“Thus play I in one person many people”: The art and craft of doubling in the Boyd history cycle

1The Roared-at Boys? Repertory casting and gender politics in the RSC's 2014 Swan season From its initial announcement, the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2014 "Roaring Girls" season began coding the terms of its reception. The company's brochure announced that In 2014, the Swan Theatre plays host to a season that reveals some of the great parts written for, and plays about, women by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Led by RSC Deputy Artistic Director Erica Whyman, and directed by some of British theatre's most exciting female directors, the season promises to introduce audiences to Jacobean classics, from the comic to the thrillingly dark, each with women at the heart of the action ("Summer 14").The reception of the company's new productions of the blackly comic (and Elizabethan rather than Jacobean) domestic tragedy Arden of Faversham, Middleton and Dekker's city comedy The Roaring Girl and Webster's sex tragedy The White Devil was, in the above terms, already loaded. Viewed within Susan Bennett's model, in which "the production company seeks to produce an internal horizon of expectations which will attract audiences through challenging their own already formed expectations/assumptions about a particular play or theatrical style" (113), the RSC established a horizon of expectations based on the alignment of plays "written for" and "about" women, "directed by … exciting female directors" and that place "women at the heart of the action".1 Particularly in contrast to the work of the main house, whose summer season staged plays nominally about "King Henry" and "Two Gentlemen", the Roaring GirlsThe Oxford English Dictionary defines "roaring" thus:Of a person: behaving or living in a rowdy, boisterous, or unruly manner. Now rare (arch. in later use). (3a)

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“Thus play I in one person many people”: The art and craft of doubling in the Boyd history cycle

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References 13 publications

“A woman's hide”: The presentation of female characters in Michael Boyd'sThe Histories

“A woman's hide”: The presentation of female characters in Michael Boyd'sThe Histories

The Roared-at Boys? Repertory casting and gender politics in the RSC's 2014 Swan season

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