Overview

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.

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9781472567062

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Reviews

Using close reading, social context, and some intriguing nuggets of performance history, Novy's book is as illuminating as it is readable. It is also rendered all the more urgent by her inclusion of current gender issues. * Times Literary Supplement *

In an age where locker room talk has become mainstream political discourse, these feminist books by female scholars are all the more urgent. They show us both where misogynistic discourse emerges from, and where we might go from there. * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Information

Marianne Novy is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, USA and has been teaching Shakespeare from a feminist perspective there since 1971.

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