Performing Shakespeare’s Women: Playing Dead

Shakespeare’s female characters die often both by suicide and by murder, both onstage and off. But what does it mean for the actor portraying these roles to to play dead? And what obstacles in playing dead are the same for women actors playing alive? This book addresses both current scholarship and the practical and ethical problems facing the female actor of Shakespeare’s plays today to explore what those deaths signify and suggest about playing female parts on the contemporary stage and in a post-feminist world.