Gay - As she likes it: Shakespeares unruly women

Susan Fleetwood as Rosalind, John Bowe as Orlando, As You Like It, 1980, directed by Terry Hands. Photograph: Reg Wilson.

To a young Australian postgraduate student arriving in London in the late 1960s, the theatrical experiences on offer were, as we used to say, mind-blowing. There wasnt much Shakespeare on in Sydney or Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s: in particular, I had never seen a Shakespearean comedyI had never laughed at a Shakespearean joke, nor been moved by a Renaissance image of young lovers rejoicing in their future.

What astonished meand still does todaywas the power of performance to make alive and infinitely varied those over-studied texts. As the 1960s turned into the 1970s, and we all became caught up in the social revolution instigated by the new wave of feminism, I became more and more fascinated by the performances of women in Shakespeareespecially in the comedies, which (with few exceptions) centre on female characters, and give them a great deal more to say than do either the tragedies or the histories (the Cleopatra play always excepted). Yet it was these latter two categories which were considered by my teachersboth at school and at universityas important, serious, dealing as they did with weighty matters of politics, government, and religion, and offering us poetic meditations on life. That this was a male-imposed cultural perspective, which elevated mens experience and interests and devalued womens as secondary and inferior, only became evident as feminist literary theory developed in the late 1970s.

Feminist theorising about theatre and performance has come even later on the scene, and is still in its early days. I hope that this analysis of five Shakespearean comedies in performance may make some contribution to it, as a set of case studies of the way gender (and other) divisions in British society of the past fifty years are reproduced, or challenged, by their embodiment in actresses and actors performing these classic texts. The Royal Shakespeare Company is unique in its concentration on Shakespeareon average, each play is done once every five yearsand it is itself the national monument of the national writer. To study its performance of Shakespearean comedy is to encounter a continuing dialectic between theatre practice and English social and political history, since theatre will always in some way reflect the general culture of which it is a part.

I begin my study of each play after the Second World War, in order to provide a context for the developments of the last twenty-five years, of which I have been a fascinated witness. The two most popular transvestite comediesTwelfth Night and As You Like It were an obvious choice, since every production, whatever its other emphases, will unavoidably foreground the question of what is proper feminine behaviour. To balance these, I look at three of the most commonly performed woman-centred comedies in which the heroine does not get into male dressThe Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and Measure for Measure. Each of these three plays has a problematic woman at its centreone who is too talkative, or who behaves in a way that denies patriarchal authority. In all five plays the disruptive behaviour of the heroine is finally contained by the prospect of marriageor so the text indicates. In performance it may be otherwise.

Plays exist most fully in performance, and classic plays such as these exist in a historical continuum of performance. This book is an attempt to write theatre history from a feminist point of view, and thereby to provide new points of entry for those who are reading, watching and thinking about Shakespeare.