SOURCE: “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Manchester University Press, 1985, pp. 88-108.

[In the following essay, McLuskie reviews several feminist approaches to Shakespeare's plays, highlighting in particular the problems with the mimetic and essentialist models of feminist criticism. The critic then applies her critique of such feminist approaches to King Lear and Measure for Measure.]

I

Every feminist critic has encountered the archly disingenous question ‘What exactly is feminist criticism?’ The only effective response is ‘I’ll send you a booklist’, for feminist criticism can only be defined by the multiplicity of critical practices engaged in by feminists. Owing its origins to a popular political movement, it reproduces the varied theoretical positions of that movement. Sociologists and theorists of culture have, for example, investigated the processes by which representations of women in advertising and film reproduce and reinforce dominant definitions of sexuality and sexual relations so as to perpetuate their ideological power.¹ Within English departments critical activity has been divided among those who revived and privileged the work of women writers and those who have focused critical attention on reinterpreting literary texts from the traditional canon. In the case of Shakespeare, feminist critics have contested the apparent misogyny of the plays and the resistance of their feminist students by directing attention to the ‘world’ of the plays, using conventional tools of interpretation to assess Shakespeare's attitude to the events within it.²

In a number of essays³ the feminist concern with traditional evaluations of sexual identity has been used to explore the importance of ideals of violence in the psychological formation of Shakespeare's male characters.⁴ Janet Adelman has analysed the importance of structures of psychological dependence in accounting for Coriolanus's phallic aggression⁵ and Coppelia Kahn has described the feud in Romeo and Juliet as ‘the deadly rite de passage that promotes masculinity at the price of life’.⁶ These essays have built on and developed a feminist psychoanalysis⁷ which places motherhood at the centre of psychological development, as Coppelia Kahn makes explicit in her book on Masculine Identity in Shakespeare: ‘the critical threat to identity is not, as Freud maintains, castration, but engulfment by the mother … men first know women as the matrix of all satisfaction from which they must struggle to differentiate themselves … [Shakespeare] explores the unconscious attitudes behind cultural definitions of manliness and womanliness and behind the mores and institutions shaped by them.’⁸

Modern feminist psychoanalysis could be applied to Shakespearean characters for the texts were seen as unproblematically mimetic: ‘Shakespeare and Freud deal with the same subject: the expressed and hidden feelings in the human heart. They are both psychologists.’⁹ Shakespeare was thus constructed as an authoritative figure whose views about men and women could be co-opted to the liberal feminism of the critic. Within this critical practice, academic debate centred on conflicts over the authors' views rather than on the systems of representation or the literary traditions which informed the texts. Linda Bamber, for example, reminded her readers of the evident misogyny of Shakespeare's treatment of his tragic heroines and placed her own work ‘in reaction against the tendency for feminist critics to interpret Shakespeare as if his work directly supports and develops feminist ideas’.¹⁰ While noting the fundamental inconsistencies between Shakespeare's treatment of women in comedy and tragedy, she explicitly resists the temptation ‘to revel in them offered by post-structuralism’. She finds instead a cohering principle in Shakespeare's recognition of women as ‘other’, which ‘amounts to sexism only if the writer fails to attribute to opposite sex characters the privileges of the other’.¹¹ In tragedy his women are strong because they are coherent—‘certainly none of the women in the tragedies worries or changes her mind about who she is’—and the attacks which are made on them are the product of male resentment at this strength—‘misogyny and sex nausea are born of failure and self doubt’.¹² The comic feminine, on the other hand, is opposed not to men but to a reified ‘society’:‘In comedy the feminine either rebels against the restraining social order or (more commonly) presides in alliance with the forces which challenge its hegemony: romantic love, physical nature, the love of pleasure in all its forms.’¹³

These assertions rest on a reductive application of feminist anthropological discussions of nature and culture but their primary effect is to construct an author whose views can be applied in moral terms to rally and exhort the women readers of today: ‘the comic heroines show us how to regard ourselves as other … the heroines laugh to see themselves absorbed into the ordinary human comedy; the heroes rage and weep at the difficulty of actually being as extraordinary as they feel themselves to be’.¹⁴ These moral characteristics ascribed to men and women take no account of their particular circumstances within the texts, nor indeed of their material circumstances and the differential power relations which they support. Feminism thus involves defining certain characteristics as feminine and admiring them as a better way to survive in the world. In order to assert the moral connection between the mimetic world of Shakespeare's plays and the real world of the audience, the characters have to be seen as representative men and women and the categories male and female are essential, unchanging, definable in modern, commonsense terms.

The essentialism of this form of feminism is further developed in Marilyn French's Shakespeare's Division of Experience. Like Bamber, she constructs a god-like author who ‘breathed life into his female characters and gave body to the principles they are supposed to represent’.¹⁵ Although shored up by references to feminist philosophy and anthropology, this feminine principle amounts to little more than the power to nurture and give birth and is opposed to a masculine principle embodied in the ability to kill. These principles are not, however, located in specific men or women. When men are approved of they are seen as embracing feminine principles whereas women are denied access to the male and are denigrated when they aspire to male qualities. French suggests that Shakespeare divides experience into male (evil) and female (good) principles and his comedies and tragedies are interpreted as ‘either a synthesis of the principles or an examination of the kinds of worlds that result when one or other principle is abused, neglected, devalued or exiled’.¹⁶

