'That woman is a woman!' So thundered Simon Callow in the film Shakespeare in Love, thus underlining one of the great differences between our theatre and that of the Elizabethans where women were prohibited from appearing on the stage. In this highly controversial book, the first on the subject for over sixty years, Joy Leslie Gibson looks at the female roles in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama from the point of view of the boys who actually had to create these fascinating and dramatic parts. Scrupulously researched, this groundbreaking book sheds new light not only on Elizabethan drama but also on society as a whole. It will be required reading for any lover of Shakespeare or anyone made curious by a visit to the theatre to see one of Shakespeare's plays.
Shakespeare and the Nature of Women was the first full-length feminist analysis of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, ushering in a new era in research and criticism. Its arguments for the feminism both of the drama and the early modern period caused instant controversy, which still engrosses scholars. Dusinberre argues that Puritan teaching on sexuality and spiritual equality raises questions about women which feed into the drama, where the role of women in relation to authority structures is constantly renegotiated. Using a critical language which predates Foucault and other major theorists, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women argues that Renaissance drama highlights ways in which the feminine and the masculine are socially constructed. The presence of the boy actor on stage created an awareness of gender as performance, now crucial to contemporary feminist thought. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women claimed for women a right to speak about the literary text from their own place in history and culture. The author's Preface to the second edition traces contemporary developments in feminist scholarship, which still wrestles with the book's main thesis: Renaissance feminism, feminist Shakespeare.
Was there such a thing as a modern notion of race in the English Renaissance, and, if so, was skin color its necessary marker? In fact, early modern texts described human beings of various national origins—including English—as turning white, brown, tawny, black, green, or red for any number of reasons, from the effects of the sun's rays or imbalance of the bodily humors to sexual desire or the application of makeup. It is in this cultural environment that the seventeenth-century London Gazette used the term "black" to describe both dark-skinned African runaways and dark-haired Britons, such as Scots, who are now unquestioningly conceived of as "white." In Shades of Difference, Sujata Iyengar explores the cultural mythologies of skin color in a period during which colonial expansion and the slave trade introduced Britons to more dark-skinned persons than at any other time in their history. Looking to texts as divergent as sixteenth-century Elizabethan erotic verse, seventeenth-century lyrics, and Restoration prose romances, Iyengar considers the construction of race during the early modern period without oversimplifying the emergence of race as a color-coded classification or a black/white opposition. Rather, "race," embodiment, and skin color are examined in their multiple contexts—historical, geographical, and literary. Iyengar engages works that have not previously been incorporated into discussions of the formation of race, such as Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis." By rethinking the emerging early modern connections between the notions of race, skin color, and gender, Shades of Difference furthers an ongoing discussion with originality and impeccable scholarship.
Are Shakespeare's plays dramatizations of patriarchy or representations of assertive and eloquent women? Or are they sometimes both? And is it relevant, and if so how, that his women were first played by boys? This book shows how many kinds of feminist theory help analyze the dynamics of Shakespeare's plays. Both feminist theory and the plays deal with issues such as likeness and difference between the sexes, the complexity of relationships between women, the liberating possibilities of desire, what marriage means and how much women can remake it, how women can use and expand their culture's ideas of motherhood and of women's work, and how women can have power through language. This lively exploration of these and related issues is an ideal introduction to the field of feminist readings of Shakespeare.
