FEMINISM AND SHAKESPEARE

In 1975 Juliet Dusinberre wrote Shakespeare and the Nature of Women , a pioneering book on Shakespeare’s
attitude to women, their social role during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods and its impact on the stage.
In Dusinberre’s view, during Shakespeare’s time there was a positive change of attitude to women largely
ignored by scholars. Such a change was initially induced by humanist and Puritan doctrines. First of all,
Dusinberre points out the humanist belief in the intellectual equality of women. However, though Dusinberre
asserts that this situation was reduced to aristocratic women and did not have a general impact in society as a
whole, she considers that the image of one of those women, Queen Elizabeth I, “strengthened the convictions
of some Humanists about women’s capacity for public life” and she considers her political and public role as “a
spur to feminism because her position forces men to ask questions about the relation between feminism and
power”.

Dusinberre considers that Shakespeare and his contemporaries supported Puritan ideas about marriage,
opposed the stereotyped images of women, and proclaimed the new concept of woman as an individual and
not just as a subordinate to man. Dusinberre admits that ideas about the stereotyped and biased image of
women were frequently referred to in the plays in order to be “criticised, ridiculed and discredited in the
dramatic actions witnessed by the theatre audience” and in order to emphasise the “artificial construction of a
creature called ‘woman’”. By following new historicist concepts, in the Preface she refers to the relationship
between subversion and containment on the stage and concludes that drama questioned the cultural codes of
the time and destabilised its patriarchal structure.

Dusinberre explains in what ways the new theatrical conditions at the time helped to transmit a new image of
woman. Acting companies and playwrights did not depend on patronage anymore since they were financed by
their own takings in the theatre. The debate about the position of women was one of the central issues at the
time and it would call the attention of a large male, and also female, audience to put it on stage.In the preface
she also points out the fact that feminism not only recuperates female-authored texts that were never
considered canonical or valuable, but also makes a distinction between those women who read female-
authored texts, what the American feminist Elaine Showalter calls “gyno-critics”, and women who try to find
new meanings, from a female perspective, in male authored texts, what Showalter calls “revision”.
Consequently, the feminist readings of Shakespeare´s plays, the revisions of his literary production, have,
according to Dusinberre, “enriched our understanding of the agency of Shakespeare’s plays in transforming
culture.”

The Woman’s Part. Feminism Criticism of Shakespeare, edited by Lenz, Greene and Neely in 1980, is
considered a revealing anthology about feminist criticism on Shakespeare at the time. Its introduction points
out the feminist concern with “understanding the parts women have played, do play, and might play in
literature as well as in culture”. The volume aspires to reach four targets. First of all, authors attempt to
“liberate Shakespeare’s women from the stereotypes to which they have often been confined”. Second, they
analyse female bonding in the plays, what they call “a kind of female subculture apart from the man’s world”
present and traditionally ignored in these texts. Third, they examine the traits and results of patriarchal
structures in Shakespeare’s texts and share Marxist maxims by analysing the relationship between women’s
oppression and their social and economic environment. Finally, they consider that in the comedies women
appear as more powerful, sometime through the use of disguise. In the tragedies they appear as more
restrained, submissive and usually absent from the social order restored at the end.
The anthology presents contributions by feminist critics that come from different critical traditions. First of all,
those who centre on the historical contexts; second, those who emphasise the sources and analogues; and
third, the ones that applied psychoanalytic views to the analysis of the plays. Feminist historians in the volume
challenge and deny Dusinberre’s conviction that women attained more freedom and authority during
Shakespeare’s time and also the idea that drama was feminist in sympathy. They also oppose her idea that the
image of Queen Elizabeth’s power must have been a great influence in the attitudes to women in general at
the time. Additionally, the contributions based on a historical analysis of the plays insist on the debatable
relationship between life and art, an issue widely developed by Linda Woodbridge. The essays that study the
literary context of the plays observe that, by comparing them with their sources, they could detect meaningful
elements that Shakespeare added in his description of women and they even bring light to the fact that “some
female characters are humanized beyond the limits of the conventions from which they spring”. Finally,
feminist critics that use psychoanalytic tools in their literary analysis develop the theme of male ambivalence
toward female sexuality and male fear of female power and of male feminisation and powerlessness. Finally,
the studies in the anthology also take into account the fact that Shakespeare’s texts do not automatically echo
Renaissance ideas about women. On the contrary, they see the texts sometimes as reflections on and
sometimes as critiques on such values. The question of the relationship between Shakespeare and his time,
between the author and the ideas that he puts into his plays and about whether these texts portray
Shakespeare as “a feminist, a sexist, or something in between” is also implicit in this anthology.

