Canonical MisogynyShakespeare and Dramaturgies of Sexual Violence

• Theorises dramaturgy as the ‘systemic’ level of a play, and argues for the centrality of dramaturgy in efforts to address misogyny in theatre
• Argues for a de-centring of Shakespeare’s authority and a prioritisation of practitioners’ voices in the process of creation and adaptation
• Contends that misogyny lives in the ‘bones’ of Shakespeare’s plays and cannot be remediated by superficial changes such as casting alone.
• Offers a toolbox of the techniques and prompts that formed the basis of the underpinning practice-as-research project, which readers can apply in their own work

If misogyny is a systemic problem, then in order to understand its influence on canonical works like Shakespeare’s, those works must be investigated at their systems level – in other words, at the level of their dramaturgies. This landmark study arises from an eight-year practice-as-research (PaR) investigation of sexual violence and rape culture through Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Moving between analytical and critical-reflective voices, and prioritising knowledge arising from and questions generated by the author’s embodied investment in this PaR work, Canonical Misogyny focuses on dramaturgy as a site of ideology and meaning-making. It seeks to address the ways in which contemporary theatre allows producers of Shakespeare to represent gendered violence in unethical and irresponsible ways. It also demonstrates how failures to make meaningful dramaturgical interventions in early modern plays result in the tacit (or even explicit) glorifying and/or trivialising of their problematic approaches to consent and agency, which intersects with questions of race, gender, sexuality and class.