[In the following essay, McLuskie maintains that Shakespeare exploited a shift in dramatic convention from the symbolic to the representational to portray women characters both emblematically—as idealized or stereotyped symbols—and mimetically, with as much realism and naturalism as was available to him within Elizabethan dramatic conventions.]

In the mechanicals action of A Midsummers Night's Dream Shakespeare presents for us the problems of staging a play at a time when the conventions of dramatic production were shifting from a symbolic to a mimetic form of action. The abstract figures of morality drama were replaced by characters with fully realised histories and relationships: where the morality plays fulfilled a predetermined design, the mimetic drama presented the illusion that action followed from motivation. The mechanicals in Shakespeare's play comically explore the conventions through which reality can be presented on the stage. They discuss the possibility of exploiting the actual physical conditions of their performance space in which both the action and the audience can share the moonshine coming through the casement of the great chamber (III.i.51-3) but eventually decide on a symbolic action in which:

one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine (III.i.54-6)

At this stage in the development of the drama and for these inexperienced players, the problem of playing a woman presents analogous problems. There was no question of representing a woman by an actual woman's body and so she must be represented by a set of recognisable and accepted conventions. When Flute protests that he cannot play a woman because of his incipient beard, Quince reassures him:

That's all one. You shall play it in a mask, and you may speak as small as you will. (I.ii.45-6)

The conventions range from the most symbolic: the mask which represents a woman's face, to the most mimetic: the notion that women have higher voices than men. However, even the mimetic needs can be met by performance. Bottom, who has already been cast as the male lead, feels himself equally up to the part, in spite of his previous macho performance in 'the raging rocks' speech:

An I may hide my face, let me play Thisbe too, I'll speak in a monstrous little voice, 'Thisne, Thisne'

and so on.

This combination of the symbolic and the mimetic in Shakespeare's dramaturgy made it possible for him to represent women both as a set of conventions and, through the creation of 'real characters', by creating the illusion of idiosyncratic life which extends beyond the boundaries of the plays' action. Shakespeare's women characters are thus bound by the conventions of female representation to a set of conventional attributes; defined in terms of the associations drawn from the misogynistic or hagiographic conventional wisdom about the woman question. At the same time his 'real characters' present us with such individualised, idiosyncratic figures as Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Goneril, Portia, Rosalind, which have created the star roles for actresses from the Restoration (when women first began to play the parts) to the present day. The conventional misogynistic assumptions come to the fore in such generalisations about women as Lear's crazed diatribes or Posthumus's denunciations of the woman's part in Cymbeline, while feminist critics have insisted on the idiosyncratic individuality of his women characters which seems to acknowledge the reality of women's lives and subvert the misogynistic assumptions of his age.

However, it is important to recognise that the mimesis which creates 'characters' both in Shakespeare's theatre and our own, is itself the product of the interaction of conventions. In the case of Shakespeare's women, moreover, the conventions of representation interact with conventions about the essential attributes of each gender. When Antony dies in Act IV of Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra faints and is revived by her anxious handmaidens calling 'Royal Egypt, Empress', to which she replies

No more but e'en a woman, and commanded
By such a poor passion as the maid that milks
And does the meanest chares.
                                 (IV.xv.75-7)

It is a moment of enormous emotional power, not only because of the horror of her situation but because it insists upon the individuality of the character by setting it against the essential human type she invokes. The contrast between queen and milkmaid serves to make Cleopatra even more of a queen because of the reminder of the distance, not the sameness, between her and a milkmaid.

This process of establishing a woman character's identity through an implied contrast with woman-kind works equally well when the character is not demanding sympathy or approval. When Lady Macbeth calls on the spirits that tend on mortal thoughts to 'unsex' her, she too is drawing on familiar essential notions of what it is to be one sex or another and asserting her own individuality. The dramatic impact comes from the complex theatrical reality of a woman (or, on the Elizabethan stage, a boy) denying the reality of her womanhood in order to assert a different kind of individuality which is supposed to go beyond sex.

In the originating moment of Shakespeare's plays, the power of these essentialised notions of women's identity was not restricted to the theatre. This contrast between a generalised notion of women and the attributes of a particular woman was used very effectively by Queen Elizabeth's biographers. Camden described her as 'a virgin of a manly courage', and Heywood, in his propaganda play, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody included a scene in which the queen explicitly contrasts herself to the carefree milkmaid she hears singing outside her prison and represented the apocryphal moment when she appeared in armour at Tilbury after the Armada. Elizabeth's speech on that occasion demonstrates both the rigidity of gender definitions—the association of courage with masculinity—and the paradoxical ease with which they could be attributed to either sex:

Your Queene hath now put on a masculine
  spirit,
To tell the bold and daring what they are,
Or what they ought to be; and such as faint,
Teach them, by my example, fortitude.
Nor let the best proou'd soldier here disdaine
A woman should conduct an host of men.