Lisa Jardine (Still Harping on Daughters: Woman and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare) classifies feminist lines
of approach to Shakespearean drama in two groups that she defines as the “perfectly reflecting glass” school
and the “distorted masculine view” school. The first group considers that Shakespeare’s literary value lies in
the fact that he is able to “project on stage a spectrum of female qualities which reflected the burgeoning
emancipation of the wives of the London bourgeoisie”. According to the first group, within which Dusinberre is
included, Shakespeare presents an autonomous woman while he is able to transcend the values of the
patriarchal structures around him. The second group’s position opposes the ideas of the first one by
considering that Renaissance chauvinism is alive in Shakespeare’s plays since “Shakespeare’s maleness
*therefore+ makes it inevitable that his female characters are warped and distorted”.

Jardine finds two different lines within this second approach that she defines as the “aggressive” and the
“non-aggressive” ones. The aggressive line, led by critics such as Coppélia Kahn and Marilyn French, aims to
lay open Shakespeare’s sexist prejudices and denies that “Shakespeare any longer deserves the place he
occupies at the centre of English literary studies”. The “non-aggressive” line, illustrated by Jardine with essays
published in The Woman’s Part, propounds that Shakespeare tried to faithfully reflect reality, however,
“contemporary society’s limited understanding of women combined with his own male viewpoint have
skewed the resulting picture”.To Jardine, Shakespeare’s plays do not function as mirrors of reality or as the
articulation of the different ideas about women at the time. Instead, she analyses certain cultural issues during
Shakespeare’s age which “provide useful perspectives on the treatment of women in the drama”. Such cultural
issues deal with cross-dressing and the boy actor, humanist education, Protestant ideas about marriage,
changes in inheritance laws, the relationship between female language and the male fear of female sexuality,
and finally the social connotations of having Elizabeth I as a ruler. Jardine’s interpretations of the Renaissance
attitude to women are radically opposed to Dusinberre’s conclusions. Not only does she reject the idea that
attitudes to women did not change, she also argues that they may “have become somewhat hardened as
individual women challenged traditional roles”.
Linda Woodbridge rejects the idea of feminist critics like Dusinberre that thought to have found the origins of
Modern English and North American feminism in the English Renaissance. According to Woodbridge, the
literature of the period emphasises the differences between women and men and do not proclaim the
intellectual, emotional and moral equality of the sexes that constitute the main concern of feminism. While
she acknowledges that social historians have considered Renaissance texts dealing with women as reflections
of the real world, Woodbridge considers that the debate, or what she calls “the formal controversy”, is just
part of a literary game and does not reproduce the actual attitudes of women at the time. She is concerned
with the extent to which the image of women in canonical texts by playwrights like Shakespeare may reflect
such contemporary reality. For example, she centres part of her study on Shakespeare’s crossed-dressed
heroine. She opposes Dusinberre’s idea that the disguise helped the author to ponder about the nature of
femininity and masculinity in positive terms. According to Woodbridge, “transvestite disguise in Shakespeare
does not blur the distinction between the sexes but heightens it”.

