SOURCE: Luckyj, Christina. “‘A Moving Rhetoricke’: Women's Silences and Renaissance Texts.” Renaissance Drama 24 (1993): 33-56.

[In the following essay, Luckyj relates Renaissance notions of female reticence as decorum or defiance to the silence of women in King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida.. She contends that sixteenth-century conduct book writers' ambivalent views of feminine silence are reflected in Shakespeare's plays.]

It is therefore useless to trap women into giving an exact definition of what they mean. … They are already elsewhere than in this discursive machinery where you claim to take them by surprise. They have turned back within themselves, which does not mean the same thing as “within yourself.” They do not experience the same interiority that you do and which you mistakenly presume they share. “Within themselves” means in the privacy of this silent, multiple, diffuse tact.

—Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One”

In the final, terrible moments of King Lear, Lear crouches over the lifeless body of Cordelia, straining to catch a breath or a whisper. As those about him speak of apocalypse, Lear focuses on the small physical details that distinguish life from death. His anguish is made more evident by painful efforts to ward it off:

I might have sav'd her, now she's gone for ever!
Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little. Ha!
What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman.
I kill'd the slave that was a-hanging thee.

(5.3.271-75)

The pause which lengthens the caesura in the third line is filled up by Cordelia's silence. Ironies abound: the silence to which Lear had refused to listen in act 1 is now the source of his despair, yet, as in act 1, he cannot listen to what it tells him—that she is dead. And, at the very moment when the quiet voice that violently launched the tragic action is forever silenced, it is reduced by Lear to a conventional feminine trait. Of course, Lear's sentimentalizing of Cordelia, like Bosola's sentimentalizing of the duchess of Malfi as “sacred innocence” (4.2.355) after her death, provides him with the energy for the burst of machismo that follows, while at the same time illuminating by contrast the woman's complexity—a complexity that is registered in the power of her silence. Yet Lear's portrait of Cordelia as a model of Renaissance womanhood with a gentle, low voice does draw attention to a central paradox in the play: Cordelia's silence, which sets the tragedy in motion—that silence that fills up the great pauses between reverberating “nothings”—is both a daring act of subversion and a cliché of feminine reticence.

For an audience, Cordelia's aside, “Love, and be silent” (1.1.62), reassuringly circumscribes filial disobedience within a larger context of virtue. And, when Cordelia does speak in act 1, she presents her silence as support for, rather than a threat to, patriarchal authority. Like Desdemona, who finds her duty “divided” between husband and father (Othello 1.3.181), or like Isabella, who fears Angelo's rape lest her “son should be unlawfully born” (Measure for Measure 3.1.190-91), Cordelia defends patrilineage, stating clearly, “Happily, when I shall wed, / That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry / Half my love with him, half my care and duty” (1.1.100-02). Given the conventional nature of Cordelia's silence, backed as it is by verbal assurances, why does Lear perceive her as most monstrous in disobedience? Is his response clearly one of dotage which no members of his audience would have shared?¹ In this essay I shall argue that King Lear and other texts offer evidence that women's silence signified more than the simple ideal of feminine decorum so tirelessly invoked by Renaissance conduct books. Rather, the skepticism, humanism, and even misogyny of the early modern period all conspired to invest feminine silence with considerable power and danger. Once acknowledged, this power may be reappropriated, since “there is a difference between being consigned to a marginalized position by the patriarchal order and voluntarily (and self-consciously) occupying that position as a strategy for subverting the dominant discourse” (Harvey 57). In this light I shall discuss recent stage productions which seek to reopen the complexity and instability of feminine silence.

That Cordelia's initial silence is an act of disobedience which ultimately expresses her filial duty is consistent with other paradoxes in the play—with blindness leading to insight, and madness to clarity (Colie 119). But this particular paradox is rooted in a struggle between contradictory Renaissance constructions of women's silence. Cordelia herself takes one view of her refusal to speak in the terms demanded of her by her father, by defending it as the “want [of] that glib and oily art / To speak and purpose not” (1.1.224-25). Like Kent, she is determined “to be plain” (2.2.92); unlike him, she must do so through silence. According to the conduct books, her behavior is exemplary. “Doubtlesse a simple woman holding her peace shal haue more honour, than one of more wit, if shee bee full of tongue,” asserts William Whately in A Bride-bush (203). “Silence is farre better … than unsavorie talke,” say John Dod and Robert Cleaver emphatically in their advice to young women (94). “Silence in a Woman is a moving Rhetoricke, winning most, when in words it wooeth least,” declares Richard Brathwait (90). And, in Of Domesticall Duties (1622), William Gouge declares that “silence, on the one side implieth a reverend subiection, as on the other side too much speech implieth an usurpation of authoritie” (282). These writers all confirm what has become a cliché about the Renaissance woman as “chaste, silent and obedient” (as the title of Suzanne Hull's bibliography of books for and about Renaissance women has it).

