Upstaged! Eunice Hanger and Shakespeare in Australia

Abstract

Early one April evening in 1950, in All Saints Hall, Brisbane, where we lay our scene, the Twelfth Night amateur theatre company put on its debut performance of Upstage, an original play by the company’s dramatist, Eunice Hanger (1911–72), a Queensland-born teacher, playwright and Shakespeare enthusiast. As the curtain lifted and the audience settled into an expectant hush, a drawing room scene was revealed and a single female actor stood as still as a statue on the stage. What followed was an evening of Shakespearian drama—with a twist. The cast was comprised entirely of the bard’s best loved female characters who, in a spirit of fun, were gathered together to elect a ‘Miss Shakespeare’. Literary jokes abounded, but the play carried a more serious commentary concerning the position of women as actors in both the little (amateur) theatre movement and in Australian cultural life generally. This paper looks at how Eunice Hanger read, or rather reread, the works of William Shakespeare. Through this, it examines the nature of reading as a simultaneously social and individualistic activity, and reflects on its implications for understanding the histories of reading English writers in Australia more broadly.