The essentialism which lies behind Marilyn French's and Linda Bamber's account of the men and women in Shakespeare is part of a trend in liberal feminism which sees the feminist struggle as concerned with reordering the values ascribed to men and women without fundamentally changing the material circumstances in which their relationships function. It presents feminism as a set of social attitudes rather than as a project for fundamental social change. As such it can equally easily be applied to an analysis of Shakespeare's plays which situates them in the ideological currents of his own time. In Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, for example, Juliet Dusinberre admires ‘Shakespeare's concern … to dissolve artificial distinctions between the sexes’¹⁷ and can claim that concern as feminist in both twentieth-century and seventeenth-century terms. She examines Shakespeare's women characters—and those of some of his contemporaries—in the light of Renaissance debates over women conducted in puritan handbooks and advice literature. Building on the Hallers' essay on ‘The puritan art of love’,¹⁸ she notes the shift from misogyny associated with Catholic asceticism to puritan assertions of the importance of women in the godly household as partners in holy and companionate marriage. The main portion of the book is an elaboration of themes—Chastity, Equality, Gods and Devils—in both polemic and dramatic literature. The strength of her argument lies in its description of the literary shift from the discourses of love poetry and satire to those of drama. However her assertions about the feminism of Shakespeare and his contemporaries depend once again upon a mimetic model of the relationship between ideas and drama. Contemporary controversy about women is seen as a static body of ideas which can be used or rejected by dramatists whose primary concern is not with parallel fictions but simply to ‘explore the real nature of women’. By focusing on the presentation of women in puritan advice literature, Dusinberre privileges one side of a contemporary debate, relegating expressions of misogyny to the fictional world of ‘literary simplification’ and arbitrarily asserting more progressive notions as the dramatists’ true point of view.¹⁹

A more complex discussion of the case would acknowledge that the issues of sex, sexuality, sexual relations and sexual division were areas of conflict of which the contradictions of writing about women were only one manifestation alongside the complexity of legislation and other forms of social control of sex and the family. The debates in modern historiography on these questions indicate the difficulty of assigning monolithic economic or ideological models to the early modern family, while the work of regional historians has shown the importance of specific material conditions on both the ideology and practice of sexual relations.²⁰ Far from being an unproblematic concept, ‘the nature of women’ was under severe pressure from both ideological discourses and the real concomitants of inflation and demographic change.

The problem with the mimetic, essentialist model of feminist criticism is that it would require a more multi-faceted mirror than Shakespearean drama to reflect the full complexity of the nature of women in Shakespeare's time or our own. Moreover this model obscures the particular relationship between Shakespearean drama and its readers which feminist criticism implies. The demands of the academy insist that feminist critics reject ‘a literary version of placard carrying’,²¹ but they cannot but reveal the extent to which their critical practice expresses new demands and a new focus of attention on the plays. Coppelia Kahn concedes that ‘Today we are questioning the cultural definitions of sexual identity we have inherited. I believe Shakespeare questioned them too …’²² and, rather more frankly, Linda Bamber explains: ‘As a heterosexual feminist … I have found in Shakespeare what I want to imagine as a possibility in my own life’.²³ However, the alternative to this simple co-option of Shakespeare is not to assert some spurious notion of objectivity. Such a procedure usually implies a denigration of feminism²⁴ in favour of more conventional positions and draws the criticism back into the institutionalised competition over ‘readings’.

A different procedure would involve theorising the relationship between feminism and the plays more explicitly, accepting that feminist criticism, like all criticism, is a reconstruction of the play's meaning and asserting the specificity of a feminist response. This procedure differs from claiming Shakespeare's views as feminist in refusing to construct an author behind the plays and paying attention instead to the narrative, poetic and theatrical strategies which construct the plays' meanings and position the audience to understand their events from a particular point of view. For Shakespeare's plays are not primarily explorations of ‘the real nature of women’ or even ‘the hidden feelings in the human heart’. They were the products of an entertainment industry which, as far as we know, had no women shareholders, actors, writers, or stage hands. His women characters were played by boys and, far from his plays being an expression of his idiosyncratic views, they all built on and adapted earlier stories.

The witty comic heroines, the powerful tragic figures, the opposition between realism and romance were the commonplaces of the literary tradition from which these tests emerged. Sex and sexual relations within them are, in the first analysis, sources of comedy, narrative resolution and coups de théâtre. These textual strategies limit the range of meaning which the text allows and circumscribe the position which a feminist reader may adopt vis-à-vis the treatment of gender relations and sexual politics within the plays. The feminist reader may resist the position which the text offers but resistance involves more than simple attitudinising.

II

In traditional criticism Shakespeare's plays are seldom regarded as the sum of their dramatic devices. The social location of the action, their visual dimension and the frequent claims they make for their own authenticity, invite an audience's engagement at a level beyond the plot. The audience is invited to make some connection between the events of the action and the form and pressure of their own world. In the case of sex and gender, the concern of feminists, a potential connection is presented between sexual relations as an aspect of narrative—who will marry whom and how?—and sexual relations as an aspect of social relations—how is power distributed between men and women and how are their sexual relations conducted? The process of interpretative criticism is to construct a social meaning for the play out of its narrative and dramatic realisation. However this is no straightforward procedure: the positions offered by the texts are often contradictory and meaning can be produced by adopting one of the positions offered, using theatrical production or critical procedures to close off others. The critic can use historical knowledge to speculate about the possible creation of meaning in the light of past institutions and ideologies but the gap between textual meaning and social meaning can never be completely filled for meaning is constructed every time the text is reproduced in the changing ideological dynamic between text and audience.

