Shakespeare and Gender

Sex and Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Drama

Kate Aughterson, Ailsa Grant Ferguson

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781474289993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare and Gender guides students, educators, practitioners and researchers through the complexities of the representation of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare's work. Informed by contemporary and early modern debates and insights into gender and sexuality, including intersectionality, feminist geography, queer and performance studies and fourth-wave feminism, this book provides a lucid and lively discussion of how gender and sexual identity are debated, contested and displayed in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. Using close textual analysis hand-in- hand with diverse contextual materials, the book offers an accessible and intelligent introduction to how gender debates are integral to the plays and poems, and why we continue to read and perform them with this in mind. Topics and themes discussed include gendering madness, paternity and the patriarchy, sexuality, anxious masculinity, maternal bodies, gender transgression, and kingship and the male body politic.

CHAPTER 1

THE WOMAN’S VOICE

Key Text: Much Ado About Nothing with The Winter’s Tale

J.K. Rowling, the most commercially successful female author of our times, identifies the double bind of women speaking in the public sphere: ‘every woman I know who has dared express an opinion publically has endured … abuse at least once, rooted in an apparent determination to humiliate or intimidate her on the basis that she is female’.¹ As public and private speech is increasingly blurred by online communication, female voices have both greater access to the public ear and greater exposure to censure. It is timely, then, to explore what Shakespeare’s women tell us about how the female voice functioned in their early modern context and in production today. This chapter holds a lens over one character, Much Ado About Nothing’s Beatrice, to explore both contextual and theatrical expectations of women and the power wielded by speech and voice on the early modern stage.

From her first appearance in the opening scene of the play Beatrice demonstrates a female voice resounding outside of archetypal expectations, both disrupting and flouting them. Fatherless, brotherless and unmarried, Beatrice is freer of patriarchal control than her peers and deeply reluctant to be forced into constraint via marriage. It is her verbal proficiency and unchecked loquacity that allows her to transgress hierarchical structures within Much Ado About Nothing’s play world. As Gina Bloom writes, ‘female characters who embrace, instead of attempting to overcome, their unpredictable vocal flows are able to elude patriarchal regulation’ (2007: 11). Beatrice’s only patriarch, her uncle, Leonato, gives mere lip service to controlling his niece, yet exhibits an unyielding attitude towards his own daughter, Hero, later in the play, wishing her rather dead than dishonoured (4.1.116–17). Beatrice’s apparently unchecked freedom of speech, often in public, provides us with a fascinating model of female verbosity from an age when many texts have it that the unequivocal ideal of womanhood was located in silent acquiescence.

We meet Beatrice very early in Much Ado, when she speaks, both publicly and critically, of a man of power and influence, Benedick. The play’s opening conversation is between men, Leonato and a messenger, discussing the victorious outcome of a military campaign. This constitutes a conventional inaugural scene, functioning to establish the context and characters for the play. However, Beatrice interrupts – and disrupts – this patriarchal convention. Shakespeare inserts a female voice into his standard opening and, specifically, one that questions the masculine narrative. Beatrice interjects with ridicule, not only of Benedick himself (whom we are yet to meet) but, more broadly, of the male spheres of public discourse and military knowledge. Specifically, she exposes to mockery the masculine language of prowess in battle and male camaraderie, the effect of her humour heightened by the deadpan messenger:

LEONATO

What is he that you ask for, niece?

HERO

My cousin means Signior Benedick of Padua.

MESSENGER

O, he’s returned; and as pleasant as ever he was.

BEATRICE

He set up his bills here in Messina and

challenged Cupid at the flight; and my uncle’s fool,

reading the challenge, subscribed for Cupid, and challenged

him at the bird-bolt. I pray you, how many

hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many

hath he killed? For indeed I promised to eat all of his

killing.

LEONATO

Faith, niece, you tax Signor Benedick too

much; but he’ll be meet with you, I doubt it not.

MESSENGER

He hath done good service, lady, in these wars.

BEATRICE

You had musty victual, and he hath holp to

eat it: he is a very valiant trencherman; he hath an

excellent stomach.

MESSENGER

And a good soldier too, lady.

BEATRICE

And a good soldier to a lady: but what is he

to a lord?

MESSENGER

A lord to a lord, a man to a man; stuffed with

all honourable virtues.

BEATRICE

It is so, indeed; he is no less than a stuffed man:

but for the stuffing, – well, we are all mortal.

(1.1.30–56)

Beatrice’s raillery attacks Benedick’s masculinity in line with archetypal standards. First, she challenges his martial ability (39–42), undermining his reputation as a ‘good soldier’, re-asserting, instead, her own confident challenge to his status. The messenger’s apparent confusion and obliviousness to Beatrice’s wordplay places her at the advantage at every point in this conversation with a man. She becomes more daring in her assassination of Benedick’s masculinity when she hints at a lack of sexual prowess, in the double entendre of ‘but for the stuffing, – well, we are all mortal’ (55–6). On the surface this serves as a basic truism of mortality but the comment also heavily implies the ‘stuffing’ (a common sexual euphemism) is under par, via the elliptic aphorism ‘well, we are all mortal’ replacing a more brazen attack.

