[In the following essay, Neely examines the way in which marriage—achieved and postponed or destroyed—influences the structure and themes of Shakespeare's plays. Neely maintains that marriage becomes the focal point for relationships, both social and emotional, for men and women in the plays.]

Marriage in Shakespeare's plays is a crucial dramatic action and a focus for tensions and reconciliations between the sexes. Movements toward marriage constitute the subject of the comedies; disrupted marriages are prominent in many of the tragedies; the establishment or reestablishment of marriage in one or two generations is the symbol of harmony in the late romances. The plays' marriages are counterpointed by what I call broken nuptials, extending Leo Salingar's use of the term.¹ These are parodic or irregular wedding ceremonies, premature or postponed consummations, estrangements, mock deaths, and real deaths—anything that disrupts the process of wooing, betrothal, wedding, marriage. These broken nuptials express the anxieties, desires, and conflicts of the couples who enter into marital unions as well as the external pressures placed on these unions by parents, rulers, the community. My study will examine how marriage, achieved or broken, influences the themes and structure of the plays and serves as the focus for the social and emotional relations of the sexes.

My emphasis on marriage is the result of my desire to explore women's roles in Shakespeare's plays. This exploration led me, as it has led feminist scholars in many disciplines, to examine the contexts in which women are defined, a project precisely articulated by the late Michelle Rosaldo in her reflections on the nature of feminist anthropology:

It now appears to me that woman's place in human social life is not in any direct sense a product of the things she does (or even less a function of what, biologically, she is) but of the meaning her activities acquire through concrete social interactions. And the significances women assign to the activities of their lives are things that we can only grasp through an analysis of the relationships women forge, the social contexts they (along with men) create—and within which they are defined.²

Marriage is the social context that centrally defines the female characters in Shakespeare's plays; with few exceptions their conflicts, crises, and character development occur in connection with wooing, wedding, and marriage. Their roles and status are determined by their place in the paradigm of marriage—maiden/wife/ widow—which likewise governed the lives of Renaissance women.³ The introduction to a Jacobean women's legal handbook starkly notes the inevitability and restrictiveness of this paradigm for women: "all of them are understood either married or to be married and their desires [are] subject to their husband. I know no remedy though some women can shift it well enough."⁴ Even exceptional historical women like Queen Elizabeth or extraordinary characters like Cleopatra do not escape definition in terms of the paradigm: Elizabeth made strategic use of the conventional roles she eschewed, manipulating her marriageability to gain political advantage and presenting herself as wife to England and as mother to her people,⁵ while Cleopatra creates for herself a symbolic marriage to Antony at the end of Shakespeare's play. Examining women characters in the context of marriage facilitates a balanced evaluation of the power and limits of their roles.

There is a long tradition of criticism that scrutinizes the roles of women in Shakespeare; recently such criticism has proliferated and become increasingly self-conscious about its methodology and its goals. This criticism, in both its current and earlier versions, has assessed the place of the women characters in somewhat contradictory ways. One strand concerns itself with analyzing the strength, influence, and complexity of the women in the plays, compensating for their past neglect, misreading, and stereotyping. Nineteenth-century forerunners of this approach, like the historians who studied exemplary women, isolated and extolled prominent female characters, admiring their strength, wit, intelligence, power—and also their charm and beauty.⁶ Recent critics, more self-conscious about their goals and more sophisticated in their methods, document the ways in which Shakespeare's women have been misread and stereotyped by critics, editors, and producers.⁷ They read Kate's role of shrew and even her speech of subordination positively, make Cleopatra the hero of her play, emphasize Desdemona's sexual assertiveness.⁸ They analyze the implications of female conversations and friendships, of female doubling, of women's commentary.⁹

Another strand of criticism stresses instead the constrictions placed on the female characters by the patriarchal structures within the plays and by the male-authored text in which they exist. Such critics show that Shakespeare's female characters inevitably are defined and define themselves in relation to men. They demonstrate that even strong, central women like Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra are socially and sexually contained by the structures of patriarchy, that the assertive comic heroines are restricted by the marriages which conclude their stories.¹⁰ They analyze how these marriages achieve social and political harmony for the patriarchy as well as providing emotional union for the couple." They reveal how the tragic heroes' fantasies of women cripple men and destroy female characters, illuminating the way in which the men's development of their own identity depends on and exploits women.¹²

Some very recent studies, drawing on and benefiting from both strands of criticism, analyze the relationship between the commanding heroines and the confining culture, between the idealization and degradation of women, and trace changes in gender relations through different genres. Linda Bamber explores how women conceived of as the other, as the representatives of external reality, assume different functions in comedy, history, tragedy, and romance.¹³ Peter Erickson examines how men and women take on each other's qualities and roles, and how women are granted power or deprived of it in different plays.¹⁴ Marianne Novy weighs the varying interactions between mutuality and patriarchy, between reason and emotion, and their effects on women's roles.¹⁵

My book grows out of and has been nourished by all this work, extending earlier explorations by focusing on the relations of the sexes in marriage. I examine the plays primarily as dramatic structures without reference to their determinants in Shakespeare's psyche. I explore the social relations of the sexes within the plays but do not draw extensively on social history (an analogous body of texts, as I show later in the Introduction) to interpret these relations. My concern is with the ways in which the plays are influenced by other literary texts: by the conventions of drama, by the effects of their disparate sources, by generic expectations. I focus particularly on the ways in which gender relations are shaped by and shape the different genres in which Shakespeare wrote: the comedies of the 1590s, the problem comedies and tragedies (1600-08), and the romances that end his career. As Shakespeare responds to the demands of a variety of genres, recasting them in response to the overall development of his own art, the role of women, the nature of relations between the sexes, and the place of marriage alter. In exploring these transformations, each of the book's five chapters offers a sustained interpretation of a single play, which places it in the context of contemporaneous plays to provide a broad reading of a key phase of Shakespeare's development.