An interesting case in point is Measure for Measure, in which the conflicting positions offered by the text have resulted in critical confusion among those who wish to fix its moral meaning as the authentic statement of a coherent author. The problems have centred in large part on the narrative resolution in which the restoration of order through marriages seems both an affront to liberal sensibilities and an unsatisfactory suppression of the powerful passions evoked throughout the action. There seems to be an irresolvable gap between the narrative strategies—the bed-trick, the prince in disguise plot—and the realism of the other scenes in which we see ‘corruption boil and bubble till it o’errun the stew’.

The relevance of discussions of early modern sexuality and social control is evident in the play's treatment of public regulation of morality. Nevertheless such historically informed attention as the play has received²⁵ has been in the attempt to close off its meaning by invoking Jacobean marriage law or Christian theology in order to determine the rightness or wrongness of Angelo's judgements, the reason or lack of it in Isabella's defence of her chastity. These arguments fail to convince, not because history is irrelevant but because they cannot solve problems which arise in the first instance from the production of meaning by the text.

The confusion in the narrative meaning is created because it offers equal dramatic power to mutually exclusive positions. The comic vitality of the low-life characters and their anarchic resistance to the due processes of law dramatises the inadequacy of any system of control which stops short of an order to ‘geld and splay all the youth of the city’ (II.i.230). Nevertheless engagement with them is complicated by the equal dramatic impact of the Duke's disgust with their trade in flesh (III.ii.22-27). Similarly Isabella's single-minded protection of her sexual autonomy is placed first by the masochism of the sexual imagery in which it is expressed and then by its juxtaposition with her brother's equally vividly expressed terror at the thought of death. Moral absolutes are rendered platitudinous by the language and verse, particularly in the Duke's summary where the jingling rime of the couplet mocks the very morals it asserts.

This speech, at the mid point of the play, offers a summary of the tension between narrative and social meaning. The moral absolutes of the first part of the speech are set against the Duke's solution to the problem. But the terms of the solution are moral and pragmatic:

Craft against vice I must apply.
With Angelo tonight shall lie
His old betrothed but despised.
So disguise shall, by th’disguised
Pay with falsehood false exacting
And perform an old contracting.

(III.ii.280-5)

Yet the ending of the play, for all its narrative manipulation, imposes not only a narrative solution but also a possible social resolution. Both the coup de théâtre of the Duke's reappearance and the language which accords his merciful authority the status of ‘power divine’ provide theatrical satisfaction for the finale which endorses the social implications of the Duke's judgement. Marriage is the solution to the puzzle of the bed-trick but it is also the solution to the disruptive power of Lucio who has offered troublesome alternatives to the main narrative line. The solution is imposed in this play by a figure from within the action, the all-powerful Duke, but it is no more inappropriate to the characters concerned than the finale of many another romantic comedy.

It is impossible to say how this resolution was regarded by Shakespeare's contemporaries. There is evidence to suggest that marriage was regarded as just such an instrument of effective social control and social harmony. However there is no reason why the elusive responses of past audiences need carry privileged status as the ultimate meaning of the text. The ideological struggle over sexuality and sexual relations which informs the text has emerged in different terms in the late twentieth century, and a liberal humanist reading of the text might present its social meaning as a despairing (or enthusiastic) recognition of the ineffectiveness of attempts at the control of such private, individual matters. A radical feminist production of the text could on the other hand, through acting, costume and style, deny the lively energy of the pimps and the bawds, foregrounding their exploitation of female sexuality. It might celebrate Isabella's chastity as a feminist resistance, making her plea for Angelo's life a gesture of solidarity to a heterosexual sister and a recognition of the difficulty of breaking the bonds of family relations and conventional sexual arrangements.

These different ‘interpretations’ are not, however, competing equals in the struggle for meaning. They each involve reordering the terms in which the text is produced, which of its conflicting positions are foregrounded, and how the audience response is controlled. In Jonathan Miller's production of the play, for example, Isabella literally refused the Duke's offer of marriage and walked off stage in the opposite direction. Miller has been a powerful advocate for the right of a director to reconstruct Shakespeare's plays in the light of modern preoccupations, creating for them an afterlife which is not determined by their original productions.²⁶ As a theatre director, he is aware of the extent to which the social meaning of a play depends upon the arrangements of theatrical meaning; which is different from simply asserting alternative ‘interpretations’. The concept of interpretation suggests that the text presents a transparent view on to the real life of sexual relations whether of the sixteenth or the twentieth century. The notion of ‘constructed meaning’ on the other hand, foregrounds the theatrical devices by which an audience's perception of the action of the play is defined. The focus of critical attention, in other words, shifts from judging the action to analysing the process by which the action presents itself to be judged.

This shift in the critical process has important implications for feminist criticism: the theatrical strategies which present the action to be judged resist feminist manipulation by denying an autonomous position for the female viewer of the action. Laura Mulvey and others have explored through the notion of scopophilia the pleasures afforded by particular ways of perceiving men and women in classic film narrative. Mulvey argues that in classic Hollywood films the techniques of lighting, focus and narrative pattern create women as the object, men as the bearers of the look: ‘A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude.’²⁷ Theatrical production, of course, effects less complete control on the spectators' gaze than Hollywood cinema. Nevertheless the techniques of soliloquy, language and the organisation of the scenes limit the extent to which women characters are ‘seen’ in the action. One of the most common strategies of liberal mimetic interpretation is to imagine a past life, a set of alternatives and motivation for the characters. Yet the text much more frequently denies this free play of character, defining women as sexualised, seen vis-à-vis men.

