SOURCE: “The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or—Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or—The Politics of Politics,” Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter 1987, pp. 707-42.

[In the following essay, Boose traces the evolution of feminist criticism in Shakespeare studies from the mid-1970s to the present, particularly regarding the treatment of marriage, sex, and family. Boose also discusses the feminist debate over Shakespeare's own attitude toward patriarchy and the subordination of women.]

Within the conventions of Renaissance drama and within the protocol of the Tudor court, being a messenger was hazardous duty. Inevitably, it fell to the messenger to hazard the wrath of the powerful by delivering precisely the information that no one really wanted to hear. However, since I could find no way to survey the trends in Shakespearean scholarship on the family without stumbling right into the politics concurrently going on in the “family” of Shakespearean scholars, my analysis of Renaissance literary research on the family, marriage, and sex commits me, I fear, to the hazards of playing the messenger. My title beribbons itself with the de rigueur deconstructive chiasmus and that most trendy of opening entitlements, “The Politics of. …” It finally arrives, however, at what serves for both the title's ultimate deconstruction and the paper's ultimate subject: “The Politics of Politics.”

While an enormous amount of important work has clearly taken place in Renaissance literary fields outside Shakespeare and while the political trends I will be pointing to may even be applicable elsewhere, I have restricted my focus to this one single author because, quite simply, no author or text so unequivocally locates the site of preeminent value for English speaking cultures as does Shakespeare. Given the elevated place that Shakespeare occupies in American academia, the status of particular social issues within the field and scholarly disputes over them are never “merely academic” in scope, but inescapably political. In English Departments, the Shakespeare privilege is clearly spelled out: not only does Shakespeare virtually define the literary canon and the literature major, but “Shakespeareans” stand apart from such departmental categories as “Medievalists,” “Romanticists,” “Nineteenth-Century Americanists” (etc.); “Shakespeareans” are hired and entitled under the authoritative name of this one author inside an exclusive territory where the discipline's otherwise governing assumptions about historical location or literary milieu suddenly seem to evaporate. And yet, as those of us who parade under this entitlement also know, the sheer potency of the name that privileges us likewise precludes us from enjoying sole claim to it. Shakespeare's purported universality works somewhat like a universal legitimation—a kind of open market that makes everyone feel not just entitled but almost professionally compelled to lay claim to it. Of late, witness even Geoffrey Hartman, the dean of literary theory, entering the arena to pronounce the definitive Questions of Theory in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is a site of such competitive jostling because Shakespeare is a site of enormous cultural power. As such, he is not only a universally available but likewise a dangerously charged locale, where maneuvers for appropriation, displacement, erasure, and the institutionalization of both cultural and academic privileges are invested with a particular energy that makes the politics within this field the more recognizable and, simultaneously, perhaps the more crucial to recognize.

In looking at any emerging scholarly trend, probably all critics in all disciplines need to be frequently reminded of the point that Terence Hawkes' witty narrations of Shakespeare and the academy unerringly bring home. And that is, that in what each generation of scholars writes, it is actually writing itself. Given Shakespeare's special status, Shakespearean scholarship effectively constitutes the equivalent of a cultural Rorschach inscribing the issues, the ideologies, the tensions, and the terms of debate that define the preoccupying investments for any given historical moment, including our own. That late nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth century critics—who were themselves either fathered within the elite bastions of British academia or anxious to prove their heritage within that tradition—should have located the “meaning of Shakespeare” within all the orthodoxies of “right reason” and “natural” hierarchy that affirmed their own threatened sense of social control is perhaps no more random a fact than is the intense interest our own era has suddenly taken in the family and the sex roles developed within it—subjects that, to earlier critics, seemed so apparently unproblematic as not to require much attention, let alone examination. But in both the contemporary Renaissance literary scholarship that privileges the Shakespeare text and in that which gives priority to non-literary, historically-specific ones external to it, the dominant interest these days is in deconstructing, demystifying, and, I would also have to argue, through maneuvers which may even imagine themselves as “disinterested,” perhaps tacitly re-constructing and re-mystifying both the structure and the internal mechanisms of the hierarchical paradigm that we in the twentieth century inherited from the Renaissance: the patriarchal nuclear family.

In North America, this newly urgent academic discourse on family and sex is taking place within the political context of two external, social phenomena with which it is inextricably bound: the American Women's Movement and its struggle for national legitimation, and, simultaneously, the emergence of a politically neo-conservative, at times nearly hysterical national propaganda that disguises protecting the status quo under “Saving The Family” and stakes the nation's survival on essentializing traditional family arrangements as the final bulwark of universal morality. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the new wave of Marxist scholars who come not from Oxford and Cambridge but from Sussex University have launched an influential British front to redefine and denounce Shakespeare as the chief cultural patriarch of Britain's imperialist heritage; and the investments of these new wave Brits in promulgating a class conscious cultural materialism—a Marxism updated via the influence of Raymond Williams—seem as historically specific and as distinctively “British” as do the less consciously ideological agendas of their distinctively “American” counterparts.

Although marriage, sex, and family have emerged as a topic of special interest not just in literature but in all Renaissance disciplines, the investigation in literature has been both significantly complicated and likewise energized by the fact that, concurrently, established modes for the whole discipline of literary theory have been undergoing upheaval and radical reshaping in response to the recent arrival of new, European methodologies. In literary studies, what was challenged by this new body of post-structuralist theory was the overtly apolitical, though inherently (if blandly) conservative, practice of “New Criticism”—the formalist model of discovering “meaning” by close textual reading that still largely dictates how literature is taught in American academia. Although the poststructuralist theories were relatively late in penetrating the phalanx of deification surrounding Shakespeare, they have, of late, begun to assert their claims.¹ Furthermore, it might be argued that this methodological contestation is being waged in English Renaissance studies as a much more insistently politicized debate than in other literary fields where it is likewise going on—a trend I would attribute both to the weightier claims at stake in possession of Shakespeare and the greater investment of British critics in this field. From a look at the most recently emerging trends, it is my feeling that the debate over methodology—and, by direct implication, ideology—is shaping up to take place precisely within the terrain which this year's RSA plenary session decided to survey: sex, family, and marriage. Perhaps all subject matter, no matter how historically remote, is inherently “political” to the age that exhumes it; certainly for these three interrelated subjects, each dimension of the contemporary scholarly debate—what subjects it includes, the terms in which it is waged, the investments of its participants, and what status the debate is given within the institution—is unavoidably so. So while the stakes in Shakespearean scholarship have always been high, it seems accurate to say that over no terrain have the stakes been higher and at no time have they been as self conscious of themselves as being claims for participation in—or exclusive retention of—this all important, powerfully political site called William Shakespeare.

.....

To say that one does “research on the family in Shakespeare” sounds innocuously domestic. To appreciate the actually radical nature of what this scholarship has produced during the past ten years, it helps to measure the work against the traditions it has challenged and the implicit sinecures it has threatened. I therefore begin by thumbing back to the category for family that most of us remember as the transmitted wisdom of graduate school. Until roughly ten years ago, “the family” was still contained by the definition of its proper place that critics like E. M. W. Tillyard had, years earlier, extrapolated unquestioned from the hierarchical discourses of the Elizabethan state and promulgated as truths that were unproblematic because still firmly in evidence, hence “natural.” As the subsumed lesser term of the old “Macrocosm-Microcosm” paradigm, the family was seldom placed into analytical focus and never approached as a construction to be queried. Perhaps because the process of mystification depends upon a certain kind of cultural amblyopia that is oblivious to its own partial sightedness, so long as the chief beneficiaries of any social institution remain the only eyes within it they will automatically imagine its mechanisms as organic, not political. When processes are seen as organic, there are no processes to deconstruct. And thus, although other of Tillyard's suppositions about the operation of Elizabethan order in the macrocosm (which was presumed to be the only political sphere) had been subjected to skeptical revision years before, those about marriage and the family (presumedly non-political) remained pristinely intact, implicitly protected by yet unquestioned assumptions that marriage, family, and sex were “natural” features of society, be it Shakespeare's or our own, not social institutions that had been culturally constructed and culturally reproduced along the ideological fault lines of arbitrary political privilege—privilege that was itself based upon what I shall now call “gender” rather than “sex.”