Feminine silence, however, is not recommended by the conduct books without careful and significant qualification. Gouge, for example, goes on, in the fashion of formal debate, to complicate his apparently simple equation of silence with subjection. “Then belike a wife must be alwayes mute before her husband,” objects his disputant. “No such matter,” explains Gouge, “for silence in that place is not opposed to speech, as if she should not speake at all, but to loquacitie, to talkativenesse, to over-much tatling” (282). Here, as in Lear's wistful ideal of his daughter's “gentle and low” voice, woman's silence becomes not absolute, but relative; not literal, but figurative. And Gouge goes even further to evince suspicion of women who do keep silent. “[S]ilence, as it is opposed to speech, would imply stoutnesse of stomacke, and stubbornnesse of heart, which is an extreme contrarie to loquacitie.” Here he develops an antithesis between the silent woman and the loose-tongued shrew that is no longer a morally polarized one; rather, both are equally horrifying, if apparently for different reasons. On the one hand, Gouge condemns those women

who must and will have all the prate. If their husbands have begun to speake, their slipperie tongues cannot expect and tarrie till he have done: if (as verie hastie and forward they are to speake) they prevent not their husbands, they will surely take the tale out of his mouth before he have done.

(282)

When one remembers the popular pun on “tale” and “tail,”² Gouge's horror of the loquacious woman is clearly linked with castration anxiety. A woman who overindulges “that glibbery member,” the tongue (Brathwait 88), usurps masculine sexuality as well as masculine discourse. Satiric abuse directed at talkative women is thus designed to defuse this threat; as Linda Woodbridge puts it, “a woman … cannot take a moral stand without suspecting that her auditors consider her a scold, cannot hold a simple conversation without wondering whether she is talking too much” (31). This kind of control through comic stereotyping must have been very effective. The silent woman, on the other hand, is a less accommodating butt for satire. Indeed, if talkative women are seen as phallic usurpers, silent women occupy a space which has always been traditionally conceived of as feminine and is thus less easily assaulted. Yet Gouge and his contemporaries persistently show their discomfort with feminine silence. “Stoutnesse of stomacke and stubbornnesse of heart” suggest a recalcitrance which is far removed from the free-flowing prolixity of the loose-tongued shrew, and perhaps more difficult to control. Whately maintains that “both good and bad dispositions have more waies of uttering themselves, than by the tongue … her whole behaviour, with the gestures of her whole body, may proclaime contempt, though her tongue bee altogether silent” (Bride-bush 204). And he proceeds to enumerate these offensive gestures: “To swell and pout, to lowre and scoule, to huffe and puffe, to frowne and fume, to turne the side towards him, and fling away from him, in a mixture of sullennesse and disdaine, be things that doe breake the bridle of feare” (205). The shrew is still a shrew, even when silent; the tongue is simply replaced by the body's whole movement. Better than any contemporary acting manual, Whately here describes a semiotic of performance in which silence is anything but neutral.

In contrast to both this dumb-show of disobedience and the dreaded superfluity of speech, the conduct books recommend for women not silence, but carefully circumscribed speech. “The meane betwixt both [silence and loquacitie],” writes Gouge, “is for a wife to be sparing in speech, to expect a fit time and iust occasion of speech” (282). According to Dod and Cleaver, a wife should be “not full of words … that were more fitter to be concealed but speaking upon good occasion, and that with discretion” (94). In his English Gentlewoman (1631), Brathwait advocates a “seasonable discourse” for women, consisting of “arguments as may best improve your knowledge in household affaires” (88-89). Whately desires that women should “suffer the due and reverent esteeme of their husbands, to worke in them a special moderation of speech” (Bride-bush 203); in a later work, he includes both “talkative” and “tongue-tied” in a list of vices found in women (Care-cloth 44). Lear would not have disagreed; one suspects that he hears in Cordelia's silence precisely that “stubbornnesse of heart” so like his own but, unlike his, articulated in a feminine, nonverbal mode. The culture that produced and watched King Lear may have experienced Cordelia's silence as both reassuringly submissive and dangerously subversive—a complex nexus for competing views of women's silence.

The idea of silence as a form of resistance to authority is a very old one; Joannes Vives's tale of the woman who bit out her tongue “in the face of the tirane that did tourment hir” (44) is matched by biblical exempla. In A Direction for the Government of the Tongue according to Gods Word (1621), William Perkins cites Christ's silence before Caiaphas and Pilate, and recalls Matthew 7.6: “Give not that which is holy unto dogges: neither cast your pearles before swine” (100). Mary is the paradigm of feminine silence: “she, as became a yonge mayde, spake never a woorde … at the crosse she was cleane dumme” (Vives 43v). Folklore and fairy tale frequently imply “that silence is an almost superhuman feat which can accomplish great deeds, break evil spells, and establish its custodian as a person of spiritual strength” (Levenson 221). It is not surprising, then, that the reticence which was supposed to guarantee subjection could also signal an independent or defiant mind.

