A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1386

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The question is not whether Shakespeare studies needs feminism, but whether feminism needs Shakespeare. This is the explicitly political approach taken in the dynamic and newly updated edition of A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare.

• Provides the definitive feminist statement on Shakespeare for the 21st century
• Updates address some of the newest theatrical andcreative engagements with Shakespeare, offering fresh insights into Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and gender dynamics in early modern England
• Contributors come from across the feminist generations and from various stages in their careers to address what is new in the field in terms of historical and textual discovery
• Explores issues vital to feminist inquiry, including race, sexuality, the body, queer politics, social economies, religion, and capitalism
• In addition to highlighting changes, it draws attention to the strong continuities of scholarship in this field over the course of the history of feminist criticism of Shakespeare
• The previous edition was a recipient of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award; this second edition maintains its coverage and range, and bringsthe scholarship right up to the present day

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Notes on Contributors

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

References

Part I: The History of Feminist Shakespeare Criticism

1 The Ladies’ Shakespeare

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

References and Further Reading

2 Margaret Cavendish, Shakespeare Critic

Introduction

Margaret Cavendish, Shakespeare Critic

Margaret Cavendish, First Feminist?

References and Further Reading

3 Misogyny Is Everywhere

References and Further Reading

Part II: Text and Language

4 Feminist Editing and the Body of the Text

Gender and Textual Crux

Gender and Annotation (1): Misogyny

Gender and Annotation (2): Bawdy

Gender, the Introduction, and the

Dramatis Personae

Feminist Editing

The Editor as Teacher/The Future of Editing

References and Further Reading

5 “Made to write ‘whore’ upon?”

References and Further Reading

6 “A word, sweet Lucrece”

The Conduct of Confession

Lucrece’s Confession

Lucrece’s Voice

References and Further Reading

Part III: Social Economies

7 Gender, Class, and the Ideology of Comic Form

The “Absolute Queene,” Companionate Wives, and the Social Order

The Ideology of Domestic Tragedy:

Arden of Faversham

and

A Warning for Fair Women

The Ideology of Shakespearean Comedy:

Much Ado about Nothing

and

Twelfth Night

References and Further Reading

8 Gendered “Gifts” in Shakespeare’s Belmont

I Economies of the Gift

II Masculine Forms of Desire

III Multiplying Gifts

IV Bonds of Flesh and Blood

V Conclusion: Belmont and Venice

References and Further Reading

Part IV: Race and Colonialism

9 The Great Indian Vanishing Trick

I

II

III

References and Further Reading

10 Black Ram, White Ewe

References and Further Reading

11 Sycorax in Algiers

I

II

III

References and Further Reading

12 Black and White, and Dread All Over

I

II

III

IV

References and Further Reading

Part V: Performing Sexuality

13 Women and Boys PlayingShakespeare

References and Further Reading

14 Mutant Scenes and “Minor” Conflicts in

Richard II

I The Condition of “Minority”

II Women and the Deterritorialization of Dominant Discourses in

Richard II

References and Further Reading

15 Lovesickness, Gender, and Subjectivity

Subjectivity, Gender, and Eroticism

Lovesickness

Sexualities

Lovesickness in Shakespeare’s Comedies

References and Further Reading

16 … in the Lesbian Void

References and Further Reading

17 Duncan’s Corpse

I

II

III

IV

References and Further Reading

Part VI: Religion

18 Others and Lovers in

The Merchant of Venice

References and Further Reading

19 Between Idolatry and Astrology

References and Further Reading

Part VII: Character, Genre, History

20 Putting on the Destined Livery

References and Further Reading

21 The Virginity Dialogue in

All’s Well That Ends Well

Cuts and Alterations

Offending/Defending Helen

Disjoints and Editorial Cruces

Character and Consistency

References and Further Reading

22 Competitive Mourning and Female Agency in

Richard III

References and Further Reading

23 Bearing Death in

The Winter’s Tale

I Death’s “Beare Tale”

II Bearing Forth

III Conclusion: Death without Rebirth?

References and Further Reading

24 Monarchs Who Cry

References and Further Reading

25 Shakespeare’s Women and theCrisis of Beauty

I

II

III

IV

References and Further Reading

Part VIII: Appropriating Women, Appropriating Shakespeare

26 Women and Land

References and Further Reading

27

Desdemona

Appropriation/Re-Vision

Collaboration

Performance Product

Dialogues with Others?

References and Further Reading

28 Woman-Crafted Shakespeares

Terms of Art

“Silken Fetters”: Womanist Remakings of Shakespeare, from Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison

Woman-Crafted Shakespeare: Rankine’s

Citizen

References and Further Reading

29 A Thousand Voices

A Boy Ariel: The Adolescent Voice

A Female Ariel

Ariel in the Marketplace

References and Further Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 29

Figure 29.1 Robert Johnson’s “Where the bee sucks,” from John Wilson’s

Cheerful Ayres

(1659).

