Gender Identity | Barbara J. Bono (essay date 1986)
Barbara J. Bono (essay date 1986)
SOURCE: "Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare's As You Like It" in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, edited by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 189-212.
[In the following essay, Bono offers a feminist analysis of As You Like It and contends that the play "represent(s) both the masculine struggle for identity and a female 'double-voiced' discourse"—the latter implying that the feminine simultaneously adopts and derides the conventions of a dominant male culture.]
Does Shakespeare's preoccupation, especially in the comedies, with strong female characters and an underlying complex of "feminine" concerns—sexuality and familial and domestic life—provide evidence for what Juliet Dusinberre calls a "feminism of Shakespeare's time"?1 Or does the same evidence indicate male projections of what women must be, what...
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