Male anxiety about quiet women may not have been confined to their potential for rebellion. When regarded favorably by the authors of conduct books, women's silences are invariably linked with the preservation of chastity. Vives, for example, advises women: “Holde thou thy peace as boldly as other speake in courte: and so shalt thou better defend the matier of thy chastitee, whiche afore iuste iudges shall be stronger with silence than with speeche” (43). But this traditional outward sign of feminine modesty (here interestingly conflated with defiance) could also be just that—an outward sign, a seductive strategy in an age when marriage was the primary objective of most young girls. In Haec-Vir, a pamphlet of the Renaissance controversy about the nature of women, the “man-woman” defends her use of speech by associating feminine silence, not with chastity, but with lascivious acquiescence: “Because I stand not with my hands on my belly like a baby at Bartholomew Fair … that am not dumb when wantons court me, as if, Asslike, I were ready for all burdens … am I therefore barbarous or shameless?” (Henderson and McManus 284). In The Taming of the Shrew, it is Bianca who first attracts, then defies, Lucentio with her silence (1.1.70; 5.2.80). In Ben Jonson's Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609), John Daw tosses off these lamentable verses:

Silence in women is like speech in man;
                    Deny't who can.
.....                    Nor is't a tale
That female vice should be a virtue male,
Or masculine vice, a female virtue be:
                    You shall it see
                    Proved with increase,
I know to speak, and she to hold her peace.

(2.3.111-19)

Daw's “ballad of procreation” (2.3.125) has a bawdy design: he “would lie with” Epicoene (1.3.16) and so construes her silence as an open space ready to be filled up by phallic “speech” for the purpose of “increase.” But other characters puzzle over why Daw “desires that she would talk and be free, and commends her silence in verses” (1.3.17-18); they know that, traditionally, silence signifies chastity. The confusion exposes a real ambiguity in Renaissance texts, which demand that a woman be both inviolable and available, both carefully locked-up treasure and goods for barter in the marriage trade. How could a man expect a woman's silence to signify a closed space—her chastity—if he himself wanted to fill it up? How could he trust that her reticence was anything more than an appropriation of traditional symbolism for the modern purposes of winning a husband?³

The conduct books of the late Tudor and early Stuart periods both contribute to and reflect this ambivalence. Their authors urge young women to concentrate, not on what others think of them, but on their inward being, all the while instructing them on how to comport themselves. Brathwait's English Gentlewoman includes a section entitled “How estimation may be discerned to be reall,” in which he exhorts: “Be indeed what you desire to be thought. Are you Virgins? dedicate those inward Temples of yours to chastity; abstaine from all corrupt society; inure your hands to workes of piety, your tongues to words of modesty” (106). But Brathwait's discomfort with having to instruct virgins on how to appear to be virgins soon surfaces in a meditation on the ease of hypocrisy: “Many desire to appeare most to the eye, what they are least in heart. … These can enforce a smile, to perswade you of their affability; counterfeit a blush, to paint out their modesty; walke alone, to expresse their love to privacy” (114). Many of the conduct books are understandably haunted by such fears. In A discourse, of marriage and wiving (1620), Alexander Niccholes begins his chapter “How to choose a good wife from a bad” with a sigh of despair:

This undertaking is a matter of some difficulty, for good wives are many times so like unto bad, that they are hardly discerned betwixt, they could not otherwise deceive so many as they doe, for the divell can transforme himselfe into an Angell of Light, the better to draw others into the chaines of darknesse.

(8)

Women's silence, perhaps partly because of its atavistic association with resistance, was a particular source of suspicion. In Epicoene, Morose, the comic misogynist who seeks a silent wife, reveals that not even he can bear too much silence in a woman. In his first meeting with Epicoene, he tests her vow of silence with long speeches designed to trick her into speaking without reserve; at first she answers him only with curtsies, but he persists in demanding submissive speech. When she finally does speak, however, her voice is so low that he cannot hear her, and is forced to ask her repeatedly to “rise a note” (2.5.72). The scene's comedy resides in Morose's inability to get reassurance from the silence he so values. When, immediately after their marriage, Epicoene turns into a scolding shrew, feminine silence is revealed to be covert manipulation. While the play thus justifies male anxieties about women, it also pokes fun at men who exalt women's silence but underestimate its subversive potential. That potential is understood and exploited by Shakespeare's Cressida, who determines to remain silent about her love for Troilus, both to protect herself and to attract his desire (1.2.294-95). After she does confess her love to him, she cries regretfully: “Why have I blabb'd? Who shall be true to us, / When we are so unsecret to ourselves?” (3.2.124-25). This is a more sympathetic interpretation of feminine reticence, not as deceit but as a necessary refuge in a world of male treachery. Speech allows men to appropriate women's inner space; silence excludes men even as it attracts them. A source of anxiety for misogynists, silence may have remained a source of power for women.

