Trans*ing Performance Approaches to Shakespeare and Lyly's Comedies

Cynthia Marie Zavala

This project argues that there is an inherent trans* potentiality in the comedies of William Shakespeare and John Lyly; despite the seeming reinforcement of hegemonic gender norms in the finales of their respective canons, actual staging practices by contemporary theatres suggest a greater degree of preserved gender liminality latent within texts such as As You Like It, The Woman in the Moon, Twelfth Night, and Galatea. This project utilizes performance assessment, which addresses the shift in language employed by early modernists to disentangle the theatrical practice of crossdressing from contemporary identitarian labels, to analyze how contemporary adaptations disrupt gender within the playworlds of early modern comedies. To uncover the negotiation between text and performance, I ask what scholars can garner from trans*ing early modern comedies through a performance study, and to what extent performance choices can challenge homogenous narratives of sex and gender? Furthermore, how do performers illuminate possibilities within the text for transformative movement through gendered spaces, and do their crossings posit gender as reconfigurable? Synthesizing trans* studies with early modern gender scholarship provides additional context for conversations, early- and postmodern, surrounding the spectatorship of gender and the subjectivities validated or erased by such discussions. Lyly’s plays in particular offer a complex treatment of gender which matches Shakespeare’s most lauded comedies, yet are seldom performed. As such, each chapter features firsthand accounts of recorded stage and film productions supplemented by secondhand descriptions from interviews, reviews, and photographs. These interrogations are aided by analyses of adapted screenplays by trans authors. In doing so, I analyze the co-creative process between the playtext, performance, and audience within contemporary adaptations, which reveal—and is made possible by—the presence of themes that enable audiences to reflect recursively on gender. Thus, despite their capacity to reinforce a hegemonic status quo, this project asserts the inherent potential within these comedies for navigating gender fluidity in performance.

Trans*ing Performance Approaches to Shakespeare and Lyly's Comedies

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