October Blogroll: All-G Edition

Dear readers:

The blogroll this month is a simple one: three interesting reads that a number of friends, popular and scholarly, emailed over the summer and fall—some multiple times. I am this kind of person; I like to email CFPs and articles of interest to friends. It both activates my brain in terms of questions about a subject I don’t know, but also reminds me of all the generous and brilliant people out there I’ve had the chance to meet.

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“the lion’s part”: Midsommer, Solstice, and Shakespeare Gender Parity

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about identity parity in Shakespeare performance. This is in part because of recent articles critiquing Hollywood whitewashing, which in actuality negatively affects box office numbers. (For recent coverage, see the Los Angeles Times and Business Insider.) This is in part because I have been seeing a great deal of theatre interested in the range of implications available when you might choose to play a character against their biological-gender identification. For example, when Hotspur is female-identifying in the Henry IV plays, as in the case at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this summer, the competing reports of her death at the start of part two resonates with a very different parental agony and pathos. Or, when Aeneas is played by and as a woman, such as is the case of Portland Actors Ensemble’s Troilus and Cressida, that rape is a necessary war strategy becomes newly apparent. But is this kind of parity necessarily true across the industry?

Continue reading ““the lion’s part”: Midsommer, Solstice, and Shakespeare Gender Parity”