Saturday, December 31, 2016

Shakespeare's 400th anniversary / 'Man of Stratford' to be celebrated in 2016

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's 400th anniversary: 'man of Stratford' to be celebrated in 2016

Death of most performed playwright in the world to be marked in Stratford-on-Avon, London and across the globe

Maev Kennedy
Friday 1 January 2016 10.00 GMT

Maev Kennedy

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he world shares him and London claims him, but Stratford-on-Avon intends to spend 2016 celebrating William Shakespeare as their man: the bard of Avon, born in the Warwickshire market town in 1564, and who died there 400 years ago.

Stratford remained hugely important throughout Shakespeare’s life, argues Paul Edmondson, the head of learning and research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. “People have seen Shakespeare as a Dick Whittington figure, who turns his back on Stratford and his family, goes to London to earn his fortune and only comes back to die,” he said.

“[But Stratford is] where he bought land and property, where he kept his library, where he lived and read and thought. We are going to spend the year re-emphasising the importance of Shakespe

For a man famous in his own lifetime there is little documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s life and times. The plays would scarcely have survived if his friends and fellow actors had not gathered together every scrap of every play they could find – drafts, prompt scripts, scribbled actors’ parts, and 17 plays not known in any other version – into the precious First Folio published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death.

The actor Mark Rylance has called it his favourite book in the world, and most of the surviving First Folios will be on display – including those belonging to the British and Bodleian libraries, and a tattered copy recently discovered in France.

Some of the most precious surviving documents will be gathered together in an exhibition at Somerset House in London, opening in February and jointly organised by the National Archives and King’s College London, including four of his six known signatures, which are all slightly different.

By Me, William Shakespeare will include his will, the court papers relating to the audacious move when Shakespeare and his fellow actors dismantled a theatre on the north side of the Thames and rebuilt it as the Globe on the South Bank, and accounts showing payments from the royal treasury for Boxing Day performances of James I and Queen Anne.

The outgoing Globe director, Dominic Dromgoole, recently jokily claimed Shakespeare as a true Londoner – albeit conceding “some spurious claim” by Stratford-on Avon. Stratford, however, will be insisting that the town made and educated Shakespeare His old school room is being restored with a £1.4m Heritage Lottery grant, to open as a permanent visitor attraction.

Shakespeare bought the splendid New Place, the second best house in the town, where he died according to literary legend on St George’s Day, 23 April, the same day as his birth. “You don’t buy a house like New Place and not live there,” Paul Edmondson said. “The general public and many academics have consistently underestimated the importance of Stratford to Shakespeare.”

Edmondson believes that after Shakespeare bought the house in 1597, all his thinking time was spent there, and that the late plays, including The Tempest, were at least planned in his library and probably written there.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trustdescribes New Place as “the jewel in the crown of the 400th anniversary celebrations”, but in truth it is more a mount with a gaping hole where the gem should be.

Shakespeare’s house was demolished 300 years ago, and the house that replaced it, probably incorporating some of the original fabric, was flattened in 1759 by an irascible clergyman, Francis Gastrell, in a row over taxes. He had already cut down Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, under which the writer is said to have sat and worked, because he was irritated by all the tourists peering into his garden.

The gap in the Stratford streetscape has never been filled, but a five-year archaeology project has peeled back the years, and the news that Shakespeare’s kitchen had been found in the partly surviving cellars went round the world. The whole site is being redisplayed for the anniversary, with the foundations marked and the garden restored.

“Without Stratford,” Edmondson said, “There would have been no Shakespeare.”

THE GUARDIAN

Jean-Claude Carrière / Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel
Photo by Man Ray

Jean-Claude Carrière

LUIS BUÑUEL

He said he worked with me because he understood my voice. Everything I said was nonsense, but at least he understood.

Friday, December 30, 2016

How close were Marlowe and Shakespeare?

Shakespeare by Fernando Vicente

How close were Marlowe and Shakespeare?

The editors of the Oxford Complete Shakespeare believe Christopher Marlowe collaborated on the three Henry VI plays … but are they right?