In Shakespeare's plays, the fluidity of these images of gender, the possibility of men and women rejecting the attributes of their sex or taking on those on those of the other provided the means of creating individual character and exploring what being a man or a woman might mean. Lady Macbeth's desire to be unsexed is carried forward into her argument with Macbeth about the behaviour appropriate to a man. She reminds Macbeth that she has fulfilled the quintessential woman's role:

       I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks
 me.
                                                 (I.vii.54-5)

But her behaviour is not bound by her womanliness, for

I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless
  gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.
                                 (I.vii.56-9)

Notions of natural and unnatural behaviour lie behind and are extended into what it is to be a woman or a man. For the discourses of the play acknowledge that being a woman can be a matter of biology, 'I have given suck', but that biology need not determine behaviour: 'I dare do all that may become a man', / 'Who dares do more is none.'

The natural attributes of men and women, the relationship between identity and action, were of course brought into even sharper focus in plays by the constant metatheatrical play with questions of true identity and the question of what reality, if any, lay behind performances on the stage. These questions were particularly extended to questions of gender by the fact that women's parts were taken by boys. Cleopatra, like Queen Elizabeth, plays frequently on the exact nature of her femininity. However, her assertion that she is 'no more but e'en a woman' is complicated by her later fear that

      The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall
  see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I'th' posture of a whore.
                                (V.ii.212-17)

These questions of role playing and essential sexual identity could extend to male characters as well. Lear implores

O, let not women's weapons, water drops,
Stain my man's cheeks!
                                        (scene 7, 436-7)

However, for the most part, male characters' considerations of identity are much more wide-ranging. Hamlet insists that his mourning for his dead father is rooted in a reality within which passes show (I.ii.85); Richard II plays with the identity of king and man and the question of what is left when he is 'unkinged by Bolingbroke, / and straight am nothing' (V.v.37-8); Bottom can ask 'What is Pyramus, a lover or a tyrant?' Unlike the male characters who can play the roles of lover, tyrant, king, man, woman, the only alternative for a woman character is 'not woman' or a range of identities determined by sexuality: maid, widow or wife, mother or 'the posture of a whore'.

Feminist criticism has gone beyond simply drawing attention to this fact and lamenting it. Indeed many feminist critics have recognised the paradox that the fixed character of sexual identities in Early Modern England allows a certain fluidity around and between them such as we see in the cross-dressing of Shakespeare's comedies. However, when we come to look at modern performance of Shakespeare's heroines, both the fixedness and the fluidity of gender identity seem to me to have changed fundamentally. The change began in the Restoration when the fact that women's parts were played by women mean that commentators on the theatre could connect the character of fictional women with those of the women who took the roles. Charles Gildon, for example, stressed the quiet respectability which made Mrs Betterton the ideal person to play Shakespeare's heroines and throughout the nineteenth century the plays and performances were adapted to suit contemporary notions of 'womanliness'. The fact of women's parts being played by women's bodies bridged the gap between character and convention, made possible the elision, central to mimetic drama, between women on stage and women in the world.

The details of modern actresses' interpretations of character may be different; they react as modern critics have reacted against the moralising of the 'family Shakespeare' associated with the Victorians. However, the notion that a character is a consistent individual remains firmly in place. Discussing the role of Portia [in Players of Shakespeare, edited by Philip Brock-bank, 1985], Sinead Cusack found

the great problem for the actress playing the role is to reconcile the girl at home in Belmont early in the play with the one who plays a Daniel come to judgement in the Venetian court. I couldn't understand why Shakespeare makes her so unsympathetic in those early scenes—the spoilt little rich girl dismissing suitor after suitor in very witty and derisory fashion. The girl who does that, I thought, is not the woman to deliver the 'quality of mercy' speech.