Figure 29.2 John Dowland, “Unquiet thoughts,”

The first booke of songes or ayres of fowre partes with tableture for the lute

(1597).

Figure 29.3 “Go thy way” from

The ARIELS Songs in the Play call’d the TEMPEST

(1674/5).

Figure 29.3

?>(

Continued

)

Figure 29.4 Manuscript annotations to “Where the bee sucks” in the hand of Edward Lowe. (Shakespeare Collection, MS. Music & Verses to the Tempest (57316); Library of Birmingham)

Figure 29.5 John Banister, “Full fathom five,” in print, from

The ARIELS Songs in the Play call’d the TEMPEST

(1674/5).

Figure 29.6 John Banister, “Full fathom five,” in manuscript, from GB-Lbl. Add. Ms. 29396, fol. 110

r

.

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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97. A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare

, Second Edition

Edited by Dympna Callaghan

A FEMINIST COMPANION TO SHAKESPEARE

SECOND EDITION

EDITED BY

DYMPNA CALLAGHAN

This second edition first published 2016© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, LtdEdition history: Blackwell Publishers Ltd (1e, 2000)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Callaghan, Dympna, editor.Title: A feminist companion to Shakespeare.Description: Second edition / edited by Dympna Callaghan. | Chichester, West Sussex : John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2015047277 (print) | LCCN 2015048991 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118501269 (cloth) | ISBN 9781118501207 (ePub) | ISBN 9781118501252 (Adobe PDF)Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616–Criticism and interpretation. | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616–Characters–Women. | Feminism and literature–England–History–16th century. | Feminism and literature–England–History–17th century. | Women and literature–England–History–16th century. | Women and literature–England–History–17th century. | Sex role in literature. | Women in literature. | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616–Political and social views.Classification: LCC PR2991 .F45 2016 (print) | LCC PR2991 (ebook) | DDC 822.3/3–dc23LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047277

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Samuel H. Kress Collection

For Jean Howard, feminist extraordinaire

Notes on Contributors

Denise Albanese is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at George Mason University. Author of Extramural Shakespeare (2010) and New Science, New World (1996), Albanese has also published on Tudor‐Stuart mathematics, Shakespeare in performance, and the place of literature in cultural studies. She regularly teaches courses in Shakespeare, Milton, and other early modern writing; critical and literary theory; mass culture; and the cultural study of science and technology. Currently she is working on two book projects: one concerning science and life‐forms in the early modern period; and another on Shakespeare as a public object, focused on discourses of performance.

Philippa Berry was Fellow and Director of Studies in English at King's College Cambridge from 1988 until 2004. She is the author of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (1989) and of Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disfiguring Death in the Tragedies (1999), and coeditor with Andrew Wernick of Shadow and Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (1993) and of Textures of Renaissance Knowledge with Margaret Tudeau‐Clayton (2003).

Amy K. Burnette is a doctoral candidate in English at Syracuse University, New York. She is currently at work on her dissertation, “Praxis Memoriae: Memory as Aesthetic Technique in English Renaissance Literature, 1580–1630.” Her dissertation project explores how ideas circulating about memory, namely within the context of the humanist revival of the classical ars memoria, supplied late sixteenth‐ and early seventeenth‐century authors with a theory and practice of literary invention.

Dympna Callaghan is William L. Safire Professor of Modern Letters at Syracuse University, New York. In 2012–13 she served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America. Callaghan is the editor of the Arden Shakespeare Language and Writing series and coeditor, with Michael Dobson, of the Palgrave Shakespeare Studies series. She has held fellowships all over the world, including Clare Hall and Hughes Hall, Cambridge, the Newberry Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, the Getty Research Center, Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Queensland, Australia, and the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy. Her books include Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (1989), Shakespeare Without Women (2000), The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Culture (2006), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2007), Who Was William Shakespeare? (2013) and Hamlet: Language and Writing (2015). She has also edited The Taming of the Shrew (2013) for Norton, and a contextual edition of Romeo and Juliet for Bedford/St. Martin’s (2009).

Mario DiGangi is Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he serves as Executive Officer of the PhD Program in English. He is the author of The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (1997) and Sexual Types: Embodiment, Agency, and Dramatic Character from Shakespeare to Shirley (2011), and has also contributed to several collections, including Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare; Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800; A Companion to Renaissance Drama; and A Companion to Shakespeare's Works: The Comedies. He has edited Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Barnes & Noble Shakespeare, and The Winter's Tale for the Bedford Shakespeare: Texts and Contexts series. His current project explores affective politics in early modern history plays.

