[In the following essay, Helms provides a feminist critique of Shakespeare's female roles in performance and envisions "a theatre where patriarchal representations of femininity can be transformed into roles for living women. "]

Feminist film theorists have revealed ways cinematic representation constructs the female as the object of the male spectator's gaze.¹ Their analyses have raised parallel questions for theatrical and specifically Shakespearean representation: to what extent and through what strategies does Shakespearean performance also construct female characters for the spectator's eye, and, since Shakespearean theatre is as verbal as it is visual, for the auditor's ear? Kathleen McLuskie argues that the representational strategies of the playwright she calls "the patriarchal bard," like cinematic cues, "resist feminist manipulation by denying an autonomous position for the female viewer of the action." Shakespearean texts, bearing the traces of their history in a theatrical enterprise which completely excluded women, construct gender from a relentlessly androcentric perspective. Yet, as McLuskie also remarks, "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."²

I do not intend to press this analogy between theatre and film, but I draw it in order to underscore my concern with Shakespearean performance. The feminist critique of Shakespearean texts has transformed literary critical interpretation of "the woman's part," but few feminist Shakespeareans have considered the sexual politics of playing that part. My allusion to the anthology The Woman 's Part will, I hope, further underscore my immediate concern: to extend the feminist critique of Shakespeare to contemporary theatrical practice.³

A feminist critique for Shakespearean performance must, as McLuskie argues, acknowledge Shakespeare's androcentric playhouse as the originating context for his representation of gender before seeking a feminist potential within twentieth-century theatre conditions. Yet the convention of the boy actor vexes critical speculation.⁴ Cross-casting marks the nexus of character and performer in subtle and shifting ways which historical inquiry cannot recover. The performance of the boy actor could have been eroticized for some spectators, aesthetically distanced for others. It could have been illusionistic at one moment, only to be broken by self-reflexive theatricality at another, as the textual references to the boy actor playing the woman's part in Antony and Cleopatra and As You Like It suggest. Its ideological valence is ambiguous. It could foreground the social construction of gender by imposing femininity on male bodies and at the same time trivialize women's social roles in puerile caricatures. It could celebrate female heroism while it excluded women from the economic and expressive opportunities of theatrical activity. Certainly the theatrical convention resonates with the cultural practices of a patriarchal society in which women shared their children's disenfranchisement. The boy actor playing Rosalind obliquely comments on this disenfranchisement when he remarks that "Boys and women are for the most part cattle of this color."⁵ Yet the theatrical effect of his having said it remains elusive.

But in the social contexts and physical settings of twentieth-century Shakespeare productions, women play "the woman's part." To what extent does this re-casting transform the cultural resonances of Shakespeare's construction of gender? Elaine Showalter argues optimistically that "when Shakespeare's heroines began to be played by women instead of boys, the presence of the female body and female voice, quite apart from details of interpretation, created new meanings and subversive tensions in these roles."⁶ Less optimistic (or more radical) critics of the dramatic canon have argued that female roles originally written by men for male performers—the Medeas and Antigones of the Greek theatre as well as the Rosalinds and Cleopatras of Shakespeare's—are caricatures, and that they should again be played by men to emphasize the fact that the classic roles are, in Sue-Ellen Case's phrase, "classic drag."⁷

Now for a feminist who wishes to make her living in the theatre, Showalter's view has certain obvious attractions. Yet the feminization of the boy actor is the theatrical strategy through which the Shakespearean representation of gender was structured; a feminist critique must confront its residual effects. Theatre historians regularly attribute the paucity and brevity of Shakespearean women's roles to the inadequacy (or the expense) of the apprenticed boy players. They have not as often remarked that female characters rarely appear unaccompanied by males. Stage practice does not in this simply mime social restrictions on women's freedom of movement, but reveals its dependence on the narrowed range of difference at its disposal. The all-male acting company contrasts the boy and the mature male to create the illusion of female presence. To leave a boy actor alone on stage is to relinquish the difference on which his feminization partly depends. At such moments, poetic, rhetorical, and narrative strategies must accomplish what the presence of the adult actor does in other scenes: they must maintain the female persona by dominating the impersonator.