Until recently, the men who defined the scholarly establishment we were all trained within never imagined that terms of discourse were needed to separate cultural ideas about sexual identity (“gender”) from the register of biological differentiation (“sex”). But until such a discourse had emerged as a conceptual tool, until language had given us the concept of a “sex/gender system” (articulated in 1975 by anthropologist Gayle Rubin), marriage, family, and “sex” remained unquestioned givens, mystified and perpetuated into that status by the absence of a language for laying bare their construction. No scholar of the late twentieth century would probably have rationalized the hierarchical gendering of family roles by reference to the Renaissance argument about divinely ordained, “natural” male superiority. Nonetheless, the same system was still firmly in place some four hundred years later. The ideology of the father-headed, father-named nuclear family that had emerged in the 1500s as the discourse defining the family unit had changed but little because its distributions of power remained intact. The hierarchy that had earlier been justified by reference to Genesis was merely rationalized in a post-Darwinian world by a scientifically “natural” functionalism that preordained women—as Angelo states in Measure for Measure—to “put on the destined livery” and become mothers—mothers who acquired social acceptability for themselves and the legal entitlement of “legitimacy” for their children only by literally donning the “livery” of a husband/lord's name and becoming servants to the production of the patrilineal family.² Thus, until the implications of “biology as destiny” were examined in light of social gendering, Shakespeare's women characters and the family units that contained them dutifully played out their roles in Shakespearean criticism, the family constructions a given and the women's roles unquestioned, indeed elevated into dispute only when characters like Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra stepped outside their definitions by disrupting the proper macro-functioning of the political sphere of men.

It wasn’t that scholars of the “old historicist” school of textual appraisal failed to notice the misogyny that so indelibly marks both the literary and non-literary texts of the English Renaissance. It was that within the benignly Anglican bias of Shakespearean scholarship, such treatises, howsoever numerous, were regarded as a distasteful historical embarrassment, a disgrace to male chivalry, and best viewed as either the unfortunate residues of earlier patristic dogma or the aberrations of Puritan fanatics. As Linda Woodbridge's survey of the 1540-1620 literature on the nature of women points out, the “vast storehouse of Renaissance misogyny” was usually handled by Victorian and post-Victorian scholars either by scrupulous avoidance or relegation to footnotes and, until its resuscitation by feminist scholars, “prompted no more response from modern commentators than the raising of an eyebrow.”³ So long as misogyny was thus contained in the outer margins or dismissed into the footnotes of the Elizabethan cultural text and not imagined as a central discourse which itself constructed the sacrosanct enclosures of marriage and family, Shakespearean scholarship functioned as a tacit apologist and reproductive instrument for these social institutions, Elizabethan or contemporary. Marxist critics may have challenged the social organization of class and thus exposed the self-interested bias of much of the criticism that preceded them. But until quite recently, in Shakespearean scholarship the social organization of gender—and thus the constitution of the inherited family model—went unchallenged. All was well that ended well—and marriage and family so quintessentially defined scholars' own culturally constructed assumptions about social and personal happiness that, until as late as the 1970s, criticism seemed incapable of even noticing questions about those institutions—questions that post-’70s scholarship subsequently came to see as being themselves raised within such plays as Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well. Shakespearean criticism thus continued to operate exactly as the Elizabethan apologists for family order would have wanted it to until the mid 1970s, when suddenly its own order was disrupted. Noting the sudden phenomenon of an emerging trend for family research in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century historical studies, Christopher Hill comments on the shift in historical criticism that was actually occurring throughout Renaissance scholarship. Hill's observations, however, are couched in language so offhandedly dismissive in tone as nearly to undermine their own relevance. Reviewing Lawrence Stone's 1977 book on The Family, Sex, and Marriage, Hill remarks: “… the family as an institution rather suddenly became fashionable, perhaps as a by-product of the women's liberation movement.”⁴

To be more precise, the three related categories in focus today virtually invaded the Shakespeare institution and other Renaissance fields concurrently with the emergence of feminist criticism and feminist academicians. The two investigations—the one, feminist, and the other focused on marriage, family, and gender—announced themselves simultaneously as such “newly fashionable” fields through Shakespeare sessions at the 1976 Modern Language Association. Until recently, the two inquiries remained tied together, the work on marriage and family not only co-implicit with the feminist concern about gender but catapulted into the Shakespeare fortress by it and launched as a legitimate field of inquiry by the emergence of a vigorous first generation of feminist Shakespeareans. The North American pioneers in this field include scholars like Janet Adelman, Shirley Garner (who had previously published under the name “S. N. Garner,” thus doing what I, too, was advised in graduate school to do), Gayle Greene, Coppélia Kahn, Carol Thomas Neely, Marianne Novy, Clara Claiborne Park, Phyllis Rackin, Meredith Skura, Madelon Sprengnether [Gohlke], Carolyn Swift [Lenz], and Linda Woodbridge [Fitz].

The methodology that most of these feminist scholars brought with them was psychoanalytic,⁵ a perspective that American feminists revised by shifting focus away from Freud's phallocentric paradigm toward an inclusion of the maternal issues of gender formation enunciated by theorists like Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Nancy Chodorow, and Dorothy Dinnerstein. It was, in fact, precisely these new perspectives that revitalized psychoanalytic criticism and moved it from its disrepute of the early 1970s into the au courant status it came to enjoy in Shakespeare studies by the early 1980s. But by the mid-1980s, in the wake of the post-deconstructionist privilege accorded to historicity—to historical conditions governing the production of individuals, social units, and texts that is primary in Marxist and Foucaultian theory—it was this very reliance on the psychoanalytical approach that was faulted for grounding feminist analyses inside the text, inside of increasingly questioned notions about the construction of subjects and subjectivity, and inside of a criticism which, though it did incorporate historical discourse and was certainly not “ahistorical” (as has of late been charged), was nonetheless focused on relations within a family model that was implicitly based on—or tacitly accepted—Freud's essentialist presumption of the transhistorical nature of both the family unit and subject members within it. Since, as Judith Kegan Gardiner points out, “psychoanalysis purports to tell us what gender means—that is, how persons become psychologically ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine,’”⁶ feminism turned to psychoanalysis as a means of investigating the induction of gender; and psychoanalysis, in turn, led the inquiry back to the family. In Shakespeare studies, psychoanalytically-theorized feminism never really acquired the Lacanian perspective that has so strongly influenced contemporary French feminism, British film studies, and the work of important American scholars like Jane Gallop. Once having refurbished psychoanalytic usage with its missing maternal pole, the feminist scholars in Shakespeare were perhaps disinclined to return to “the Law of the Father” (Lacan). In Shakespeare studies, the fusion of feminist concerns and psychoanalytic work on the family was itself enabled by a supportive father-figure, the late C. L. Barber, whose influential body of work reached its final statement with Richard Wheeler's 1986 completion of their jointly authored book, The Whole Journey.

From the very beginning, Shakespearean feminism found itself forced to juggle the paradoxes of its own liminality. Feminism within American English Departments is, logically enough, centered in nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies where it has built its power base and insured its place in the literary institution by the focus it has brought to the works of women writers. If you think about it, even the term “Shakespearean feminism” is a kind of oxymoron. As fledgling feminist literary criticism began to try to theorize itself, it initially enunciated a shift toward a progressively gynocritical stance that denounced further use of feminist energies for even revisionist readings of the literary masters.⁷ But for feminist literary scholars whose intellectual interests, graduate degrees, and hardwon appointments were already invested in historical fields like the English Renaissance—periods which left few enough records of women's existence and even fewer in words that women themselves had written—the effect of such a stance was obviously isolating. And while scholars like Margaret Hannay, Mary Lamb, Margaret Ferguson, Ann Rosalind Jones, Josephine Roberts, Mary Beth Rose, and Nancy Vickers are at work recuperating the muted histories and forgotten texts of real women writers,⁸ representations of Elizabethan and Jacobean women's voices are, for the most part, to be found within male-authored fictions, especially the drama, and particularly Shakespeare's. For political as well as personal reasons, Renaissance feminist scholars felt it would be self-annihilating for feminist criticism to restrict itself to women writers and thereby relinquish claim to the predefined (and thus, by definition, male) literary canon. Where feminist Shakespeareans made good their tenacity is through the widely influential revisionist readings they initiated—modes of interpretation that made an immediate impact on Shakespeare teaching by asserting a co-gendered perspective at last appropriate to the co-educational classroom. Using the formalist mode of close reading, feminist interpretations saw new questions to ask and liberated new psycho-social significances from the Shakespeare texts.

Because the initially most compelling project for Renaissance feminist scholarship was to understand/account for the male misogyny that earlier critics had pushed to the background, feminist family studies such as Coppélia Kahn's and Janet Adelman's focused as much or more on the construction of masculine as feminine identity, particularly on the role played by the mother—either present or absent—in that formation. The strength of the feminist critique lay in the focus that it gave for the first time to the social production of gender, which it located inside the family. By enunciating what amounted to a new subject, these new voices in Shakespeare effectively opened up what we might call a new, scholarly mother-lode, on which site the first generation critics staked out the feminist claims for participation in literature's most treasured field. As the ensuing gold rush got underway and many wagons headed west, feminist assumptions might be defined by the idea of “self-interested generosity”: feminism politically wanted, welcomed, and actively encouraged the involvement of male scholars in this inquiry, for the assumption that the family was primarily a woman's territory was precisely the assumption that feminism as a political movement was fighting to change. Furthermore, since the bedrock of family construction was inseparable from its asymmetrical distribution of gender privilege, further family scholarship would, it was thought, logically produce greater awareness of these skewed distributions, which, once acknowledged, would implicitly compel materialist critics to reconsider the notion of social class and at last recognize gender as being itself a major class distinction hidden beneath but actually transecting the restrictedly masculine categories proposed by Marxist theory.⁹ Such, at least, were the optimistically imagined trajectories.