Juliet Dusinberre is a Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. Her first book, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, still in print after 37 years, was a pioneer study of attitudes to women and gender in Shakespeare's plays. She taught Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and Tragedy and directed studies at Girton for 20 years. In 1996 she was elected to the first M. C. Bradbrook Fellowship in English. Her second book, Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art, still in print after 25 years, uncovered the links between nineteenth‐century children's books and the rise of modernism, with particular reference to Virginia Woolf. Her third book, Virginia Woolf's Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader? (1997) investigated Woolf's sometimes unlikely forebears as woman reader and writer: Montaigne, Sir John Harington, Donne, Bunyan, Pepys, Dorothy Osborne and Madame de Sévigné. In 2006, after her retirement, she published the new Arden (Arden Third Series) edition of As You Like It. She continues to give occasional public lectures and to publish.

Juliet Fleming is Associate Professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (2001) and Cultural Graphology: Book History after Derrida (forthcoming).

Margo Hendricks is Professor Emerita of Renaissance and Early Modern English Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A recipient of a number of fellowship and research grants, including awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, she has written and lectured extensively on the concept of race in pre‐1700 English culture and literature. She has published on early modern women, race, Shakespeare, and performance. She has contributed an essay on race and nation in the forthcoming Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare.

Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English and Head of Graduate School at Sheffield Hallam University. She is coeditor of Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association, and of the Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. Her most recent publications include Renaissance Drama on the Edge (2014) and Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 1561–1633 (2011).

Jean E. Howard has published, among others, Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration (1984); Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited with Marion O'Connor (1987); The Stage and Struggle in Early Modern England (1994); with Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (1997); Marxist Shakespeares, edited with Scott Shershow (2000); and four generically organized Companions to Shakespeare, edited with Richard Dutton (2001). She is a coeditor of The Norton Shakespeare (3rd edn, 2016). Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598–1642 (2007) won the Barnard Hewitt award for Outstanding Theater History for 2008. She is currently completing a book entitled Staging History that uses Shakespeare's history plays as a starting point for considering Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill's use of history in framing debates about current political issues. A book on early modern tragedy is in the works. From 1996 to 1999 Professor Howard directed the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University; in 1999–2000 she was President of the Shakespeare Association of America.

Sujata Iyengar teaches Shakespeare, expository writing, and book history at the University of Georgia. Her most recent single‐authored book, Shakespeare’s Medical Language, appeared in 2014 and her edited collection Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body was published in 2015. With Christy Desmet, she cofounded and coedits Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. She is currently at work on three projects: a scholarly monograph, Shakespeare and the Art of the Book, which interprets as aesthetic and literary interventions Shakespeare books from the Folio to twenty‐first‐century “artists’ books”; Transformative Shakespeares, an edited collection of creative and critical essays about Shakespearean appropriation; and a suite of essays about intermediality, Shakespeare, and intersectional identities.

Theodora A. Jankowski, retired professor of English, is the author of Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama (1992) and Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (2000). She is also the author of articles on Shakespeare, John Lyly, John Webster, and Thomas Heywood, among others. She is currently completing a book on John Lyly’s court comedies and entertainments.

Anna Kamaralli received her MA (Hons) from the University of New South Wales, Sydney and her PhD from Trinity College Dublin. Her book Shakespeare and the Shrew: Performing the Defiant Female Voice was published in 2012. Her articles have appeared in Shakespeare Survey and Shakespeare Bulletin. She is also a director, dramaturge and drama teacher.

M. Lindsay Kaplan is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. She authored The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (1997), coedited, with Valerie Traub and Dympna Callaghan, Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture (1996), and produced a contextual edition of The Merchant of Venice (2002). She has written several essays on the intersection of race and religion in medieval and early modern representations of Jews, and is currently completing her next monograph, Figures of Slavery: The Invention of Jewish Inferiority and the Construction of Race.

Farah Karim‐Cooper is Head of Higher Education and Research at Shakespeare’s Globe and Visiting Research Fellow of King’s College London. She is author of Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (2006 and 2012) and The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment (2016). She has coedited with Christie Carson, Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (2008); with Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance (2013), and with Andrew Gurr, Moving Shakespeare Indoors (2014).

Ania Loomba is Catherine Bryson Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (2002), Colonialism–Postcolonialism (3rd edn 2015), and Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (1989 and 1992). She is coeditor of Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies (forthcoming), South Asian Feminisms (2012), Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (2007); Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005) and Post‐Colonial Shakespeares (1998). She is also editor of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (2012).

Rory Loughnane is Assistant Research Professor in the Indiana University School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University‐Purdue University Indianapolis and Associate Editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare. He is coeditor of Late Shakespeare, 1608–1613 (2012), Celtic Shakespeare (2013), Staged Transgression in Shakespeare's England (2013), and The Yearbook of English Studies for 2014. Current book projects include The Memory Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology with William E. Engel and Grant Williams, Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England with Edel Semple, Early Shakespeare with Andrew J. Power, and a monograph entitled Middleton Reading Shakespeare. For the Shakespearian Authorship companion to the New Oxford Shakespeare he is coauthoring, with Gary Taylor, a new essay about the “Canon and Chronology” of Shakespeare's works.

Joyce Green MacDonald is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature. The author of numerous articles on women, gender, and race in early modern drama, she has also published a book, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (2002).

