Overview

This book examines the attempts of Shakespeare's male characters to fashion female identity in a way that ensures their own self-definition. In the patriarchal society of Renaissance England women played an important role in male self-definition. Since patriarchy was founded on the idea of male superiority, men fashioned women as weak. Medicine, which began to replace religion in the degree of influence, also helped towards that definition, ascribing to women an imperfect and unstable nature, which subjected them to male scrutiny and control. The anxiety of Shakespeare's male characters about female nature often makes them charge women with crimes they have not committed, an injustice which raises the necessity of female vindication and revaluation. However, the refashioning of the abused heroine at the end of the plays merely ascribes to her new (positive) stereotypes, which seem as unstable as the (negative) stereotypes with which she was previously identified.

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Focusing on female roles, [the author] insists that they cannot be confined within the categories and tropes designed to define and restrict their identities. (Prof. John Jowett University of Birmingham) ...an original approach to the much written about Shakespearean canon. (Prof. Elizabeth Sakellaridou Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

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