The dance of Death: Maitre de Philippe de Gueldre, Un transi entrainant la femme du chevalier, extrait de La Danse macabre des femmes de Martial d'Auvergne (1430-1508)

The Dance of Death. Guyot Marchand, Danse macabre. 1485.

William Shakespeare, The Chandos Portrait William Shakespeare, The Chandos Portrait. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Bakhtin’s notion of carnival (1941) Rabelais and His World: festive culture medieval peasant culture, referred to alternately as “the people,” “the folk,” “the second world,” “the unofficial world,” and “popular-festive culture,” defined against the “official world” of civil and religious authority. World turned upside down: boy bishops Hierarchical reversals. Focus on “the material lower bodily stratum.” The grotesque and the carnivalesque express a reversal of moral and logical expectations.

Judith Butler’s “performative gender”: the unfixing of sexual identity The notion of an original or primary gender identity is often parodied within the cultural practices of drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylization of butch-femme identities. …This perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontexualization: parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. (Butler, Gender Trouble,137-8)

Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman “A woman’s only care is chastity; therefore when this has been thoroughly elucidated, she may be considered to have received sufficient instruction.” The two great qualities for married women are “chastity and great love for one’s husband.”

Questions What is the function of disguise in Twelfth Night? What is the function of the comic characters? Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek – and Feste?

References She’s the Man: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4OhwrMidSU Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1941. Print. [for carnival] Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Print. Davidson, Clifford, ed. Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge: A Middle English Treatise on the Playing of Miracles. Washington, D. C.: UP of America, 1981. Print. Orgel, Stephen. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. Vives, Juan Luis. The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual. Ed. and trans. by Charles Fantazzi. Chicago: U of Chicago P,