Shakespeare's Representation of Women | Phyllis Rackin (essay date 1993)
Phyllis Rackin (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Historical Difference/Sexual Difference," in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England: Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, Vol. XXIII, 1993, pp. 37-63.
[In the following excerpt, Rackin probes the role of gendered spaces and languages in Shakespeare's history plays.]
The first wave of twentieth-century feminist Shakespeare criticism focused on the comedies, especially the ones with cross-dressed heroines, to theorize a theater in which female spectators could find liberating images of powerful, attractive women who violated gender restrictions and were rewarded for those violations with admiration, love, and marriage—a Utopian moment when gender identity was as changeable as the theatrical costumes that transformed boy actors into female characters. The romantic comedies were doubly satisfying to modern feminists, for at the same time that they empowered their female characters,...
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