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Shakespeare and Nudity

ON SHAKESPEARE - by G.L. Horton

Concerning Julius Caesar's Conventions at The Shakespeare Conference 1/28/04

There must have been some convention about or acceptance of nudity, because there had been wide spread stagings of Mystery plays featuring naked Adams and Eves. Presumably, though not necessarily, Eve was played by a male. But the Fall plot stipulates that our first parents must begin naked, become ashamed, and cover themselves with leaves that grow nearby. Pictorial representations of Adam and Eve before and after the period show them as naked, with varying degrees of veiling of the private parts by posture or gesture or vegetation-- not really possible on a stage, although movies manage it.

I've staged Cycles including Adam and Eve and the Fall multiple times, in the context of a church worship-event, using various conventions from maximum flesh to baggy long johns dyed beige with "parts" drawn on with magic marker. The response-- which ranges from bawdy laughter to reverent seriousness-- seems to depend more on the performance style and the actors' own expressive choices than on the choice of costume. A convention is only acceptable if it is accepted-- there must have been those to whom the very idea of nakedness is so offensive that any mention of it, let alone and representation of it, is an abomination. So the question becomes: did the offended have enough power to make staging nakedness unlikely? Lear and Poor Tom suggest otherwise. (1/27/04)

 

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