The effect of this process can be seen in Measure for Measure where the women characters define a spectrum of sexual relations from Mistress Overdone (Overdone by her last husband), the elderly bawd, through Juliet who is visibly pregnant, to Isabella whose denial of sexuality is contained in the visual definition of her nun's habit. Mariana's ambiguous position as ‘neither maid, widow nor wife’ affords her no autonomy but is seen as problematic: indeed the narrative organisation of the latter part of the play is directed to reinstating her within the parameters of permitted sexual relations.

Mariana's introduction into the play shows how the text focuses the spectator's attention and constructs it as male.²⁸ She is introduced in tableau, the visual accompaniment to the boy's song. Her role in the action is defined not by her own activity but by her physical presence, itself contextualised within the narrative by the song's words:

Take, O, take those lips away
That so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn;
But my kisses bring again, bring again;
Seals of love, but seal’d in vain, seal’d in vain.

(IV.i.1-6)

Isabella, for all her importance in the play, is similarly defined theatrically by the men around her for the men in the audience. In the scene of her first plea to Angelo, for example, she is physically framed by Angelo, the object of her demand, and Lucio the initiator of her plea. When she gives up after Angelo's first refusal, Lucio urges her back with instructions on appropriate behaviour:

Give’t not o’er so. To him again! entreat him,
Kneel down before him, hang upon his gown!
You are too cold.

(II.ii.43-5)

As her rhetoric becomes more impassioned, her speeches longer, our view of her action is still dramatically mediated through Lucio whose approving remarks and comic asides act as a filter both for her action and for the audience's view of it.

Through Lucio and the provost the text makes us want her to win. However, the terms of her victory are also defined by the rhetoric and structure of the scene. A woman pleading with a man introduces an element of sexual conflict which is made explicit in the bawdy innuendo of Lucio's remarks (II.ii.123-4). The passion of the conflict, the sexualising of the rhetoric, and the engagement of the onstage spectators create a theatrical excitement which is necessary to sustain the narrative: it also produces the kind of audience involvement which makes Angelo's response make sense. Like Angelo we are witnesses to Isabella's performance so that we understand, if we do not morally approve of, his reaction to it. It is, moreover, rendered theatrically valid in the heartsearching soliloquy which closes the scene. His rhetorical questions ‘Is this her fault or mine … Can it be that modesty may more betray the sense / Than woman's lightness?’ define the sexually appealing paradox of the passionate nun, and the audience is intellectually engaged in his quandary by his dilemma being put in the questioning form.

A feminist reading of the scene may wish to refuse the power of Angelo's plea, may recognise in it the double bind which blames women for their own sexual oppression. However to take up that position involves refusing the pleasure of the drama and the text, which imply a coherent maleness in their point of view.²⁹

Isabella's dilemma is, by contrast, a pale affair. Her one soliloquy deals only in the abstract opposition of chastity against her brother's life. Her resounding conclusion ‘Then Isobel live chaste and brother die: / More than our brother is our chastity’ (II.iv.184-5) offers no parallel intellectual pleasures; it does not arise out of the passion of the preceding scene which was a conflict between Angelo and Isabella not Isabella and Claudio; its lack of irony or paradox offers no scope for audience play. It is simply the apparently irresolvable problem which the ensuing action, under the Duke's control, must seek to resolve. Isabella's action is determined in the text by her sexuality and her space for manouevre is explicitly defined in Angelo's reminder of her circumscribed condition:

                                                            Be that you are
That is, a woman; if you be more, you’re none;
If you be one, as you are well expressed
By all external warrants, show it now,
By putting on the destined livery.

(II.iv.134-7)

Angelo's definition of a woman ‘by all external warrants’ is shared by the theatrical devices of the text. Any criticism which argues whether Isabella is a vixen or a saint places itself comfortably in the limited opening that the text allows for it; it takes up the argument about whether Isabella is to be more than a woman in giving up her brother or less than one in submitting to Angelo's lust. The text allows her no other role. The radical feminist ‘interpretation’ floated earlier would require a radical rewriting both of the narrative and of the way the scenes are constructed.

Feminist criticism of this 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—gelding and splaying hold no terror for women—and the women's role as the objects of exchange within that system of sexuality is not at issue, however much a feminist might want to draw attention to it. Thus when a feminist accepts the narrative, theatrical and intellectual pleasures of this text she does so in male terms and not as part of the locus of feminist critical activity.

III

In Measure for Measure the pleasure denied is the pleasure of comedy, a pleasure many feminists have learned to struggle with as they withhold their assent from the social approval of sexist humour. A much more difficult pleasure to deny is the emotional, moral and aesthetic satisfaction afforded by tragedy. Tragedy assumes the existence of ‘a permanent, universal and essentially unchanging human nature’³⁰ but the human nature implied in the moral and aesthetic satisfactions of tragedy is most often explicitly male. In King Lear for example, the narrative and its dramatisation present a connection between sexual insubordination and anarchy, and the connection is given an explicitly misogynist emphasis.

The action of the play, the organisation of its point of view and the theatrical dynamic of its central scenes all depend upon an audience accepting an equation between ‘human nature’ and male power. In order to experience the proper pleasures of pity and fear, they must accept that fathers are owed particular duties by their daughters and be appalled by the chaos which ensues when those primal links are broken. Such a point of view is not a matter of consciously-held opinion but it is a position required and determined by the text in order for it to make sense. It is also the product of a set of meanings produced in a specific way by the Shakespearean text and is different from that produced in other versions of the story.