Such textual strategies, originally designed to feminize the boy actor, may infantilize or eroticize the woman who now plays the woman's part. Showalter's promise of feminist re-interpretation will not automatically be fulfilled. To create "new meanings and subversive tensions" in Shakespearean roles demands specific strategies for intervention. These strategies must interrogate the ideological continuity between apparently antithetical theatrical practices. The twentieth century, like the seventeenth, still divides humanity into men on the one hand and women and children on the other. The patriarchal structures which hierarchize physical and social distinctions between male and non-male characterize contemporary cultures as well as Shakespeare's. The actor who wants to play Shakespeare's female characters without playing parts scripted by a "patriarchal bard" must confront the linguistic recalcitrance of the Shakespearean construction of gender.

The Gendered Subjects of Shakespearean Soliloquy

Shakespearean verse, as John Barton remarks, gives the actor "stage directions in shorthand." He offers examples throughout Playing Shakespeare: monosyllables demand more rapid delivery; shared lines tell the actor to pick up the cue.⁸ Such stage directions create individuated patterns of speech and structure representation of the social categories of class and gender. They are perhaps most subtly directorial in soliloquies. Soliloquy, by convention, allows an actor to establish a privileged relation to the audience, either to tell the character's side of the story by creating the illusion of interiority or to restructure the theatrical event by breaking through the dramatic fiction. But Shakespeare's female characters are rarely alone on stage and even more rarely do they address the audience directly. When they do, the conventions of the soliloquy are regularly adapted to the female character, revealing the extent to which the Shakespearean soliloquy is ordinarily gendered as male.⁹

In Hamlet and Macbeth, the protagonist's soliloquies provide an internal analogue to the unfolding of the plot. They not only focus audience response on the speaker, but direct it toward his interpretation of events. But throughout Ophelia's soliloquy after the nunnery scene, Hamlet remains before the audience: "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" (HI. i. 150). When Lady Macbeth is alone on stage, Macbeth remains before the audience, as she reads a letter from him and then turns to apostrophe: "Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be / What thou art promis'd" (I. v. 15-16). The subjectivity of the female characters, even in soliloquy, is, for the audience, mediated through their shared concentration on the male protagonist. The text insistently interposes a male presence between the female speaker and the auditor.

Comic soliloquies deploy quite different strategies and seem to offer greater possibilities for feminist intervention. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Helena addresses the audience directly:

How happy some o'er other some can be!
Through Athens I am thought as fair as she.
But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so.
He will not know what all but he do know;
And as he errs, doting on Hermia's eyes,
So I, admiring of his qualities.

[I. i. 226-231]

End-stopped couplets replace the normal blank verse of the Shakespearean soliloquy. Their self-conscious artifice, through which Helena analyzes her situation so shrewdly and articulates it so cleverly, can, in performance, effect her transformation from a greensick girl into a commentator who interrogates the vagaries of erotic experience. This transformation plays on the soliloquy's power to privilege Helena's relation to the audience and yet distances the actor from the character. It creates an opportunity for the "gestic feminist criticism" which Elin Diamond calls for, a Brechtian practice which would "foreground those moments in a playtext in which social attitudes could be made visible."¹⁰

A similar prosodic device appears in Troilus and Cressida. Like Helena, Cressida addresses the audience on the subject of the ephemeral nature of male desire. But when Cressida articulates her love and her despair in rhymed couplets, prosodic and syntactical strategies simultaneously construct, delimit, and subvert the subjectivity of the female speaker:

Words, vows, gifts, tears, and love's full sacrifice,
He offers in another's enterprise,

But more in Troilus thousandfold I see
Than in the glass of Pandar's praise may be.