Sinead Cusack was attempting to find consistency in the character in order to make the character understandable in her own terms and she arrives at the solution of making her 'very young' as a way of motivating and explaining her 'mercurial moods'. The solution was effective since it also ensured a kind of audience sympathy and fitted in with a trend to 'young' performances of Shakespeare's heroines which began with Zeffirelli casting the 14-year-old Olivia Hussey in his film version of Romeo and Juliet. Nevertheless, Sinead Cusack's observation about the difference in style between the 'suitor' speech and the 'mercy speech' could be explained very differently. For within the construction of the play, the speech in which Portia dismisses a list of suitors with witty set piece descriptions has to do more than express her character. It has to introduce the situation at Belmont and establish the comic tone of the Belmont world. It also generates the subsequent scenes with the Prince of Morocco and the Duke of Naples which eliminate the gold and silver caskets, building up to the climax in which Bassanio chooses lead as we always knew he would. In other words the scene has a structural function quite independent of Portia's character as a coherent human being.

Shakespeare has used a very similar structure to introduce Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (I.ii.9-16), for such witty set pieces were part of his dramatic raw materials, and part of his skill as a dramatist was to integrate such formal elements into the flow of narrative. Many women characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are introduced in similar ways: Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It begin their action by a set piece in which they 'mock the good huswife Fortune', Desdemona engages in a set play of wit with Iago when the action moves to Cyprus and Cleopatra banters with Mardian the eunuch and her women while she waits for news from Antony. In the latter two cases Shakespeare seems aware of the problem of consistency. Desdemona is given an aside in which she explains her inappropriate levity:

I am not merry, but I do beguile
The thing I am by seeming otherwise.
                                 (II.i.125-6)

and Cleopatra's jesting is kept firmly on the central subject of sex and her passion for Antony. Nevertheless, in all cases the deep structure of the comic set piece is evident. It serves itself to dramatise the notion of a character making individual choices about her marriage partner and, in the case of the tragic figures creates the impression of complexity by the interaction of comic structures in an otherwise tragic narrative. For women characters, as well as representing people involved in an action, also have a function in a narrative, which is to be the object of men's love, a solution to the conventional pattern of heterosexual relations.

Part of Shakespeare's achievement is in taking that conventional pattern and creating the illusion of idiosyncratic characters, making, as it were, their own story. The rift which Sinead Cusack experienced between the Portia of the Belmont scenes and that of the court is a rift in poetic styles and conventions of representation which create the illusion of complexity by being incorporated in a single character. When a modern actress experiences these inconsistencies as a problem, it is because she is responsible for speaking the lines in character and therefore regards all of them as the expression of her thoughts and feelings. Lying behind this notion is the idea that every character is an individual, her love for the man in the play a result of individual choice and not part of the predictable social organisation in which women fulfil their literary and social destiny by marrying men. By rejecting or ignoring the conventional character of women's speeches in Shakespeare, the actresses mystify the conventional nature of the social relationships which they present. Just as it would be impossible in the naturalist conventions of modern theatre for a woman to be represented by a bearded man in a mask, so the elements of the construction of character have to be integrated into the expression of a consistent personality.

The task of a modern actress is to find a way of speaking the lines written for very different theatrical circumstances in ways that will make them make sense for a modern audience. One of the most important influences on this process has been the work of Cicely Berry, the voice coach for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her work, as described in The Actor and His Text, presents a fascinating combination of technical analysis and character study. One of the fullest reflections of her work is to be found in Juliet Stevenson's description of her performance as Rosalind in As You Like It. She is describing the scene where she first meets Orlando in the forest and behind the description, once more, lies the problem of creating character out of formal language and the convention of the scene filling 'set piece':

she tries to 'speak to him like a saucy lackey': 'Do you hear, forester?' When Orlando replies, 'Very well. What would you?' she's stumped. What does she want that she can express in disguise? Erm … 'I pray you, what is't o'clock?' She might as well have said, 'Got a light?' It's that witless. She hasn't a clue what she's going to say to him so she says the most banal thing in the world. He responds, 'There's no clock in the forest.' Undaunted, she then launches into a dazzling performance. 'I'll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal …' Once again, the arcs of her language get longer and longer until you almost have to draw air into your boots to get through it. At the beginning of the scene the breath is coming in shallow gulps—the delirium, the nerves, the shock, the anticipation show up in the breathing. But then as things develop, the breath gets deeper and deeper as she grows more confident with what she's discovering.

In this passage we see the actress applying Cicely Berry's method of using the syntax of a speech, the breathing indicated by the punctuation and phrasing, physically to feel and so perform the character's state of mind. In Juliet Stevenson's description, the rhythm of breathing which is a technical necessity for getting through a long speech with complex punctuation has become the key to character and situation. The mask which Quince advised Thisbe to wear has become fused onto the actor's face and become one with her personality.