The five plays I reinterpret—Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter's Tale—share a number of concerns and motifs. All have marriage as a central issue and each contains more than one courtship or marriage. Taken together, these plays encompass the whole process of wooing, wedding, and repenting. Much Ado begins with the beginning of courtship. The wedding ceremony and delayed consummation occur in acts 2 and 4 of All's Well. The opening of Othello is coterminous with Othello's and Desdemona's elopement. Antony and Cleopatra employ the rituals of courtship long after their affair is established and do not complete their union until after the rupture of Antony's actual marriages. In The Winter's Tale the long-standing marriage of Hermione and Leontes is disrupted early in the play and is restored only after the betrothal of their daughter, Perdita.

All of these plays embody the conflicts attendant on marriage by the incorporation of broken nuptials; these range from Claudio's denunciation of Hero during their wedding ceremony in Much Ado to Polixenes's interruption of Perdita's and Florizel's betrothal in The Winter's Tale. The mending of these ruptured nuptials is achieved primarily through the women's apparent or actual deaths. The strategic mock deaths of Hero, Cleopatra, and Hermione, accomplished with the assistance of other women, Helen's pretended death on a pilgrimage, and the real death of Desdemona engender—however problematically—their lovers' repentance and the rejuvenation of the unions. Although bonds between males are in conflict with courtship and marriage, prominent female characters, female friendships, and female doubles further heterosexual relations. Love relationships and marriages are also impeded by social and political tensions: patriarchal rivalry and friendship in Much Ado, class distinctions in All's Well, racial divisions in Othello, imperial war between Rome and Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra, estrangement between court and country, fathers and sons in The Winter's Tale. I explore the pressures that make the transition from wooing to wedding so difficult and examine its effects on relations between the sexes, and especially on the status of the female characters. One way to start thinking about this transition as it is experienced by the women and men in the plays is to examine certain of the ideologies that shape it—to look at the functions, interactions, and implications of the conventions of courtly love, which is associated with courtship, and of cuckoldry, which is associated with marriage. These conventions coexist in all the plays examined here.¹⁶ The men idealize their beloveds, and the women deny, mock, and qualify their lovers' protestations of commonplaces of what I will call Petrarchan love, the attenuated, formulaic Renaissance version of medieval courtly love relegated here to the period of courtship. Through this mockery the women enhance, but ultimately threaten, their status. By debunking Petrarchanism, they expose the emptiness of male idealization and the unrealiability of male vows of undying love. They are able to seize control of courtship, to insist on the reality of female sexuality and shrewishness, and to affirm for themselves and other women a complex identity beyond the Petrarchan stereotypes. Apparently freer in courtship than most upper-class Renaissance daughters were, these heroines typically defy their fathers, choose their own marriage partners, and woo them aggressively. In the bedtricks of All's Well and Measure for Measure, women even coerce their husbands to consummate their marriages. But by attaining verbal superiority, and taking themselves off the pedestal, by asserting their desires and acting on them, Shakespeare's maids are moving toward and necessitating their subordination as wives—their domestication by silence, by removal of disguise, and by giving themselves, their possessions, and their sexuality to the husbands.

Deidealization, as it prepares the way for marital sexual union, activates the misogyny that coexists with idealization. Having dismantled the conventions of Petrarchan love, Shakespeare's maids, when they become wives or are about to, ignite the comic—or tragic—conventions of cuckoldry. Cuckoldry derives from misogyny and is the inverse of both medieval and Renaissance courtly love; it subordinates women in a variety of ways. Both conventions express anxiety about or hostility toward marital sexuality. Courtly love does so, in its medieval form, by encouraging adulterous love and, in its Renaissance form, by idealizing unattainable women and denying their sexuality. Cuckoldry does so by emphasizing women's dangerous sexuality and promiscuity and the precanousness of their possession by their husbands. On the other hand, courtly love implies some mutuality, either in a physically adulterous or sublimated relationship or in a mutually chaste courtship, whereas cuckoldry assumes asymmetry: the motif concerns itself only with female infidelity; women cannot be cuckolded. In this way, cuckoldry subordinates as well as denigrates women. The woman is the focus of courtly love conventions, however attenuated her presentation or self-absorbed her lover; the central image of courtly love is the woman's eyes, symbol of her ennobling influence over her lover. In contrast, the focus of cuckoldry is entirely on cuckold and cuckolder; in fact, there is not even a term comparable to adulteress to designate the woman's role in the cuckoldry triangle; nor is there a special term for her if she is the victim of infidelity. Cuckoldry's central emblem is, of course, the cuckold's horns, symbol of the sexual potency that has been appropriated by his rival.¹⁷ The convention acknowledges the power of women's sexuality but represses this knowledge. Instead, male sexuality is emphasized, and wives are treated as property that serves to validate husbands' manhood, honor, and status.

The effect of the motif in Shakespeare's plays is complicated by the fact that usually the men are only imaginary cuckolds; the women are almost invariably chaste and faithful. Though they are vilified in misogynist commonplaces, they are eventually vindicated, and the plays prove them superior to the men in their fidelity, love, strength, endurance, while the men are made to look foolish or murderous and to experience guilt, punishment, repentance, forgiveness. So women's poswer is enhanced and confirmed by the men's slander, but only at the price of confinement in the most restrictive of stereotypes—only if they remain chaste, loving, obedient, and long-suffering, only if they are willing to die for lové (or to pretend to die for love), to return after marriage to something resembling the chaste immobility of the Petrarchan beloved. In the plays as in the period, women's sexuality is a source of potential power and considerable anxiety.

Marriage especially may be the locus of sexual anxiety in the plays because it was the focus of multiple pressures in the culture in which Shakespeare lived and worked. Traditionally, the state, the church, the family, the local community, and the marriageable couple had powerful and conflicting designs on the institution of marriage. In Shakespeare's England these conflicts were particularly acute because of the political tensions which accompanied the establishment of an independent Protestant state, the religious changes which attended the Reformation and the creation of the Anglican church, the influential programs of the humanist reformers, and the extensive theoretical controversy about the nature of women, possibly generated by unsettling changes in their social roles. Attitudes toward the place of women, the nature of sexuality, and the function of marriage were contradictory and in flux in the Elizabethan period as they are in the plays, so that reading the social representations of women is as complicated a business as reading the literary ones. But those representations in the prescriptive literature provide a useful backdrop and an illuminating analogue to the literary representations that are the focus of this book.