[I. ii. 282-285]

Why, in this speech, do rhymed couplets, sometimes in feminine rhyme, replace blank verse? Does their calculated artificiality serve numerically to represent the coquetry which patriarchal criticism attributes to Cressida? Do they heighten a pleasure which the actor is to offer by playing Cressida in the posture of a whore? Shakespeare's versified stage directions, it would then appear, undermine the rhetorical force of the character's argument. They provide a sort of linguistic analogue to cosmetics; they warn the audience that this is not an honest woman. Thus the Shakespearean script exploits Cressida's speech to tell Troilus's tale of feminine treachery rather than her own story of male violence. Discursive strategies recuperate the subversive potential of the speech, turning Cressida's analysis of male desire into a source of eroticized aesthetic pleasure for the male auditor. Even in soliloquy, Cressida remains an object of desire and disdain.

The syntax of the speech as well as its rhyme contains stage directions which further diminish the performer's opportunity to communicate directly to the audience. The formal structure of Cressida's speech, like Helena's in its prosody, differs strikingly in its syntax. Helena's soliloquy parodies a scholastic Petrarchism in its analysis of desire:

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind.
Nor hath Love's mind of any judgement taste;
Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste;
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd.
As waggish boys themselves in games forswear,
So the boy Love is perjur'd everywhere.

[I. i. 232-241]

Helena's argument is articulated with comically pedantic clarity. But Cressida's argument against male hegemony, which is equally knotty and more profoundly subversive, is aphoristic and obscured by ellipses:

Women are angels, wooing:
Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing.
That she belov'd knows naught that knows not this:
Men prize the thing ungain'd more that it is.
That she was never yet that ever knew
Love got so sweet as when desire did sue.
Therefore this maxim out of love I teach:
Achievement is command; ungain'd, beseech.

[I. ii. 286-293]

While the artificiality of rhymed couplets works against the actor who tries to motivate a character who can tell her own story, the obscurity of this elliptical syntax works against the actor who tries to use the speech to comment on the dramatic fiction. Shakespeare's stage directions impede feminist revision in both naturalistic and gestic modes.

If a feminist re-interpretation of Troilus and Cressida is to succeed theatrically, the performer must find ways to re-interpret these stage directions. Patriarchal literary criticism has assumed Cressida's vanity and duplicity, while feminist re-readings have argued for her intelligence and vulnerability.¹¹ Although literary analysis of Cressida's soliloquy can work through the androcentric text toward a feminist reading, it leaves theatrical practice with as patriarchal a bard as ever. Vanity and duplicity at least offer a theatrically viable motive for action. A feminist re-interpretation must discover performance choices which offer as much scope for motivated activity as showing off. The actor must transpose the mimetic foundation of Cressida's language into another key.

Yet what could Cressida's motivation be when the ellipses occlude the female subject: It is the soul of male joy that lies in the doing; it is male achievement and male command to which Cressida refers, while she herself is one of the "things" to be won and done. Cressida is already speaking from the androcentric perspective which she will more fully internalize at the end of play. In her last speech, her alienation is complete, and with it, the actor's options for consciously motivated action are further narrowed.

This second speech, again in rhymed couplets, occurs after the eavesdropping scene, in which Thersites spies on Troilus and Ulysses as they watch Diomedes force Cressida, through symbolic and perhaps physical violence, into sexual submission:

Troilus, farewell! One eye yet looks on thee,
But with my heart the other eye doth see.
Ah, poor our sex! this fault in us I find,
The error of our eye directs our mind.
What error leads must err; O then conclude,
Minds sway'd by eyes are full of turpitude.