John Dugdale

Friday 28 October 2016 13.00 BST

By crediting Christopher Marlowe this week as the previously unacknowledged co-writer of Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, the New Oxford Shakespeare’s editors have added another portrayal of Marlowe – the handy helpmeet working with a less experienced writer, and apparently not seeking recognition for the results – to the wildly contrasting other versions of him (and of his relationship, if any, with Shakespeare) offered by novels, plays and screen fiction. Here are some of them:

Seminal but solo

In the conventional account of his career, Marlowe had written at least five plays, starting with his 1587 smash hit Tamburlaine, and the narrative poem Hero and Leander, by the time of his much-speculated-about death in a knife fight in Deptford in 1593 – but, unlike most of his Elizabethan peers, idiosyncratic Kit is not viewed as having added to his CV as a team-writer. Shakespeare, also born in 1564 but a comparatively late starter (he staged his first play in 1590/91), paid graceful homage to him in As You Like It and was clearly influenced by him in choice of subject and individual passages. But there is no documentary evidence of them meeting, let alone pooling resources.

Dream team collaborator

In the Oxford complete Shakespeare, published on 27 October, Marlowe is credited as co-writer on the title pages of all three parts of Henry VI for the first time in a Collected Works; and reportedly is regarded as the lead writer on Part One, the debut covering England’s defeats in France after Henry V’s death that gave the young Shakespeare a deceptive reputation as a jingoistic chronicler of war (hitherto Marlowe has been cited among possible collaborators on it, but with others seen as more likely). How the partnership worked is unclear: the academic editors behind the project have said the playwrights may have written together, or a draft could have been handed on or around (like team-authored scripts in Hollywood today) for additions and rewrites.

Christopher Marlowe (1585), by an unknown artis

Masterclass mentor

The idea that the playwrights collaborated is anticipated in John Madden’s Oscar-winning Shakespeare In Love, scripted by Tom Stoppard, where Marlowe is Elizabethan theatre’s undisputed No 1 (“there’s no one like Marlowe”, says Henslowe, and almost all the audition scene hopefuls choose the same speech from Doctor Faustus). Yet to pen a single word of “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter”, Joseph Fiennes’s Shakespeare, a struggling wannabe with writer’s block, is set on the course to greatness when Marlowe, played by Rupert Everett, suggests an Italian setting, romance entangled with a family feud and the death of Romeo’s best friend in a fight. Anthony Burgess’s Marlowe bio-novel, A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), similarly sees them as star writer and occasional sidekick, and specifically as partners on Henry VI Part One.

First advanced in the 19th century, the “Marlovian theory” – that the story of his death in 1593 was a ruse, and he continued writing plays billed as by Shakespeare – was turned into docu-fiction in Ros Barber’s verse novel The Marlowe Papers, winner of the 2013 Desmond Elliott prize. Facing a trial for heresy, Marlowe flees across the Channel and becomes an exile creating works supposedly conjured up by a merchant from the Midlands – and somehow it works. A comparable arrangement is talked about in Peter Whelan’s 1992 RSC play The School of Night (where they are friends but also rivals as both playwrights and suitors of a Dark Lady figure) as a solution to Kit’s arrest for his atheistic views and links to the titular free-thinkers; but in the end the official version of his death turns out to be true.

Bumped off by the Bard

Based on the best-known variant of the so-called “anti-Stratfordian” theory - that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, Roland Emmerich’s 2011 film Anonymous posits that Marlowe stumbled on the secret and was killed by the provincial nobody (a boozy, devious young actor paid to be the De Vere conspiracy’s frontman once Ben Jonson declined the role) after confronting him. But not in 1593, apparently, as Kit is seen still alive in the late 90s.

Pseudo-playwright

Ben Elton’s BBC2 sitcom Upstart Crow wittily inverts the Marlovian theory, depicting Shakespeare as authoring Marlowe rather than vice versa. Marlowe, a philandering, swaggering Elizabethan 007 resembling Rik Mayall’s Lord Flashheart in Blackadder, needs to be seen as a poet as a cover story for his spying; so David Mitchell’s verbose Warwickshire family man produces plays for the playboy spook who gave him his break in the theatre including Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus.

the guardian

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

The funniest person I Know / Jayde Adams

Jayde Adams: ‘Absolutely Fabulous hasn't aged at all’

The standup and 2016 Edinburgh best newcomer nominee on what makes her laugh the most, from Brooklyn Nine-Nine to YouTubers

Rachel Aroesti
Friday 23 December 2016 13.00 GMT

The funniest person I know

John Sizzle. He’s a drag queen I gig with and he owns a pub called The Glory in Dalston. He’s more than a drag queen. He’s a comedian, but like one who is undercover. He’s also on Netflix in a movie about east London drag queens called Dressed As A Girl.