Just as literary critics have arrived at various assessments of the role of female characters in the plays, so historians propound conflicting views on the status of women in the period. Traditionally, historians have assumed that ferment over women, sexuality, and marriage generated improvements in the status of women as well as that of men. They cite as evidence the presence of exemplary women who achieved political power or exhibited impressive intellectual accomplishments (Mary Tudor, Queen Elizabeth I, Margaret Roper, Lady Jane Grey, the Howard sisters, the Countess of Pembroke),¹⁸ the humanists' advocacy of education for women, and Protestantism's new ideology of companionate marriage.¹⁹ But most contemporary scholars of women, marriage, and the family argue that the status of women relative to that of men and to that of women in earlier periods diminished and emphasize their new restrictions. They discover that the remarkable accomplishments of exemplary women were anomalous, manifested asymmetries, and generated anxieties;²⁰ they argue that education for women was less available, less serious, more problematic than that offered men;²¹ they show that women's economic freedom and potential declined;²² they argue that companionate marriage in a patriarchal society demanded the increased subordination of women.²³ The evidence and arguments supporting the two assessments, taken together, reveal the paradoxical mixture of gains and losses that was the lot of Renaissance women.

In the period as in the plays, the ideology of marriage brings into sharp focus the contradictory attitudes toward women and the complicated blend of power and subordination which characterized their status. The Reformation had begun to transform the old ideology without altering the prescribed form of marriage, its traditional functions, or the attitudes that accompanied them. To the two conventional functions of the institution—the accomplishment of legitimate procreation and the avoidance of fornication—the state-and-church sponsored homilie on marriage joined a new one, the loving amity of the couple. Marriage "is instituted of GOD, to the intent that man and woman should live lawfully in a perpetuali friendship, to bring foorth fruite, and to avoid fornication."²⁴ Advocacy of companionate marriage—the loving sexual partnership of husband and wife—went hand in hand with other changes in attitude that had potentially positive implications for women. Love, once denounced as a dangerous disrupter of marriage, was now decreed essential to it. Celibacy having been demoted by the Reformation, marital sexuality was no longer viewed as a necessary evil but as a positive good—and not only by Protestants. Erasmus, for example, in his Epistle in laude and praise of matrimonie, extravagantly extolled copulation as a law of God and nature (even trees and rocks do it).²⁵ He implied that sexuality provides not just progeny (the main argument of the epistle) but intrinsic fair pleasure: "I here nat hym whiche wyll saye unto me that that foule pchynge and pryckes of carnali lust have come nat of nature, but of syn. . . . And as touchyng the fowlnes surely we make that by our imaginacion to be fowle, which of the selfe nature is fayre and holy" (sig. B8). He points out that men who fail to till their fields are punished and asks "what punyshment is he worthy whyche refuseth to tylle that ground which tylled beareth men? And in tyllage of the erthe is requyred a longe and paynefull labour, here the short tyllage is also entysed with a pleasure as it wer a reward prepared therefore" (sig. C6^v). Since a harmonious sexual companionship requires the consent and compatibility of the couple, enforced marriage and the custom of wardship were increasingly condemned; and since sexual satisfaction was to be found in marriage by husband as well as wife, adultery was condemned for both and the double standard denounced,²⁶ as it is in Shakespeare's plays; directly by Emilia in Othello and indirectly by the paucity of either wayward wives or philandering husbands throughout the canon.

There are, however, a number of external and internal impediments to the success of companionate marriage. The new demand for the couple's mutual affection and sexual satisfaction was inevitably in conflict with the desire of parents to control their childrens' marriages for family advancement or consolidation, a conflict that is central to many of the plays. Although children were theoretically able to negotiate their own marriages, parents, especially upper-class parents, continued to regulate spousals in order to achieve or maintain status, cement alliances, gain economic advantage, and ensure continuity of family and property. Indeed, parental pressures may have been especially strong in the period (as they certainly are in the plays) due to economic and demographic factors that tender to increase competition for suitable matches. Since aristocratic fortunes were in decline, heirs from the peerage needed to marry lower-born brides from the expanding mercantile class, whose large dowries would restore depleted family reserves. At the same time, because the population (and hence the number of marriageable daughters) was increasing and the number of male heirs in the peerage was not, the competition to marry these daughters into the aristocracy was fierce. This competition is reflected in the doubling of the average size of dowries in the period from 1570-1590 (with still greater increases later) and in the increase in the ratio of dowry to jointure, the husband's provision for the wife after his death.²⁷ Hence fathers continued to betroth their children before they reached the age of consent (twelve) and to control their children's marriage prospects even after their deaths, through wills more restrictive and less imaginative than that of Portia's father in The Merchant of Venice. Although legal marriage required only the consent of the couple, economic arrangements could not be accomplished without a ceremony and parental contracts;²⁸ therefore parental consent was often essential. Children who were wards (like Bertram and Helen) were under still more severe restraints, as their marriages could be auctioned off to the highest bidder and they had no appeal to parental affection.

Even when the couple's choice met the requirements of their parents and their society, they themselves (like Claudio and Hero) might find negotiating an amicable relationship difficult. These difficulties were exacerbated by the contradictory attitudes of the period toward women, sexuality, and male-female relations. In spite of the mutuality and companionship urged, in fact the woman had unequal status at every point in the process of wooing and wedding. She gave up more, she had to endure more, and she bore greater responsibility for the success—or failure—of the marriage. The very assumption of her emotional and sexual equality in the context of a male-dominated social order seems to have had the consequence of creating restrictions on her.