[V. ii. 107-112]

These lines make sense from Troilus's perspective, from Ulysses' or Thersites', but not from Cressida's. Such de-centering renders this speech among the most difficult to perform in the Shakespearean canon; it also presents perhaps the greatest challenge to a feminist performance. Janet Adelman argues that, during the eavesdropping scene, the text has moved suddenly and inexplicably "into opacity .. . at exactly the moment at which we most need to understand what Cressida is doing, we are not only given no enlightenment but are forced to acknowledge our distance from Cressida by the structure of the scene itself." An actor will, she concludes, have to speculate on Cressida's motives "in order to play the part at all," but such speculation cannot be grounded in the text.¹²

What are Shakespeare's versified stage directions? Although the speech is delivered at a moment of intense emotion, that emotion is mediated by rhymed couplets which echo those of the earlier speech. This formal repetition implies a continuity of character that may undermine Troilus's interpretation of Cressida's inconstancy: "This is, and is not, Cressid" (V. ii. 146). Yet Cressida's words renew and deepen the alienation of the "Women are angels" soliloquy. They announce her collusion with the ideology Thersites offers as commentary on her speech: "A proof of strength she could not publish more, / Unless she said, 'My mind is now turn'd whore'" (V. ii. 113-114). Can the contradiction between the violence Cressida suffers and the blame she accepts create a space for a feminist performance as it has for a feminist literary criticism? What are the performance choices? Is there a motive which would subvert the androcentric perspective of the speech? Or a gest which would foreground the social contexts from which the character's alienation arises?

Cressida's soliloquies illustrate the technical and theoretical problems which a feminist theatrical practice encounters in re-interpreting "the patriarchal bard." Can one suit the action to the word if the word subverts the speaker? The 1987 Stratford, Ontario production resolved the dilemma in favor of the action. In the eavesdropping scene, in which the audience sees Thersites watch Troilus and Ulysses spy on Diomedes and Cressida, Diomedes subjected Cressida to relentless symbolic violence, intermittently underscored by physical menace. He left Cressida so near hysteria that when she came to her soliloquy, the words were virtually unintelligible. The text of Cressida's collusion gave way before an image which represented the terror of rape as forcefully as Gloucester's on-stage blinding represents the horror of mutilation.

The Ontario production exposed Cressida's victimization at the price of her silence her inarticulate hysteria deconstructed the patriarchal representation of a vain and shallow coquette, but did not in itself foreground the social attitudes and circumstances which structure sexual victimization. Troilus's response to the scene, however, in some measure completed Cressida's gest. His self-indulgent grieving for what he willfully interpreted as Cressida's faithlessness went extravagantly over the top. The audience had just seen a rape scene; they now saw patriarchal ideology at work as Troilus bustled about blaming the victim: "The fractions of her faith, orts of her love, / The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics / Of her o'er-eaten faith, are given to Diomed" (V. ii. 158-160). Such theatrical moments may move spectators from empathy to anger.

Having praised the Ontario staging of the eavesdropping scene, I must also remark that the program notes do not affirm the interpretation for which I praised it: "No sooner has Troilus won Cressida than they are parted and, despite her desperate protests, she is sent to join her father in the Greek camp. There, confused and susceptible in her new womanhood, she is quickly seduced by Diomedes."¹³ A similar gap between program notes and theatrical performance characterizes another recent Shakespearean production in which, again, soliloquy focuses the tension between an androcentric playtext and a performable feminist critique.

How The Jailer's Daughter Escaped

Fletcher and Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen represents or evokes fourteen female characters. The three principals are Hippolyta, the Amazon queen who Theseus has conquered in a single combat; her sister Emilia, whose love for women underscores her suffering when Theseus orders her to marry the survivor of Palamon and Arcite's duel; and the nameless Jailer's Daughter, who fulfills her dramatic function in the main plot when she releases Palamon from her Father's prison and fulfills her function in the sub plot when, mad for unrequited love of the knight whom she has freed, she is seduced and thereby cured by a suitor who sleeps with her pretending to be Palamon. The text, like other texts of "the patriarchal bard," constructs these characters from a masculinist perspective which celebrates Hippolyta's defeat in her combat with Theseus, which validates Emilia's brutally forced marriage, and which mocks the sexuality of the Jailer's Daughter. Yet in contemporary performance, the female characters of The Two Noble Kinsmen may challenge the patriarchal perspectives of the text.

