Priyanka Roy

PhD Student in Theatre

Playing Feminine Rage: Bodies, Identities and the Performative Embodiment of Emotions on Shakespeare’s Stage

Supervisors: Prof David O'Donnell & Dr James Wenley

ABSTRACT

Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is one of Priyanka’s favourite plays of all time. Having seen countless productions of the play, she always found Tamora’s character enthralling. This fascination with the interpretation of female emotions in early modern texts, particularly women’s anger, motivated her to study theatre. Priyanka’s thesis focuses on feminine rage and its representation in Shakespeare’s plays. Theatre is a place where great stories are told, and it has immense power to engage, influence and empower its audience. Concentrating on the portrayal of female anger in the early modern period and in contemporary productions, Priyanka is working to map out how theatre practitioners use the dramatic medium to present the emotional landscape of women, offering an insight into how performance choices impart female subjects with agency.

Demonstrations of anger often function as sources of power for women in the early modern period. Though men are commonly exemplified as the sex more inclined to articulate their wrath compared to women, women also display their anger in a wide range of ways in early modern plays. In her study on femininity and emotion in the works of Shakespeare, Priyanka’s emphasis is on the depiction of women’s emotional self-expression in general and their venting of fury in particular. In Shakespeare, the illustration of female anger is broad in scope and offers a fundamental mode of subjective realisation for the women. Feminine rage provides an outlet for the manifestation of pent-up emotions and it can be an essential channel to shape and assert female self-identity. The objective of Priyanka’s study is to review the portrayal of feminine rage in the early modern theatrical productions and contemporary adaptations and feminist re-interpretations. In her thesis, she proposes that female anger has agency and, therefore, she seeks to explore a neglected aspect of early modern gender representations — namely, feminine rage.

BIOGRAPHY

Priyanka Roy is a PhD student in Theatre Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. She is working on Shakespeare and emotions. Her research interests are early modern women, history of emotion, race and gender, performance and theatre history. She is the President of the Postgraduate Students’ Association of Victoria University of Wellington.