Routledge Revivals: Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism (1991)

An Annotated Bibliography and Commentary

Philip C Kolin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351984034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1991, this book is the first annotated bibliography of feminist Shakespeare criticism from 1975 to 1988 — a period that saw a remarkable amount of ground-breaking work. While the primary focus is on feminist studies of Shakespeare, it also includes wide-ranging works on language, desire, role-playing, theatre conventions, marriage, and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture — shedding light on Shakespeare's views on and representation of women, sex and gender. Accompanying the 439 entries are extensive, informative annotations that strive to maintain the original author's perspective, supplying a careful and thorough account of the main points of an article.

1975

1. Bamber, Linda Vigderman. “Comic Women, Tragic Men: Genre and Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Plays.” DAI 36 (1975): 2212A. Tufts U.

See item 175.

2. Beckman, Margaret Boerner. “The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1975): 44-51.

Rosalind paradoxically reconciles the opposites of male and female by combining them-emotionally and physically-in the plot, language, and disguises of ^4YL. Rosalind’s union of the sexes creates the harmony of marriage which is a concordia discors of realism and idealism. Rosalind thus symbolizes the “natural harmony of opposed forces that constitutes man’s ‘possible perfection’” (49). She and Orlando “often switch traditional sexual characteristics” (41); Rosalind speaks from the head while Orlando does from the heart. It is only when feminine pity overcomes Orlando’s “‘masculine’ anger at his brother” that he can fight the lioness (48). Serving a complex function by joining male and female, Rosalind symbolizes the union of Mars and Venus, the “Renaissance prototype of all combinations” of man and woman (47). She is the “protecting male figure” and the “aggressive lover” as well as a chaste woman with a faint heart with Orlando. Yet while Rosalind displays outside a “man’s readiness to fight,” she has a woman’s fears inside. In “both instances, the inner ‘reality’ … [is] … less real than the disguising outside” (48). Rosalind’s wit and puns, which also “bring together contrary meanings” (49), are a sign of an active masculinity, another concordia discors. As both shepherd and courtier, Rosalind’s estate further “comprises both extremes of the play” (51).

3. Biggins, Dennis. “Sexuality, Witchcraft, and Violence in Macbeth” Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 255-77.

Sexuality has never been considered a major concern of Mac; however, there are important links between sexuality and violence in the play. Although they are not full-fledged devils, the Weird Sisters have demonic tendencies, along with witch-like characteristics. “The witchcraft theme coalesces with the themes of fruitfulness and offspring, which are associated particularly with Duncan and Banquo, and of unfulfillment, sterility, and the destruction of progeny, associated with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth” (260). Sexuality that is perverted by the will to do harm, either by violence or witchcraft, results in a “life-denying barrenness.” In other Shakespearean plays, witchcraft is associated with “unnatural sexual desires and sexual domination.” Macbeth is deprived of his masculinity because he is “spiritually seduced” by the witches. “The exchanges between Macbeth and his wife that lead up to Duncan’s murder, tensioned as they are by an eroticism that is sometimes submerged, sometimes overt, but continuously present, culminate in the decisive act of violence, which is envisaged as a kind of rape” (266). Macbeth’s tragedy is that his crimes bring him no peace or satisfaction. Ironically, he realizes this before, while, and after committing them.

4. Boose, Lynda E. “Othello’s Handkerchief: ‘The Recognizance and Pledge of Love.’” English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 360-74.