So how can we read Beatrice’s bold voice in the play in the context of the silent female archetype of the early modern period? The ideal of a chaste, silent, obedient woman permeates many writings of the early modern period and is widely explored in scholarship of women’s representation in the drama and literature of the time. Poetic expressions of female perfection idealize chastity of body and of speech: in effect, the less speech the better. Sidney’s blazon, ‘What Tongue Can Her Perfections Tell?’ (1590), for instance, effects an exhaustive geographical exploration of the female body as object of male gaze and desire. The ‘perfections’ do not, however, include movement or sound and the effect is the presentation of a feminine perfection predicated in stillness and silence. Indeed, the subject’s silence, or at least a sort of chaste taciturnity, is clearly a great virtue – or rather, a positive attraction:

But who those ruddy lips can miss,

Which blessed still themselves do kiss?

Rubies, cherries, and roses new,

In worth, in taste, in perfect hue,

Which never part but that they show

Of precious pearl the double row,

The second sweetly-fenced ward

Her heav’nly-dewed tongue to guard,

Whence never word in vain did flow.

Sidney eulogizes silence, or at least the bare minimum of speech among the ‘perfections’. The visceral eroticism of Sidney’s description of the subject’s ‘ruddy lips’ contrasts immediately with the chastity to be found within her mouth, both figuratively and literally. Her ‘precious pearl’ teeth act as pure white jailers to her tongue, which never moves ‘in vain’. While we may read here a simple praise of the discernment of the woman’s speech, the language of restraint and imprisonment (‘ward’, ‘guard’) cannot be ignored. Such literary presentations of the desirability of self-enforced female silence and the more forthright instruction that women must stay quiet and avoid public speech (see Resource 1.a) contextualize Beatrice’s verbosity and Shakespeare’s response to these ideals.

Shakespeare’s mockery of the blazon tradition itself and the standards of female perfection it peddles, can be found scattered across several texts. In Twelfth Night, for instance, Olivia expresses her exasperation at the constant pestering praise sent by Count Orsino by providing ‘divers schedules of my beauty: it shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labelled to my will: as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth’ (1.5.236–40). Olivia’s ‘inventory’ though, will not be set out by a man’s pen: it will be ‘labelled to my will’, reclaiming ownership of her own body and voice. Most famously and openly, however, the blazon convention is mocked in Sonnet 130, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun …’, in which Shakespeare takes a clear swipe not only at the absurdity and literary limitations of the convention, but in the very standards of beauty and attraction it expounds, notably female silence (‘I love to hear her speak …’; see Introduction). In Much Ado About Nothing, it is Beatrice who, in a festive moment of reversal, is identified as the female creator, not the female subject of a blazon, when she employs comic conceit and witty punning to describe sulky young Claudio as ‘civil as an orange, and something of that jealous complexion’. ‘I’faith Lady,’ replies the prince, ‘I think your blazon to be true’ (2.1.270–2). In Beatrice, the witty, speaking woman, not the ‘guard[ed]’ tongue of chaste silence, is presented as desirable.

When Beatrice first encounters her adversary, Benedick, it is to pick up what has already been framed as an ongoing battle of words and wits that has begun long before the action of the play:

BEATRICE

I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior

Benedick: nobody marks you.

BENEDICK

What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet

living?

BEATRICE

Is it possible disdain should die, while she

hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?

Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in

her presence.

BENEDICK

Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain

I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted: and I would

I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for,

truly, I love none.

BEATRICE

A dear happiness to women: they would else

have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank

God and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that:

I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man

swear he loves me.

BENEDICK

God keep your ladyship still in that mind!

so some gentleman or other shall ’scape a predestinate

scratched face.

BEATRICE

Scratching could not make it worse, an ’twere

such a face as yours were.

BENEDICK

Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.

BEATRICE

A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of

yours.

BENEDICK

I would my horse had the speed of your

tongue, and so good a continuer. But keep your way,

o’ God’s name; I have done.

BEATRICE

You always end with a jade’s trick: I know you

of old.

(1.1.110–39)

Beatrice’s first remark to Benedick is to suggest he talks without audience, that his speech is inconsequential to his male companions: ‘nobody marks you’. Her first attack, therefore, is both on his speech and his status among men. Rhetorical skills, as well as physical vocal control, were important tools in establishing men’s authority and position, as Gina Bloom writes:

Whereas early modern women and children were discouraged and even barred from certain forms of vocal expression, men were often coached from an early age in the skill of oratory in an effort to prepare them to speak effectively.

(Bloom, 2007: 9)

The evenness of the verbal and vocal battle between Beatrice and Benedick, then, and her suggestion that his fellow men do not attend to his speech, undermines his accomplishment and power as a man among me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Woman’s Voice
• 2 The Male Body, Kingship and the Body Politic
• 3 Testing the Marriage Plot: Form, Violence and Gender
• 4 Cross-Dressing and Gender Transgression(s)
• 5 Gendering Madness
• 6 Paternity and Patriarchy
• 7 Sexual Excess: Space, Sex and Gender
• 8 Anxious Masculinity
• 9 Maternal Bodies: Female Powers
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint