'This object kills me': The intersection of gender and violence in performance of Shakespearean tragedy

My project examines the ways that acts of violence intersect with notions of gender in stage, film, and television productions of Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. In these four tragedies, an unrelenting amount of verbal and physical violence is perpetrated against the female body, and I find that these acts---especially as revealed through violence of male figures against females---reflect an underlying sense of faulty gender construction. As Titus tries to transition into civilian life as a heralded citizen of "honorable" Rome, or Hamlet attempts to "become" a man in charge of setting his political and familial environment straight, or Othello struggles to live up to the honorable narratives he has built for himself, or, finally, Lear makes the cataclysmic mistake of determining that he can "shake all cares" and still maintain his position in his family and society, these male figures show how their disrupted transitions are innately tied to a troubling sense of just what makes a man or a woman. The male ideal in these plays is tied to a notion of martial might and honor, while the female is defined by her lack of space and voice, and her main measure of value is her chastity. Thus a subject/object divide is exposed, and gender and violence collide in scenes such as Lavinia's rape and the way the males interpret Lavinia thereafter, the nunnery scene and Ophelia's mad scenes, Othello's fit and his subsequent accusations and murder of Desdemona, and Lear's alternate banishing and cursing of his daughters or his fear of succumbing to such "female forces" as "hysterica passio" or being exposed as weak by emitting tears or "women's weapons," as he calls them. And through these violent episodes, the previously sanctioned gender constructs---both male and female---prove untenable.;I argue that the faulty gender constructions are a crucial structural element to these plays; thus, regardless of the cuts, edits, camera framing, or staging, the selected subsequent stage, film, and television productions maintain this gender struggle as a central component of the tragedies that unfold. My project thus argues for a transhistorical understanding of the gender/violence conflicts within the plays and productions, which goes against New Historicist or Materialist Feminist readings. I explore many twentieth and twenty-first-century stage, television, and film productions of Titus, Hamlet, Othello, and Lear and I assess how different mediums present the gender conflicts and, in some cases, offer alternative models. For theatrical productions, I focus mainly on the RSC, National Theatre, and the Globe Theatre, because I see the gender conflict most fully realized in "traditional" productions---ones that use the text in more traditional ways. Further, certain film productions that do take some license through extra-textual images, flashbacks, or fantasies, such as Buchowetzki's silent film of Othello, Branagh's Hamlet, or Parker's Othello, still solidify and expose the gender conflict or even offer alternative, homosocial relational models. And particularly in television and film productions, I assess the way the camera enacts a sort of violence of its own through extreme close-ups, wide pans, and "cutting" bodies out of frame to redirect our view. Ultimately, on page, stage, or screen(s), the violence that males enact against females exposes the inefficiency of both models and thus, arguably, calls for a reassessment therein.