This collection of short, accessible essays serves as a supplementary text to Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s play, Emilia.
Critically acclaimed and beloved by audiences, this innovative and ground-breaking show is a speculative history, an imaginative (re)telling of the life of English Renaissance poet Aemilia Bassano Lanyer. This book features essays by theatre practitioners, activists, and scholars and informed by intersectional feminist, critical race, queer, and postcolonial analyses will enable students and their teachers across secondary school and higher education to consider the play’s major themes from a wide variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives. This volume explores the current events and cultural contexts that informed the writing and performing of Emilia between 2017 and 2019, various aspects of the professional London productions, critical and audience responses, and best practices for teaching the play to university and secondary school students. It includes a foreword by Emilia playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, arts activism, feminist literature, and theory.
Author(s): Laura Kressly, Aida Patient, Kimberly A. Williams
Series: Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 257
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Boxes
List of Contributors
Foreword
Introduction
SECTION I: Current Events and Cultural Contexts
1 Women ‘think round it’! Writing and Publication in Emilia
2 ‘Burn the Whole F*cking House Down!’: Black Feminist Lessons for Joyful Rage
3 Frenzy’s Weaponry: The Mythic Dimension of Emilia
4 ‘This is My Gaff’: Safe Spaces, Cultural Property, and Shakespeare
5 Towards Emilia: Black and South Asian Women in the performance of Shakespeare
SECTION II: Emilia in Practice
6 ‘There’s a Woman on the Stage!’: Emilia and the Politics of Bodies in Space at Shakespeare’s Globe
7 Embodying Emilia: A conversation about movement creation
8 History, Her Story, or Our Story? Navigating the Tensions of Historically-Responsive Storytelling in Emilia
9 ‘For Eve. For Every Eve’: An Intersectional Feminist Investigation of Men’s Violence Against Women in Emilia
10 We are Emilia: Emilia as Witness, Witnessing Emilia
11 #IAmEmilia: When Marketing Creates a Movement
SECTION III: Critics and Audiences Respond
12 ‘There’s Only So Much Work Our Imaginations Can Do’: Emilia and London’s Privileged Theatre Critics
13 #EmiliaFamilia: Representation Matters
14 The #EmiliaFamilia: Feminist Fandom on Twitter
15 Feeling Collectives: Emotions, Feminist Solidarity, and Difference in Emilia
SECTION IV: Teaching Emilia
16 Teaching Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Emilia in a
University Classroom
17 On Teaching Emilia as Intersectional Feminist Praxis
18 ‘What’s past is prologue’: Teaching Women, Race, and Emilia in the Twenty-first Century
19 Opening Up New Worlds: Emilia at a London Girls’ School
Appendix A: A Brief Chronology of the Life and Times of Aemilia Bassano Lanyer
Appendix B: Biographies of Historical Figures in Emilia
Appendix C: Nationality, Racial, and Education Demographics of
Emilia Critics
Appendix D: Semester research project
