ABSTRACT
In The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theater, Richard Senelick tells us that Fiona Shaw’s performance of Richard II at the UK’s National Theater looked different from the “hyacinthine locks, dagged sleeves and vair-trimmed foppery of earlier Richards” ( Senelick 2000: 284). But according to the reviews Senelick cites, there the difference ends. Although Shaw’s version of Richard seemed to depart superficially from a stage history of effeminacy, it was in fact just more of the same, only madder:
Her imagination wandered easily, she fidgeted, smiled inanely, gazed at herself in a mirror, jigged her way off stage. On the return from Ireland, she sat on the ground and sucked her thumb; in the deposition scene, she jogged, then shrieked and battered Bolingbroke’s chest, like Scarlett O’Hara attacking Rhett Butler.
(284)