The prescriptive literature, while urging men to marry and providing them with detailed instructions on the choice of wives, rarely provides assistance for women beyond a vague admonition to choose a spouse wisely. This lack of helpful advice implies that women had no choice other than marriage, that their marriages were controlled by their parents even more than men's, and that men took the initiative in courtship—as they probably usually did in the period, if not always in Shakespeare's plays. Women, moreover, like Iago's "deserving woman" are warned to be wary of their wooers: "See suitors following, and not look behind" (Oth,II.i.157). Both the conservative Catholic Vives, in Instruction of a Christian Woman, written at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and the progressive anonymous compiler of The Lawes Resolution of Womens Rights, written at the beginning of the seventeenth century, sternly warn women to guard against the inevitable deceits of their wooers:

Give none ear unto the lover, no more than thou wouldst do unto an enchanter or sorcerer. For he cometh pleasantly and flattering, first praising the maid, showing her how he is taken with the love of her beauty, and that he must be dead for her love, for these lovers know well enough the vainglorious minds of many, which have a great delight in their own praises, wherewith they be caught like as the birder beguileth the birds,²⁹—

and against the violence which furthers these deceits:

But to what purpose is it for women to make vowes, when men have so many millions of wayes to make them break them? And when sweet words, faire promises, tempting, flattering, swearing, lying will not serve to beguile the poore soule: then with rough handling, violence, and plaine strength of armes, they are, or have beene heretofore, rather made prisoners to lusts theeves, than wives and companions to faithfull honest lovers: So drunken are men with their owne lusts, and the poysen of Ovids false precept, Vim licet appellant, vis est ea grata puellis: That if the rampi er of Lawes were not betwixt women and their harmes, I verily thinke none of them, being above twelve yeares of age, and under an hundred, being either faire or rich, should be able to escape ravishing. [p. 377]

Having survived the perils of courtship, the woman, at marriage, became in the apt term, a femme couverte, losing all her possessions along with her legal and economic rights: That which the Wife hath is her Husbands. "For thus it is, If before Marriage the Woman were possessed of Horses, Neate, Sheepe, Corne, Wool, Money, Plate, and Jewels, all manner of moveable substance is presently by conjunction the Husbands, to sell, keepe or bequeath if he die."³⁰

Once married, the wife suffered more severely than the husband the consequences of the injunction to procrete; she endured the dangers of repeated pregnancies and childbirths (a poignant theme in the romances) and the difficulties of nursing and weaning (she is advised to nurse her children herself) and of child raising. Even the homilie on marriage acknowledges women's heavier burden: "Trueth it is, that they must specially feele the griefe and paines of their Matrimonie, in that they relinquish the liberty of their owne rule, in the paine of their travailing, in the bringing up of their children. In which offices they be in great perils, and be grieved with great afflictions, which they might be without if they lived out of Matrimonie" (p. 243). A similar but more radical acknowledgment occurs in Lawes Resolutions when, at the beginning of its chapter on laws pertaining to widows, they are counseled to rejoice rather than grieve at their husband's death: "Why mourne you so, you that be widowes? Consider how long you have beene in subjection under the predominance of parents, of your husbands, now you be free in libertie, 'fró e proprii juris, ' at your owne Law, . . . the vow of a widow, or of a woman divorced no man had power to disallow of, for her estate was free from controlment" (p. 232). As the passage suggests, the death of her husband was the wife's only escape from the afflictions of marriage. Although judicial separation, divortium a mensa et thoro (which did not legally dissolve the marriage or allow remarriage), was available to the wife in the case of the husband's adultery, brutality, or desertion, and although remarriage in the case of a husband's adultery was tolerated, most wives could not practically avail themselves of this option, since they had no money, property, or legal power.³¹

Even those parts of the ideology of marriage that might have been expected to alter and enhance women's status engendered demands for their subordination. The assumptions that sexuality was superior to celibacy and that sexual satisfaction was to be achieved in marriage by both men and women placed the wife's sexuality in a new light; she was no longer merely a necessary vessel for procreation but an active sexual partner. But sexuality, and in particular female sexuality, continued to be associated with sin and Eve's fall, and lasciviousness, inconstancy, and frailty were attributed especially to women.³² The enhancement of women's sexual role made female incontinence more threatening. Hence chastity became the primary duty required of women throughout life in the forms of virginity, marital fidelity, widows' abstinence. Not only did the wife have to remain faithful but, unlike the husband, she had to prove her faithfulness by exhibiting the peculiarly Renaissance virtue of shamefastness and by avoiding all appearances of immodesty or wantonness. Elaborate restrictions on dress and behavior grew out of this emphasis on chastity and shamefastness. The liberal Tilney's advice to wives on how to protect their reputations is identical with if less elaborate than the counsel the conservative Vives gave to maids: stay at home. Going abroad was dangerous, Vives argues, because

if a slander once take hold in a maid's name by folks' opinion, it is in a manner everlasting, nor cannot be washed away without great tokens and shows of chastity and wisdom. If thou talk little in company folks think thou canst but little good; if thou speak much they reckon thee light. If thou speak uncunningly, they count thee dull witted; if thou speak cunningly thou shalt be counted but a shrew. If thou answer not quickly thou shalt be called proud or ill brought up; if thou answer [readily] they shall say thou wilt be soon overcome. If thou sit with demure countenance, thou art called a dissembler. If thou make much moving, they will call thee foolish. If thou look on any side, then will they say, thy mind is there. If thou laugh when any man laugheth, though thou do it not of purpose, straight they will say thou hast a fantasy unto the man and his sayings, and that it were no great mastery to win thee. Whereto should I tell, how much occasion of vice and naughtiness is abroad.³³

The woman's militant chastity was essential to counteract both her own "frailty" and men's deceit and aggression. While Shakespeare's women do not always stay at home, they do protect their chastity assiduously.