And indeed, amidst the near euphoria that surrounded Shakespearean research on gender, marriage, and family in the late 70s and early 80s, the inquiry seemed to promise not only the belated exhumation of Renaissance Woman into a contemporary dialogue that would at last include her, but a newly enfranchised space for latter day Renaissance Man—a space in which he might get beyond being merely soldier, scholar, and poet and dare to explore his entitlements as son, brother, father, and husband. Interest in the field burgeoned to such an extent that the research on these interrelated topics came rapidly to dominate the Shakespeare scholarly output. From a purely scholarly perspective, it might even be said that the subjects became too popular, for commercial and academic presses alike began publishing with less discrimination than enthusiasm, leaving an output as occasionally mixed in quality as it is extensive in quantity. As the subject gained preeminence, the feminists who had initiated it and whose names remain most prominently associated with it worked, I would say, to foster a context of non-competitive, cooperative sharing inside the discipline—a point that may reflect, in a fascinating way, a great deal not only about the social construction of gender but about the way such constructions implicitly affect the politics that derive from them.

Existing within a discipline that increasingly valorizes theory and scorns the idea of literary criticism as a pluralistic community of interpretive acts, feminist literary criticism—which is frequently defined as something more like an “approach” than a coherent and definable “theory”—repeatedly goes at buffets with itself over this issue. There are those who see defining an adequately theorized position as both essential for survival and a mark of maturity within the discipline. There are others, however, who view “theory” as aridly male and see the most fundamental definition of feminist criticism as radically inseparable from pluralistic interpretation and resistance to self-theorizing.¹⁰ In all these internal debates, what liberal American feminism has seemed most uneasy about is the totalizing tendency of theory—the impulse that necessitates contestation and turns the literary profession into a shoot ’em out at the You’re-Not-O.K. Corral. That the contestation model of scholarship is increasingly assumed, however, is implicit in the fact that at the Central Renaissance conference in St. Louis (March, 1987), Shakespearean feminists were attacked from the podium for, among other things, their failure to attack each other. But that American feminist criticism has remained reluctant to embrace the dialectical model of a perpetually competitive struggle for power and dominance is not only a resistance that is thoroughly consistent with the gendering process of socialization. It is equally a political assertion of difference meant to affirm those particular behaviors that culture has marked out as “female.” In Shakespeare studies, the feminist inspired scholarship on the family seemed, if anything, to operate like a growing family of shared interests. In the chain of MLA sessions it generated, equal numbers of newcomers and equal distributions of male and female scholars were scrupulously invited. In many of the texts it produced—such as the 1980 Lenz, Greene, Neely collection, The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, the 1982 Schwartz and Kahn volume, Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, and the 1985 Mary Beth Rose anthology, Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—the emphasis was on collaboration rather than single voice authority. It seems accurate to say that the work on family construction was itself born inside an atmosphere which was, in psychoanalytic terms, distinctly nurturing, distinctly maternal. One might also say that the ambience in which it developed was thus, ironically, tied back into the inherited model of gender and family that the feminist exploration was, at one and the same time, holding up for critique.

Shakespearean feminism and Shakespeare studies in marriage, family, and gender were twinned together, have developed in tandem, and during their approximate twelve years of kinship have come to be locked together in a fierce embrace, ever more aware of the dangerous slippage between bonds and bondage. When the first book to explore the position of women in the Renaissance came out with British scholar Juliet Dusinberre's Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, Dusinberre read the Protestant and Puritan conceptions of and new emphasis on marriage as a positive, liberating trend in the history of women. She thus read Shakespeare's apparent affirmation of that institution and woman's role as stabilizer of it as indicative of Shakespeare's own laudably proto-feminist sympathies. Subsequent feminist work strove to avoid the enthusiastic excesses which had made Dusinberre's book vulnerable. But, with a few exceptions, the general direction of the work was similar in its affirming perspective, a perspective that it maintained by perhaps unconsciously avoiding direct engagement with what it was not quite ready to confront. When feminist critiques looked at the marriage structures evoked at the end of comedy, for instance, they tended to focus on the subversively liberating actions that had led up to the conclusion rather than on the hierarchical subordination and the silencing of the comic heroine that often accompany the reimposition of institutions at the end of those same comedies. It took a few more years before feminism would feel impelled to go beyond analyzing character relations within family representations and scrutinize the construction of the family itself.

With a certain irony, it can be said that psychoanalytic theory—which assumes the transhistorical nature of the family unit—had seemed to feminist explorers so strikingly appropriate a compass for remapping Shakespearean drama precisely because the Shakespearean family seemed to resemble our own modern one so closely. Even the Christian marriage ceremony has changed but negligibly from the ritual alluded to in Shakespeare's plays.¹¹ And that apparent familiarity initially provided the feminist critic with the one truly indispensible reward of the scholarly profession—the private reinforcement of intellectual delight that accompanies recognition. But when feminism moved outside the text to the critique of systems rather than the analysis of relationships within them, that same familiarity felt more like a manacle testifying to the bondage of women's history. For feminist critics, not even the most obviously historical models of marriage and family can be purely (and merely) historical. And they cannot because, as topics, they carry with them the still unresolved, deeply ambivalent history of women's oppression. Consequently, the more the research they pioneered made feminist critics aware of the resolutely patriarchal nature of these institutions, the more such awareness problematized the liberal feminist dream of resolving the conflict between personal and political desire—of reaching the imagined space where that conflict no longer existed. To reject rather than extend the history of their own oppression meant taking a stance against the inherited forms of marriage and family. And to do this meant nothing short of taking a stance against the very model of female fulfillment that feminist scholars were themselves raised to value. In calling for a more political feminism in Shakespeare studies, British critic Kathleen McLuskie at least recognizes the particular conflict that characterizes this issue. For as feminist scholars research the Renaissance family organization, what is finally at issue is, as she says, our own “socialisation within the family and, perhaps more importantly, our psychological development as gendered subjects [that] make these changes no simple matter. They involve deconstructing the sustaining comforts of love and family as the only haven in a heartless world.”¹²

If race, ethnicity, and religion have already mapped a differential investment for blacks onto Othello and Jews onto The Merchant of Venice, gender construction has always already dictated a disproportionate feminist investment in a number of issues which span the canon. In the most recent one to emerge into debate, investment runs so high that the issue itself threatens to become some sort of oath of allegiance upon which feminist critics are compelled to swear their integrity. The troublesome new question concerns Shakespeare's own attitude toward patriarchy and its institutional subordination of women—or at least the attitude espoused by his textual representation and reproduction of that institution. The problem with the question may be not the question per se, but the assumption it generates that the breadth and variety of the Shakespeare canon will yield up a coherent answer. As long as the plays were read as being unproblematically mimetic and characters were imagined as psychological subjects, a systematic pattern was inferred. Ironically, it is just when criticism is moving away from its mimetic model and toward a more complex understanding of theatricality that it suddenly becomes compelling to answer a question that perhaps can no longer be answered. For Shakespearean feminism, this question reaches into areas that are significant in the widest personal, political, and pedagogical ways. By putting at risk the perception of Shakespeare's authorization of women that became widely accepted as a result of the past twelve years of feminist scholarship, the question may also inadvertently put at risk the ground upon which Shakespearean feminism established whatever entitlement it has carved out within American university teaching.

From Dusinberre's 1975 ebullient appropriation of Shakespeare for the feminist cause, the direction of scholarship addressing this issue has moved with a slow but increasing momentum toward seeing the frequent patterns of gender reversal and female power in Shakespeare's plays as actually serving only to consolidate the status quo of male hierarchy. The directions in which the inquiry has led American and British feminism have been similar. The positions it has reached, however, differ significantly enough as to illustrate some fundamental and important distinctions about the mainline politics that energize the otherwise common interests of each of these two, decidedly national versions of Shakespearean feminism.

