(Un-)Strangemaking Gender: Cross- and Single-Gender Productions of Shakespeare

While review headlines would have us believe that casting women in Shakespearean roles normally given to men is a new and fleeting trend, women have been playing male characters on professional stages in England since the Restoration; more specifically, women have been performing professionally in Shakespeare's male roles since at least 1899, when Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet. This paper will examine the recent uptick in attention to cross- and single-gender productions of Shakespeare, asking why and how such productions and their casts attempt to make Shakespeare and gender (un-)strange. In doing so, I will query the dramaturgical implications of productions that either treat their gendered casting as inherently strangemaking or go out of their way to make their gendered casting familiar and un-strange. This will include attention to aspects of Phyllida Lloyd's Donmar Shakespeare Trilogy (2012-17), the Globe's recent production of Richard II (2019), Glenda Jackson's performance as King Lear (2018-19), the RSC's cross-cast Taming of the Shrew (2019), and the Donmar's gender-switching Measure for Measure (2018). This selection of productions also allows me to investigate performances of gender at its intersections with other identity categories that affect casting. Do casting choices, on their own, make familiar texts strange in Brecht's sense (or in any other sense)? Or are more specific dramaturgical choices necessary in order to create the meaningful conversation between audience, performance, and familiar text that produces the Verfremdungseffekt?
Biographical Note
I am an independent scholar and freelance writer and editor. My PhD was completed in Drama at the University of Exeter in 2016, and since then my work has been published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Early Modern Literary Studies, and PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, as well as an edited collection on Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation (ed. Kara Reilly). Tying together all of my research is an interest in afterlives and remediations of old plays. Prior to undertaking my PhD, I trained as an actor at the University of Toronto and Sheridan College, and this background informs my research and pedagogy. My first monograph, Shakespeare and Social Media: Constructions of Authority, will hopefully be under contract soon!