The handkerchief ritualistically expresses the themes of marriage and justice that are central to Oth. Mentioned 31 times, the handkerchief is vital to the dramatic structure of the play and reflects an audience’s awareness of marriage customs. An “emblem of consummation” (368), the strawberry-embroidered handkerchief visually represents the blood-stained wedding sheets that were publicly displayed to prove the bride’s virginity. Shakespeare changes Cinthio’s description of the “napkin” to elevate its mythic significance and to stress the connection between the love token and the act of consummation. The handkerchief receives dramatic life through the “tragic potential” it possesses. With “terrible irony,” Othello destroys this emblem which just a few hours earlier signified Desdemona’s fidelity as a bride (368). Echoes of work, bed, blood “strengthen the handkerchief/sheets analogy” (371) and deepen the connection between the two most important props in Oth. The “ocular proof of the spotted handkerchief and our final indelible vision of the blood-soaked bed towards which the play relentlessly leads come together in the powerful verbal/visual echo Thy bed, lust stained, shall with lust’s blood be spotted’ (Act 5.1.36)” (370). In Othello’s thinking, Cassio possessed the virginal Desdemona when he possessed her handkerchief. Shakespeare departs from Deuteronomy which prescribed stoning an unfaithful wife and from Cinthio’s inartistic ending by having Othello murder Desdemona in bed. With the tragic loading of the bed Shakespeare offers a “dynamic fusion of handkerchief and wedding sheets, the sanctified union promising life and the tragic union culminating in death” (373). Yet Oth tragically fulfills the “holy writ” of Deuteronomy that legally sanctioned executing an adulterous wife and her lover.

5. Crichton, Andrew B. “Hercules Shaven: A Centering Mythic Metaphor in Much Ado About Nothing.” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 16 (1975): 619-26.

The centering metaphor of Hercules shaving his beard is part of a “submimetic system” that “parallels a mimetic heightening of beards with foppish fashion that Benedick must transcend if he is to realize his humanity” (626). Understanding references to beards/bear1 ds helps to universalize the “struggle between equally strong male and female types at the center of the play” (621). Beatrice, who is stronger than Rosaline of LLL or Rosalind of AYL, wants to be taken seriously and depends upon her wit “to survive in a male world” (625). In that world, beards are a sign of male disguise, a symbol of “false heroism and male egotism” blocking the “potential marriage of true minds” (625). Shaving his beard in Act 3.2, Benedick realizes he can become a real (not conventional) man and still profit from Beatrice’s refining touch. Beatrice learns “the shorter lesson that Benedick’s masculine strength exceeds the hormonal powers she has granted him all along” (621). Shakespeare wisely did not develop parallels with the story of Samson and Delilah because of its unflattering lady barber.

6. Dusinberre, Juliet. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. New York: Barnes and Noble; London: Macmillan, 1975.

Chapter One, “The Idea of Chastity,” is divided into five sections: “The Puritans and the Playwrights”; “Chastity as Mystique”; “Virginity and Virtue”; “The Double Standard”; and “Chastity and Art.”

The Puritans have wrongly been portrayed as kill-joys. During 1580-1625, encompassing the period of Shakespeare’s achievements, Puritanism saw its most “creative and fertile years.” Many Puritan ideas about love, women, and marriage “were lifted wholesale into the drama” (24), and in fact the Puritans “pushed dramatists into thinking about women” (30). The Puritans vitalized married life by attributing to it a “spiritual prestige” formerly reserved for single life. This Puritan influence is most notably affirmed in the “exuberant celebration in the comedies of married life against celibacy” (27), many of them set in London, the Puritans’ stronghold. Shakespeare adapted Puritan ideas, but unlike other playwrights of the period, he wrote “with no explicit reforming purpose” (26).

Challenging the mystique of chastity, the Puritans divorced “chastity from physical virginity” (32) and extended this virtue to married life. Such thinking in life and in drama had significant implications for “attitudes about women” (32). Like the Puritans, Shakespeare and his contemporaries wanted “to define and explain” the nature of chastity.

Chastity took on “new possibilities” for men and women (41). Following Erasmus, the Puritans saw the celibate, single life, as opposed to the fertility of marriage, as unnatural, perverse, and reflecting self-love (as Olivia’s in 77V). Parolles emphasizes such unnaturalness to Helena in AWW; and Isabella finds a greater test of her virtue outside the convent. “Playing down virginity benefitted women” (49), since fertility was a blessing to marriage and in no way did married life threaten a “man’s spiritual life.” As Hermione proves, a good wife “protects a man’s virtue” (51).

