Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage

The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

"Detailed and extensively researched, Asuka Kimura’s Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage offers scholars interested in early modern performance studies a uniquely material perspective on the class and gender concerns navigated in English dramatic performance."

"…Performing Widowhood on the Early Modern English Stage is a carefully considered, inclusive, and accessible monograph. Clear in its focus and admirably unwilling to stray from it, the book should be considered a good resource for scholars of material and performance studies…"

(both excerpts from Renaissance and Reform 47.1)