Content area
Full text
Performing Shakespeare's Women: Playing Dead Paige Martin Reynolds Bloomsbury, 2019 £75 hb., 208 pp. ISBN 9781350002593
The subjectivity of the actor playing dead in William Shakespeare's plays provides the critical and creative impetus for Performing Shakespeare's Women: Playing Dead. Taking the idea of the dead female character on stage as its starting point, Paige Martin Reynolds argues that "an actor playing one of Shakespeare's women may feel as if she is 'playing dead' before the curtain even goes up" (15). She contends that scholars, practitioners, and critics have a tendency "to corpse" Shakespeare's women, restricting interpretations of female characters to such an extent that they are rendered little more than living props for male protagonists.
Reynolds's analysis is founded on her embodied experience of "playing dead" in Shakespeare. Drawing on a varied...