Laurie E. Maguire is Professor of English at Oxford University and a Fellow of Magdalen College. She is the author, coauthor or editor of nine books on Shakespeare and related topics. Recent books include Othello: Language and Writing (2014), Thirty Great Myths about Shakespeare, coauthored with Emma Smith (2012), and Helen of Troy (2009). She is currently working on projects on cognitive Shakespeare, on stage directions, on Greek tragedy, and on book history.

Carol Thomas Neely, Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana‐Champaign, is coeditor of The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare; author of Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays and Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture; and of articles on Shakespeare, Middleton, sonnet sequences, feminist theory, and Margaret Cavendish. Two recent essays further explore queer desires: in The Merry Wives of Windsor, forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook on Shakespeare and Embodiment, edited by Valerie Traub; and in The Revenger’s Tragedy, forthcoming in an Arden collection on the play edited by Brian Walsh.

Phyllis Rackin is Professor of English Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America and the author of numerous articles on Shakespeare and related subjects and of four books on Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Tragedies; Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles; Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories, which she wrote with Jean E. Howard; and Shakespeare and Women. She has recently coedited with Evelyn Gajowski an anthology of essays on The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Katherine M. Romack is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies Coordinator at the University of West Florida where she teaches courses about Shakespeare, Milton, women's writing, and feminist theory. Romack is the coeditor, with James Fitzmaurice, of Cavendish and Shakespeare, Interconnections, and was a 2003–5 recipient of The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities (formerly the Stanford Humanities Fellows Program). Her work on seventeenth‐century women and culture includes essays on the drama and criticism of the prolific Margaret Cavendish, the deployment of tropes of monstrous maternity in women’s political writings, and the performance of early Quaker female pamphleteers. Other research interests include Milton, the poetics of religious enthusiasm, and women’s troubled relationship to the metaphysical tradition. She is currently at work on a project about the seventeenth‐century reception of Shakespeare.

Rachana Sachdev is Associate Professor of English at Susquehanna University, Pennsylvania. She is coeditor with Qingjun Li of Encountering China: Early Modern European Responses (2012).

Jyotsna G. Singh is Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Her published work includes A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion (editor, 2009 and 2013); Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (coeditor with Ivo Kamps, 2001); Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (1996); and The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (coauthor with Dympna Callaghan and Lorraine Helms, 1994). Her articles have appeared in, among others, Renaissance Drama and Theatre Journal. She has received several fellowships, including at the John Carter Brown Library and Queen Mary University of London (Distinguished Visiting Faculty). She is currently working on a monograph entitled Transcultural Islam in the Early Modern Period.

Molly Smith was born in Madras (now Chennai), India, and has held faculty and administrative posts at Saint Louis University, University of Aberdeen in Scotland, Seton Hall University (New Jersey) as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Wheaton College (Massachusetts) as Provost, and Manhattanville College (New York) as its eleventh president. She currently serves as Professor of English and Provost/Vice President for Academic Affairs at Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, Washington. She is a regular faculty member in the annual Leadership Development Program for Asian‐Pacific academics at Cal Poly, Pomona, California. Her current board memberships include the Foundation Board of Tubman University in Liberia, the Thurston County Economic Development Council in Washington, and Fairleigh Dickinson University. Dr. Smith has published two books and several articles on Renaissance drama.

Kay Stanton is Professor of English at California State University at Fullerton, where she specializes in Shakespeare studies. She has presented over a hundred professional conference papers, in twelve foreign countries and twenty American states, and has published over 27 scholarly articles, on Shakespeare, Milton, and Arthur Miller. Her book Shakespeare’s ‘Whores’: Erotics, Politics, and Poetics was published in 2014, and she is currently at work on a book on Shakespeare and quantum physics.

Mihoko Suzuki is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Miami. She is the author of Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (1989, 1992) and Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form (2003). She has coedited Debating Gender in Early Modern England (2002), Women’s Political Writings 1610–1725 (4 vols., 2007), and The Rule of Women in Early Modern Europe (2009). Her most recent publication is The History of British Women’s Writing, 1610–1690 (2011 and 2015). Her current project, Antigone’s Example, is a comparative study of women and civil war in early modern England and France.

Ayanna Thompson is Professor of English at George Washington University, and she specializes in Renaissance drama and issues of race in/as performance. She is the author of Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student‐Centred Approach (Arden, 2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (2008). She wrote the new introduction for the Arden Third Series Othello (forthcoming), and is the editor of Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (2010) and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (2006). Professor Thompson’s essays have been published in numerous journals and edited collections. She is currently a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Marshall Scholars.

Amanda Eubanks Winkler is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University, New York. She is the author of O Let us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth‐Century English Stage (2006), which was a finalist for the American Musicological Society’s Lewis Lockwood Award, and Music for Macbeth (2004). Her articles on English theater music have appeared in essay collections and journals, including Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of Musicology, and Musical Quarterly. She has been the recipient of a long‐term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities), and the Kauffman Foundation has supported her teaching initiatives. She is currently one of the General Editors of the Collected Works of John Eccles, a multivolume set with A‐R Editions, and is completing a book on music, dance, and theater in early modern English schools.