Although names like Madelon Sprengnether, Louis Montrose, and Clara Claiborne Park should at least be mentioned in connection with the movement away from seeing Shakespeare as a latter-day feminist, the most extensive such American treatment of Shakespeare's sexual politics is Peter Erickson's feminist exploration, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama. Erickson constructs a Shakespeare who repeatedly undermines tyrannical patriarchy, but just as repeatedly affirms its benevolent version. According to Erickson, Shakespeare does grant his female characters that unusual strength that critics have vested in them; but women's roles are also invariably qualified by Shakespeare's overriding conviction that social harmony requires male control. If we imagine an ideological agenda (conscious or unconscious) behind any critic's particular view, the following lines excerpted from Erickson's conclusion seem to me to sum up several important things about the deployments that are bound up in the mainline politics of American Shakespearean feminism:

It is important to question and to qualify the notions of linearity and maturity in Shakespeare's development. From my perspective, The Winter's Tale does have a crucial value in the total picture. … Against the background of the destructive antagonism between men and women in the tragedies, the recovery of the possibility for harmonious relations enacted by Leontes and Hermione is miraculous. Nevertheless, … the legitimate need to celebrate the positive aspects of The Winter's Tale should not be permitted … to obscure the negative elements. I would do justice both to Shakespeare's growth and to his limitations, and I cherish the limitations as a valid, precious part of the cultural tradition we critically transmit. A complex picture of the fluctuations in the course of Shakespeare's development involves the recognition of loss as well as gain.¹³

What governs these lines is a recurring rhetorical balance that insists on the “both-and” perspective, tacitly refusing to extend its argument about Shakespearean patriarchalism into exclusive definition. On the one hand, that very commitment may lead the rhetoric into an accidental—and problematic—affirmation when, in order to acknowledge Shakespeare's growth, the logic is led into the position of equally “cherishing” his (patriarchal) limitations as a “valid, precious part of the cultural tradition” we transmit. On the other hand, by simultaneously insisting upon the complexities that “question and qualify” any single position, the argument implicitly rejects the totalizing impulse to control its readers. It is a criticism that is everywhere marked with signs of its origins in democratic liberalism, and, like most American political positions, is not overtly conscious of itself as reflecting any particular ideology. It is, however, shrewdly aware of the practical exigencies of the American academic scene it tacitly addresses. Its political interests are most apparent in the fact that while Erickson is concerned to expose Shakespearean patriarchalism, he is also concerned not to participate in it by excluding women himself. He therefore stops short of defining the canon as a males-only playground and leaves the pleasures of the text and the power of Shakespearean authorization still more or less universally available. What might be read as caution in Erickson's position is, ultimately, a practical political awareness of having reached a point beyond which there is potentially as much to be lost as to be gained.

British feminist Kate McLuskie is likewise concerned to expose Shakespeare's patriarchalism. Her conclusions differ dramatically from Erickson's, however, because McLuskie's is an overtly political feminism tactically committed to the Marxist schematics of “either-or” and to the mode of argument that allows no space outside itself. McLuskie's strategy—which begins by reproving the liberal perspective of her American counterparts—is bluntly to sever the female reader from the notion of subjective identity with Shakespeare's attitudes or from any figurative inclusion within the dramaturgical maneuvers of his plays. For McLuskie, Shakespeare's plays locate the audience in so totally masculinized a perspective that the only possible position open to feminist readers is radical resistance: to imagine Shakespeare as an advocate is merely a sentimental attempt to co-opt his authority by trying to ignore the often misogynistic perspective supported within and elicited by his plays. Therefore, “Feminist criticism of [the/any] play is restricted to exposing its own exclusion from the text. It has no point of entry into it, for the dilemmas of the narrative and the sexuality under discussion are constructed in completely male terms.”

Given the standard organization of American (albeit not British) English departments where faculty are hired specifically to teach in one particular area, short of a massive restructuring of curricula and teaching arrangements it is hard to imagine the translation of this position into pedagogical terms that would not finally raise the question why feminists would even want to teach in a field where, term after term, they would be “restricted to exposing their own exclusion from the text.” To be a feminist in McLuskie's terms is to renounce completely one's pleasure in Shakespeare and embrace instead the rigorous comforts of ideological correctness. Since “when a feminist accepts the narrative, theatrical and intellectual pleasures” offered by Shakespearean drama “she does so in male terms and not as a part of the locus of feminist critical activity,” feminism is exhorted to abstain from such seductions and abstemiously invest its energies in asserting “the power of resistance, subverting rather than co-opting the domination of the patriarchal bard.”¹⁴ If Shakespeare can be accused of participating in the reification of patriarchy by his reproduction of it, then surely McLuskie has here likewise participated in the reproduction of—if not the production of—the feminist exclusion upon which she insists. But then, her call for an adversarial feminist response to Shakespeare depends upon totalizing women's exclusion so as to leave feminists with no ground to occupy other than subversive resistance. It is clear from McLuskie's argument that one cannot serve feminism and Shakespeare, too. What has never been clear to American liberal feminism, however, is how one can serve feminism and Marxism too without practicing the same co-option and the same contradictions that Shakespeare's feminist sympathizers are here accused of glossing over or wishing away.

McLuskie's is a tough, articulate, uncompromising, and identifiably British argument. By the very extent of its determination to denounce Shakespeare, it is everywhere marked as belonging to the larger concerns of the newly energized Marxist political criticism, a criticism in which—if the sheer weight of the recent British output on Shakespeare is any measure¹⁵—deposing the English Bard and the imperialistic heritage of British Bardolatry is clearly a first priority. If Erickson's rhetoric bumps into problems in the commitment to balance that arises from its implicit politics, McLuskie's does so in its politically inspired commitment to polarization. The argument which places feminism in rhetorical opposition to “pleasure” comes originally from Laura Mulvey's widely recognized analysis of the film medium as being visually constructed around male pleasure, the male spectator, and the female object. But in its use of the Mulvey opposition, McLuskie's argument provides no explanation (other than apparent masochism) for the pleasure women readers and audiences have taken and do take in Shakespeare.¹⁶ And whereas Mulvey—a feminist film maker—is writing not so much to tell us to cease enjoying, in this case, film, but to open up a positive way for considering how feminist film makers can re-vision and reconstitute film dynamics to create an aesthetics of female pleasure that will transform women into subjects, McLuskie can only warn us away from Shakespeare in terms that warn us away from pleasure. And logically, Shakespeare must be only the beginning: if one is to renounce Shakespeare for his patriarchalism, then surely one must also renounce the enjoyment of most of Western drama (Mamet; Shepherd; Stoppard; Rabe—??) and, for that matter, most of western literature. By setting up a linguistic opposition between feminism and pleasure with no access possible to such alternatives as Mulvey can provide, McLuskie's polarities reinvoke the perhaps unintended spectre of a feminist politics reallied with the puritanical, eventuating in a definition of women's pleasure that begins in restriction and finally leaves authorizable feminist “pleasure” available only through embracing the all too familiar ideal of renunciation. Yet, by setting this debate into such an extremity of choices and by her willingness to identify the personal issues here at stake as being nothing short of one's own socialization within the idealized myth of family, McLuskie's unblinkered honesty contributes a newly tough political awareness to the discourse of family in Shakespeare studies. It also challenges that discourse to a comparably unflinching awareness of its own contemporary implications.

In surveying the atmosphere of the present moment, it seems accurate to say that feminist scholarship right now stands at a cross-roads that is as much political as intellectual. In terms of the outward marks of political achievement, what initially began as a feminist inquiry spearheaded by a group of scholars (most out of academic jobs at the time) worked within a mere twelve years to effect substantial changes in the shape and classroom content of American English Departments. What gets foregrounded in contemporary classroom discussion of the plays and the orthodoxies about “meaning” in Shakespeare has shifted so substantially that even the composition—and thus, implicitly, the message—of the academy itself has been threatened: for, once the issue of gender became a major consideration within the classroom, the lopsided representation of that issue within the Shakespeare faculty began to become an implicit comment by—and on—the academy itself. In consequence, many departments even began … at least contemplating … the potential relevance of … perhaps considering … or at least thinking about … maybe hiring … at least … one woman in the Shakespeare cadre. This consideration has not, by contrast, really entered the hiring debate in other literary fields that likewise lack canonical women writers. But it has in Shakespeare. And to the extent that the impetus became a fait accompli, what the decision authorized was something quite radical in the history of education and the history of gender. For while some of Cambridge and Oxford's most prestigious colleges were still debating letting women onto the faculty at all, American academia was feeling impelled at least to imagine women as authoritative transmitters of the generational wisdom of the language's most sacred, most canonical text. Unquestionably, such wisdom had been substantially altered by an energetic generation of research into an area that had hitherto been dismissed as apolitical—that “microcosm” of domestic concerns—the world that, in the wake of the scholarship of those years, could probably no longer unblushingly be called “the little world of man.”

What feminist scholars did not want to happen, however, is exactly what there is by now reason to fear is subtly happening: that the putative “microcosm” of marriage, family and gender relations, having once been brought into the center of scholarship and made equal with the supposed “macrocosmic” subjects, be tacitly turned into an academic ghetto, a “little world of woman” where feminist issues could be progressively contained and re-marginalized while male scholarship returned under the name of new methodologies to its old study of power and court politics and effectively reconstructed a 1980s version of the Elizabethan World Picture that Renaissance scholars had, but a few years earlier, set out to deconstruct. Such a micro-macro segregation and such a return to the old, gender-based asymmetries of power was, however, what was proleptically dramatized before the audience of the 1982 Shakespeare Association in Boston. On one side of the steel curtain that separated the convention's central and simultaneous seminars, several of the major feminist psychoanalytic critics had been invited to confess their shortcomings in a forum entitled “The Limitations of Psychoanalytic Criticism.” On the other side of the barrier—where several of the major new historicist critics held forth in an authoritative show called “The Implications of The New Historicism”—Coppélia Kahn, speaking from her anomolous position on the second panel, pointed out the disturbing division that the seminar organization seemed to dramatize. In doing so, Kahn seems to have been the first to comment publicly on the incipient schism and the first to call for a consciousness that might prevent it.