The funniest TV show I’ve ever seen

Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The Captain alone is very funny. And Ab Fab: it hasn’t aged at all.

The funniest book I’ve ever read

Yellow Pages. Why are they still printing it?

The funniest sketch I’ve ever seen

The Hobbyist. It was made by a couple of Welsh blokes in 2008 and it won a Virgin Media Shorts award back then.

The funniest thing that shouldn’t be funny

I find this YouTube generation stuff quite funny: these young people vlogging and making millions of pounds from something that essentially doesn’t exist and then flaunting their wealth from that “job” on their channels and thus making this generation of children believe that’s how it’s all meant to be. When I was their age I worked hard at menial jobs and earned no money at all and was treated badly by managers who hated me because I was young. Young people aren’t meant to be millionaires.

The funniest hairstyle I’ve ever had

I dyed it rainbow for my Sky horror short Bloody Tracy and then crimped it. I’m 32.

The funniest word

Ffa Pob. It’s Welsh for baked beans. I’m not Welsh but I lived there for a while. I met Charlotte Church the other day at Sink The Pink in east London and it was like meeting Michael Jackson.

The funniest item of clothing I’ve ever owned

My old Asda uniform that I like to wear in posh private members bars to make the management worry that working-class people have accidentally bought memberships.

Jayde Adams: 31 is at Soho Theatre, W1, Wed to 7 Jan

THE GUARDIAN

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Lucia Berlin / Angel’s Laundromat

Angel’s Laundromat

by Lucia Berlin

Lucia Berlin / Lavandería Ángel

A tall old Indian in faded Levi’s and a fine Zuni belt. His hair white and long, knotted with raspberry yarn at his neck. The strange thing was that for a year or so we were always at Angel’s at the same time. But not at the same times. I mean some days I’d go at seven on a Monday or maybe at six thirty on a Friday evening and he would already be there.

A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, Reviewed

A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN BY LUCIA BERLIN, REVIEWED

ELSKE RAHILLSEPTEMBER 22, 2015

There is a moment in Berlin’s story, “Strays”:

“The world just goes along,” says Tina, a rehabbing heroin addict, “Nothing much matters, you know? I mean really matters. But then sometimes, just for a second, you get this grace, this belief that it does matter, a whole lot.”

The 50 best films of 2016 in the UK: the full list

Top UK films 2016

The 50 best films of 2016 in the UK: the full list

Our countdown of the Guardian film team’s favourite movies released in the UK is complete, topped by a strange and wonderful encounter

Tuesday 29 November 2016 13.06 GMT

1 Anomalisa

Charlie Kaufman's piercingly original puppet animation, an ineffably strange account of a motivacional speaker underging an identity crisis and his encounter with a fan.

Son of Saul

Traumatisingly plausible study of the brutalities of a Holocaust death camp, revolving around a Jewish Sonderkommando gas-chamber worker. An astonishing debut from Hungarian László Nemes. Read more

Arrival

Emotionally intelligent alien-contact sci-fi from Sicario’s Denis Villeneuve,with Amy Adams as the unhappy linguist called in to try and decipher communications from mysterious extraterrestrial arrivals. Read more

Murder Most Appealing / Black And Rendell

Murder Most Appealing: Black And Rendell

By Ed Siegel

August 21, 2012

John Banville, when he’s not winning the Man Booker Prize and other literary hosannas, has become one of the world’s great mystery men. You might know him better in that vein by his pen name — Benjamin Black, author of four previous Dublin novels featuring the aptly named Quirke, a forensics specialist often enlisted by the Dublin police force in the 1950s.

Author John Banville, AKA Benjamin Black. (Photo by Barry McCall.)

A depressive man of uncontrollable appetites for women (mostly of the fatale variety), wine (and anything else with an elevated alcohol content), and food (the unhealthier the better), Quirke’s swagger doesn’t take a back seat to any fictional investigator’s out there. And Black’s literary style doesn’t take a back seat to any other mystery writer out there with the possible exception of Ruth Rendell.