Susan Zimmerman is currently on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and is Professor of English Emerita at Queens College, City University of New York, and coeditor of the annual journal Shakespeare Studies. She is author of The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre as well as numerous articles and reviews, editor of several collections of essays on early modern culture, and was guest editor of the Fall 2008 issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies entitled “Premodern Disease: Ideology and Representation.” She is currently at work on a study of animal/human linkages in the Middle Ages.

Preface to the Second Edition

In the Introduction to the first edition of A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, published in 2000, I confidently defined feminism as a political and intellectual movement that took as its central object of concern the status of women. Sixteen years on (the lifetime of Perdita in The Winter’s Tale from babyhood to marriageable princess) my conviction that this is the primary goal of feminist analysis remains intact. Although it is the convention in a volume such as this to emphasize new developments in the field and to stress innovation and transformation, and although there is no shortage of that, I want to resist the continual grasp for the new. Instead, I want to draw attention to the strong continuities of scholarship in this field and argue that over the course of the history of feminist criticism of Shakespeare there may have been distinct phases in the conversation but not different conversations altogether. My reluctance to assert that “Much has changed in the past sixteen years” is motivated neither by the dispiriting fact that in relation to the condition of women worldwide not nearly enough has changed, nor by a perverse desire to cling to a victimized identity for women. My diffidence on that score stems rather from my conviction that a feminist perspective remains an immensely powerful lens through which to view literary texts, and its potential, far from being exhausted, continues to generate fresh insights about Shakespeare’s plays and poems as well as about the early modern world in which they were written.

We are still learning how gender designations are generated and embodied; how they operate in the early modern period and our own; how sexual identities become attached to or disconnected from gender; and how gender intersects with all other aspects of culture and society. The operations of gender remain so naturalized that they are difficult to see, and even when made visible, they can all too soon again vanish from sight. Furthermore, some patriarchal ideas have a very long shelf life indeed. To give but one example, in her brilliant study Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy(2008), Frances E. Dolan details the ways in which some of the most egregious notions about conjugal intimacy, specifically ones which physically endanger women, remain alive and well in the twenty‐first century. This is but one of the reasons why the topics of critical conversation underway in 2000 are still very much in progress, still vital, still significant. Moreover, because feminist analysis has always understood that gender does not exist in isolation from other social markers, it has not been superseded by ostensibly competing categories of analysis. Theatrical transvestism, race, ethnicity, gender, gendered aesthetics, sexuality, identity, social status, textual work, performance, and critical theory remain the constitutive elements of feminist Shakespeare criticism.

What, then, of the present‐day status of women? There is no doubt that feminist Shakespeare criticism and, say, a World Health Organization’s report on women occupy distinct discursive arenas. A description, no matter how accurate, of the welfare of women is not the specific goal here after all. However, that welfare remains the impetus to feminist critical analysis, and as such it behooves us to examine the gap between the apparent assimilation of feminism into the critical mainstream and the still secondary status of women in the world. There is, then, a great deal that has not changed, at least for women. The point here is not to adopt a grim, pessimistic view about women’s lives, or even of cultural representations of those lives. It is, however to resist the idea that “new and improved” is the only and inevitable understanding of developments not only in the status of women but also in the insights of feminist literary criticism. A reluctance to claim some brand new, shinier model of feminist criticism does not, of course, mean that the field is devoid of cutting‐edge feminist work – far from it, as the new essays in this volume amply demonstrate. It is simply that the Whig view of feminism – which is to say, the view that there is an evolutionary progress in the sphere of gender equality – is not the one that we can readily espouse without annulling the specifically political aims of feminist criticism.

In rereading the earlier edition of the Companion I am also struck by how very relevant the essays remain to current debates and controversies, such as the argument about whether the term “woman” is oppressive because it excludes those who identify as female despite being born with male anatomy. Indeed, the feminist insistence on denaturalizing gender and its related categories is a constant theme in both editions of the volume. However, to denaturalize gender does not mean that it is without material foundation or that gender identities are “just made up.” On the contrary, to argue that the complex operations of gender identity are not an inevitable result of anatomy or biological “fact” allows that there are, as Stephen Whittle points out in his Foreword to The Transgender Studies Reader (2006), “deeply held self‐understandings” of identity that are not “entirely due to nurture and environment.” Since on Shakespeare’s all‐male stage there were no “women‐born‐women” (that is to say, persons whose female sexual identity corresponds with their biology) but only “women” with male anatomy,1 feminist Shakespeareans tend to have a much more comprehensive and less exclusive sense of who fits in and falls out of the designation “woman” in any given historical moment or theatrical context. As the French feminist theorist Monique Wittig pointed out almost forty years ago, women are not a “natural group,” or as Wittig’s predecessor Simone de Beauvoir famously put it in The Second Sex: “One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.”2 While “Woman” as a blanket designation with a capital letter may conflate a vast range of anatomical configurations and lived experiences, including but not limited to those related to religious identity, sexual orientation, class, race, and ethnicity, as a constitutive idea, “Woman” nonetheless remains a fully operative idea in our world, and those operations, past and present, demand critical analysis. Such pointed relevance to current issues surely must dispatch the idea that since the literary establishment not only tolerates but actively embraces feminist analyses, then our work is done – or if not done, then shifted into ecocriticism, or the new formalism, to name only a few, where its feminist intellectual bite becomes a much smaller mouthful.