As the emphasis on sexual partnership in marriage resulted in more stringent demands for female chastity, likewise the call for a loving partnership between men and women resulted in or was accompanied by a contradictory insistence on rigid hierarchy. The husband's and the wife's contributions to marital amity were distinct and asymmetrical. The husband's duty was to govern his wife lovingly, firmly—untyrannically but absolutely. Tolerating the frailties of the "weaker vessel," he was to ignore small faults and correct large ones, not brutally but subtly, a strategy recommended as being effective as well as humane: "And therefore considering all her frailties she is to be rather spared. By this meanes thou shalt not onely nourish concord: but shalt have her heart in thy power and will. For honest natures will sooner be reteined to do their duties, rather by gentle wordes than by stripes."³⁴ Tilney's dialogue argues that the wife's sexuality could be similarly controlled: "In this long and troublesome journey of matrimonie, the wise man maye not be contented onely with his Spouses virginitie, but by little and little must gently procure that he maye also steale away her private will and appetite, so that of two bodies there may be made one onelye hart, which she will sonne doe, if love raigne in hir" (sig. B6). Many Shakespearean husbands, among them Petruchio, Benedick, Othello, and Leontes, manifest the desire to control their wife's will and appetite.

The wife's love, in contrast to the husband's, was to be expressed through the obedience promised by her (but not by her husband) in the Anglican marriage ceremony and enjoined on her by all the prescriptive literature and by the homilie on marriage: "But as for their husbands, them must they obey, and cease from commanding, and performe subjection. For this surely doth nourish concord very much when the wife is ready at hand at her husbands commandement, when she will apply her selfe to his will, when shee endehoureth her selfe to seek his contentation, and to doe him pleasure, when shee will eschewe all things that might offend him" (p. 242). If husbands should have faults, wives are to admonish them gently and tactfully, preferably in bed.³⁵ Women are urged to love and "endeavor to please" even vile, vicious, or vice-ridden husbands: "howe much more the husbande bee evill, and out of order, so much more is the woman's prayse, if shee love him" (Tilney, sig. D5). Hero, Helena, Desdemona, and Hermione all deserve such praise. Writings on marriage assume that conflict is inevitable but offer men and women complementary strategies of control and obedience for alleviating it.

The relative status of men and women when relations of the sexes were at their most friendly and civilized, the competing forces that interacted in companionate marriage, and the surface equality that masked and upheld male authority are not only expounded in Edmund Tilney's The Flower of Friendshippe, they are also embodied in its frame and its dramatic interplay. This pleasing work by a future master of the revels is a combination of instructive marriage treatise and witty dialogue with roots in Castiglione's Courtier, Pedro de Lujá n's Coloquios Matrimoniales, and Erasmus's marriage colloquies.³⁶ Superficially, the dialogue represents dramatically the equality for men and women in marriage which it advocates. The pastime is first undertaken in preference to various sports rejected because the women in the company cannot participate. The husband's duties, delineated by Don Pedro, guest and game leader, and the wife's, expounded by Madame Julia, the hostess, are parallel and reciprocal. Husband and wife are urged to love and care for each other, to tolerate the spouse's weaknesses, to avoid various faults including adultery, to be discreet, perform their duties, raise the children. The dramatic interplay concerns sexual politics and is carefully balanced. Isabella, Julia's "feminist" daughter attacks women's subordination and defends their rights, like her prototype, Lord Julian, in The Courtier and like her successors in Shakespeare, Adriana and Emilia. Opposing her, Gualter mounts commonplace attacks on women's shrewishness and desire for mastery. His name, the same as that of Griselda's husband, marks him as a conventionally witty misogynist with many counterparts in dialogues, colloquies, the women controversy, and the drama, including Berowne, Benedick, and Iago.³⁷

But in spite of its attention to balance and equality, the dialogue responds to the anxieties Gualter voices about female domination and unruliness by implicitly and explicitly affirming male authority. The frame arrangements, which apparently promote shared authority, are in fact controlled by Pedro, who proposes the pastime and, even as he delegates to Julia the garland of sovereignty for the first day, determines the topic. Her immediate return of the garland, ceding him the right to speak first, is inevitable; her token authority gives her no actual control over either topic or speaker. On the second day, Julia passes the garland to her friend and contemporary Aloisa, and when it is predictably returned to her, she willingly but obediently accepts the role of speaker: "For disobedience is a fault in all persons, but the greatest vice in a woman" (sig. D3). The duties enjoined are also not quite parallel. While both husband and wife are forbidden to commit adultery, only the wife is counseled to maintain a perfectly chaste reputation. Considerably more forbearance is urged for the wife than for the husband. An extreme case of wifely forbearance is represented in Pedro's example, which is welcomed by Julia as an apt conclusion to her lecture on the wife's duties. He tells of a wife who cures her husband's adultery by enhancing it for him: she brings a fine bed and hangings to make the bare surroundings in which he carries on his affair with a poor woman more pleasant, and in this way wins him back to her love (and more attractive bedchamber). "He should . . . have had a bed of nettles, or thornes, had it bene to mee" (sig. E6), retorts Aloisa, unmoved by the exemplary tale.

The tensions underlying equality and the mode of their resolution are clearest in the contrasting treatments of Gualter and Isabella. Gualter's misogynistic generalizations about the evils of women are not taken entirely seriously or adopted by Pedro, but they are never denied. Gualter's interpolations reiterate that, even at their best, women pose problems for husbands—that, for example, rich, fair, noble, and virtuous women all make bad wives because these advantages can turn a husband into a "slave" or a "bondman" (sigs. B5^v, B5), and that, at their worst, "they be shrewes all, and if you give the simplest of them leave to treade upon your foote, tomorrowe she will tread upon thy head" (sig. C7^v). Although the women persistently (but playfully) demand that Gualter be banished or silenced for his digressive and intrusive "prattle," Pedro tolerates him, significantly arguing that "he increaseth our sporte, and we cannot well want him" (sig. B7). Isabella, with equal persistence, inserts her own witty interpolations on behalf of women, disagreeing with Pedro's claim that marital equality is achieved by joining an older man to a younger woman, arguing that wives cannot be expected to love adulterous husbands, and asking sarcastically whether the wives should accommodate themselves to husbands who are mad or drunk. Julia and Aloisa similarly remark women's oppression and mock at excesses of male authority. But in contrast to the tolerance afforded Gualter's witty misogyny, Isabella's earnest arguments for equality between women and men in marriage are vigorously refuted.