Valerie Wayne points out how collaboration between feminists, new historicists and cultural materialists can
benefit feminist criticism. Much more can be written and said about the relation between Shakespeare’s texts
and Renaissance discourses on marriage, medicine and theology. However, she criticises new historicism for its
apolitical and recuperative effects and traditional feminist approaches for “their tendencies to idealise or
essentialise women. Wayne opposes the new historicist idea that subversion is always contained for the
benefit of the dominant forces. On the contrary, Wayne sees political resistance as a necessary element for
social change and views feminism as a political movement that upholds such transformations. She analyses
plays by Shakespeare as Twelfth Night , The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, King Lear, Titus Andronicus and
Othello from a materialist feminist perspective. They deal with issues such as “money and women’s work, rape
in English law and drama, prosecutions for sexual crimes and slander, [on] the circulation of homoerotic
desire, the disarticulation between oppressions of class and gender, changes brought about by the material
conventions of theatre attendance, and rhetorical practices in this profession”. Her book The Matter of
Difference is divided into three sections. The first is devoted to Shakespearean Comedy, the second to
Shakespearean tragedy and the last one to the English Renaissance culture. The first two chapters question the
genre division already observed in The Woman’s Part in the sense that they do not view “the comedies as
providing a haven of possibilities for women, and the tragedies as summarily confining, condemning and killing
them”. Both tragedy and comedy are presented as sharing many elements and as having a close relationship
with cultural practices. One of the main purposes of her book is to relate material conditions of life during the
Renaissance, configured by gender, race, class and erotic practice not only to literary texts but also to the
present times. Wayne is conscious that “producing history is not an apolitical activity” and that our sex, our
social class, our race, our historical moment, our geographical location and our political and social
circumstances affect the way we rewrite the past from our present.

Penny Gay published As She Likes It. Shakespeare’s Unruly Women. This volume centres on Shakespearean
comedy and, more specifically, on the way unruly women in such plays have been performed on stage over
that last half century. Gay focuses her attention on Twelfth Night, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About
Nothing, As You Like It and Measure for Measure. She analyses the representation of gender in the plays and
on stage and deals with the implications of the relationship between theatre as a male-dominated sphere and
the female-oriented performances.
Deborah Barker and Ivo Kamps edited Shakespeare and Gender. A History. This book, that aims to be for
“classroom use”, shows the development of feminist criticism since the late 1970s.

Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether edited another volume of essays entitled Shakespearean
Tragedy and Gender. The volume presents a feminist interrogation of the Aristotelian definition of tragedy in
which the female voice is silenced and the characterization of the hero is fully developed from his fatal error to
his final decline.

Coppélia Kahn published Roman Shakespeare. Warriors, Wounds and Women. She analyses The Rape of
Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus and Cymbeline and, more
specifically, she centres on female Roman characters. Kahn points out that Shakespeare’s Roman plays
question “the ideology of gender on which the Renaissance understanding of Rome was based”. Traditional
criticism has considered that Shakespeare’s Roman plays have unconsciously represented Romanness as an
image of maleness. Kahn considers that Shakespeare was aware of the relationship between masculinity and
Romannes and by dramatising this bond, he “demystified its power”. In order to develop her argument she
thoroughly analyses the image of the wound as central in the process of gender construction in the plays and
concludes that “poised, as it were, between warriors (men locked in agonistic structures of rivalry) and
women, the wound in these texts is always a site of anxiety and indeterminacy; a point at which it is possible
to identify an ideology of gender difference in process”.

Jane E. Howard and Phyllis Racking published Engendering a Nation. A feminist Account of Shakespeare’s
English Histories. The authors respond to the lack of feminist studies on Shakespeare’s History plays. The
history plays represent traditional gender relations and a clear distinction between the public, male and
aggressive domain and the enclosed, female and private sphere. These authors aim to analyse these plays
from a more profound perspective in order to detect “stories about gender; that is about how masculinity and
femininity differ and about the ways those differences are to be linked to specific social arrangements
involving work, marriage, citizenship, and cultural power”.

The various essays in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (2000) edited by Dympna Callaghan, show us
elements such as textual editing, language, social economies, race and colonialism, sexuality and religion from
a feminist perspective.