Precisely because they remain so relevant, the essays from the previous edition have been integrated into the current volume. But what then of the specifics of new contributions to feminist Shakespeare in this volume? As with the previous edition, contributors come from across the feminist generations and from different career stages. The essays address what is new in the field in terms of historical and textual discovery, and especially in analyses of recent performances and appropriations of Shakespeare. However, these essays also acknowledge and confront the historical facts around dynamics of the gender hierarchy in early modern England, that is, the restrictions imposed upon women as a group no matter what degree of (sometimes considerable) latitude they were able to achieve in the exercise of personal or political agency. This is because for feminism, changing history does not mean denying or downplaying women’s subordination in the past, but rather changing the present by coming into a much fuller understanding of the history that has produced it.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Will Fisher, Jessica Rosenberg, and Marjorie Rubright for stimulating discussions about feminist Shakespeare as I was preparing this volume. As ever, I am also indebted to Chris R. Kyle for his enlivening conversations about Shakespeare and all matters early modern.

Notes

1

Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (eds.),

The Transgender Studies Reader

(New York: Routledge, 2006), p. xiii.

2

Monique Wittig, “On ne naît pas femme,”

Questions Féministes

, 8 (May 1980), and as “One Is Not Born a Woman,”

Feminist Issues

, 1 (2) (Winter 1981); Simone de Beauvoir,

The Second Sex

(New York: Bantam, 1952), p. 249.

Introduction

Dympna Callaghan

To read … texts against themselves is to concede that the performativity of the text is not under sovereign control. On the contrary, if the text acts once, it can act again, and possibly against its prior act. This raises the possibility of resignification as an alternative reading of performativity and of politics.

Butler (1997: 69)

In my more distrustful moments, I sometimes feel that feminist Shakespeareans are a persecuted minority, vulnerable to attack from all sides. More reactionary non‐ (if not anti‐) feminists claim that feminism has “gone too far” and is only outlandishly brought into juxtaposition with the venerable activities of Shakespearean scholarship. Rather than dismissing concerns about gender and sexuality (as “pelvic studies” in one particularly retrograde instance I came across recently), a more progressive school of thought claims that these issues are already assimilated into the mainstream of a post feminist, postgender world. Nor is there much comfort to be had within the feminist community, where there is an insistent critique of abstruse intellectualism in general, and the energy spent on elite literary culture in particular. For feminists in other spheres of life and academic discipline often regard Shakespeare as at worst irrelevant and at best marginal to the core of its concern: the status of women.

Feminist Shakespeareans must tackle the onslaught, then, from both outside the perimeters of feminist concern and, more significantly, within them. For if the essentialist view of identity has been dispatched in terms of gender, race, class, and a host of other categories, so that we no longer consider, for example, people to be wholly or primarily defined by their biology, skin color, or socioeconomic status, it remains in relation to the feminist Shakespeare scholar. Under the mantle of this identity, it is unfairly assumed that one reads Shakespeare but none of his contemporaries, no early modern women writers, no noncanonical writers. Allegedly insulated in the bowels of the library from the toils and troubles of life in general, at the start of the millennium feminist Shakespeareans were even thought, however unwittingly, to contribute and compound social ills by failing to engage in practical politics.

I will admit that such perceptions, though not wholly unwarranted, may unreasonably amplify the dilemmas facing people of a feminist persuasion who study Shakespeare. I must further concede – however reluctantly – that such criticism, paradoxically, is itself an integral part of feminist Shakespeare scholarship. For questions about both scholarly and political relevance are of course also questions that feminist Shakespeareans ask themselves all the time because we necessarily also belong to broader intellectual and political communities, whose critiques not only pressure but also shape feminist studies of Shakespeare. Even, or perhaps especially, blunt, uncomfortable questions like “What’s the point?” – often posed not by “experts,” but by students, those most vigorous representatives of a feminist future – have an invaluable place here. A scholarly example of this phenomenon is to be found in a recent commentary by feminist cultural historian Margaret King, who argues against canonicity in all its forms, and whose argument has crucial implications for the study of Shakespeare as literature’s most venerated and studied canonical object:

The scholar must turn away from the grand monuments: the palaces, cathedrals, fortifications, and most of the painted and sculpted works of art. To understand women, it is necessary to look at the objects most associated with them: textiles, above all, spun, woven, sewn, embroidered by female hands; their boxes, books, and toys; the beds, chairs, stools and buckets associated with cooking, laundering, and giving birth; the rooms in which they sat to spin, sew, weave, embroider, cook, and talk.

