Come and Experience
"As You Like It"
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Popular culture is the term that describes the everyday practices of ordinary people. It is concerned with how individuals negotiate their existence and experience on a daily basis. Performing Life is designed to illustrate the intricacies of gender and sexuality in popular culture during the English Renaissance. These intricacies pertain to the ways in which social constructions of gender and sexuality clash with personal thoughts and desires. The site explores the “scripts” that society gives people and how individuals interpret and ad-lib the “performance” of their roles. Thus, performance functions as the process by which individuals mediate their various identities from the self to others.
Performing Life provides the opportunity to explore performance in the Renaissance by analyzing gender and sexuality in the household, the theater and the church. In the theater gender roles were complicated by the fact that men played both male and female roles. Notable works such as Shakespeare's, As You Like It, have men playing women who then masquerade as men! However, even with such amorphous gender roles onstage, offstage gender roles were stringent on identity performance. In addition, it is important to note that the household was one of the most fundamental spaces from which gender roles developed. It is the primary site of childhood development, heavily influencing how individuals learn to perform their specific roles within society. Lastly, organized religion serves as a space in which to understand the construction of gender roles in English society during the Renaissance.
We hope that this site gives you insight into the world of Renaissance identity, both in its construction and its performance. And scene!
Click on an image below to experience life in the English household, theater or church