For an actress performing a Shakespearean role, Cicely Berry's approach, which finds clues to character in the structure and punctuation of individual speeches, can be very suggestive. It motivates particular lines and provides a clue to the pressing question of how, in what tone of voice, with what physical expression, to say a particular line. Sinead Cusack, for example, decided

to play Portia's words 'my little body is aweary of this great world' not in the bored voice of a child who has too much of everything, but as a cry of anguish from one who finds the whole business of the caskets very painful.

It opens the possibility of hearing the lines in a different way, sensing the possibility of real life anguish which lies behind the completely formal, fairy tale structure of the casket plot.

However, Cusack's distinction between the 'usual' way of playing the line and her own interpretation is significant. For as well as creating a consistently serious tone, the performance met the other requirement of modern theatre that each interpretation should offer something new. Jonathan Miller, for example, has described [in Subsequent Performances, 1986] how 'As a director I often respond negatively to a precedent and … I recoiled from the sentimental radiance that actresses bring to Portia's famous mercy speech'. In this negative response to precedent, directors are rejecting the conventions and fixed images of previous productions and this often includes the ways in which gender has been represented in the past.

Siobhan Redmond, discussing her performance as Goneril in a recent Renaissance Company production of King Lear, deplored the conventions in which

in the opening scene, three women walk on, one wearing blue and with long blonde hair; the other two wearing black and looking sinister.

In rejecting this image of Lear's three daughters, Redmond is rejecting the fixed symbolic system which defines character according to costume and which defines action in terms of easily identifiable good and evil. She suggests in its place a more individualised approach which frees the actress to create a character in terms of a model of human personality, motivated by a fully realised life which extends beyond the boundaries of the action. However, that motivation is not less conventional. It merely replaces moral received ideas with psychological ones:

'He (Lear) is so horribly blatant about loving Cordelia best' says Francine Morgan, the Renaissance Company's Regan. 'It's no wonder I'm so bitter and twisted …'

When Lear curses Goneril, invoking the 'great goddess Nature' to 'dry up her organs of increase' audiences cannot help but wince.

Estelle Kohler (RSC) sees Goneril as a woman desperate for children who is naturally terrified by this curse.

These actresses' efforts to understand their characters, to find 'the tragic roots of their villainy', bypasses the question both of representation and of what is being represented. The text provides no lines for the actress to express her desperation for children, her pathological resentment of Lear's treatment of her. The psychological reading is in fact based on a modern convention about what it is to be a woman (naturally desperate for children) and how the companionate family should function, mediating the power of patriarchy through affective bonds between parents and children. By naturalising and modernising the text, the performers are able to mitigate the misogyny of Shakespeare's play. Overt misogyny based on absolutes of gender is one of the greatest difficulties for a modern audience for it denies the individuality which is central to liberal democratic ideas. Richard Briers, who played King Lear, declared himself appalled by the 'vicious language about women':

When I was learning the part, my jaw dropped.

But by seeing Lear's language merely as an expression of his pathology, the actors were able to separate Lear's language from Shakespeare's:

In the end I think Shakespeare's treatment of them is sympathetic. I'm absolutely sure he wants us to see beyond the violent speeches and understand more about these women.

The implications of this approach through psychological characterisation are evident in the director Claire Higgins's summary of her feelings about the play:

It's like reading about some suburban housewife who's gone mad and murdered her three children. An enormous tragedy, yes—but I always want to know what really went on in that family.

Domestic violence is seen as the product of an individual family and their particular psychopathology rather than being located within the structures of social organisation. Women characters are constructed as individuals with a particular psychological history which is then located as one of the truths about the play and part of its enduring appeal.

This process of interpretation has been criticised by the French theorist Pierre Macherey [in A Theory of Literary Production, 1978]. He describes the 'interpretative fallacy' in which the critic as interpreter 'replaces a text by its meaning':

it transposes the work into a commentary, a displacement intended to conjure up the content, unchanged and stripped of the ornamentation that concealed it. The interpreter realises a copy of the work and, in a miracle of reciprocity, discovers that of which the work itself is a copy.

In the theatre this process of reinterpretation is inevitable, for by dint of speaking the lines in different voices, with different set designs and different bodies on the stage, every production makes a new object which can more properly be called a recreation rather than a mere interpretation of a pre-existing text. The vitality of the resulting performance depends as much on the creativity of the director and actors, their ability to create startling stage images, as it does on the cogency of their interpretation in literary critical or historical terms.

