feminist criticism
feminist criticism.Women's critical engagements with Shakespeare date from Margaret Cavendish's discussion of his plays in her Sociable Letters (1664), and have taken many forms, embracing fiction and performance as well as literary scholarship and criticism. Such engagements have often been motivated by a desire to defend or praise Shakespeare's female characters which can be described as broadly feminist. When a feminist perspective on Shakespeare began to emerge within academic literary criticism in the 1970s, it was initially informed by a similar approach. This was counterbalanced, though, by a more challenging critique of Shakespearian constructions of femininity, which argued that by underwriting certain versions of womanhood with the power of the bard, they had a pernicious cultural effect. In subsequent decades, feminist Shakespeare criticism has flourished and diversified. Committed to making connections between the critic's cultural moment...
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