No one supports Isabella in her direct challenge to the key doctrines of the wife's obedience. Isabella argues that this obedience should be reciprocated: "but as meete is it, that the husbande obey the wife, as the wife the husband, or at the least that there be no superioritye betweene them, as the auncient philosophers have defended. For women have soules as wel as men, they have wit as wel as men, and more apte for procreation of children, than men. What reason is it then, that they should be bound, whom nature hath made free" (sig. D8). She extends her case with an example from the Achaians in which gender roles are reversed, with the women ruling and the men doing the housework. Her argument is authoritatively attacked by the whole company. Gualter expresses the dangers in such role reversal when he responds to her Utopian example by asking mockingly of such a wife's treatment of her husband, "and might she beat him too?" Julia for the first time in the dialogue asserts her maternal authority over Isabella, condescendingly urging her not to believe everything she hears and dismissing another sort of potential "equality"—that of separate spheres with men ruling outdoors and women in the home. This, she claims, is a barbarian and dangerous custom because it gives women a sphere, if only a limited one, for potential disobedience. She is immediately seconded by "father Erasmus" who has spoken only once before in the dialogue and whose succinct, unqualified assertion—the last word on the topic—is lent weight by his age, his reputation, and his appeal to religion: "both divine, & humaine lawes, in our religion giveth the man absolute authoritie, over the woman in all places" (El). Julia then provides a rational, secular, psychological justification for Erasmus's declaration, arguing that men are naturally suited for sovereignty and women only rarely so.³⁸ Through this exchange the tensions that emerge from female demands for equality in marriage are decisively resolved.

But this resolution is temporary and fictional. The continuing dialectic between women's small gains in power and status and the restrictions urged in response to them characterizes the period and makes conclusive assessments of the woman's part difficult. These assessments, historians now emphasize, will differ according to which women are examined—women of what century, what country, what class, what marital status; according to which sources are used—diaries, letters, court depositions, demographic data, prescriptive or ideological texts, literature or drama; and according to what criteria are employed, which features isolated for analysis. Gualter's attacks on women may be extracted from Tilney's dialogue to emphasize the period's pervasive misogyny or Isabella's spirited and sensible arguments may be cited as evidence of its enlightened awareness of women's authority and inequality. When the complex, witty interplay of the prescriptive dialogue as a whole is taken into account, its relationship to actual marriages in the period becomes even harder to explicate. Do its form and symmetry and the presence of women as active eloquent participants reflect or condone new liberties gained by women? Does its final unequivocal support for male authority reflect or advocate increased restrictions for women? Or is it merely a playful fiction unrelated to women's lives?

Precisely the same questions can be asked about Shakespeare's plays, whose strong female characters are often silenced at the conclusions; they can be answered only with difficulty. Unless there were real women whose power and activities seemed threatening, it is hard to account for the numerous works like Tilney's devoted to the regulation of female behavior. But neither the fact of ideological ferment about women and marriage nor the presence of some exceptionally powerful women is proof of significant changes in the lives of most women, in the Renaissance or today. Most historians of women, marriage, and the family in the period would answer Joan Kelly's provocative question, "Did women have a Renaissance?" as she did—with an unqualified no.³⁹ But as these historians marshal evidence for the negative, they nonetheless make heretofore invisible women visible, devote sustained and subtle attention to them, and reweave their lives into the texture of history, redefining it. It is, ironically, as if today's historians were creating for those long dead women the Renaissance they never enjoyed.⁴⁰

The contradictory assessments of women's place made possible by the complex evidence the period provides are neatly summed up in Juliet Dusinberre's Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (1976) and Lisa Jardine's Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983),⁴¹ books which extend these assessments to encompass fictional women. Both books examine attitudes toward women in the drama by examining attitudes toward women in the period; both look at the effects of Protestantism and puritanism, virginity and chastity, humanist education, cross-dressing in drama and social life, the roles of exemplary historical women, and the influence of powerful female stereotypes. Employing similar material with similar aims, they construct precisely contradictory theses encompassing the period, the drama, and Shakespeare.⁴² Dusinberre argues that the "feminism" (p. 1) of the period is reflected in drama which is "feminist in sympathy" and that Shakespeare questioned received stereotypes about women, "saw men and women as equal" (p. 308), and created strong, complex female characters who reflect the period's elevation of women's status. Jardine reads the drama as a reaction to, not a reflection of, social realities, a misogynist response to "the patriarchy's unexpressed worry about the great social changes which characterize the period" (p. 6). Strong, passionate women like Kate in Taming of the Shrew, the Duchess of Malfi, or Moll Cutpurse in Middleton's Roaring Girl (chap. 3 passim; chap. 4 passim; pp. 159-61) are not exemplary or liberating but are satiric creations or cautionary warnings. Such women are invariably contained or chastised by the drama; like Isabella in Tilney's dialogue, they are set up to be suppressed. Shakespeare's plays reflect this misogyny; his treatment of strong women reflects patriarchal anxieties, and his admirable heroines fit the "saving stereotypes" which the period created of patient, chaste, long-suffering, self-martyring women (pp. 184-93). Although these two books are in sharp contradiction to each other, each reflects, I think, one side of the complex truth about the representations of women both in the period and in the drama. Although Shakespeare certainly did not speak as a woman or in defense of women, he did represent them fully, absorbing and recreating in another dimension all of the contradictions that surround women's status. His created male and female characters articulate tensions in relations between men and women as clearly, and sometimes perhaps more clearly, than does the historical record, with its persistent tendency to erase female voices.