Another factor contributing to masculine discomfort with feminine silence was undoubtedly the humanist emphasis on the civilizing power of speech. Ben Jonson declares: “Language most shows a man: ‘speak that I may see thee.’ It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind” (Timber 45-46). “Without Speech can no society subsist,” proclaims Brathwait. “By it we expresse what we are, as vessels discover themselves best by their sound” (88). Speech, that God-given, distinctively human faculty, both expresses individual subjectivity and allows it to be apprehended by others. Silence, from this point of view, is at best antisocial, at worst dangerously anarchic.⁴ Mowbray in Richard II sees banishment from his “native English” tongue as a “speechless death” (1.3.172); Sir John Daw views silence as a “masculine vice” (Epicoene 2.3.116); Ajax in Troilus and Cressida is, according to Thersites' description, “languageless, a monster” (3.3.263). Women were often considered to be closer to beasts than to men; silence brought them even closer. Woodbridge quotes from The Woman-Hater (1606): “Why should woman only aboue all other creatures that were created for the benefit of mã, haue the vse of speech?” (269). In Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's A Treatise of the Nobilitie and excellencye of woman kynde (trans. Clapham, 1542), the notorious prolixity of women becomes a sign of their superiority: “Is it not right faire and co˜mendable, that women shulde excelle men in that thing, in whiche men chiefly passe all other beastes?” (Woodbridge 41). Woodbridge rightly points out that “the argument is almost certainly facetious” (41), but it simply carries to a logical extreme what was a Renaissance commonplace. Indeed, the gap between the championing of speech (for men, by implication) and the recommendation of silence for women led to discontinuities and outright contradictions in some conduct books. According to Dod and Cleaver, a woman's suitability as a wife can be judged by

her talke or speech, or rather her silence. For a man or a womans talking, is the mirrour and messenger of the mind, in the which it may commonly be seene without, in what case the man or woman is within. … Such as the man or woman is, such is their talke. Now silence is the best ornament of a woman.

(105-06)

The anxious bachelor can be forgiven some confusion at this point. The authors seem to recommend two mutually exclusive means of evaluating a virtuous woman: she can be discovered as a human individual through her speech, or revealed as a generic type through her silence. Catherine Belsey argues that silence thus negates the subjectivity briefly accorded to women through speech (179). But the competing discourses may also suggest underlying discomfort with the silence that is so predictably recommended. While silence should ensure subjection, a man must have something to go on in his search for a properly submissive wife: a woman who speaks allows herself to be known, hence controlled; by implication, the silent woman, though conventionally supposed chaste, confounds knowledge and hints at the hidden and perhaps even the bestial. The suppressed, silent connective in the passage, of silence as the dark, anarchic underside of human speech, opens a space for the potential subversiveness of women's silence, a potential which is fully realized at the opening of King Lear. Lear responds to Cordelia's silence not only as the rebellion of child against father but as the assault of the subhuman upon the superfluous needs of men—the “barbarous Scythian” who feeds on his own young is the (ironic) parallel he finds for his “sometime daughter” (1.1.116-20). Later he compares the apparently virtuous, reticent woman to the “fitchew” or the “soiled horse” (4.6.122). The silent woman has become something quite other than chaste, irreproachable virgin.