Coincidentally, Black and Rendell both have new books out, Black with “Vengeance” and Rendell with “The St. Zita Society,” though Rendell is so prolific she always seems to have a new book out, sometimes under her pen name of Barbara Vine. To add to his bona fides, Black/Banville also made news recently by signing up with the Raymond Chandler estate to write a new Philip Marlowe book.

Black and Rendell both create worlds that their fans lust to spend time in, as do all mystery writers. What makes Black and Rendell more artful is that the worlds they create also have something to say about our world. Both are sharp observers of the darker recesses of class clashes across the pond, a big issue in both their new books. Rendell, along with the late Patricia Highsmith, is justly praised as a pioneer of the psychological mystery novel. Black is no slouch at investigating the darker recesses himself.

What makes Black and Rendell more artful is that the worlds they create also have something to say about our world. Both are sharp observers of the darker recesses of class clashes.

And in both, storytelling technique trumps detecting technique. You enter these worlds to partake of the authorial vision of the human parade, not because the murders are particularly grisly, the perpetrator so maniacal or difficult to guess, the denouement so tension-filled.

None of those book-selling niceties are on display in “Vengeance.” A successful businessman takes his partner’s lower-born son aboard his boat, pours out his sadness to the young man, takes out a gun and shoots himself. Quirke, whose upbringing allows him to navigate the Irish class structure, is called in to help with the investigation, and eventually figures out the shenanigans that led to this death and a later murder.

It’s not as good or issue-oriented as the two best in the series, “Christine Falls” and “A Death in Summer” — the actions of one or two of the main characters aren’t particularly believable — but it’s still a delicious read. Here’s a father and son — the lower-born partners — at the funeral of the suicide:

Jack Clancy was dragging on a cigarette as if he was suffocating and it was a little tube of oxygen. His son, looking more than ever like a bantamweight contender, was frowning at the sky, as if wistfully expecting something to swoop down out of it and carry him off to somewhere less grim than this balefully sunlit churchyard.

Black describes Ireland with as much detail as he does the Irish. What’s missing here, and in some of the other Quirke books, is a sense of time. You’re forced to remind yourself that the events are happening half a century ago. Part of that is because Black’s characters are timeless, but part of it is his neglect of period detail. No matter. Quirke and his friends and his enemies make for great company. Black is to mysteries what Guinness is to beer — rich, complex, satisfying.

Ruth Rendell (Photo by Jerry Bauer, courtesy of Scribner)

Rendell, meanwhile, has taken to writing Altmanesque books that shift quickly from one character to another without a real central protagonist. It’s a device that usually works beautifully for Rendell, allowing her to survey the new multiculturalism of London with more than a touch of humor worked into the occasional horror.

She’s also as masterful as anyone in any genre of British literature at limning the class differences of her country, evoking little sympathy for the rich or sentimentality for the poor. Each class carries its baggage and Rendell delights in exposing their dirty underwear. Tastefully, of course.

“The St. Zita Society,” in that sense, is the perfect wedding of her new style and her old concerns with class as she focuses on a rich London street that still has an “Upstairs/Downstairs” quality to it. The society is actually a gathering of the servants — drivers, gardeners, au pairs, etc. — who meet regularly at a pub to compare the injustices and other issues of their lives outside of England’s one percent. (St. Zita is the patron saint of domestic servants.) It’s a wonderful stew as far as it goes, but I wish Rendell had gone further and taken a little more time to make those class differences as integral to the story as she has in previous books — notably “A Judgement in Stone” or a more recent multicultural affair, “Tigerlily’s Orchids.”

Still, the Pinteresque power plays that result when one of the servants helps one of the masters get away with murder, the clash between swinging London and Muslim morality, the psychopath who thinks the automated voice on his phone is his guardian angel, make for a good, Rendellian time. Even when the story isn’t hi-test, the literary miles per gallon sets an industry standard.