The Puritans, like the dramatists who inherited their ideas, attacked a double standard which irrevocably held women to virginity while allowing men the opportunity to reform. Virginity assumed an economic value. Elevating chastity made it “a class system and class-based morality” (51). Calling a woman a whore (Desdemona, Hermione) took away “her position in society” (52). Moreover, a woman’s loss of chastity (one virtue) symbolized the loss of all others making her “worthless in every other sphere” (53). Unchaste women were thought to “betray their own sex.” Against Angelo, the Puritans believed that if a man pursued his wife like a “whoremonger” he “deserved a whore” (58).

For sixteenth-century thinkers, art was the enemy of chastity, and women who practiced artfulness were guilty of seductiveness and sexual misconduct. Unlike Juliet’s artlessness (a virtue), Cressida feigns art; the lark speech in TrC “reads like a sad parody” of RJ (65). Allowed to be artful, men were not held to the same standards. Cleopatra, however, follows “her own moral law” (69). An artist, Cleopatra is “true to her own nature” like Sidney’s poet. Unlike Cressida, Cleopatra does not manufacture emotions through art.

Chapter Two on “The Problems of Equality” is divided into sections on: “Women and Authority” and “Women as Property.” The Elizabethan and Jacobean age “bred the condition of a feminist movement” (80) through social unrest. Asserting its belief in “mutual consent,” Puritan ideology fostered feminism. Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists reflected Puritan beliefs about the role of women. Emphasizing a woman’s freedom of conscience, her individual identity, and her willing submission in the “mystical union” of marriage, Puritan thinkers deplored authoritarianism and saw “no monopoly of authority” by men in marriage (84). Hence, Portia is true to “the spirit of Puritanism” in retaining her separate identity. A “husband’s villainy annulled” his wife’s duty to him (Emilia and Desdemona, for example). Breaking the union between man and wife, as Claudius does with Hamlet and Gertrude, is a mockery of marriage. The Puritans’ “gift to their world lay in replacing the legal union of the arranged marriage with a union born of spirit” (104). Thus, woman’s freedom-her desire to be wed-is represented in the drama. Beatrice’s selecting her own husband and Desdemona’s confronting Brabantio accord with Puritan ideology. Adriana in CE berates her husband for violating “an equal division of labor” (a Puritan belief) and, like Portia, rightly attacks the sexual “double standard.” The Puritan “spirit of ideal union” was also satirized in the drama. How could Shakespeare, who was “more liberal” (105) than any other dramatist, adopt the “most hyperbolic” and absolute view of women in Kate’s final speech? That speech, though, occurs in an ambiguous and theatrical setting where “Kate’s transformation is a miracle” (108); it would have never happened in the real world. “Petruchio could only play the part of lord if Kate agreed to the game” (110).

Puritans maintained that treating a wife like a piece of property or using her only to gratify a man’s senses was equivalent to seeing her as a whore because such actions diminished a wife’s role as man’s partner, counselor, and spiritual instructor. The Puritans rigorously confronted the problem of sex in marriage. Unlike other Renaissance dramatists, Shakespeare had no trouble with married sex; for him it was not “an act of power and persuasion” but, as Juliet, Imogen, and Hermione exemplify, mutual bounty and Edenic “completion” (121). Shakespeare’s contemporaries concentrated instead on the “similarities between whores and respectable women” and the high price of satisfying a man’s lust. Parents who forced daughters-like Kate in TSh-inio marriage behaved like bawds. Women were thereby reduced to property. “Lear, like Richard II, is one of the few men to enter the experience of woman and discover his own nullity … once he is separated from his property” (125). Adultery and whoredom ravaged and so divided marriages. Claudius characterizes his guilt, for example, as whorish.