The representation of patriarchal misogyny is most obvious in the treatment of Goneril and Regan. In the chronicle play King Leir, the sisters’ villainy is much more evidently a function of the plot. Their mocking pleasure at Cordella's downfall takes the form of a comic double act and Regan's evil provides the narrative with the exciting twist of an attempt on Lear's life.³¹ In the Shakespearean text by contrast, the narrative, language and dramatic organisation all define the sisters' resistance to their father in terms of their gender, sexuality and position within the family. Family relations in this play are seen as fixed and determined, and any movement within them is portrayed as a destructive reversal of rightful order (see I.iv). Goneril's and Regan's treatment of their father merely reverses existing patterns of rule and is seen not simply as cruel and selfish but as a fundamental violation of human nature—as is made powerfully explicit in the speeches which condemn them (III.vii.101-3; IV.ii.32-50). Moreover when Lear in his madness fantasises about the collapse of law and the destruction of ordered social control, women's lust is vividly represented as the centre and source of the ensuing corruption (IV.vi.110-28). The generalised character of Lear's and Albany's vision of chaos, and the poetic force with which it is expressed, creates the appearance of truthful universality which is an important part of the play's claim to greatness. However, that generalised vision of chaos is present in gendered terms in which patriarchy, the institution of male power in the family and the State, is seen as the only form of social organisation strong enough to hold chaos at bay.

The close links between misogyny and patriarchy define the women in the play more precisely. Goneril and Regan are not presented as archetypes of womanhood for the presence of Cordelia ‘redeems nature from the general curse’ (IV.vi.209). However Cordelia's saving love, so much admired by critics, works in the action less as a redemption for womankind than as an example of patriarchy restored. Hers, of course, is the first revolt against Lear's organising authority. The abruptness of her refusal to play her role in Lear's public drama dramatises the outrage of her denial of conformity and the fury of Lear's ensuing appeal to archetypal forces shows that a rupture of ‘Propinquity and property of blood’ is tantamount to the destruction of nature itself. Cordelia, however, is the central focus of emotion in the scene. Her resistance to her father gains audience assent through her two asides during her sisters’ performances; moreover the limits of that resistance are clearly indicated. Her first defence is not a statement on her personal autonomy or the rights of her individual will: it is her right to retain a part of her love for ‘that lord whose hand must take my plight’. Lear's rage thus seems unreasonable in that he recognises only his rights as a father; for the patriarchal family to continue, it must also recognise the rights of future fathers and accept the transfer of women from fathers to husbands. By the end of the scene, Cordelia is reabsorbed into the patriarchal family by marriage to which her resistance to Lear presents no barrier. As she reassures the king of France:

It is no vicious blot, murder or foulness,
No unchaste action or dishonoured step
That hath deprived me of your grace and favour.

(I.i.228-31)

Her right to be included in the ordered world of heterosexual relations depends upon her innocence of the ultimate human violation of murder which is paralleled with the ultimate sexual violation of unchastity.

However, any dispassionate analysis of the mystification of real socio-sexual relations in King Lear is the antithesis of our response to the tragedy in the theatre where the tragic power of the play endorses its ideological position at every stage. One of the most important and effective shifts in the action is the transfer of our sympathy back to Lear in the middle of the action. The long sequence of Act II, scene iv dramatises the process of Lear's decline from the angry autocrat of Act I to the appealing figure of pathetic insanity. The psychological realism of the dramatic writing and the manipulation of the point of view, forges the bonds between Lear as a complex character and the sympathies of the audience.

The audience's sympathies are engaged by Lear's fury at the insult offered by Kent's imprisonment and by the pathos of Lear's belated attempt at self-control (II.iv.101-4). His view of the action is further emotionally secured by his sarcastic enactment of the humility which his daughters recommend:

Do you but mark how this becomes the house:
Dear daughter, I confess that I am old.
Age is unnecessary. On my knees I beg
That you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed and food.

(II.iv.53-6)

As Regan says, these are unsightly tricks. Their effect is to close off the dramatic scene by offering the only alternative to Lear's behaviour as we see it. The dramatic fact becomes the only fact and the audience is thus positioned to accept the tragic as inevitable, endorsing the terms of Lear's great poetic appeal:

O reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest things superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beasts.

(II.iv.263-6)

The ideological power of Lear's speech lies in his invocation of nature to support his demands on his daughters; its dramatic power lies in its movement from argument to desperate assertion of his crumbling humanity as the abyss of madness approaches. However, once again, that humanity is seen in gendered terms as Lear appeals to the gods to

          touch me with noble anger,
And let not women's weapons, water drops
Stain my man's cheeks.

(II.iv.275-7)

The theatrical devices which secure Lear at the centre of the audience's emotional attention operate even more powerfully in the play's denouement. The figure of Cordelia is used as a channel for the response to her suffering father. Her part in establishing the terms of the conflict is over by Act I; when she reappears it is as an emblem of dutiful pity. Before she appears on stage, she is described by a ‘gentleman’ whose speech reconstructs her as a static, almost inanimate daughter of sorrows. The poetic paradoxes of his speech construct Cordelia as one who resolves contradiction,³² which is her potential role in the narrative and her crucial function in the ideological coherence of the text:

                                                            patience and sorrow strove
Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
Sunshine and rain at once: her smiles and tears
Were like a better way: those happy smilets
That played on her ripe lip seemed not to know
What guests were in her eyes, which parted thence
As pearls from diamonds dropped.

