeare Studies., This is a book of great range, but also great depth. It reads with an ease facilitated by mastery of the performers and the frames surrounding them, taking the discussion of domestic, sexual and theatric roles of women to a new level of complexity. Its discussion of the diversity of response, including many reviews outside London, and carefully modifying ideas of recent critical writing as well as that of the period, offers itself as a model for future writing. The precision, brevity and clear, jargon-free style also makes it highly enjoyable to read.

Sophie Duncan is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Her principal research interests are in Early Modern and nineteenth-century drama, theatre history, cognitive approaches to literature, and cultural memory. She has published on fin-de-siècle Gothic culture, Shakespeare, and celebrity. Beyond academia, she works regularly as a historical advisor and dramaturg for theatre, radio, and television.