My study examines the complex ways in which women's roles are represented in Shakespeare's plays. The status of the female characters varies according to their place in the maiden/wife/widow paradigm. It varies, too, from genre to genre, from play to play, and from moment to moment in individual plays. In the comedies (and— with more strain—in the problem comedies) the women are maidens who "can shift it well enough." Their assertions of verbal, social, and sexual power enable them to evade or manipulate financial pressures, fathers' commands, the intricacies.of marriage contracts, and the stereotyping of themselves by romantic or misogynist lovers. They do so by using the resources of disguise, wit, greenworld escapes, parodic or postponed nuptials, salutory mock deaths, generative bedtricks. But at the conclusions of the comedies, the maidens' approaching subordination as wives is manifested dramatically not only in Kate's speech advocating obedience, but in the women's sudden silence, their removal of disguise, their return from the green world, their forgiveness of husbands "molded out of faults" (MM, V.i.441). Yet Portia maintains her power even after, her extravagant giving away of herself; she manifests it through her ability in the final scene to use her sexuality positively, to keep control of cuckoldry jokes (usually the male prerogative on the eve of consummation), and to engineer the commitment she desires from Bassanio and Antonio.

In the tragedies, maidens become wives and must often "relinquish the liberty of their owne rule." Their released sexuality is now execrated, their disobedience is experienced by the men as threatening, their subordination is demanded. Many of the women characters in the tragedies, however passionately loving or brutally strong-willed, move at the end of the plays toward isolation, passivity, madness, or suicide. Almost all die as a result of their love of men—Juliet, Portia, Ophelia and Gertrude, Desdemona and Emilia, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff. But Cleopatra's suicide is not obedient, not a punishment, not enacted just for love. In the romances, these tragic paradigms are averted by the splitting of female characters into mothers and daughters, the wife/mothers—good or bad—die or appear to die and can be idealized or scapegoated. The daughters, though they do not stay at home, remain impeccably pure maidens; their loving chastity regenerates (literally or symbolically) the virtues of their mothers and reconciles their fathers (who have mitigated their tyranny) with their suitors (who have tempered their desires). But Paulina is anomalous; neither a daughter nor a mother (we know she has three daughters, but she is never put in any dramatic relation to them), when "free in libertie," she makes use of her widow's role to sustain the long friendships with Hermione and Leontes which enable her to serve as catalyst to their reunion.

The rich characterization, dramatic development, and symbolic implications of the women's roles in the plays are, of course, far more difficult to interpret than this summary can begin to suggest. In this study I will explore the intricately interwoven contexts that define the meaning of women's actions in Shakespeare's plays: the relationships they forge with men and with each other; the dramatic and psychological significance of the institution of marriage and of the motif of broken nuptials; the structures of particular plays and their interactions with their sources; the nature of genres; and the development of the canon. It is not only that these contexts define women's actions. Making women newly visible in them transforms the meaning of marriage and broken nuptials, the texture of the plays, the shape of the genres, and the configurations of Shakespearean development.

Notes

¹ Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 302-05.

² Michelle Rosaldo, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding," Signs 5 (1980): 400.

³ Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), emphasizes the profoundly conservative effect of the dominant paradigm of marriage on Renaissance thinking about women. This paradigm, he argues (as well as vested interest in preserving it) is crucially responsible for the maintenance of unchanged views of women's inferiority throughout the period in the disciplines of theology (pp. 25-27), ethics and politics (pp. 65-67), and law (pp. 80-81); only in the area of medicine is there conceptual change, because there the absence of the paradigm of marriage "acts as a liberating force" (p. 45). "Marriage is an immovable obstacle to any improvement in the theoretical or real status of women in law, in theology, in moral and political philosophy" (p. 85).

⁴ T. E., The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights; or The Lawes Provision for Women. A Methodicall Collection of such Statutes and Customes, with the Cases, Opinions, Arguments and points of Learning in the Law, as do properly concerne Women (London: John Grove, 1632), p. 6.

⁵ Allison Heisch, "Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy," Feminist Review 4 (1980): 45-56.

⁶ Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, 2 vols. (London: Saunders & Otley, 1832); Mary Cowden Clarke, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines, 3 vols. (London: W. H. Smith and Son, 1850-55); Helena Faucit Martin, On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters (London: Blackwood, 1885).

⁷ Irene Dash, Wooing, Wedding, and Power: The Women in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

⁸ Copp élia Kahn, "The Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare's Mirror of Marriage," in The Authority of Experience, ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee Edwards (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 84-100; L. T. Fitz, "Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony and Cleopatra Criticism," Shakespeare Quarterly 28.(1977): 297-316; S. N. Garner, "Shakespeare's Desdemona," Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 233-52.

⁹ Carole McKewin, "Counsels of Gall and Grace: Intimate Conversations between Women in Shakespeare's Plays," in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 117-32; Marilyn Williamson, "Doubling, Women's Anger, and Genre," Women's Studies 9 (1982): pp. 107-20; Madonne Miner, "Neither mother, wife, nor England's queene: The Roles of Women in Richard HI," in Lenz et al., Woman's Part, pp. 35-55.

¹⁰ Joan Klein, "Lady Macbeth: 'Infirm of Purpose,'" in Lenz et al., pp. 240-55; Clara Claiborne Park, "As We Like It: How a Girl Can Be Smart and Still Popular," in ibid., pp. 100-16

¹¹ Louis Adrian Montrose, " The Place of a Brother': Social Process and Comic Form in As You Like It," Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1982): 28-54

¹² Madelon Gohlke, "'I wooed thee with my sword': Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms," in Lenz et al., pp. 150-70; "'All that is spoke is marred': Language and Consciousness in Othello," Women's Studies 9 (1982): 157-76; "'And When I Love Thee Not': Women and the Psychic Integrity of the Tragic Hero," The Hebrew University Studies in Literature 8 (1980), 44-65. Coppélla Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

¹³ Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982).

¹⁴ Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

¹⁵ Marianne Novy, Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

¹⁶ In All's Well That Ends Well the conventions are less central, and they are inverted. The woman idealizes her beloved, and the man actually participates (by virtue of the bedtrick) in what he imagines to be infidelity.

¹⁷ Kahn, Man's Estate, discusses the significance of the horns and delineates cuckoldry's connections with misogyny, the double standard, and patriarchal marriage (pp. 119-22). She notes that while cuckquean is defined by the OED as a female cuckold, the word does not appear in Shakespeare (p. 120, n. 2).