When new historicism (or rather, “The” new historicism, as it calls itself) emerged in Renaissance literary criticism with the 1980 publication of Stephen Greenblatt's justifiably influential book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, in the shared excitement of this event feminist critics assumed—perhaps naively—that the theoretical framework of new historicism and its British counterpart, cultural materialism, would lead to a natural alliance. To paraphrase Carol Thomas Neely's points about what these three criticisms have in common, although the materialist critics go further than most American liberal feminists in denying all subjectivity, interiority, and identity which is continuous across time and not purely the construct of patriarchal ideology, these critiques, like the feminist one, view gender roles as culturally and linguistically constructed and, like feminism, are centrally concerned with distributions of authority in literary representation and critical response.¹⁷ For that matter, the materialist manifestos actually repeat many of the axioms that feminism had enunciated early in the 1970s. But rather than an alliance with feminism, what seems instead to have happened is more like a progressive eradication of even the subject of women, accomplished by means of several (though, I would emphasize, not necessarily conscious) critical displacements.

When American Marxist critic Walter Cohen addressed a seminar on “Political Criticism in Shakespeare” at the 1985 World Shakespeare Congress in West Berlin—where the growing political tensions amongst Shakespearean critics apparently began to take on almost the character of the divided city itself¹⁸—Cohen did something unusual. Instead of comparing only American new historicism and British cultural materialism, he included feminism. In doing so, and in pointing out the prevailing “shared indifference to feminism or even gender” that characterizes both American and British Marxism and the invariable subordination of gender to power that occurs whenever new historicists take up the subject,¹⁹ Cohen implicitly recognized the growing schism that Kahn had pointed to three years earlier but that had become, until Berlin, the explosive subject that everyone remained resolutely silent about. When gender is not being simply ignored in the materialist critiques, it repeatedly ends up getting displaced into some other issue—usually race or class—and women are silently eradicated from the text, leaving only one gender for consideration. This kind of displacement and erasure—which is, in effect, a modern day re-silencing taking place even as Renaissance strategies of silencing are being discussed—is something that materialist/historicist Peter Stallybrass, like Cohen, seems acutely aware of. In his essay on how social relations get mapped onto the body, Stallybrass observes that although in the Renaissance “bodily definitions were as important in the mapping out of gender as of class,” in current scholarship on the politics of the body, the issue of gender has a way of vanishing. What happens is that even scholars like Bakhtin and Elias become “silent on this issue, assuming an ‘ungendered’ or implicitly single gendered—male body.”²⁰

The desire to confirm and empiricize the sole existence of this “ungendered” or explicitly single gendered (and hence male) body has a fascinating history in the learned tradition of the West that begins in Genesis, surfaces into Renaissance medical lore through Aristotle and Galen, and re-emerges periodically in authoritative texts from medieval to modern times as a tellingly defensive fantasy that was produced and reproduced by a deeply misogynistic tradition. To see women's reproductive organs as being inverted and hidden, thus inferior versions of the male's, as does Galen, or to see their external genitalia as incomplete, thus castrated remnants of the masculine, as does Freud, tells us, if anything, a great deal about a psychic history that on the one hand produces gender difference in order to demonstrate male superiority and yet also attempts to erase biological sex difference in order to prove the same thing. But the Renaissance discourse of sexuality is fascinating precisely because it is really a mélange of multiple discourses—some medical, some folkloric, some theological in origin. It has no universal, monolithic, single vision, nor is there any way of knowing to what extent the learned theories were disseminated throughout the society enough to constitute anything like a normative belief in popular culture. If the discourse of the learned tradition should be accorded any special privilege, it lies primarily in its ability to textually and professionally reproduce itself and thus transmit its particular ideological biases about gynecology to later ears. By thus constituting a powerful stencil by which the wider cultural discourse of female erasure was for century after century reproduced, the medical treatises are inescapably political. They therefore seem even more problematic when our own culture's most authoritative voices invoke and reuse them, unqueried and unassessed politically, as though they were transparencies for reading literary discourse.

Shakespearean feminists had long hoped that Stephen Greenblatt would extend his incisive analysis beyond the patterns of powerful men and begin to look at Renaissance women and the production of gender. But when at last he does in “Fiction and Friction” (1986), gender disappears beneath the category of biological sex differentiation, then sex difference becomes elided beneath the relevance of medical treatises to a 1601 account of a hermaphrodite in Rouen, France, and then—through an associational leap much wider than new historicism will usually venture—all of this becomes the contextual stencil through which Greenblatt, in three pages, reads the cross-dressing of comic heroines, the convention of boy actors, the sexual discourse of Twelfth Night, the sexual discourse for all Shakespeare's plays, and, by implication, for all English Renaissance drama.

Shakespearean women are … the representation of Shakespearean men, the projected mirror images of masculine self-differentiation … the theater reveals, in the presence of the man's (or boy's) body beneath the woman's clothes, the ultimate sexual reality. Since on stage there is in fact but a single gender, the open secret of identity, that beneath or within differentiated individuals is a single structure, identifiably male, is quite literally presented—presented, but not represented, for the play (plots, characters, and the pleasure they confer) cannot continue without the fictive existence of two distinct genders and the friction between them.²¹

Suddenly, there is only one gender and there are no more women in Shakespeare's plays. According to Greenblatt, from the basis of this gynecology we can inferentially conclude that English Renaissance plays present only maleness; and, as Walter Cohen observes, “women thus cease to be historical actors or subjects.” They may indeed exist on stage as discursive representations, but even that existence is wholly in service of the male plots which they help enable and from which, as male presentations themselves whether on stage or off, they have no separate identity anyway.

Not only the issue of women tends to disappear in new historicism; what also gets erased is the terrain of the domestic microcosm. When new historicism locates itself upon the site of family, sex, and marriage, the literal arena of domestic space has a way of losing its local habitation through its name and turning into its descriptive other. In a critical practice that comes perilously close to duplicating the Renaissance political strategies it anatomizes, historicist criticism has of late taken up the “family” as a topic, only to then redefine it as the locus upon which the political state built its power through strategic appropriation, marginalization, and transformation of the family into an instrument of state authority. “The family” of the Elizabethan-Jacobean era has thus been repositioned as a metaphor for the Elizabethan-Jacobean state, and scholarly focus consequently shifted away from literal families and their reproduction back onto the patriarchal state and its self-generating modes. Once again, gender is erased, women are erased, and the historicist critic is busily back at work reconstructing and reproducing an academic microcosm of the absolutist court and its strategies of male power. And, we might add, “the family” has once again been pressed into the service of the ruling elite.

Given what Walter Cohen calls new historicism's “fascination with the absolutist court” and given the historical centrality that Elizabeth's forty-five year reign so clearly occupies in this period, the most interesting avenues that court politics would seem to hold open for historicists would be ones that took up rather than dislodged or detoured around the relationship between gender and power. Since an operation that is central to new historicist practice is the juxtaposing of a given literary text to another cultural text (which is usually, though not inevitably, non-literary), followed by the demonstration of how the literary work derives from and is produced by the cultural one to which it has been juxtaposed, exactly what cultural texts get chosen for juxtaposition is obviously crucial. For while the new historicist manifesto insists in theory on granting equal status to both the literary and the social text, as Edward Pechter notes, in practice the literary work is inevitably seen as fully determined and produced by its ideological and historical situation.²² And, since new historicism frequently chooses to read the times through discourses which are distinctively liminal and focus on the strange and unusual, the increasing number of laboriously recovered but now available women's texts would seem to offer a rich new mine of anomolous voices. But the cultural texts that new historicists invariably select to privilege over the literary one are distressingly all of a kind: even though they may focus on subjects that are in some way culturally anomolous, the texts of choice are always and predictably male-authored—hierarchical—patriarchal. By the contextualization of Shakespearean drama inside of such a selective vision of “history,” even the voices that Shakespeare gave women are silenced. Women slip once again into mute invisibility, weighted down once more with that which has been singled out to serve as the authoritative narrative for (at least someone's) “history.”

