Eighteenth-Century Reading Group: Kristina Straub
Eighteenth-Century Reading Group: Kristina Straub
All are Welcome! Refreshments Served!
While A Midsummer Night’s Dream had only two performances under its original title in the long eighteenth century, Shakespeare’s characters from this play were seldom off the stage, appearing regularly in operas, masques, burlettas, pantomimes, and other hard-to-label ‘favours,’ ‘pageants,’ and ‘spectacles.’ It offers, therefore, a rich case study in theatrical ‘variety,’ in terms of different performative genres, but also in terms of human variety and the period’s responses to differences of identity and social status in a shifting economy and a changing world. The various performances into which Shakespeare’s play was adapted are packaging for differences that both attracted and troubled eighteenth-century audiences. In these mixed genres, class, age, gender, and exotic otherness constitute a performative matrix for sexual desires and relations as they resist normative understandings of identity, status, and the social relations that define them.
Professor Straub works at the crossroads of performance studies, queer theory, and eighteenth-century studies. She is author of Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton, 1992); Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-century Britain (Johns Hopkins, 2009); and Divided fictions : Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Kentucky, 1987). She is professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
All are Welcome! Refreshments Served!
While A Midsummer Night’s Dream had only two performances under its original title in the long eighteenth century, Shakespeare’s characters from this play were seldom off the stage, appearing regularly in operas, masques, burlettas, pantomimes, and other hard-to-label ‘favours,’ ‘pageants,’ and ‘spectacles.’ It offers, therefore, a rich case study in theatrical ‘variety,’ in terms of different performative genres, but also in terms of human variety and the period’s responses to differences of identity and social status in a shifting economy and a changing world. The various performances into which Shakespeare’s play was adapted are packaging for differences that both attracted and troubled eighteenth-century audiences. In these mixed genres, class, age, gender, and exotic otherness constitute a performative matrix for sexual desires and relations as they resist normative understandings of identity, status, and the social relations that define them.
Professor Straub works at the crossroads of performance studies, queer theory, and eighteenth-century studies. She is author of Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton, 1992); Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-century Britain (Johns Hopkins, 2009); and Divided fictions : Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Kentucky, 1987). She is professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.
Tawes Hall