Chapter Three, “Gods and Devils,” concentrates on idolatry and satire which humanists regarded as “complementary” and equally damnable since they denied women’s individuality and their status as “rational creatures.” The “male cult of idolatry” was associated with court artifice and often concealed “contempt for women” (149). Such idolatry sprung from pagan rights and, as Navarre in LLL proves, Catholic ritual. Through Bertram Shakespeare condemns the courtly pursuit of lust under the guise of the religion of love, an attack sanctioned by middle-class Puritans. Bred at court, Rosalind can see through court folly. Shakespeare, “more than any of his fellow playwrights,” wanted to “dissolve the artificial distinction between the sexes” (153) which idolatry established. More objective than men, women in the comedies are detached observers of men’s idolatrous folly; “women reach out to the world of the audience while men are contained in the play” (156). Shakespeare does encourage “mutual idolatry” to promote harmony in nature and love whereas male idolatry is based on preconceptions of women. The Ladies in LLL shatter the play world set in motion by their suitors’ idolatry. Shakespeare puts such idolatry clearly in the larger physical world, away from its “male sanctuary” (169), to show how unreasonable it is. Associated with the “physical world of birth and death” (170), women offer a life-long perspective.

The age-old tradition of satirizing women was popular in the Renaissance theatre, yet Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists “contrived to have it both ways-to reap the audience’s laughter at the satirist’s sallies against women without compromising their own position as defenders of women” (176). Though the satirist enjoyed “impunity” in poetry, dramatists exposed his lies by pointing out women’s virtues. Puritanism and the audience’s “alertness” helped Shakespeare to exploit the satirist himself. Associated with the court and viewed as debased by the middle-class Puritans, satire against women “perhaps more than anything else [was] a class symbol” (195). In the drama, “satire tells us more about the nature of the masculine serpent than about the nature of women” (183). Iago, Othello, Posthumus, and Iachimo create their own theatre “peopled” with illusions of “monstrous women” (184). In their fictions these characters see other men in themselves. Because Hamlet obliterates the real Ophelia his “satire initiates tragedy” (190). In Ado, Claudio “cures both Beatrice and Benedick of their taste for acting” by satirizing Hero. Women like Isabella in MM “disarmed their detractors” by agreeing to their sex’s faults and in the process found new freedoms.

Chapter Four on “Femininity and Masculinity” contains sections on “Women and Education”; “Disguise and the Boy Actor”; and “Politics and Violence.”

St. Thomas More and other Humanists argued that since women had the same capacity and spiritual equality as men, they should be educated with no fear that they would become masculine through such education. “The prominence of educated women in Elizabethan and Jacobean society made the Elizabethans sensitive to the whole area of masculinity and femininity … “(212). Forced to be silent, women could not historically engage in disputation, the “medium of instruction” (214). But Shakespeare did not believe that “silence is natural to women” or that “femininity requires silence” (245). Only Virgilia in Cor “conforms to the masculine ideal of feminine silence” (214). Cordelia’s silence links her to Kent and contrasts with the masculine “ferocity” of her speaking sisters. To see how they are reflected in men’s eyes, women “momentarily become men” when they see other women (218), as Gertrude does assessing the Player Queen. Yet Hermione’s “orator’s subtlety” joined with her femininity shows that in WT Shakespeare believes that “conventions of femininity have no relevance in the tribunal of right and wrong” (220). In H8, Katherine through her silence “defies” the male world and “outwits her accusers.” Eloquence in women always breeds male animosity, and eloquent women such as Portia or Isabella must plead in a “hostile” environment. Their speech is always “coloured by their sex” (224). The eloquent and educated Elizabeth had a tremendous influence on the views of women. Wit and intelligence level gender distinctions, “making Beatrice more akin to Mercutio than to Ophelia” (229).

A moralist like Philip Stubbes inveighed against actors playing women and women wearing breeches since a woman in man’s clothes threatened “to usurp his authority” and “to annex his na...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Annotated Bibliography of Scholarship
• Author Index
• Play/Poem Index
• Subject Index