However—lest one imagine (as feminist critics have been wont to do) that women's silence in Shakespearean drama should be read as a sign of their disempowerment, speaking authoritatively from within the section on feminist criticism in Questions of Theory in Shakespeare Jonathan Goldberg at last takes up the topic of gender distinction in order to condemn such feminist interpretation and insist that since silence for characters like Iago and Henry V is a strategy of empowerment, silence can likewise signal power for women. Although examples of any comparably authoritative female muteness are admittedly hard to find, even for Goldberg, perhaps those problematically different meanings that gender has mapped onto voice and silence could just neatly be eradicated by turning to Greenblatt's notion that Shakespeare's stages contain no women anyway but only the undifferentiated wholeness of the single male gender. Goldberg's essay—entitled, interestingly enough, “Shakespearean Inscriptions: the Voicing of Power”—goes much further than merely displacing or erasing gender issues inside the text and feminist issues outside it. Selecting one feminist critic as whipping girl and elevating her into the unwarranted status of emblematic Shakespearean feminist, he castigates Linda Bamber for seeing Shakespeare's culture as patriarchal and for imagining that Shakespeare replicated that attitude in his plays (an argument for which Erickson or McLuskie or Montrose, as the most vociferous spokespersons, should really stand accused—not Bamber). Assuring us that he is not attacking feminism but only all those (unnamed) feminist critics who are like the one he is lambasting, Goldberg begins his essay by denying the category of oppressive gender distinctions that feminism has placed into focus, asserting that the whole notion of gender polarity “must be seen through and must be read beyond for a genuine feminist discourse to arise.” For a conclusion he suggests that “the reason we cannot find Shakespeare reflecting his culture's supposed patriarchalism and sexism is that the culture represented on stage is the culture off-stage.”²³ Oppressive gender distinction and patriarchy—on stage and in Shakespeare's culture, as well—have not only disappeared; they have been named as the subjects which Shakespearean feminism must cease discussing if it is ever to receive the imprimatur of being “a genuine feminist discourse.” And since one cannot help but observe that Goldberg's voice has actually been placed within the feminist section of an anthology of Shakespearean criticism that includes not one critic whose primary work has been in Shakespearean (or English Renaissance) feminism, the effect is that of a silencing that has been textually framed, as it were, by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman's quite noticeable editorial exclusions. The Voicing Of Power—and—the Power of Voicing, indeed!

In the last several years, the work of American Shakespearean feminists has become the focus of attacks that are at once puzzling and yet also somehow numbingly familiar. The most accessible of the charges accuses feminist scholarship of employing an approach deemed ‘ahistorical’ for its failure to recognize the historical specificity of psychic and social structures that produce gender and family. If de-contextualized, the charge has an acknowledged validity. Its validity, however, can never be considered wholly in isolation from the distinct irony occasioned by materialist/historicist criticism unblushingly admonishing feminism for oversight and omission. The accusation furthermore compels the legitimate question as to what, precisely, the posited ideal of “historical” is here assumed to cover—whether, for instance, it is the methodological procedure or the name alone that automatically presumes “historicist” criticism is consonant with what a historian might define as “historical.” Finally, it also compels a deeper questioning of the apparently automatic privileging of history that the charge subsumes.

In choosing what textual dimensions to foreground, feminist readings never wholly ignored the historical context but neither did they valorize nor privilege it over the literary text, as is characteristic of new historicist and cultural materialist readings. Though the feminist privilege of the literary work never assumes that the text is a free agent nor wholly divorced from its historical moment, by its ability to survive massive social changes and still fascinate a modern reader a historical text is seen as fully approachable through contemporary ideas—nor are those ideas assumed to be projections backward from the present. Even though a social idea may not have been articulated during the historical moment in which the text was produced, such ideas are imagined as being potentially fully present, latent within earlier times, but, like the late discovered planets, awaiting the invention of a telescope, a discourse, that could articulate them. Essentially, the relative weight accorded to literary text or history represents two ways of philosophically imagining the human being—as a being who inscribes at least something universal that transcends history, or as an entity completely produced by its historical culture. But in addition to this definition, the different preferences for history or text suggest a less tangible sense of an experiential relationship to “history” that is divided along the axis of gender. While it is true that feminist work in Shakespeare never invested its critique in history, that choice seems less the basis for opprobrium and the assertion of methodological primacy than the ground for speculation about the relationship between women and history. If materialist critics valorize history as an omnipotent producer and are skeptical about the notion of subjectivity except as a product of history, the feminist investment in history—or at least in what has been recorded and traditionally considered as history—is not only minimal, but is itself committed to a skepticism extending to the production, the definition, and indeed the valorization of “history.”

Since Western history is essentially a transmitted record of upper class white males, the various elided social groups probably do not—historically should not—automatically trust recourse to the authority of “history.” The banner of “history” has its own long history of being a rallying point for the consolidation of status quo power. Before marginalized groups are likely to feel unambiguously positive about the validity of 1066 and all that, “history” needs be rewritten to include them. And while it is arguable that new historicism is, in effect, doing just that—rewriting history by re-presenting it, whether this most recent turn to “history” has extended the social privilege any farther than its traditional donneé is, like Falstaff's “question not to be asked,” precisely the question to be asked. Out of the new historicist work, that which Louis A. Montrose has done inevitably merits being singled out for its attention to the issues of gender and for its apparent awareness of what, in fact, an indifference to those issues really signifies. In contrast to new historicism, the Marxist theories of history are conscientiously premised on a demand to extend privilege. But, with a few feminist exceptions like British Marxist Catherine Belsey, Marxism has disappointingly been as unresponsive to theorizing a history that includes women as has new historicism. So while recent arguments in Shakespeare studies have discounted the past decade of feminist analysis of family, sex, and marriage for not being “historical” and for instead being psychoanalytically based and textually rooted, given what I would call the subtext of this debate—given feminism's very different historical relationship to “history,” it seems thoroughly consistent with the feminist goal of liberating women from their history that the mainstream feminist interpretations of Shakespeare did indeed marginalize the historical and concentrate instead on the literary text. The text, at least, contained representations of women and could thus be used as a mirror in which modern women and men could recognize—and begin to change—the reflected image of a history of oppressive sexual and familial relations.

Currently, feminism in Shakespeare is in what could be called its second phase in the academy and shows signs of beginning to move in a number of potentially new directions. Already, a number of key Shakespearean feminists have begun reformulating their psychoanalytic approach to gender and family so as to balance text and historical context in ways that would dissociate feminism from the essentialized notion of gender embedded in Freudian determinism and allow for deconstructing—rather than unwittingly reproducing—the subjugating past.²⁴ But perhaps the more interesting observation one might make about the imputation of feminism's “ahistorical tendencies” is the way the accusation actually ignores its own authenticity. It unwittingly assumes the same essentialized perspective of social development that it criticizes in feminism. And it does so by tacitly assuming that American feminism is free from its own history and from the historically specific coercions of time, place, and gender in which it developed. The perspective needed is, in fact, the historicized one that is the genuine contribution new historicism has made both to Shakespearean criticism and to literary methodology in general. Without contextualizing American feminism, there would be no way either to locate it politically or recognize, for instance, what sets it apart from the literal politics and literary methodologies favored by its British or French counterparts.

When feminism first entered the American Shakespeare bastion, its psychoanalytic approach to family, marriage, and gender may have seemed the most appropriate tool for the kind of textual analysis it wished to do. But in its implied resistance to location within more overtly ideological methodologies, feminism inside the academy also seems to me to have been half-consciously engaged in, or at least cooperating with, another agenda taking place on the national political level. If the psychoanalytical approach adopted within the academy kept feminist investigations focused on given relationships within patriarchal family structure rather than on stepping outside and demanding an overturning of the structure itself, then perhaps the very limitations of the approach served to keep feminists in the academy within the tacitly understood boundaries of the national women's movement with which American academic feminism was coimplicit. And these were strategies that, whether rightly or wrongly, nonetheless conscientiously tried during the years of the E.R.A. debate to appear as non-radical and socially non-threatening as possible.

Because the political stakes for American feminism have been not just theoretical but very real and because the most practical way to achieve them was, during the referendum years, perceived as being through a politics of persuasion rather than confrontation, feminism within the academy has always been a Janus-like presence, unlike other modes of criticism, because never separate from the practicalities of applied politics outside it. And by virtue (or vice) of gender inflection, those politics by definition differ from and cannot really be evaluated in terms of the only model of social change that history's monological narrative of male-male conflict has given us to imagine. Even academic feminism of the 1970s and 80s must needs be understood as circumscribed by both the literal and mythological legislation of “America,” and as being, throughout those years, engaged in selling the Equal Rights Amendment to a voting public conditioned by the peculiarly American bias against “isms” in general and any “ism” in specific that is labelled an “ideology.” The Equal Rights Amendment—which in the early ’70s had seemed unproblematic to voters—was defeated in the ’80s not so much by the un-truths, but by the truths that were publicized about it. Inside the academy, feminist faculty research and teaching was centered on marriage, gender, and family. Outside it, these same topics increasingly became the ideological battle zone upon which the E.R.A. was defeated—and defeated it was, once the equations were exposed that identified the women's movement with “feminism,” feminism with “ideology,” and the ideology defined as an “ism” that was subversively “politicizing marriage” and “trying to destroy the traditional American family.”