The Two Noble Kinsmen has only recently been rescued from long oblivion in Beaumont and Fletcher's Collected Works. In 1980, Glynne Wickham set the play in the homoerotic context of the Jacobean court, remarking that Theseus's love for Pirithous had "an all-too-evident counterpart" in James's relation to his favorite, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset.¹⁴ In 1985, Richard Abrams further questioned the play's sexual politics, noting that it is "with each other's fantasies, rather than Emilia's, that Palamon and Arcite, [who call themselves] 'one another's wife,' obviously interlock" and that Emilia's own "stated sexual preference is for other women."¹⁵ In 1986, Barry Kyle's production at the Swan in Stratford and then at the Mermaid in London gave The Two Noble Kinsmen a place in the repertory of the Royal Shakespeare Company, extending these questions of the play's sexual politics to their significance for twentieth-century audiences. As The Two Noble Kinsmen enters the academic and theatrical arenas where the contemporary meanings of Shakespeare are contested, it offers new perspectives on the relation between the scope of feminist criticism and the tasks of theatrical representation.

The elite cultural contexts of The Two Noble Kinsmen focus literary critical interpretation on the setting of Theseus' court. The duel between Palamon and Arcite for possession of Emilia and her torment thereby become the play's most significant representation of the physical and symbolic violence which underlie the exchange of women. A feminist critique of this exchange can recognize, with Richard Abrams, that "the play's deepest conflict is not between the kinsmen, but between Theseus, as patriarchal ruler of Athens, and Emilia as representative of 'the powers of all women'" (Abrams, 74 [III.vi.194]). Yet the narrative resolution of Emilia's story reveals its significance most fully when it resonates theatrically with the representation of the Jailer's Daughter, for this character, a crazed and nameless victim in the text, can command an extraordinary presence on stage—a presence which undermines both androcentric and elitist interpretations of the playtext. In resisting heterosexuality, Emilia exposes the symbolic violence of dynastic marital rites; in contesting the barriers to the marriage she desires, the Jailer's Daughter illuminates the intersecting hierarchies of class and gender.

The plot demands the sexual humiliation of the Jailer's Daughter, and it is this aspect of her role that the Royal Shakespeare Company program notes chose to underscore: they place the Jailer's Daughter among Shakespeare's "wanton wenches from the lower orders who give rein to their sexual appetites" and who are "contrasted with high-born ladies who put a proper price on their own virginity." She "is less a mad sister to Ophelia than a tragi-comic version of the ail-too available Jaquenetta in Love's Labour's Lost—or perhaps a sort of siamese twin from As You Like It, combining the honest earthiness of Audrey with the pretensions of poor Phebe, likewise fobbed-off with an inferior substitute for daring to fall in love beyond her social station."¹⁶

Like the Ontario production of Troilus and Cressida, the Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Two Noble Kinsmen belied the sexism and elitism that the commentary attributed to the playtext, for Imogen Stubbs, as the Jailer's Daughter, created a heroic figure who was at once socially marginal and theatrically central. The text invites this conflict between the social structures it seems to reinforce and its own theatrical strategies, for Fletcher and Shakespeare give the Jailer's Daughter four soliloquies. The first, in II. iii, opens with an analysis of the barriers she faces in her quest for Palamon's love:

Why should I love this gentleman? 'Tis odds
He never will affect me; I am base,
My father the mean keeper of his prison,
And he a prince. To marry him is hopeless;
To be his whore it witless. Out upon't!
What pushes are we wenches driven to
When fifteen once has found us!

[II.iv.1-7]

To combat the disadvantages of class and gender, she must challenge both political and domestic order:

What should I do to make him know I love him,
For I would fain enjoy him? Say I ventur'd
To set him free? what says the law then?
Thus much for law or kindred! I will do it,
And this night, or to-morrow, he shall love me.

[II. iv. 29-33]

She frees Palamon and sends him, still in chains, to hide in a nearby wood until she comes to bring him files and food. The second soliloquy begins with a cry of triumph:

Let all the Dukes and all the devils roar,
He is at liberty! I have ventur'd for him.