The contradictions inscribed in Renaissance constructions of feminine silence may owe something to humanist discourse and something else to the notorious paradoxes of Puritan marriage ideology (Rose 126-31). It may also owe something to the behavior of real Renaissance women, who showed repeatedly the gap between the theory and the practice of silence. Whether the repeated exhortations of conventional tracts suggest how often they were ignored by Renaissance women (Hogrefe 8) or how comfortable and acceptable these doctrines had become (Davies 78) is still a subject of some debate. Doubtless there were women who spoke their minds or were simply silenced. The very multiplicity of referents for women's silence meant that people, especially men, could interpret it for their own ends: Iago seizes on Bianca's silence in the final act of Othello as proof of her guilt (5.1.105-10), while Paulina relies on the newborn Perdita's silence to signify her “pure innocence” before Leontes (Winter's Tale 2.2.39); Pheroras in Elizabeth Cary's Mariam claims that “silence is a sign of discontent” (2.1.42), while De Flores in The Changeling assures the woman he is about to rape that “silence is one of pleasure's best receipts” (3.4.167). Silence leaves women, more than men, open to manipulation. Women's speech, on the other hand, is firmly circumscribed by Renaissance convention: vehemence becomes shrewishness, prolixity sexual wantonness. Desdemona's verbal barrage on Cassio's behalf confirms Othello's suspicions of her promiscuity; Bianca's silence confirms her guilt. There seems to be no way out for women: speaking, they are shrews or whores; silent, they are blanks. Much recent feminist criticism has simply registered this impasse: for Kate McLuskie, too often “feminist criticism … is restricted to exposing its own exclusion from the text” (97); for Belsey, Renaissance women are denied “a single, unified, fixed position from which to speak” and thus cannot be autonomous subjects (160). Yet, as Jonathan Goldberg points out, “It is not necessarily a sign of power to have a voice, not necessarily a sign of subjection to lose it” (130). It has become a battle cry for many feminists that women must “break out of the snare of silence” (Cixous, “Laugh” 251) because “silence is the mark of hysteria. The great hysterics have lost speech. … They are decapitated, their tongues are cut off and what talks isn't heard because it's the body that talks, and man doesn't hear the body” (Cixous, “Castration” 49). Other feminists think differently. “The silence in women is such that anything that falls into it has an enormous reverberation,” writes Marguerite Duras; “[w]hereas in men, this silence no longer exists” (175). Renaissance conduct books expose the cracks and fissures in the man-made fortress of women's silence. In the drama, silence that is both prohibition and subversion can open up new space for women because, on the stage—to borrow from Hélène Cixous—“it's the body that talks.”

No play in Renaissance drama foregrounds feminine silence more than Titus Andronicus, and no play exposes so vividly the competing cultural constructions surrounding it. Just before Lavinia is raped, she prudishly shrinks from uttering that which “womanhood denies [her] tongue to tell” (2.3.174). Even to utter the word “rape” is to participate in it; modesty and silence are coextensive. However, at the moment she is dragged offstage to be violated, she discovers that woman's silence has another meaning. “Confusion fall—” she cries, and is abruptly silenced by Chiron's “Nay then I'll stop your mouth” (2.3.184-85). The editor of the 1948 Cambridge edition politely gives the stage direction “he gags her,” but the phrase occurs too often in Renaissance plays for one to be in much doubt of its meaning.⁵ Deborah Warner's prompt script for her 1987 production reads “C[hiron] pulls her head back and savagely kisses L[avinia]—spits out piece of her tongue.”⁶ (Previous directors miss or ignore the sexual implication.) Lavinia discovers that her womanly reticence can become involuntary silence. We may note that the sign of retreat from rape—the closed mouth—becomes the sign of rape itself; the trope of silence is radically destabilized. When Lavinia reappears in the following scene, tongueless and “ravish'd” (2.4.1.sd), her silence utterly disrupts the established relation between signifier and signified; here, feminine silence is monstrously unchaste. Robbed of the offensive “glibbery member,” Lavinia's body inscribes male ideals of female decorum so literally that they are savagely exposed and inverted. Lavinia's body is both sealed up in silence and open, bleeding, sexually violated, “grotesque.”⁷

Modern directors have attempted to contain Lavinia's silence and delimit its meaning. In his famous 1955 production, Peter Brook directed Vivien Leigh to play Lavinia as the icon of suffering Titus claims she is, yet the interpretation resulted in a double amputation. Brook's most notorious cutting of the text—his removal of the whole of Marcus's response to the sight of the ravished Lavina—was presumably designed to spare the actress embarrassment, since Brook's stage direction at the beginning of 3.4, which reads “Lavinia stands desolate,”⁸ would be difficult to sustain for a full fifty-seven lines. The excision, however, robbed the actress of any opportunity to react to this sustained perusal of her body; her silence was itself silenced. Reviewers described the role as “thankless” (Daily Mail 17 Aug. 1955), and “unactable” (Star 17 Aug. 1955). Leigh's interpretation of Lavinia as a lovely, non-threatening, passive object of pity was enhanced by costuming. In keeping with Brook's stylized conception, Leigh was heavily draped, red streamers falling from loose, open sleeves to represent the loss of blood. Her body was thus made aesthetically attractive and decorously sealed off—unstained, even her “chin was clean, impossibly clean” (Solihull and Warwick County News 20 Aug. 1955). As a “map of woe” (3.2.12) for her father and the audience, this Lavinia's silence was defused and reinscribed as chaste.

