Discovering Shakespeare's feminine side

This Autumn Shakespeare’s Globe will host Women’s Wit, a major conference and series of discussions about women in Shakespeare.  The season will explore the Bard’s attitude towards women and the role women have played in Shakespearean theatre, then and now. We spoke to Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, head of higher education and research, Globe Education, at Shakespeare’s Globe.

Why have you decided to put on a season about women in Shakespeare?This season was sparked by the retirement of a very eminent Shakespearean scholar Ann Thompson, Emeritus Professor at King’s College London, who has been a pioneer in feminist studies in Shakespeare.  She was the first woman to be elected to the English National Theatre Education Committee and she was the first female editor of Hamlet andthe Taming of the Shrew. She has been a great mentor to other scholars both male and female.  There will be a conference dedicated to her as well as a book.

What are the highlights?Besides the conference there is going to be a great platform event called ‘To Kill a Wife with Kindness’, about misogyny and stereotyping in the Taming of the Shrew. It was really brought home to me last season that the play is very difficult to swallow; people laughed at all the places that feminists find tricky.
I have invited Samantha Spiro, the actress who played Katherina and Lucy Bailey, who directed the Taming of the Shrew for the Royal Shakespeare Company to have a chat about delivering this comedy to a 21^st century audience.

We will also run an event called These are the Youths that Thunder at the Playhouse, an attempt to showcase the work of young scholars.  This year will feature two female scholars. Dr Edel Semple of University College Cork will be looking at Women’s Wit in Shakespeare’s comedies of the 1590s and Dr Sarah Lewis, King’s College London, will be examining the wit and wisdom of patient wives and prodigal husbands in All’s Well that Ends Well.

What do you hope to achieve from the season?I think it’s about making people aware of the huge part that women had to play in the development of Shakespeare.  We all know that Shakespeare had all-male casts and he wrote female parts for young boys and that’s a very important part of early modern theatre history. But I think sometimes we forget the role that women have had in developing those parts from when Shakespeare was writing.  He was thinking about real women when he was writing his parts and there were women working back stage as hire women and women who made costumes. Women played an important part in company business.

We tend to worship the Great White Shakespeare, the Big Man, but there are a lot of women doing work in Shakespeare studies and in the Shakespeare industry, so it’s about shining a light on them.

Women’s Wit runs from October to December as part of Globe Education’s Autumn season at Shakespeare’s Globe, London. More information can be found at shakespearesglobe.com/education/events. Picture credit Manuel Harlan

Story published in Libertine, 1 October, 2013.