90.0wbur

http://www.wbur.org/2012/08/21/black-vengeance-rendell-zita

Friday, December 16, 2016

A life in writing / Siri Hustvedt / ‘Trump was elected because misogyny is alive and well’

Siri Hustvedt

A LIFE IN WRITING

Siri Hustvedt: ‘Trump was elected because misogyny is alive and well’

The American author on feminism, the arts-science divide and misogyny in the presidential election

Michelle Dean
Friday 16 December 2016 12.00 GMT

peaking to Siri Hustvedt in her Brooklyn brownstone not long before the American presidential election, conversation naturally turns to Hillary Clinton. “For someone so accomplished ... who performs as superbly as Hillary Clinton does, to be constantly criticised,” Hustvedt muses. “When she performs brilliantly in a debate, they call her over-rehearsed. I have never heard anything like that said about a man.”

Hustvedt knows something about being an accomplished woman, and having things said about her work that would never be said about a man’s. I am here to talk about her new book of essays, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. One of them, “No Competition”, catalogues her experiences as “a woman writer married to a man writer (Paul Auster)”. A journalist insists that Auster must have taught her psychoanalysis and neuroscience. A publisher magnanimously instructs her to “keep writing” when she has already published three novels. A fan asks if her husband has written sections of her most recent novel, The Blazing World.

During my meeting with Hustvedt, Auster is just a low murmur moving around elsewhere in the house. “He is doing an interview upstairs,” Hustvedt explains. “I think for the first time in our history of 35 years together, we have books coming out one month apart.” We don’t mention him again.

Hustvedt says she often encounters surprise that she is, above all, a person interested in ideas. “Women who write books about ideas are not instantly anointed in the way that men are. You get a lot of criticism for being too intellectual, too cerebral. But I don’t see those same complaints addressed to male writers. I’m sure they’re out there, but not to the same degree.”

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women seems likely to inspire more people to call Hustvedt “cerebral”, though in this context as a compliment. Somewhat unusually in a publishing age characterised by slim essay collections about personal experience, Hustvedt’s book is nearly 600 pages of learned commentary on everything from the nature of literature to neuroscience. It takes in a remark Karl Ove Knausgaard once made to her – women writers, he said, were “no competition” – as well as the work of the 17th-century philosopher Margaret Cavendish. The centrepiece is a 200-page meditation on “The Delusions of Certainty” that ranges from the science of perception to neo-Cartesianism to the history of psychiatry.

Siri Hustvedt, daughter Sophie and Paul Auster in 2004. Photograph: Contino/Bei/Rex Features

Hustvedt has never been a writer of narrow or fleeting interests. “These are questions I have been addressing in both my fiction and nonfiction for a very long time,” she says. “It’s about a long, long accumulation of knowledge, and changing my mind, rethinking, discovering another beat I hadn’t been thinking about before. Or discovering some earlier thought that’s wrong.”

It should be said that this is also a pretty good description of Hustvedt’s conversational style. She makes a statement, then revises it, and revises it again. It’s not that she is uncertain of what she thinks; it’s that she’s precise.

Hustvedt was born in Minnesota, in 1955, to a Norwegian mother and an American father of Norwegian descent. As a child, she spent time in Norway, and graduated with a degree there in her teens. (For days after our interview I find myself trying to emulate her correct pronunciation of the name “Knausgaard” – something like “K-NOOSE-gurt”). She says she became a feminist at 14, “carrying around my Sisterhood Is Powerful and Kate Millett, and trying to read Simone de Beauvoir and it was that terrible edition [of The Second Sex] translated by the zoologist [Howard M Parshley]”.

In the 1980s, Hustvedt had her poetry published and got a PhD in English literature from Columbia, writing her dissertation on Dickens. She then published several novels, each to greater acclaim than the last. But the differential treatment she received as a writer and thinker who also happened to be a woman became an abiding theme in her work, too. In The Blazing World, the main character is a female artist whose work is largely neglected in her lifetime, while her husband, an art dealer, is relatively successful. “In that effete microcosm,” writes Hustvedt, “it is fair to say Felix had been a giant, dealer to the stars, and I, Gargantua’s artist wife.”

Siri Hustvedt at home in Brooklyn.
Photograph by Tim Knox for the Guardian

The resurrection of female intellectuals from obscurity is a preoccupation of Hustvedt’s. At one point she begins to quiz me about the mathematician Emmy Noether. “She did work in symmetry in mathematics that then became adopted in physics,” she tells me. “Extremely important thinker. Praised by Einstein. Praised by, I think, Heisenberg. The stellar figures of 20th-century physics thought Noether was a genius. Does Noether set off bells in your head? No?”