Brook's enormously successful production of Titus had a lasting influence on theatrical practice: Trevor Nunn's acclaimed 1972 production and John Barton's failed 1981 production both made similar cuts to the text. Barton was forced to go even further than Brook: he cut 850 lines to Brook's 650 (Dessen 51) in order to run the play as a ninety-minute piece alongside Two Gentlemen of Verona. The result, according to most reviewers, was “a cardboard piece of Grand Guignol” (Oxford Mail 2 Sept. 1981). As in Brook's production, Lavinia was played as a “mute, mutilated figure, her mouth gashed with blood and red ribbons dangling from her quivering arms.” Michael Billington commented that “it is the pity of it rather than the sheer horror that Barton brings out” (Guardian 4 Sept. 1981). Nunn's production, on the other hand, retained most of the Brook excisions, but nonetheless managed to suggest a Lavinia very different from Vivien Leigh's. Janet Suzman was “a pitiable, hunched grotesque crawling out of the darkness like a wounded animal” (Billington, Guardian 13 Oct. 1972), and transformed Lavinia “from radiant girl to old woman, hump-backed, almost crawling” in what was, incredibly, “a moment of beauty” (Monk, Stage and Television Today 19 Oct. 1972). Lavinia's complex subjectivity was evoked by one critic who found that “the humiliation of her crouching body is to some extent belied by the passion in her eyes” (Wood, Stratford-upon-Avon Herald 19 Oct. 1972). This actor's interpretation led to a new assessment of the possibilities of the role, now considered “the greatest non-speaking part ever written” (Wood, Stratford-upon-Avon Herald 20 Oct. 1972). It would be up to Deborah Warner, who directed the play at the Swan in 1987, to exploit the full potential of Lavinia by combining a mobile, inventive actor with an uncut playtext.

In Warner's production, Sonia Ritter as Lavinia appeared after her rape “as a drab, crawling sub-human creature, caked with clay, characterised by intermittent, jerky movements” (Dessen 66). Chiron, sitting astride Lavinia, went “to kiss her then pull[ed] back” (2.4.8), a revulsion that was later echoed in Marcus's retreat from his niece in the same scene (2.4.12). However, this Lavinia was also a human subject, beyond easy appropriation. Throughout Marcus's speech Lavinia was more than an icon of pain; to Marcus's question “Shall I speak for thee?” she responded by backing away, and when Marcus attempted to lift her in a cradle position (2.4.41), she struggled in panic.⁹ The actress's gestures of resistance allowed her to project a new and complex subjectivity even at those points in the speech when Marcus appeared to define and limit her, as in the following lines:

Ah, now thou turn'st away thy face for shame!
And notwithstanding all this loss of blood,
As from a conduit with [three] issuing spouts,
Yet do thy cheeks look red as Titan's face
Blushing to be encounter'd with a cloud.

(2.4.28-32)

Douglas Green notes the ambiguity suggested by Sonia Ritter's Lavinia: “Though her actions matched Marcus' words, one could never be quite sure whether Lavinia's turning away ‘for shame’ (in which sense of the word?) ratified Marcus' lighting upon the apt Ovidian analogy or sought to avoid this painful contact altogether or indicated rejection.” He sees this as “a powerful instance of the ways in which women's playing parts originally meant for boys [have] historically altered readings of the text” (324n), but the gesture itself is surely inherently ambiguous. Though Marcus tells us that Lavinia blushes, and that this blush is a sign of “shame,” Shakespeare uses the word elsewhere in different senses: in The Comedy of Errors, it is used as a synonym for disgrace (“Free from these slanders and this open shame” [4.4.67]); in A Midsummer Night's Dream, it is a synonym for modesty (“Have you no modesty, no maiden shame, / No touch of bashfulness?” [3.2.285-86]). “The shameful blush,” David Bevington tells us, “may represent one of two opposite responses: dismay and confusion at an undeserved accusation, or admission of guilt” (96). Which meaning applies here? The OED glosses “for shame” as (13a) “from a sense of shame, because one feels shame; also, for fear of shame, in order to avoid shame.” The difference, however slight, is important: is Lavinia acknowledging a feeling of disgrace by turning her face, or is she protecting herself from Marcus's invasive gaze? Is she dissociating herself from or implicating herself in the act of rape? Indeed, the ambiguity is compounded by the curious analogy Marcus finds for her blush: Titan's blushing is usually associated not with shame but with anger (as it is, for example, in Richard II, where the king arrives to face his deposers, “As doth the blushing discontented sun / From out the fiery portal of the east, / When he perceives the envious clouds are bent / To dim his glory” [3.3.63-66]). Given such a range of referents for Lavinia's silence, the audience cannot “read” her simply, reduce her to a single signified.

The play itself provides a hermeneutics of silence separate from Lavinia. Just before the mutilated daughter appears to “blind a father's eye” (2.4.53), Titus laments the tribunes' refusal to hear his plea for the life of his sons:

Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones,
Who, though they cannot answer my distress,
Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes,
For that they will not intercept my tale.
When I do weep, they humbly at my feet
Receive my tears, and seem to weep with me,
And were they but attired in grave weeds,
Rome could afford no tribunes like to these.
A stone is soft as wax, tribunes more hard than stones;
A stone is silent, and offendeth not,
And tribunes with their tongues doom men to death.