If the law
Find me, and then condemn me for't, some wenches,
Some honest-hearted maids, will sing my dirge,
And tell to memory my death was noble,
Dying almost a martyr.

[II. vi. 1-2, 13-17]

In the third soliloquy, she realizes that Palamon will not keep their meeting in the wood. Fearful that he has fallen prey to the wolves she hears howling nearby, her struggle for her sanity begins:

My father's to be hang'd for his escape,
Myself to beg, if I priz'd life so much
As to deny my act, but that I would not,
Should I try death by dozens. I am mop'd:
Food took I none these two days—
Sipp'd some water. I have not clos'd mine eyes
Save when my lids scoured off their [brine]. Alas,
Dissolve, my life, let not my sense unsettle
Lest I should drown, or stab, or hang myself.

[III. ii. 22-30]

Her last soliloquy is delivered after she has gone mad:

I am very cold, and all the stars are out too,
The little stars and all, that look like aglets.
The sun has seen my folly. Palamon!
Alas, no; he's in heaven. Where am I now?

[III. iv. 1-4]

In Cressida's speeches, versified stage directions contain the representation of female subjectivity to recuperate patriarchal ideology; in these four soliloquies, as in Hamlet's and Macbeth's, they create an internal analogue to the action of the plot. Interrogative sentences, resolutions, and narrative speculations all reinforce a mode of direct address; and direct address offers an opportunity either to communicate a character's interiority or to comment on the scene.

Shakespeare more often extends this opportunity to his Hamlets than his Ophelias, and indeed, textual scholarship often attributes these soliloquies to Fletcher rather than to Shakespeare.¹⁷ If this is true, then Fletcher, having been the collaborator of "the patriarchal bard," can now become the collaborator of feminist Shakespeareans. When the actor who plays the Jailer's Daughter truly seizes her opportunity, the audience cannot easily dismiss her character as "a wanton wench from the lower orders" punished for failing to know her place or control her sexual appetites.

In the Royal Shakespeare Company production, Imogen Stubbs's performance fully realized the desperate heroism of the Jailer's Daughter. The actor's intelligence granted dignity to the character's erotic energy and her vulnerability made that dignity poignant. Perhaps most importantly, Stubbs is also an athlete. During her mad scenes, her skill enabled her to climb a flag-pole and to cross downstage walking on her hands while singing. Such explicitly theatrical actions charge the nexus of performer and character with an extraordinary vitality. They compel spectators to acknowledge that the physical presence of the performer constitutes the fictional character on stage; they insist that a character in a play is, as Michael Goldman argues, "something an actor does"¹⁸ When the Jailer's Daughter was realized as the enactment of Imogen Stubbs, the performer's skill and strength turned the madness of the Jailer's Daughter, not, like Ophelia's, to prettiness, but to power.

This power can refract the ideology of the Shakespearean playtext, expanding the strategies through which a feminist critique of Shakespeare can intervene in theatrical practice. This feminist critique may explore alternatives to the performance choices, tasks, and motivations by which masculinist productions have trivialized or demonized female characters; it may investigate more radical revisions through alienation effects, applying Diamond's gestic feminist criticism to the Shakespearean playtext. And it may also applaud the performer whose special skills can destabilize power relations in both the dramatic fiction and the theatrical space. Through such explorations and affirmations, feminist Shakespeareans may begin to create a theatre where patriarchal representations of femininity can be transformed into roles for living women.

Notes

¹ See especially Laura Mulvey's influential essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16:3 (1975): 6-18. I find Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen 23:3-4 (1982): 74-87, and Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (London: Routlege and Kegan Paul, 1985), particularly suggestive for questions of theatrical representation.

² Kathleen McLuskie, "The patriarchal bard: feminist criticism and Shakespeare—King Lear and Measure for Measure" (93), in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 88-108.

³The Women 's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980).