(IV.iii.15-23)

With Cordelia's reaction pre-empted by the gentleman, the scene where Lear and Cordelia meet substitutes the pleasure of pathos for suspense. The imagery gives Cordelia's forgiveness divine sanction, and the realism of Lear's struggle for sanity closes off any responses other than complete engagement with the characters' emotions. Yet in this encounter Cordelia denies the dynamic of the whole play. Lear fears that she cannot love him:

                                                            for your sisters
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.
You have some cause, they have not.

(IV.vii.73-5)

But Cordelia demurs with ‘No cause, no cause’.

Shakespeare's treatment of this moment contrasts with that of the earlier chronicle play from which he took a number of details, including Lear kneeling and being raised. In the old play the scene is almost comic as Leir and Cordella kneel and rise in counterpoint to their arguments about who most deserves blame.³³ The encounter is used to sum up the issues and the old play allows Cordella a much more active role in weighing her debt to Leir. In Shakespeare's text, however, the spectacle of suffering obliterates the past action so that audience with Cordelia will murmur ‘No cause, no cause’. Rather than a resolution of the action, their reunion becomes an emblem of possible harmony, briefly glimpsed before the tragic debacle.

The deaths of Lear and Cordelia seem the more shocking for this moment of harmony but their tragic impact is also a function of thwarting the narrative expectation of harmony restored which is established by the text's folk-tale structure.³⁴ The folk-tale of the love test provides an underlying pattern in which harmony is broken by the honest daughter and restored by her display of forgiveness. The organisation of the Shakespearean text intensifies and then denies those expectations so as once more to insist on the connection between evil women and a chaotic world.

The penultimate scene opposes the ordered formality of the resolution of the Gloucester plot with the unseemly disorder of the women's involvement. The twice-repeated trumpet call, the arrival of a mysterious challenger in disguise, evoke the order of a chivalric age when conflict was resolved by men at arms. The women, however, act as disrupters of that order: Goneril attempts to deny the outcome of the tourney, grappling in an unseemly quarrel with Albany (V.iii.156-8) and their ugly deaths interrupt Edgar's efforts to close off the narrative with a formal account of his part in the story and Gloucester's death.

Thus the deaths of Lear and Cordelia are contrasted with and seem almost a result of the destructiveness of the wicked sisters. Albany says of them: ‘This judgement of the heavens, that makes us tremble, / Touches us not with pity’ (V.iii.233-4). The tragic victims, however, affect us quite differently. When Lear enters, bearing his dead daughter in his arms, we are presented with a contrasting emblem of the natural, animal assertion of family love, destroyed by the anarchic forces of lust and the ‘indistinguished space of woman's will’. At this point in the play the most stony-hearted feminist could not withhold her pity even though it is called forth at the expense of her resistance to the patriarchal relations which it endorses.

The effect of these dramatic devices is to position the audience as a coherent whole, comfortably situated vis-à-vis the text. To attempt to shift that position by denying Lear's rights as a father and a man would be to deny the pity of Lear's suffering and the pleasurable reaffirmation of one's humanity through sympathetic fellow feeling. A feminist reading of the text cannot simply assert the countervailing rights of Goneril and Regan, for to do so would simply reverse the emotional structures of the play, associating feminist ideology with atavistic selfishness and the monstrous assertion of individual wills. Feminism cannot simply take ‘the woman's part’ when that part has been so morally loaded and theatrically circumscribed. Nor is any purpose served by merely denouncing the text's misogyny, for King Lear's position at the centre of the Shakespeare canon is assured by its continual reproduction in education and the theatre and is unlikely to be shifted by feminist sabre-rattling.

A more fruitful point of entry for feminism in is the process of the text's reproduction. As Elizabeth Cowie and others have pointed out,³⁵ sexist meanings are not fixed but depend upon constant reproduction by their audience. In the case of King Lear the text is tied to misogynist meaning only if it is reconstructed with its emotional power and its moral imperatives intact. Yet the text contains possibilities for subverting these meanings and the potential for reconstructing them in feminist terms.

The first of these lies in the text's historical otherness; for in spite of constant critical assertion of its transcendent universality, specific connections can be shown between Shakespeare's text and contemporary material and ideological conflict without presenting a merely reductive account of artistic production in terms of material circumstances.³⁶

Discussing the ‘gerontocratic ideal’, for example, Keith Thomas has noted that ‘The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are conspicuous for a sustained desire to subordinate persons in their teens and twenties and to delay their equal participation in the adult world … such devices were also a response to the mounting burden of population on an unflexible economy’.³⁷ This gerontocratic ideal was not without contradiction, for the very elderly were removed from economic and political power and ‘essentially it was men in their forties or fifties who ruled’.³⁸ Moreover the existence of this ideal did not obviate the need for careful material provision for the elderly. There is a certain poignancy in the details of wills which specify the exact houseroom and the degree of access to the household fire which is to be left to aged parents.³⁹ However, this suggests that Lear's and his daughter's bargaining over the number of his knights need not be seen as an egregious insult and that the generational conflict within the nuclear family could not be resolved by recourse to a simply accepted ideal of filial piety.