(3.1.37-47)

Cut in part or whole in most productions (Dessen 55), this speech constructs silence as impotent in contrast to the “tongues” of tribunes who “doom men to death” with words. Like the ideal Renaissance woman, the stones, “soft as wax,” receive Titus's imprint as their silence holds no threat; real power resides in masculine discourse. Of course Titus is wrong: stones are not soft, but hard and unfeeling like the tribunes. And the speech's context further deconstructs Titus's reading: the immediate, visible source of power is not words, but the silence of the tribunes as they pass over the stage deaf to Titus's pleas. The text thus opens up the semiology of silence that Titus (and Brook in his production) tries to close down.

Consistent, then, with Shakespeare's own semiotics of silence, Sonia Ritter—unlike Vivien Leigh in the Brook production—played Lavinia as an active subject whose “open” silences heightened her complexity.¹⁰ After Titus's suggestion that “we bite our tongues, and in dumb shows / Pass the remainder of our hateful days” (3.1.131-32), Peter Brook cut Lavinia's response, as it is indicated by Lucius (“at your grief / See how my wretched sister sobs and weeps” [136-37]). By contrast, Deborah Warner restored the ambiguity of those “signs” which Titus claims to “understand” (3.1.143). When faced with the mute Lavinia, Titus ignored her as she rushed wildly across the stage, collapsing to her knees (3.1.78) at his masochistic excesses—in empathy, despair, or possibly some combination of both. Was she weeping at her father's grief or at his terrible self-absorption and masochistic narcissism? Was Lavinia's reaction a reinforcement of or a corrective to Titus's insular despair? There was a brief moment of intimate contact when Titus knelt beside her and wiped away her tears, addressing her directly (3.1.103-06), but most of the scene measured the distance between Lavinia and her grief-stricken father, insulated by the “numbed shock of real pain” (Billington, Guardian 14 May 1987) and thus an unreliable interpreter. When Titus suggested that they all cut off their hands (3.1.130), Lavinia wept audibly (in pity or in protest?), and when he proposed “some device of further misery, / To make us wonder'd at in time to come” (3.1.134-35), she slumped over. When Titus crowed, “I understand her signs” (3.1.143), his words were directed at a woman lying face down. Throughout the scene, Lucius was a marked contrast to Titus, holding and comforting Lavinia (3.1.78, 136) and wiping away her tears (3.1.142). In the banquet scene, Titus offers her food in an apparent gesture of solicitude:

Come, let's fall to, and, gentle girl, eat this.
Here is no drink! Hark, Marcus, what she says;
I can interpret all her martyr'd signs:
She says, she drinks no other drink but tears,
Brew'd with her sorrow, mesh'd upon her cheeks.

(3.2.34-38)

Presumably to avoid the embarrassment of Titus's conversion of his failure to provide wine into Lavinia's rejection of it, both the Brook and Nunn productions cut the awkward “Here is no drink!” and provided a goblet which Lavinia refused. In Warner's production, Titus was oblivious to his daughter's physical difficulties: after biting into some bread, he pushed a plate of meat toward Lavinia but ignored her failed attempt at eating. His reading of her “signs” was visually undercut by his indifference to simple realities.

Warner's interpretation paid dividends in the scene in which Lavinia reveals her rapists' identities (4.1). Here the uncut text itself insists on the gap between Lavinia's persistent, unreadable, threatening gestures and the men's attempts to appropriate and defuse them. Warner widened the gap by showing Lavinia crumble at the end of the scene, still ignored and unpitied by the men, who were now wrapped up in schemes of retaliation. The vows of outraged revenge were directed over her collapsed body, and Lavinia (like Titus) was left facing out of the circle of kneeling avengers, despite Marcus's command to “kneel” (4.1.87). Titus himself ignored Lavinia, who was kneeling motionless, and put his arm around the shoulder of young Lucius. As Alan C. Dessen tells it, “[her] initial reaction [of euphoria at communicating her attackers' identities] was soon followed (once events had passed her by) by a let-down that was acted out in a slow, shambling exit upstage during Marcus's closing speech” (66). The moment undermined any notion that Lavinia's phallic inscription of her rapists' identities was a triumphant “testimonial of the limits of nonverbal communication” (Bevington 31), since Lavinia's articulation actually diminished her agency.¹¹ Instead of merely mirroring Titus, this Lavinia was a complex subject whose anguish her father tragically could not absorb. Her mute solitude and desolation emphasized, not Titus's justified and heroic revenge (as in Brook's version),¹² but his increasing dehumanization under the stress of terrible grief. Warner's production thus brought Titus closer in spirit to its antecedent, The Spanish Tragedy, as well as to its successor, Hamlet. Lavinia's complex silences also anticipated Cordelia's at the end of King Lear; there, Lear's utopian vision of blissful exile with his daughter is met by her silence—a silence that has persistently refused to collude with Lear's fantasies. As both chaste closure in its recognition of the limits of speech and frank openness in its exposure of an anarchic, primitive world which takes shape on the heath, Cordelia's silence, like Lavinia's, draws on shifting, unstable constructions of feminine silence in early modern culture. On the stage, such cultural paradox creates new space for women to resist definition and claim multiple subjectivity.