But perhaps both liberal feminism and new historicism—the two distinctly American contributions to contemporary academic methodology—need to be historicized in order to propose at least some perspective on the gap between them and on new historicism's progressive reassertion of the priority of the public and political over the private and domestic. Of the two methodologies, feminism is the child not born to the manor of literary fathers but outside it, without academic foremothers, but thus perhaps endowed with that peculiar liminality of daughters that leaves it oddly free to constitute itself. New historicism is, by contrast, the legitimate son, the heir that developed not only inside the academy but specifically inside Renaissance studies, appearing shortly after feminism and preceding Marxism into the field, and yet an heir that seems philosophically to feel less free, more constituted, and always already doomed by some futile but inescapable obligation to repeat the oppressive struggle for power that it habitually reads as history's only heritage.

In looking at feminist and historicist perspectives in relation to one another, I would like to turn to an observation that Leah Marcus seems to have been the first to make but that Jean Howard and Walter Cohen have also singled out as being somehow amorphously implicit in the shaping of the newly ideological dimensions of American Shakespearean criticisms. And that is—that the generation of scholars now emerging into prominence is the same generation who were college students during the turbulent challenges to establishment ideology that defined the 1960s. It is a generation whose experience may be both unique in and unique to American history. Furthermore, it is a generation that came into its own academic power during the conservative reaction of the Ronald Reagan years. For Jean Howard, the significance of this background lies in the way it led contemporary scholars to embrace overtly political methodologies: the recognition of how untheorized had been the political activism of the ’60s resulted in a sense of the inadequacy of the old American common sense approach to politics and a movement toward more theorized models of social change. Likewise for Cohen, “political activism of the 1960s lies behind the political criticism of the 1980s”; and in Cohen's mind, the tenor of this criticism intangibly derives from the disillusionment of a generation defined by all that is subsumed under the name “Vietnam.”

In reflecting on both the social construction of this, my own generation of scholars, and on the widening gap between two methodologies that emerged out of its seemingly common experience, I offer a speculation. The years of social activism are always retrospectively imagined as years when student activists, women and men, worked together. But perhaps, just perhaps, those years had very different psychological and moral effects on women and men, marked them separately and taught them very different lessons that eventually became transmuted into two positions in literary theory. Thus, while the two share their origin in the committed rebellion of that era, they may well have come away from those years having unconsciously acquired fundamentally different convictions about the relationships between subversion and dominance, resistance and power.

My speculation is that women came out of the activist ’60s empowered with new possibilities, a new sense of self liberation and commitment, and an optimistic social idealism. Awakening to a second life during the anti-war and civil rights protests of the ’60s, American feminism might be described as a street urchin, born during a peace march to the strains of “We Shall Overcome.” Its optimism is its fundamental and perhaps only resource; it is what keeps it dynamic even in the face of political setbacks and what it cannot afford to lose. American feminism—which in academia in general and certainly in Shakespeare studies has remained committed to liberal rather than radical or Marxist politics—by definition must believe that resistance to and subversion of the ruling discourse can, must, and shall overcome. Since it cannot posit its future by assuming a violent revolution as the means to claim it, it furthermore must believe that dominant institutions are capable of change and that motives do exist—if not benevolence then at least rational self-interest—beyond the will to absolute and undistributed power. Whether the defeat of the E.R.A. will precipitate the loss of such faith and a turning away from political liberalism is yet to be seen.

When critics try to describe the spirit of new historicism, the terms evoked are substantially different, substantially more pessimistic. In the new historicist view of history, whatever is subversive in culture or challenges the ruling order suffers inevitable defeat, for power is the final and only currency. In Walter Cohen's description, “New historicism ends up if not with something like a totalitarian model, then at least with a sense of the almost inevitable defeat of the poor, the innocent, and the oppressed. … [lower class] aspirations must either be crushed or be shown to serve the interests of the state. … The point is that unless one is an aristocrat there is nothing to be done.” For Cohen, such totalitarian/aristocratic proclivities are ultimately best explained as a form of leftist disillusionment. Meanwhile, what strikes Edward Pechter about new historicist writings is how compulsively they seem to need to control the subversive power of the Shakespeare text by detaching themselves from it and subordinating it to some authoritarian cultural script—and yet, at the same time, how frequently these writings themselves communicate an aura of depotentiation and entrapment, a sense of “being surrounded by a hostile otherness, enmeshed in a complex matrix of forces all of which threaten their freedom.”²⁵ Unlike feminism, new historicism is not, meanwhile, an activist politics of social change; unlike Marxism, it theorizes no model that even imagines it. And yet, when new historicism insists that resistance is inevitably crushed, that resistance is implicitly futile because always co-opted, or that the will to power is all, what I suggest impels the apparent reactionism of such a thesis and simultaneously gives it its powerfully contemporary American appeal is the way it recuperates an unsatisfactory narrative, a Bildungsroman, from the history of twenty years ago. Its disillusionment resonates with the same bitter lesson that a generation of college males—resisting America's war in Vietnam on the grounds of a moral idealism that was implicitly undermined by the recognition that they were excused from combat through deferments based on class and racial privilege—discovered about the co-option of resistance by authority. By definition, the Vietnam war and the bitterly self-defeating “choices” that it forced on America's draft-age males indelibly marked the political experience of the protest era with distinctively gendered meanings that may well construct not only the seen but the unseen agendas underlying the tenor of the two criticisms that emerged from that generation.

If the feminist critic may well be accused of reading Shakespeare through potentially contradictory notions of psychological essentialism and transhistorical subjectivity that create an unconscious framework to explain past suppression and yet leave open the way for a subjectively female/self determined future, then the new historicist critic is equally capable of unconsciously formulating a way to read Shakespeare through the central cultural trauma and its residue of needs that define his experience. Given the particular investment in history that grows out of the untenable space where “Vietnam” left the best educated class of American males of the 60s generation, new historicism's inevitable privileging of authority and what otherwise seems to be its arbitrary selection of dominant cultural discourses to be juxtaposed to/privileged over the given literary text seem no longer arbitrary, but cohere within the inscription of a contemporary history trying to rewrite the moral defeats of its past. When considered in this light, the new historicist tenets do accomplish the requisite two maneuvers necessary for successful recuperation of an unaccommodatable past: they narrate an account of resistance, co-option, and defeat while simultaneously undoing that defeat by aligning themselves with institutional power and thus appropriating the oppressor's dominance for the critic/self. By reading Shakespeare as being himself a co-opted servant of state orthodoxies, the historicist critic contextualizes perhaps not so much Shakespeare in history as his own history in Shakespeare; by thus disempowering Shakespeare, the literary critic recuperates cultural power for himself by exerting it over the culture's most potent literary authority. And the son proves his right to the all-powerful father's heritage by dethroning him and assuming the patriarchal position himself. Perhaps it is even appropriate that recuperation should enact itself upon the symbolic site of struggle and defeat, and that not only Stephen Greenblatt—new historicism's chief architect and founder—but most of the board members of the new historicist journal, Representations, should be located at Berkeley.

Yet if political defeat is thus undone, perhaps not so easily is spiritual disillusionment. If there is a price for acquiring such dominance, it may lie in the disconcerting sense of embittered idealism that often seeps through into new historicist practice. But for feminism—confronting this increasingly dominant methodology inside the academy, observing new historicism's preoccupation with institutional forms of absolute male power, and watching itself become progressively the subject under erasure and the object under attack—it becomes progressively more difficult to see the new historicist premises about power as politically disinterested or restrict them to purely a Renaissance application, especially since both these sibling criticisms insist on recognizing the ideological nature of criticism itself. Since feminism is, by definition, a subversive site of resistance to the dominant discourse, what is to be made out of new historicism's (Foucaultian) premise that any site of subversive resistance is inevitably defeated or co-opted by the dominant institution? What to be made from the idea that such rebellions against authority are often, in fact, culturally produced and covertly promoted only so they may be co-opted? When—as happened at a recent Renaissance conference—the two male scholars on a panel present investigations of the plays that are both carefully modelled after the new historicist discourse and that both also eradicate any mention of the women characters (thus ignoring even the supportive relevance that those figures could actually have contributed to their own arguments), to what cultural messages are these writers responding? And why is this kind of elision—that appears to be quite unconscious—suddenly occurring more and more frequently? When both of these two scholars then individually rationalize their omissions by saying that, since feminism had already “won” its battle, they had logically concluded that there was no longer any need to have to include its representative concerns—where does this leave the future? For if scholarship ever reaches the place where anyone presumes that feminist concerns have made their mark and therefore no longer need be addressed, then feminism has marked nothing: as a political movement, as a critical scholarship, and as an ethics within and beyond the American academy, feminism will then never have happened.