As a corrective to prevailing gloomy assessments of the happiness of the early modern family, Keith Wrightson has produced evidence of individuals who show considerable concern to deal with family conflict in a humane and flexible fashion.⁴⁰ But it is equally clear from his evidence that family relations were the focus of a great deal of emotional energy and the primary source both of pleasure and pain. This is also borne out in Michael MacDonald's account of a seventeenth-century psychiatric practice in which, as today, women were more susceptible to mental illness than men:

Not all the stress women suffered was caused by physical illness … women were also more vulnerable than men to psychologically disturbing social situations. Their individual propensities to anxiety and sadness were enhanced by patriarchal custom and values that limited their ability to remedy disturbing situations … Napier and his troubled patients also believed that oppression made people miserable and even mad, but the bondage they found most troubling subordinated daughters to parents, wives to husbands rather than peasants to lords.⁴¹

This discussion of social history cannot propose an alternative ‘interpretation’ of the text or assert its true meaning in the light of historical ‘facts’. Rather it indicates that the text was produced within the contradications of contemporary ideology and practice and suggests that similar contradictions exist within the play. These contradictions could fruitfully be brought to bear in modern criticism and productions. The dispute between Lear and his daughters is in part concerned with love and filial gratitude but it also dramatises the tense relationship between those bonds and the material circumstances in which they function. Lear's decision to publish his daughters' dowries is so ‘that future strife / May be prevented now’; the connection between loving harmony and economic justice is the accepted factor which underlies the formal patterning of the opening scene and is disrupted only by Cordelia's asides which introduce a notion of love as a more individual and abstract concept, incompatible both with public declaration and with computation of forests, champains, rivers and meads. Cordelia's notion of love gained precedence in modern ideology but it seriously disrupts Lear's discussion of property and inheritance. When Lear responds with ‘Nothing will come of nothing’ his words need not be delivered as an angry calling to account: they could equally be presented as a puzzled reaction to an inappropriate idea. Moreover Cordelia is not opposing hereditary duty to transcendent love—she does not reply ‘There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned’. When she expands on her first assertion her legal language suggests a preference for a limited, contractual relationship: ‘I love your majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less’ (I.i.94-5). The conflict between the contractual model and the patriarchal model of subjects' obligations to their king was at issue in contemporary political theory⁴² and Cordelia's words here introduce a similar conflict into the question of obligations within the family.

When in Act II Lear again bargains with his daughters, a similar confusion between affective relations and contractual obligations is in play. Lear asserts the importance of the contractual agreement made with his daughters, for it is his only remaining source of power. Since they are now in control, Goneril and Regan can assert an apparently benign notion of service which does not depend on contract or mathematical computation:

What need you five and twenty? ten? or five?
To follow in a house where twice so many
Have a command to tend you?

(II.iv.259-62)

The emotional impact of the scene, which is its principal power in modern productions, simply confuses the complex relations between personal autonomy, property and power which are acted out in this confrontation. The scene could be directed to indicate that the daughters' power over Lear is the obverse of his former power over them. His power over them is socially sanctioned but its arbitrary and tyrannical character is clear from his treatment of Cordelia. Lear kneeling to beg an insincere forgiveness of Regan is no more nor less ‘unsightly’ than Goneril's and Regan's formal protestations to their father. Both are the result of a family organisation which denies economic autonomy in the name of transcendent values of love and filial piety and which affords no rights to the powerless within it. Such a production of meaning offers the pleasure of understanding in place of the pleasure of emotional identification. In this context Lear's speeches about nature and culture are part of an argument, not a cri de coeur; the blustering of his threats is no longer evidence of the destruction of a man's self-esteem but the futile anger of a powerful man deprived of male power.

Further potential for comically undermining the focus on Lear is provided by the Fool, who disrupts the narrative movement of the action, subverting if not denying the emotional impact of the scenes in which he appears. In an important sense the Fool is less an alter ego for Lear than for his daughters: like them he reminds Lear and the audience of the material basis for the change in the balance of power. However, where they exploit Lear's powerlessness with cruelty and oppression he denies that necessity by his continued allegiance. In modern productions this important channel for an alternative view of events is closed off by holding the Fool within the narrative, using him as a means to heighten the emotional appeal of Lear's decline.⁴³

The potential for subversive contradiction in the text is, however, restricted to the first part. Lear's madness and the extrusion of Gloucester's eyes heavily weight the action towards a simpler notion of a time when humanity must perforce prey upon itself like monsters of the deep, denying comic recognition of the material facts of existence. Yet even Cordelia's self-denying love or Gloucester's stoic resignation are denied the status of ideological absolutes. The grotesque comic lie of Gloucester's fall from Dover cliff is hardly a firm basis for a belief in the saving power of divine providence and Cordelia's acceptance of her father's claims on her is futile because it is unsupported by material power.

A production of the text which would restore the element of dialectic, removing the privilege both from the character of Lear and from the ideological positions which he dramatises, is crucial to a feminist critique. Feminist criticism need not restrict itself to privileging the woman's part or to special pleading on behalf of female characters. It can be equally well served by making a text reveal the conditions in which a particular ideology of femininity functions and by both revealing and subverting the hold which such an ideology has for readers both female and male.

The misogyny of King Lear, both the play and its hero, is constructed out of an ascetic tradition which presents women as the source of the primal sin of lust, combining with concerns about the threat to the family posed by female insubordination. However the text also dramatises the material conditions which lie behind assertions of power within the family, even as it expresses deep anxieties about the chaos which can ensue when that balance of power is altered.

An important part of the feminist project is to insist that the alternative to the patriarchal family and heterosexual love is not chaos but the possibility of new forms of social organisation and affective relationships. However, feminists also recognise that our socialisation within the family and, perhaps more importantly, our psychological development as gendered subjects make these changes no simple matter.⁴⁴ They involve deconstructing the sustaining comforts of love and the family as the only haven in a heartless world. Similarly a feminist critique of the dominant traditions in literature must recognise the sources of its power, not only in the institutions which reproduce them but also in the pleasures which they afford. But feminist criticism must also assert the power of resistance, subverting rather than co-opting the domination of the patriarchal Bard.