For example, Sinead Cusack has described how she worked on the character of Lady Macbeth, informing the role with an awareness of the psychology through which real women are created. Her description suggests that she perceived a gap between the woman Lady Macbeth, deprived of her children, denying her femininity, and the queen who has to support the man she loves. In her discussion of the sleepwalking scene, she dealt with the most complex psychological moment in the character's stage life. But she also saw it in terms of the technical question of avoiding generalisation which would turn the speech into 'one long blur'. Her solution was to break up the long speech with stage business which she in turn motivated psychologically:

I knelt and started putting stuff all over my face. I was looking in a mirror and making myself up to be Queen. To be the very very beautiful Queen …

On the 'Oh! Oh! Oh!' I collapsed on the floor. But then I pulled myself together, in queenly fashion, took my little pot of carmine, made up my lips with that queenred lipstick, put my carmine away, looked down at my hand—and saw blood on my fingers! It was the carmine, but I saw Duncan's blood! I went berserk then.

In the interview, Cusack locates these images in her own memories of sleepwalking as a child. However, the technical means she uses to create the scene, the use of the carmine, the sense that a queen or a beautiful woman is made not born, have a resonance which goes beyond the individual and her psychology. They are first of all part of a fashion for representing mad people which goes back to the Brook production of the Marat Sade where the inhabitants of the Charenton asylum were presented as obsessive rather than raving. They thus appear to communicate a 'truth' about madness which seems quite absent from, for example, old films of Ellen Terry's performance, produced in a more melodramatic late-nineteenth-century style. Secondly, the incongruity of a mad queen making herself up removes the action from the familiar realm of naturalism and renders the action symbolic or representative. We are seeing both a woman putting on makeup and a mad woman turning herself into a travesty of a beautiful queen. The resonances of these images for an audience informed by feminism are inescapable. They invoke similar oppositions to those of Cleopatra's lament which allow movement around the images of woman and queen, the sense that women characters always have to work through essentialised ideas about what it is to be a woman; the continual complex negotiation around biology and behaviour is brought into focus by a single telling image.

For however much women might want to resist the conventions of the ways they are stereotyped in the social world, in the theatre meaning has to be constructed in terms of familiar conventions. The most powerful images of women are as a result created out of an adaptation and reworking of familiar notions of what it is to be a woman which are not necessarily the same as fully realised characters. Trevor Nunn's recent production of Timon of Athens for the Young Vic demonstrated this to the full. Timon is a play in which women are almost entirely absent. There is a 'masque of Amazons' who appear at Timon's feast early in the play and when Alcibiades returns to Athens he is accompanied by a pair of whores. Women in other words are absent as characters but present as symbols which can be read to understand the role of women in the male world of commerce and wealth. Nunn's production had a contemporary setting with many of the images owing more to Tom Wolfe's novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities than to Shakespeare. The contemporaneity of the play's exploration of the world of commerce was thus made evident and David Suchet presented Timon entirely credibly as a high financier whose change of fortunes echoed those of the many companies which have crashed in recent months. In that male world women were seen as one of the commodities which wealth gave access to. The masque of Amazons came in dressed as eighteenth-century ladies who first danced very formally and elegantly; emblems of high culture for the entertainment of the dinner-jacketed men. However, their bodies were also sexually entertaining, for once the formal dance was complete, they removed their skirts, revealing the fishnet tights and high-cut body suits which signal prostitution. The scene presented a powerful image of both sides of corporate entertainment: the sponsorship of high culture urged by successive arts ministers and its alternative side in the gratification of male sexual desire.

When Timon in his misanthropic phase encounters Alcibiades' whores, his denunciation of them is seen as part and parcel of his rejection of all commodities, his insistence that the reality of mankind, as Lear also found, was in the poor bare forked animal. However, by presenting the whores as sophisticated and elegant women, not the disease-ridden parasites of Timon's imagination, Nunn's production allowed the audience to understand the psychopathology of commercial culture which has no place for women except as commodities.

Timon is a difficult play; it is Lear without the consolations of Cordelia. But in this production it seemed a play which engages urgently with contemporary social circumstances and the role of women within them. This engagement with contemporary social issues, including consideration of the role of women, seemed to have been more successfully produced by working with and playing on convention than by engaging with individualised characters in which we can see mirror images of ourselves without perceiving the conventions through which that knowledge is produced.