(King 1997: 22)

For if the object of feminist inquiry is “women” of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, then Shakespeare, undoubtedly the grand monument of literary studies, would seem to offer only a very oblique bearing on the subject. While, indeed, there must be something to be gleaned about women’s diurnal domestic activities in Shakespeare’s plays, these are heavily mediated by male representation and the constraints of literary convention.

Of course, the importance of juxtaposing canonical information with all kinds of new knowledge about women in Shakespeare’s time cannot be underestimated. However, feminist Shakespeareans are also interested in how the plays may reflect real women, as well as how they help produce and reproduce ideas about women that then shape, perpetuate, or even disturb prevailing conditions of femininity. For “woman” is never an already accomplished, cold, hard, self‐evident fact or category, but always a malleable cultural idea as well as a lived reality that, to use a Derridean formulation, always already has a history. An example framed within the theoretical terms of Judith Butler’s important book, Excitable Speech, may make this clearer. In misogynist diatribe, for instance, the word “whore” (examined in detail by one of the contributors to this volume, Kay Stanton) does not secure its injurious effect because women are powerless victims who wilt at its very utterance. Rather, the word is injurious because in the long history of its usage it has become freighted with systemic patriarchal violence. (Notably, this remains true whether enunciated by males or females – women regularly slandered and defamed one another in early modern England – because women, no less than men, inhabit and implement the social and conceptual structures of the patriarchal order.) A staggering old man who drinks to allay the poverty and misery of his life and calls a woman a “whore” before he passes out cold on the stone floor of a tavern is not a powerful representative of patriarchy, but his words nonetheless may have the power to wound. “Whore” is probably the worst name you can call a woman in Shakespeare’s England and its capacity to “wound” means not only the power to hurt someone’s feelings but potentially also to deprive women (who might be disowned by their kin as the result of allegations of unchastity) of all means of social and economic support. This word has accrued patriarchal power and its attendant material effects by means of its insistent reiteration in the culture. That is, there is no such thing as an isolated instance of the denigration of women – were it isolated, it would be devoid of cultural power. However the way that history is always inextricably woven into the materiality of discourse applies not just to particular words relating to women, but to the entire edifice of gender organization itself. Thus, femininity is continually produced and reproduced in ways that may subvert conventional understandings or, more commonly, in ways that may further subjugate women, and the operation of this reiteration has to be carefully unraveled and examined in any given historical and/or discursive instance. If language in general is crucial to any understanding of gender organization, then canonical representations of women – that is, preeminent cultural representations, reiterations, self‐conscious reenactments and rearticulations of the condition of femininity – hold a hugely important place. However, they do so only in relation to all manner of noncanonical knowledges and texts. That is, we can only tell what Shakespeare means about gender, sexuality, race, or social relations by reading his texts in the context of the culture in which he wrote them.

What answers there are, then, to the critiques of feminist Shakespeare studies it must be emphasized are historically complex and intellectually demanding. Indeed, this volume aims to push ahead with uncomfortable questions rather than to offer reassuring answers. For only by doing so can feminism thrive both in its intellectual agenda and as a vibrant social politics. Crucially, all work that conceives itself as feminist necessarily situates itself within a wider political purpose. That purpose, however, is not necessarily, of course, a practical or pragmatic one. Thus, none of the contributors to this volume believes that their essay will diminish patriarchal violence, the number of women on the welfare rolls, or demolish the ubiquitous glass ceiling. Of course, attention to Shakespeare does not prohibit feminist scholars from vigorous participation in the social issues so central to the feminist agenda, and, more to the point, it does not magically extricate Shakespearean feminists from the world of gender trouble, or more specifically, the institutional issues which daily concern feminist educators and students. The point is that no single feminist intervention is an isolated act. Contributors to this volume are part of an ever growing body of scholarship that has set out to discover what the world, and in this instance, quite specifically what a hugely influential body of canonical literature, might look like from the perspective of women, from the margins of hitherto patriarchal knowledge.

While the objection to feminist pragmatism can be fairly readily dispatched, perhaps a more difficult critique of the intellectual project of feminist Shakespeare scholarship is one I have only touched on so far, namely, that it further marginalizes already neglected noncanonical women writers. Feminist Shakespeareans no longer consider themselves as purely literary scholars but as cultural historians who are especially interested in women’s own representations of themselves, which range from poetry to embroidery. Indeed, the interest in women’s writing in particular has been a vital part of redrawing the map of Renaissance literature in general. As Maureen Quilligan points out in making the case for reading noncanonical women writers in relation to canonical men, the effect is not merely “sticking a heretofore unnoticed feature onto the map but by seeing how that new feature changes the relationship among all other features” (1997: 42).