Notes

1. See Michele Barrett, Ideology and Cultural Production (London: Croom Helm, 1979), Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (London: Marion Boyars 1978) and Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge, 1982).

2. See the preface to Carolyn Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Neely, eds., The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Urbana: Illinois Univ. Press, 1980).

3. See Lenz, Greene and Neely, ‘Women and Men in Shakespeare: a selective bibliography’, ibid., pp. 314-36.

4. See especially Madelon Gohlke, ‘“I wooed thee with my sword”: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms’, ibid., pp. 150-70.

5. Janet Adelman, ‘“Anger's my meat”: Feeding, Dependency and Aggression in Coriolanus' in David Bevington and J. L. Halio eds., Shakespeare's Pattern of Excelling Nature (Newark, 1978), pp. 108-24.

6. Coppelia Kahn, ‘Coming of Age in Verona’, in Lenz, Greene and Neely, op. cit., p. 171.

7. In particular Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) and Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California Univ. Press, 1979).

8. Coppelia Kahn, ‘Man's Estate’, in Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California Univ. Press, 1981) p. 11.

9. Ibid., p. 1.

10. Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: a Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press), p. 1.

11. Ibid., p. 5.

12. Ibid., p. 15.

13. Ibid., p. 32.

14. Ibid., p. 39.

15. Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (London: Cape, 1982).

16. Ibid., p. 25.

17. Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975) p. 153. Dusinberre's understanding of feminism has been challenged by Martha Anderson-Thom, ‘Thinking about Women and their Prosperous Art: a Reply to Juliet Dusinberre's Shakespeare and the Nature of Women’, Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 259-76.

18. William Haller and Malleville Haller, ‘The Puritan Art of Love’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 5, (1942) 235-72. Cf. K. Davies, ‘“The sacred condition of equality”: how original were Puritan doctrines of marriage?’ Social History, 5 (1977), 566-7.

19. Juliet Dusinberre, op. cit., p. 183.

20. Chapter 4, ‘Husbands and Wives, Parents and Children’ of Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982) provides a comprehensively informed discussion of the controversy. See also Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977); G. R. Quaife, Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early Seventeenth Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1969); Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 1974).

21. Lenz, Greene and Neely, op. cit. preface, p. ix.

22. Coppelia Kahn, op. cit., p. 20.

23. Linda Bamber, op. cit., p. 43.

24. See for example Lisa Jardine's summary dismissal of feminist criticism in favour of historical criticism in Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), introduction, or Inga-Stina Ewbank reminding her audience at the bicentennial congress of the Shakespeare Association of America of Ibsen's distinction between ‘feminism’ and the truth about men and women: ‘Shakespeare's Portrayal of Women: a 1970s View’ in Bevington and Halio, eds. op. cit., pp. 222-9.

25. See Ernest Schanzer, ‘The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure’ Shakespeare Survey, 13 (1960), 81-9, and replies by J. Birje-Patil, ‘Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969), 106-11; S. Narajan, ‘Measure for Measure and Elizabethan Betrothals’, Shakespeare Quarterly 14, (1963), 115-19.

26. This idea was fully developed in Jonathan Miller's Eliot Lectures, ‘The After Life of Plays’ delivered at the University of Kent in 1978 (London: Faber and Faber, forthcoming).

27. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, no. 3, p. 13. For a more extended discussion see Annette Kuhn, op. cit.

28. Cf. Laura Mulvey's account of the way songs and close-up are used in order to fetishise women characters in Hollywood cinema, op. cit., p. 13. The fact that Mariana was played by a boy does not alter the point: she is always played by a woman in modern representation.

29. Cf. the discussion of ‘Reading as a Woman’ in Jonathan Culler, Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 43-63. The implication there is that positioning the reader as a woman is a matter of free choice and the position adopted is coherent and determines clear cut readings.

30. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (London: Chatto, 1966), p. 45.

31. See The True Chronicle History of King Leir, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. VII (London: Routledge, 1973), 337-402.

32. The imagery of ll. 12-14 gives this resolution a political tinge; resolution is seen as subjection.

33. See The True Chronicle History of King Leir ed. Bullough, p. 393.

34. Freud in ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ accounts for the psychological power of the myth in terms of ‘the three inevitable [sic] relations that a man has with a woman—the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him’. Lear's entrance with Cordelia dead in his arms is, for Freud, a wish-fulfilling inversion of the old man being carried away by death (The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernest Jones, vol. IV (London: Hogarth, 1925), pp. 244-56).

35. ‘The problem of stereotyping is not that it is true or false, distorting or manipulated, but that it closes off certain production of meaning in the image’, Elizabeth Cowie, ‘Images of Women’, Screen Education, 23 (1977), 22.

36. Bullough (op. cit., p. 270) has drawn attention to ‘the remarkable historical parallel’ of the case of Sir Brian Annesley whose daughter Cordell took steps to prevent her sister declaring their father insane so that she could take over the management of his estate. Cordell Annesley's solution was that a family friend should be entrusted with the old man and his affairs.

37. Keith Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 62 (1976), 214.

38. Ibid., p. 211.

39. Discussed in Margaret Spufford, op. cit., p. 113.

40. See note 20.

41. Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 39-40.

42. See Gordon Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).

43. For example in the 1982-3 Royal Shakespeare Company production Antony Sher played the fool as a vaudeville clown but the theatrical inventiveness of his double act with Lear emphasised the closeness of their relationship with the fool as a ventriloquist's dummy on Lear's knee.

44. See Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family (London: Verso, 1982).