Chapter 4 - ‘Sport Indeede’

Summary

This chapter considers how star roles such as Shakespeare's Cleopatra were sculpted and scored by precisely the kind of physical virtuosity that is demanded in the scenes of skill instruction and sporting display discussed elsewhere in the book. The chapter offers sustained, in-depth readings of a number of leading female roles, placing Cleopatra within a broad theatrical context of corporeally virtuosic leading women including the titular heroine of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe's Dido, Queen of Carthage, Pandora in John Lyly's The Woman in the Moon, and Lucretia in Barnabe Barnes's The Devil's Charter. It also offers sustained, in-depth readings (partially informed by practice-based research) of particularly spectacular features of Cleopatra's stagecraft, demonstrating how specific acts of violence and physical collaboration redound widely across the early modern dramatic canon. These cross-repertorial readings create a complex network of physical feats and corporeal interactions between actors that centre on the dexterity of the leading boy player, further extending the concept of early modern theatrical culture’s shared investment in boys’ corporeal performances.