The kind of intervention feminist Shakespeare scholarship understands itself to be making is gestured to in another context by Judith Butler in the epigraph to this introduction. What is at stake for Butler is how to do things differently, how to understand differently. Interestingly, what she says is something Shakespeare scholars have known all along, namely, that performance altered Shakespeare’s playtexts and continues to do so – that is, that changes in understanding and interpretation of the variety that feminist scholarship seeks to effect are already written into the cultural transactions of theater.

Other forms of reiteration have, however, also proved necessary: feminists have had to repeat themselves in order to be understood. But now, at least in the realms of Renaissance literary criticism, feminism is so much a part of the common currency of the discourse, that, as Carol Neely pointed out at the 1997 meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco, feminism barely needs announce itself. Thus, feminist Shakespeare is caught in the position of being, depending on how you look at it, completely integrated or completely invisible. On the one hand, it is in an important sense a measure of the work done by feminist Shakespeareans over the last twenty years that our project is likely, as we have noted, to be subject to far more rigorous scrutiny and interrogation from within the feminist ranks than outside them. No class or conference worth its salt, after all, fails to include some reference to the gender hierarchy which so fundamentally informs the culture of Shakespeare’s England. On the other hand, the questionable progress of feminism may be measured by Stephen Orgel’s infamous declaration that “Everyone in this [Renaissance] culture was in some respects a woman” (1996: 124). Orgel writes from the position of an anti‐essentialism so radical that it is impossible to posit the real historical existence of women, let alone women’s oppression. He argues, in other words, that back then everybody – male and female – was victimized anyway. However, the difference between men being subordinate within the social hierarchy, to which Orgel alludes, and the position of women is not just a relative but rather an absolute distinction. This distinction is, in fact, foundational to the feminist enterprise and constitutive of the very core of feminist politics, which concerns itself with the historical, structural, and systemic facts of women’s subjugation. (There was, for instance, no notion in the period of releasing women from traditional social roles.) Even where the oppression of women overlaps with certain other instances of difference – such as race and class – it is never wholly coincident with them. Furthermore, despite backlash rumors to the contrary, feminism has no investment in identifying the complex subjugation of women in patriarchy with mere victimization. Nor can the position of women be reduced to or elided with all other forms of social hierarchy. In short, feminism, while in some sense more prominent than ever, has not quite escaped the danger of being swept under the carpet, and has certainly not escaped the necessity of repeating itself in order to be properly understood.

The aim of this volume is to demonstrate feminist visibility – even to the point of conspicuousness – and its integration into the broader field of Shakespeare studies via a series of overlapping categories: the history of feminist Shakespeare criticism, text and language, social economies, sexuality, race, and religion. Beginning with an account of the origins of feminist readings of Shakespeare and their contribution to the political project of feminism, the essays included here cover historical and theoretical contexts and perspectives as well as readings of Shakespeare’s texts within a feminist problematic. In particular, the essays in this volume demonstrate that feminism, because it commands a view from the margins, is especially well placed to access the eccentric categories of Renaissance knowledge – those aspects of thought in the period ranging from female circumcision to early modern ideas about the blood – that sit uneasily with our own but are nonetheless central to the period’s core concerns – in these instances, religion and national identity.

Feminism is about creating the future differently by looking at history differently. And, of course, we cannot tell what the future, what that world beyond patriarchy might be. Here our project might be seen to parallel that of our Renaissance humanist forbears who ushered in the era of modernity only by looking back and examining afresh a world long past.

The volume begins with two essays that address the origins of Shakespeare criticism. Juliet Fleming historicizes the project of Shakespearean feminism or feminist Shakespeare by addressing its late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century precursor, “The Ladies’ Shakespeare.” The concept of such an enterprise was proposed, tongue in cheek, by J. M. Barrie in a speech to the Stationers’ Company. Fleming explores the need of all Shakespeareans – male, female, feminist, and otherwise – “to identify Shakespeare’s interests with our own.” Fleming takes the parodic proposition of the Ladies’ Shakespeare to its logical conclusion. She looks also at those notoriously eccentric projects of editing and interpretation (a high proportion of them, notably, undertaken by women) in order to show that, like Freud’s patients, far from being so aberrant that they are irredeemably distinct and separated from the norm, rather they are but exaggerated versions of it. Thus, Henrietta Bowdler, for example, in purging Shakespeare of “indelicacy,” merely enacted with a self‐consciously ideological clarity nowhere available until the Oxford Shakespeare the standard principles of textual editing. Delia Bacon, too, whose intellectual labor seems at first far beyond the margins of sanity, believed that Shakespeare was written by a consortium of playwrights of the Baconian persuasion. Textual studies now demonstrates, of course, that she may have been right – or at least less off the mark than those critics who support the model that Shakespeare’s plays were a product of his isolated genius.

Katherine M. Romack