Shakespeare Twelfth Night Essay

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I need a 3 page essay written. The Bulman article is the article the paper guidelines mention.

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BEARDING THE QUEEN Bearding the Queen: Male Cross-Dressing at the New Globe Jrunes C. Bulman ,, 1 I WHEN SHAKESPEARE'S GLOBE THEATRE DECIDED TO CAST A MALE AS Cleopatra in 1999, it took a risk. The Globe, after all, was· a popular tourist venue whose audiences could not be counted on to respond ap­ preciatively to the archaic convention of casting males in female roles; moreover, the challenge of playing Cleopatra had recently defeated a number of the most talented actresses on the British stage, including Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren, and, in Stratford earlier that same summer, Frances de la Tour.Surprisingly, the Globe's Antony and Cleo­ patra became both a popular and a critical success because of Mark Rylance's performance as Cleopatra.Garbed in a succession of low-cut dresses in fashions ranging from milkmaid to gypsy, sporting long black curls, barefoot, and ankle-braceletted, Rylance skipped and flounced, preened, swooned, and died with a "histrionic excess" that drew at­ tention to the role's flamboyant theatricality (Billington, 1999). His transvestite Cleopatra, as Paul Taylor observed, enhanced one's sense of the queen "as a fluid and compulsive actress who has enjoyed playing drunken gender-bending games with her lover and who always, even as she goes into the final, glorious apotheosis, keeps you guessing about the exact degree of seriousness behind the role play" (1999).Rylance performed the queen in all her infinite variety, and his emphasis on per­ formance is what critics and audiences applauded most.Where the exag­ geratedly "feminine" role play of recent female Cleopatras had some­ times come across as a "a toughened drag-act" which "made the queen's capricious volte-faces look crashingly premeditated" (Taylor, 1999), Ry­ lance, because he was not a woman, was praised for the spontaneity 75 with which he exhibited the same exaggerated femininity."By showing an actor shadowing, or paralleling, the role rather than identifying with it," wrote Robert Smallwood, he demonstrated "the extent to which Cleopatra is constantly performing ... never identifiable as herself" (2000, 246). The success of a male Cleopatra shouldn't have come as a surprise. By 1999, the idea_t:)!
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