Shakespeare Unmasked: Gender, Power, and Performance on the Renaissance
Mondays, March 3–May 19 (12 weeks) from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Hybrid (online and in the Barn Door Gallery at 33 Hawley)
Suggested donations on a sliding scale of $25–$50 help support our programming!
Discover the joy of Shakespeare in an engaging and welcoming community! Our 2025 program features seminars, guest speakers, and workshops, offering fresh insights into the Bard’s works. Whether you’re a longtime Shakespeare enthusiast or new to his plays, there’s something for everyone! Be part of the conversation—learn, explore, and celebrate Shakespeare with us!
For more details and to register, visit: https://www.communityshakespearene.org/
Spring 2025 Course Description:
Plays under discussion: Cymbeline, 12th Night, and Two Gentlemen of Verona
This course explores gender, performance, and power through three female characters in Shakespeare’s plays: Imogen from Cymbeline, Viola from Twelfth Night, and Julia from The Gentleman of Verona. Considering that men performed all female roles during the Renaissance, we will analyze how these portrayals influenced and reflected societal views on gender, especially under a female monarch in Elizabethan England. We will also examine women's roles during the Renaissance, the Reformations, and the Scientific Revolution, assessing their contributions and voices through historical texts and scholarship. The course encourages rethinking traditional ideas of gender performance and connects Shakespeare’s works to contemporary discussions on power and representation.
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Clothes do not make the man: Rethinking Shakespearean gender-crossing
Are Cesario and Viola “cross-dressed” or trans characters? Does Duke Orsino marry Cesario or Viola and is the un-staged wedding a heterosexual or queer one? In what ways might performances of Twelfth Night depict trans and queer trauma?
A great deal of analysis goes into a play before the acting begins. This interactive presentation explains the critical concepts of speech acts and performativity and offers Twelfth Night as a case study in queer dramaturgy that go beyond the question of clothing to consider dramatic situations that echo trans trauma, such as harassment, body dysphoria, homelessness, and violence.
Twelfth Night is unique among Shakespearean comedies. It involves a journey of self-discovery in an elsewhere, but it does not depict any sort of returning to where the characters purportedly come from. The gender binary has diminishing returns in this story as genderplay seems to be the name of the game. It is serious business to be playful with gender.
Alexa Alice Joubin is Professor of English and director of the Digital Humanities Institute at George Washington University. Specializing in Shakespeare, gender, and adaptation studies, she is the inaugural recipient of the Bell Hooks Legacy Award. She co-founded the MIT Global Shakespeare’s open-access digital performance archive.
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Join us for an engaging talk with Adam Zucker, a renowned Shakespeare scholar, as he delves into the wit, wordplay, and deeper meanings within the Bard’s works. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain fresh insights into Shakespeare’s language, humor, and timeless relevance. Shakespeare Unlearned (Oxford University Press, 2024) examines the fine line between sense and nonsense in early modern texts, revealing overlooked insights in words and ideas once dismissed as too trivial for serious scholarship. Adam Zucker challenges this perspective, arguing that terms like “baffle” in Twelfth Night and “twangling” in The Tempest, along with characters such as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Holofernes, present rich opportunities for understanding Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His reflection on the limits of learnedness and the value of a “philology of stupidity” uncovers new dimensions of meaning in the seemingly trivial.
Adam Zucker (PhD, Columbia University, 2004) is an English professor at UMass Amherst who specializes in Shakespeare and early modern literature. He is the author of Shakespeare Unlearned (Oxford, 2024) and The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge, 2011) and co-editor of Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater (Routledge, 2015) and Localizing Caroline Drama (Palgrave, 2006).