One curious aspect of this very loud election season has been that the two largest political rallies were staged by entertainers: Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally of August 29 and John Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” this past Saturday. A rightwing pundit and two liberal comedians (one of them who […]
Tag Archives: Twelfth Night
Republicans Need a Shakespearean Fool
William Dyce, “King Lear and the Fool in the Storm” (1851) There’s been a lot of talk about bubbles in recent years. Tiger Woods’ bubble, which cut him off from his fellow human beings, may have led to some of his self-destructive behavior. The Vatican has been living within a bubble for a while, unable […]
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Crossing the Great Gender Divide
In last Friday’s post on Twelfth Night, I talked about how Shakespeare uses cross-dressing to acknowledge that men and women have dimensions to them that are not acknowledged by the standard male and female categories. I understood this about the play at an early age. In a past post on Twelfth Night, I describe how […]
The Temporary Transvestite Comedy
Brown and Lemmon Film Friday Sometimes my different classes overlap in interesting ways. I am currently teaching Twelfth Night in my British Literature survey class and Some Like It Hot in my senior-level film genre class. Thanks to an article on the Billy Wilder classic by film scholar Chris Straayer, I can now label both […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Billy Wilder, gender, Some Like It Hot, Transvestism, Trevor Nunn, William Shakespeare Comments closed
The Challenges of Asking Her Out
In a discussion of Twelfth Night last Friday, my British literature survey class discussed the challenges of a first date. The scene that sparked our conversation is the one where Viola, passing as a man, carries Orsino’s love proposal to Olivia. Of course Olivia falls in love with Viola instead. We started talking about Orsino’s decision to […]
Striving to Emulate Little Lord Fauntleroy
Children, when they start developing a sense of self, discover that there is a preset gender program they are expected to conform to. For some this is not a problem, but others feel constrained by their assigned designation. It’s not always that girls want to be boys and boys girls. Sometimes they just want to […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Francis Hodgson Burnett, gender, Little Lord Fauntleroy Comments closed
Biology and Poetry Love Gender Diversity
After a week of discussing how literature can help us handle anger and violence, I return to Twelfth Night and the slippery issue of gender identity. This too is grabbing national headlines these days (what a time we find ourselves in!) as Americans battle over same sex marriage, “don’t ask don’t tell,” and other concerns […]
Shakespeare’s Cross-Dressing Fantasies
When I was a child, I was fascinated by works containing characters of ambiguous gender. Specifically, I was drawn to images of boys who either looked like girls or who were, unbeknownst to them, actually girls. I was also drawn to images of girls (and women) who passed themselves off as guys. The prevailing culture […]
