Shakespeare's Representation of Women | Joyce H. Sexton (essay date 1978)
Joyce H. Sexton (essay date 1978)
SOURCE: "'Slander's Venom'd Spear': The Tradition," in The Slandered Woman in Shakespeare, English Literary Studies, 1978, pp. 11-38.
[In the following excerpt, Sexton discusses Shakespeare's theme of the slandered woman in Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale.]
About mid-way through his career as a dramatist, in 1598 or 1599, Shakespeare took up the theme of the slandered woman. From a familiar story (one he could have found in Ariosto, Bandello, and Spenser, among others) of a bride falsely accused by a rejected suitor, he created the main plot of Much Ado about Nothing. But Hero, Claudio, and Don John, as it turned out, were just a beginning. In some five years Shakespeare returned to the theme, this time transmuting a "true" tale (from Cinthio's Hecatommithi) of disappointed passion, vengeful slander, and violent murder—a simple, crude...
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