In 1982, just when the developing schism in Renaissance literary perspectives was becoming felt, feminist scholars Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers tried to bring what had been assumed as common interests back together through a major conference held at Yale. They tried, we could say, to create and name a new genesis: thus “Renaissance Woman, Renaissance Man,” created they them. The collected papers from this conference finally appeared in 1986 in a newly titled book, Rewriting the Renaissance. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the schism was already evident in the conference papers, the book title states very clearly, very openly, and very optimistically, just what the political aims of Renaissance feminist scholars are. This title furthermore stubbornly continues to assume that in the 1980s, all scholars would clearly want to rewrite the Renaissance so as to include the woman/women left sitting mutely in the margins by historians in the Renaissance and by academic historiographers that followed. The question I suppose I would therefore raise in closing is simply this: as we scholars of the Renaissance—who now include men and women—become the new historiographers of the Renaissance, do we have a shared idea about who and what gets written into our texts—or mutually exclusive ones? Are we setting out to deconstruct and demystify patriarchy—or reconstitute it by repeating the same old patriarchal erasure? Did we, in fact, come to rewrite the Renaissance, or just repeat it? In short—did we come to bury Caesar or to praise him?

Notes

1. See the Drakakis “Introduction” to Alternative Shakespeare.

2. In keeping with the concomitantly emerging ideology of the closed nuclear family, English literature begins to feature a new kind of villain in the Renaissance—the bastard, who is almost always male and whose “illegitimacy” is coded as a threat not only to the boundaries of family but to the sanctity of the state. When the legal concept of branding a bastard child as “illegitimate” emerges—a terminology which apparently enters the language around the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century—it creates a positive and negative verbal coding which, by segregating children born outside the patriarchal family unit from those “legitimate” within it, serves to protect the self-reproducing capacity of patriarchy. The most famous disquisition on this system of verbal stigmatization to protect social privilege through its “Fine word, ‘legitimate!’” is, of course, the one spoken directly to the audience in the opening lines of King Lear's second scene by Edmund, the play's bastard son/tragic villain. See also Phyllis Rackin's essay, “Anti-Historians,” for commentary on Shakespeare's history plays and the relationship of wifehood, motherhood, and bastardy to the construction of patriarchy.

3. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, p. 2. Woodbridge's point that “the relationship between literature and life is a very slippery subject,” and that there may well be “cases where the very prominence of a theme in literature argues against its being a representation of real life” (3), leads her ultimately to posit a more debatable thesis. Working with a vast amount of material from the Renaissance debate over the nature of women, Woodbridge concludes that the misogynistic tirades of Renaissance literature belong to a literary convention, not to real life, and they therefore cannot finally be seen as representing either the author's or the culture's attitudes toward women.

4. Hill, “Sex, Marriage, and the Family,” p. 450.

5. My apologies for any names that have been overlooked in listing this group that I have defined as the first generation of American feminist Shakespeareans. While it is an accurate generalization to say that the majority were psychoanalytic critics, there are, of course, exceptions—notably, Phyllis Rackin and Linda Woodbridge (Fitz).

6. Gardiner, “Mind Mother,” p. 114.

7. In opposition to Annette Kolodny's belief that a “playful pluralism” was “the only critical stance consistent with the current status of the larger women's movement,” Elaine Showalter first coined and proclaimed the “gynocritical” position as the direction in which feminism should theorize itself (“Feminist Criticism,” p. 112ff.). Feminist criticism has since moved back more toward a balance that includes an androcentric pole of male writers, as well.

8. In addition to recent collections edited by Mary Beth Rose and Margaret Hannay, for recent scholarship on women writers see English Literary Renaissance, 14 (Autumn, 1984) for a special issue on Women in the Renaissance. The issue includes Elizabeth H. Hageman and Josephine A. Roberts' bibliography of recent studies in the field.

9. British Marxist-feminist (or perhaps, feminist-Marxist) Catherine Belsey's work in Renaissance drama, however, does seem implicitly to compel this kind of reconsideration of traditional Marxist categories; likewise, Jacqueline Rose's work in drama and film should be mentioned. Of all the various British academic disciplines, film studies seems to be the one area where there is a consistent focus on revising Marxism to make it accommodate rather than continue to ignore feminist concerns.

10. Under continual external pressure from the methodological push going on throughout the literary discipline, advocacy within feminism for an articulated methodology seems of late to have gained support. There is also, however, a well articulated opposition from highly respected voices such as Annette Kolodny's (see Showalter, pp. 10-14). For a broader look at the issues that particularly effect Shakespearean feminism, see Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Shakespearean scholars Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn. See especially Greene and Kahn on the social construction of woman; Adrienne Munich on locating a relationship not already foreclosed between a male author and feminist readers; Cora Kaplan on subjectivity, class, and Marxist/Socialist politics; Ann Rosalind Jones on the new French feminism; and Judith Kegan Gardiner on psychoanalysis and feminism.

11. On Renaissance marriage ritual, see Boose, “The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare.”

12. McLuskie, p. 106.

13. Erickson, p. 171.

14. McLuskie, pp. 97, 98, 106.

15. Two important collections, Alternative Shakespeares (ed. Drakakis) and Political Shakespeare (eds. Dollimore and Sinfield) have come from British Marxist scholars in the past two years, and Political Shakespeare II is apparently underway. What defines the organizing principle underlying these British collections is what differentiates them from the typical American anthology; the organizational distinction itself recapitulates that of the mainline political allegiances of literary scholars within the two academic institutions. The liberal politics of American academia tend to result in generally pluralistic collections in which the essays share the topic under consideration but not necessarily any conscious, coherent, or identifiably political viewpoint on it. What marks these new British Shakespeare collections is the reader's awareness of the shared political perspective from which the essays all speak.

16. Because the (widely accepted) dynamics articulated by Mulvey's 1975 essay would leave no explanation for female pleasure other than masochism, her work has inspired an intense and continuing effort in film studies to theorize the female spectator, including a number of Mulvey's subsequent thoughts in interviews and other commentaries. The theories that this topic has elicited are richly various and too numerous to catalogue. See, however, the British film journal Screen for a number of such responses and further references, plus see also the work of American film scholars E. Ann Kaplan and Mary Ann Doane. All of this work in film does have a particular relevance to considerations of gender and stage representation, as McLuskie is perceptively aware. Given the different media considerations, however, the applicability of transferred ideas seems to me to be less direct.

17. From a paper delivered by Neely at a CUNY Graduate Center conference on “Shakespeare and the New Politics” (March 28, 1987). In her critique of new historicism, Neely likewise notes the point I later make concerning the patriarchal, authoritarian nature of the invariably male discourses that new historicists recurrently select as the definitive lens through which to read Shakespeare.

18. The selected and edited papers from this Berlin seminar will appear in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited by seminar organizers Jean E. Howard and Marion O’Connor, forthcoming at Methuen. It was not, however, only (or perhaps primarily) during the Howard seminar on Shakespeare and ideology that conflict between feminism and new historicism emerged as the explosive subject in Berlin; apparently such conflict became almost the sub-topic of participant exchanges at the seminar on “Gender and Power in Shakespeare” that was co-chaired by Carol Thomas Neely and Lisa Jardine.

19. Cohen's paper will appear in the forthcoming Howard and O’Connor volume.

20. Stallybrass “Patriarchal Territories,” p. 125.

21. Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” p. 52.

22. Edward Pechter's analysis of “New Historicism and its Discontents” likewise notes that although a central premise of new historicism is to grant literary and cultural knowledge an equal and interanimating status, the practice is “a long way from the mutually generative interpretation of culture and text … the text is said to be produced by its ideological and historical situation; it is unambiguously dependent, while the culture is unambiguously determining” (p. 293). Pechter's assessment of the premises, strategies, and contradictions of new historicism is generally quite incisive. In analyzing new historicist politics, however, he is led by his own conservative perspective to render more unto Marx than Marx is probably owed. When he is led for the same reasons to assume some kind of implicit alliance among all methodologies within the general category of the “left-liberal academic community, for whom … feminism [is] an article of faith” (299), his assumptions prevent him from noting the actual distance that new historicism has been stepping off in moves that seem like an attempt to define itself away from feminism.

23. Goldberg, “Shakespearean Inscriptions” pp. 118, 134.

24. In the Introduction to Shakespeare Reproduced (forthcoming), Jean E. Howard defines this movement away from the psychoanalytical and toward the historical as responding to “the necessity to historicize gender constructions if one wishes to escape the oppressive notion of a universal human nature, or, worse, of an eternal feminine.” David Scott Kastan, in his Introduction to the Shakespeare Association of America seminar, “Shakespeare and the New Feminisms” (March, 1987), similarly sees the move as a means by which feminism can “deny that gender distinctions are fixed outside of human construction and control, and … [as] a means of imagining alternatives to our own structures of social relations.” At the CUNY conference on “Shakespeare and the New Politics,” however, Carol Thomas Neely suggests that completely abandoning the claim of subjectivity in exchange for a model in which gender is construed to be entirely an ideological product of a historically specific culture may create as many problems for feminist methodology as it resolves. Noting American liberal feminism's reluctance to deny all subjectivity or identity that is not the construct of ideology, she explains: “feminists have assumed some area of femaleness not strictly biological but not utterly inscribed by patriarchal ideology which makes possible female discourse, a women's literary history, a feminist critique which can do more than lament its own inevitable suppression.”

25. Pechter, p. 301.