¹⁸ Pearl Hogrefe, Tudor Women: Commoners and Queens (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1975), and Women of Action in Tudor England: Nine Biographical Sketches (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1977).

¹⁹ Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975), emphasizes the importance of these factors.

²⁰ Carole Levin, "Queens and Claimants: Political Insecurity in Sixteenth-Century England," paper delivered to Newberry Library Conference, Changing Perspectives on Women in the Renaissance, May 1983, and.Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power ,in Elizabethan Culture," Representations 2 (Spring 1983): 61-94, explore some social and literary responses to the anxieties of having a woman on the throne. See also Heisch, "Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy."

²¹ Margaret King, "Thwarted Ambitions: Six Learned Women of the Early Italian Renaissance," Soundings 76 (1976): 280-300; "The Religious Retreat of Isotta Nogarola (1418-1466)," Signs 3 (1978): 807-22; "Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance," in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York: New York University Press, 1980), and other essays in this volume.

²² Kathleen Casey, "The Cheshire Cat: Reconstructing the Experience of Medieval Women," in Liberating Women's History, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976). pp. 224-49.

²³ Lawrence Stone, "The Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England," in The Family in History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), pp. 13-57; The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 123-218. Stone discusses the period from 1530 to 1660 as the patriarchal stage in the evolution of the nuclear family.

²⁴Certaine Sermons or Homilies, facsimile reproduction of 1623 edition, ed. Mary Ellen Rickey and Thomas B. Stroup (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968), p. 239.

²⁵ Desiderius Erasmus, A ryght frutefull Epystle in laude and prayse of matrymony, trans. Richard Tavernour (London: R. Redman, 1530?), sigs. B3-B4^v.

²⁶ Although attacks on the double standard were commonplace, it did not, of course, disappear, as Keith Thomas incisively demonstrates in "The Double Standard," Journal of the History? of Ideas 20 (1959): 195-216.

²⁷ Lawrence Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 637-39, 643-45.

²⁸ George Elliot Howard, A History of Matrimonial Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904), 1:377-80. Cf. Henry Swinburne, A treatise of Spousals written in the reign of Elizabeth I and first published in 1686, p. 15 (quoted in Howard, p. 377-78).

²⁹ Juan Luis Vives, Instruction of a Christian Woman, (1523) trans. Richard Hyrd (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1540), excerpted in Vives and the Renascence Education of Women, ed. Foster Watson (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), pp. 105-06.

³⁰Lawes Resolutions, p. 130.

³¹ Howard, Institutions, 2:71-85, and Thomas, "The Double Standard," 200-01.

³² Maclean, Notion, p. 15-19. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 246-50, discusses Renaissance anxieties about sexuality even within marriage and their implications for Othello's relationship with Desdemona and his belief in her infidelity.

³³ Watson, Vives, pp. 94-95. Cf. Edmund Tilney, A brief and pleasant discourse of duties in Mariage, called the Flower of Friendshippe (London: Henrie Denham, 1568), sigs. E3^v-E4^v.

³⁴ Rickey and Stroup, Homilies, p. 241.

³⁵ Tilney, Flower of Friendshippe, sig. E7^v.

³⁶ J. Moncado, "The Spanish Source of Edmund Tilney's 'Flower of of Friendshippe,'" Modern Language Review 65 (1970): 241-47, and Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 59-60. I am especially grateful to Valerie Wayne, who is currently preparing an edition of Tilney's Flower of Friendshippe, for allowing me to read a draft of her introduction that illuminated the dialogue and its contexts.

³⁷ Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, discusses the stock misogynist characters in the dialogues of the formal controversy on women (see her index), and includes a chapter on "The Stage Misogynist" (pp. 275-95).

³⁸ " . . . reason doth confirme the same, the man being as he is, most apt for the soveraignetie being in government, not onely skill, and experience to be required, but also capacity to comprehende, wisdome to understand, strength to execute, solicitude to prosecute, pacience to suffer, meanes to sustaine, and above all a great courage to accomplishe, all which are commonly in a man, but in a woman verye rare" (sig. C1).

³⁹Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 137-64.

⁴⁰ I was especially struck by this phenomenon at the Newberry Library Conference, Changing Perspectives on Women in the Renaissance, May 1983. During papers, brief presentations of works in progress, and lengthy discussion periods, participants, agreeing that women did not have a Renaissance, emphasized the numerous restrictions placed on them; at the same time, their presentations created a rich and complex existence for Renaissance women. This effect was apparent, for example, in Janel Mueller's analysis of The Book of Margery Kempe, Carole Levin's explorations of the insecurities created by Queen Elizabeth's reign, Mary Lamb's exploding of the myth of the Countess of Pembroke's patronage and her explorations of the functions of this myth, John Hill's report on the evidence for an extensive body of songs written by Francesca Caccini, Elissa Weaver's analysis of the nature of Italian sixteenth-century convent theatre, Jane Schulenburg's examination of the conditions for female sainthood, and Tilde Sankovitch's discussion of Madelaine and Catherine Des Roches's awareness of the special problems of female authorship and the female-centered myths they created in response to them.

⁴¹ Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughers: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983).

⁴² Although neither book deals with Shakespeare as extensively as their titles might suggest, both wish to make him a central example of their respective theses about the period. Jardine begins by declaring that her book was generated by irritation at feminist criticism of Shakespeare, Dusinberre devotes a brief final chapter to him, and both books contain numerous remarks about particular moments in the plays. Both authors, however, are often at their least persuasive when analyzing these moments, perhaps because their piecemeal discussions of isolated characters, speeches, and scenes fail to do justice to the rich and complicated meanings these acquire as part of a complex whole. Jardine's book is a better one than Dusinberre's, but this is at least in part because she has had the benefit of much research that Dusinberre did not have available to her, including the feminist criticism which she finds inadequate, but which, like Dusinberre's book itself, has raised the issues she addresses.