⁴ Discussions of the boy actor include Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975); Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (Brighton: Harvester, 1983); Phyllis Rackin, "Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage," PMLA 102:1 (1987), 29-41; and Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988). See also my "Roaring girls and silent women: the politics of androgyny on the Jacobean stage," in Women in Theatre, ed. James Redmond (London: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and "'Marina thus the Brothel 'Scapes': The Senecan Rhetoric of Rape in Shakespeare's Pericles" (forthcoming).

⁵As You Like It, III, iii. 414-415. Quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Subsequent references to this edition will be cited in the text.

⁶ Elaine Showalter, "Representing Ophelia: women, madness, and the responsibilities of feminist criticism" (80), in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Metheun, 1985), 77-94.

⁷ Sue-Ellen Case, "Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts," Theatre Journal 37 (1985): 317-27. See also the opening chapter of her Feminism and Theatre.

⁸ John Barton, Playing Shakespeare (London: Metheun, 1984). The book is based on a series of videotaped workshop programs which the Royal Shakespeare Company made in 1982 for London Weekend Television.

⁹ The most recent full-length study of the Shakespearean soliloquy, Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare 's Soliloquies (London: Metheun, 1987), does not employ gender as a category of analysis.

¹⁰ Elin Diamond, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism" (91), The Drama Review: A Journal of Performance Studies 32:1 (1988), 82-94. In conjunction with Margot Heinemann, "How Brecht read Shakespeare"( Political Shakespeare, 202-30), Diamond's "gestic feminist criticism" suggests a range of possibilities for feminist Shakespearean performance that I hope to explore more fully in the future. See also Griselda Pollack, "Screening the seventies: sexuality and representation in feminist practice—a Brechtian perspective," 155-99 in her Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988).

¹¹ Feminist defenses of Cressida include R. A. Yoder, "'Sons and Daughters of the Game': An Essay on Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida" Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 11-25; Gayle Greene, "Shakespeare's Cressida: 'A kind of self " in The Woman's Part, 133-49; and Arlene N. Okerlund, "In defense of Cressida: character as metaphor," Women's Studies 7 (1980): 1-17. See also my "'Still Wars and Lechery': Shakespeare and the Last Trojan Woman," in Arms and the Woman: Feminist Essays on War, Gender, and Literary Representation, eds. Helen Cooper, Adrienne Munich, and Susan Squier (Greensboro: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

¹² Janet Adelman, "'This Is and Is Not Cressida': The Characterization of Cressida" (128), in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, eds. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 119-41. See also Linda Berning Labranche, The Theatrical Dimension of Troilus and Cressida. Diss. Northwestern University, 1984. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1984 (8502394). In '"Still Wars and Lechery': Shakespeare and the Last Trojan Woman," I argued that the language of Cressida's submission reveals a subtext of resistance; my concern here is with performance choices that will make such a subtext theatrically effective.

¹³ In this production, directed by David William, Cressida was played by Peggy Coffey, Diomedes by Lorne Kennedy, and Troilus by Jerry Etienne. The program notes are unsigned.

¹⁴ Glynne Wickham, "The Two Noble Kinsmen or A Midsummer Night's Dream, Part II?" (183), in Elizabethan Theatre VII, ed. George Hibbard (Hamden: Archon Books, 1980), 167-96,

¹⁵ Richard Abrams, "Gender confusion and sexual politics in The Two Noble Kinsmen" (71 and 69), in Drama, Sex, and Politics, ed. James Redmond (London: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 69-76.

¹⁶The Two Noble Kinsmen by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher: A programme/text with commentary by Simon Trussler (London: Methuen, 1987), xvii.

¹⁷ Paul Bertram argues for Shakespeare's authorship in Shakespeare and The Two Noble Kinsmen (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1965), but the scenes in which the soliloquies of the Jailer's Daughter occur are more commonly attributed to Fletcher. For a concise summary of the debate, see Hallett Smith's introduction to the play in the Riverside edition.

¹⁸ Michael Goldman, Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 149.