Appearance vs. Reality | Christy Desmet (essay date 1992)
Christy Desmet (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "'Who Is't Can Read a Woman?': Rhetoric and Gender in Venus and Adonis, Measure for Measure, and All's Well That Ends Well," in Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992, pp. 134-63, 196-203.
[In the excerpt that follows, Desmet examines Shakespeare's treatment of disguised female characters in Venus and Adonis, Measure for Measure, and All's Well That Ends Well. The editors have included only those footnotes that pertain to the excerpted portion of the essay.]
Encouraged to impersonate exotic female characters even while the bulk of their rhetorical training makes communication with women problematic, young Renaissance rhetors enjoy an ambivalent relationship with women as fictional speakers and characters.
In the rhetorical tradition as in controversy over the theater, woman is...
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