The Blazing World was generally well received, but there were “quite a few reviews that said, ‘But she’s not likable’. Well neither is Raskolnikov,” Hustvedt says. “This [criticism] is so much more aimed at a woman’s book than a man’s book. Where did that come from? What kind of a criterion is that for a work of literature?”

Not that she is fond of hard definitions of literature. In another essay she alludes to James Wood, particularly his book How Fiction Works, with dismay and disdain. “It’s incomprehensible to me that anyone who has read a great many books could come to any conclusion about how books should be written.” She talks about telling a prize committee that in the whole history of literature there has never been one clear formula for what makes a good book. “Goya said ‘There are no rules in painting.’ And I think there are no rules.”

Certainly Hustvedt has not been observing any rules herself. As well as writing she has a burgeoning career as a thinker in psychiatry and neuroscience. Her longstanding interest in those subjects took off after the success of The Shaking Woman, a hybrid memoir and intellectual investigation she published in 2009. The departure point was her own illness – a nervous disorder that caused her body to convulse and gave her migraines – but it quickly expanded into an inquiry into the nature of the self that encompassed both contemporary research and the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, a 19th-century neurologist who studied hysteria.

This sideline in science has been transformative. “You can sit and argue about whether or not you like a writer deep into the night, and you can make arguments about why, and at the same time it’s not like finding the fault line in somebody’s argument about the predictive brain.” The problem is that science tends to appeal to a limited audience. “People who are working in neuroscience, they can see what’s original. People outside of those worlds, they don’t know where I’m original. Where I’m shocking people. They can’t see.”

For Hustvedt the gulf between science and the humanities is something of a tragedy. In the introduction to A Woman Looking at Men …, she laments that “I have witnessed scenes of mutual incomprehension or, worse, out-and-out hostility.” She devoted her work in the sciences to drawing connections between what you could call humanistic ideas and scientific findings. She thinks that gender bias could be explained by way of the science of perception. “The brain as an organ of prediction is founded on prior expectations,” she explains. And our prior expectations are often set up to disadvantage women: we don’t associate them with artistic greatness.

The connections between body and mind fascinate her, too. For example, lately Hustvedt has become “very interested in the placenta”. It has only been lightly studied, even though scientists refer to it as a kind of “third brain” in the process of human development, but Hustvedt’s interest is also philosophical. “What does that literal mediator, that is the beginning of every human being, have to do with our later development? The idea of mediation is there in utero as an actual physical organ. This has to have an effect on what we become.”

Some of this abstracted talk may sound alienating, but in person Hustvedt’s engagement has an infectious quality. It reminds me of something she wrote about another apparently intimidating writer, Susan Sontag. “In every conversation I had with her I found myself amazed at the certitude of her opinions,” Hustvedt writes. In conversations with Hustvedt, the observation is slightly different: it’s hard not to be amazed at the richness, the texture of her views. “I’m always doing this tug of war between different positions. It’s not that I don’t have a position. But I really do not have a final position on a great many profound questions,” she says, later adding, “I am alarmed by all kinds of solidified knowledge.”

In the weeks after our interview, one particular piece of knowledge did firm up: Hillary Clinton would not be the president of the United States; Donald Trump would be. Hustvedt had repeatedly told me that the election was “charged with misogyny”. So how does she feel about things now?

“He was elected because his exploitation of the big lie technique worked, because misogyny is alive and well among women and men,” she says. “He was elected because, as a study at Yale demonstrated, when faced with an identical description of an ambitious politician, both men and women respond to a female candidate with feelings of ‘moral outrage’, but have no such feelings for a power seeking male candidate.” It goes back to what she has been saying about the science of perception, the kinds of expectations we have for men versus those for women. “If she’s emotional, then she’s like a woman. If she’s not emotional, then she’s cold and heartless,” she says of Clinton. “Whereas Trump actually has played the female role: the out of control, angry hysteric. And yet, he has been perceived as a robust, masculine figure by a large portion of the US public. The possibilities for a woman are infinitely more narrow.”