‘Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality’ in The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women Onstage (eds. jan sewell, clare smout

Abstract: Questions of theatre and gender are fundamentally linked through the concept of performance. Both are shared public phenomena, and both engage with representation. The rise of text-based drama in the late nineteenth century and the expansion of modern education gave rise to conventions of theatre historiography based on textual reperformance; but in earlier periods and places, ‘theatre’ was not necessarily a concept bound by a stage or occasion. This chapter will suggest that our modern categories—painting, sculpture, theatre, literature, etc.—prefigure our ability to think about theatre and gender in antiquity at all. In an era when all arts had a mimetic relationship to the real or with il-lusion, they could be seen as different dimensions of the same ‘game’ (ludus). The Latin vocabulary of ludus and its cognates can be taken to refer to the game of playing with an audience, whether live, in poetry or painting. ‘Games’ about gender were always popular: but during the period of social upheaval and overt social engineering associated with the first Roman emperor Augustus, they were also an opportunity to play with meaning, definition and interpretation itself; to perform a vibrating space of both/and, and direct attention to the ploys and pretences of all public messaging. Revisiting this ancient history illuminates the cultural specificity of the remarkably binary thinking which characterises Western discussions of gender in later periods.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_4