Miranda Thomas

Shakespeare's Body Language: Gesture, Shame, and Gender Politics on the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stages

This thesis is the first study of shaming gestures in Renaissance drama and how they are gendered. By studying the non-verbal performances surrounding the appropriation and employment of physical shaming as a coded system, the project offers new approaches to the relationships between documents of performance, the social spaces of performance, spectators from the Renaissance to the present day and the gendered tensions that underlie each of these factors. Theatre - in itself an art form based on a shared social network of coding and decoding signs - provides an exemplary form in which to explore the function of insulting physical gestures. Analysing theatrical gestures as cultural codes reveals some of the values informing Renaissance culture more widely: to quote Keith Thomas, 'to interpret and account for a gesture is to unlock the whole social and cultural system of which it is part'. In this regard, it can be argued that gestures become embodied metaphors for what Pierre Bourdieu calls 'habitus', namely those sets of 'cognitive activities' that lead to the construction of social reality. Consequently, this thesis examines how gestures elucidate both the fictive world of the plays and the social context within which they were originally produced and consumed.

The project contains three key research questions. First: what do gestures tell us about theatrical practice and the interface between playacting and societal norms in the Renaissance period? Second: what specifically gender-inflected norms and assumptions become manifested through these shaming gestures? Third: of what significance is the political context of the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I on the types of shaming gestures staged?

Miranda graduated with first-class honours in English Literature at the University of York. She subsequently completed an MA in Renaissance Literature there, winning the Postgraduate English Department Prize. In 2012, she began her doctoral research at King's and Shakespeare’s Globe, examining shaming gestures and gender politics in Renaissance drama. Miranda has worked as a research assistant for the ARC-funded project, Memorialising Shakespeare, which created an online database of Shakespearean memorials from across the globe. She has published on pedagogy, Albert Camus, and has a forthcoming article on Julius Caesar and gesture in Early Modern Literary Studies. Recently, her article on queerness in Twelfth Night was published by the British Library as part of the Discovering Literature project. She has also written book and stage reviews for Shakespeare Bulletin, The Times Literary Supplement, and What’s On Stage, as well as a piece on Shakespeare and 2016 politics in The Independent. Miranda has taught Early Modern literature at King’s for two years, co-convened the Shakespeare In London Summer School for the first time in 2015, and also teaches on the Virginia Programme at Oxford University. She is a visiting lecturer at Shakespeare’s Globe and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.