When, in the fourth act of Troilus and Cressida, Cressida arrives in the Greek camp, a hostage of the Trojan war, Ulysses suggests that the Greeks welcome her by kissing her “in general” (4.5.21). She remains silent at first, but finally takes up verbal sparring. Ulysses, who shows his contempt for Cressida by refusing her the kiss she has not asked for, interprets her behavior:

                                                                                                                        Fie, fie upon her!
There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip,
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.
O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give a coasting welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader! set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity
And daughters of the game.

(4.5.54-63)

Ulysses' gloss capitalizes on Cressida's shift from silence to speech during the scene. While speech, unlike silence, allows her to hold off the men effectively, it also makes her a collaborator in their stichomythic rhyming banter. Ulysses presents Cressida's silence as a moving rhetoric of wanton invitation, a text that responds to the manipulations of any reader, yet, as a “ticklish reader” of Cressida's textual body, Ulysses stimulates the wantonness he criticizes and hence is unreliable. Of course, silences in the drama often promiscuously shape themselves to the will of the interpreter; women's silences in particular may shift their meanings to suit the sexual politics of reader or director. Those sexual politics have usually led both academic critics and theater directors to accept Ulysses' gloss on Cressida's silence. In 1938 O. J. Campbell writes: “Cressida goes directly to the Greek camp, and kisses all the men” (215); it is hardly surprising that a 1936 production was praised for its Cressida, who “contrived to convey a suggestion of levity and insincerity from the very beginning of her performance” (Times 25 April 1936). Three landmark Royal Shakespeare Company productions in the 1960s and 1970s, directed by John Barton, chart a course of increasing misogyny: in 1960 Cressida was played as “a natural and not unsympathetic wanton” who “fails through weakness rather than perversity” (Robert Speaight, Shakespeare Quarterly 11: 452); in 1968, “Helen Mirren play[ed Cressida] as a sensual child who is on the point of seducing her uncle before Troilus takes her, and who moves over with equal facility to Diomed” (Wardle, Times 9 Aug. 1968); in 1976, Cressida was “the assured sexual specialist whom Ulysses instantly recognizes” (Wardle, Times 18 Aug. 1976). The latter production, according to Irving Wardle, dressed Cressida as a courtesan for her entrance to the Greek camp and showed her after her betrayal of Troilus wearing a harlot's mask in some performances and exiting on a “tremendous brazen, cackling laugh” in others (David 120). In Terry Hands's 1981 Royal Shakespeare Company production, “when Diomedes unwraps her for the Greeks … she emerges in figure-hugging silk” (Billington, Guardian 7 July 1981). If stage interpretations are any guide, Cressida is at best a weak wanton, at worst a brazen harlot, always collaborating in the sexual advances of the men. Ambiguity is restricted to playing variations on her gullibility, as Richard David suggests in his account of the 1976 production: “Miss Annis subtly kept the options open. Could it not have been the glory of the occasion and the flattery of so many princes that excited the girl to these freedoms?” (125). Clearly, stage Cressidas have not kept the options open enough. And the much-touted critical revaluation of Cressida in the 1960s and 1970s has not seriously contested the misogynist theatrical interpretation of her. In her essay in The Woman's Part, Gayle Greene declares that “Cressida is quick to live down to [the Greeks'] view of her, allowing herself to be ‘kiss'd in general’” (143). Similarly, in her essay “In Defense of Cressida,” Carolyn Asp claims that Cressida “uses her physical beauty to attract the praise of men and thus assure herself of her worth” (410). More sympathetically, R. A. Yoder asserts that “the Greek generals are taking what Cressida, essentially a captive, has no real power to refuse. She plays their game with wit and spirit, for that is her best defense” (22). These claims for Cressida as a victim whose self-image is shaped by the surrounding misogyny, however true, make little difference in the theater. Because the stage foregrounds individual agency, Cressida still looks like a whore in the Greek camp.

The 1985 Royal Shakespeare Company's interpretation of Cressida was hailed by theater critics as “revolutionary” in its violation of the theatrical tradition of presenting her as a “wanton flirt” (Billington, Guardian 27 June 1985). The scene in the Greek camp was a gang rape and Cressida a struggling, resistant rape victim whose facial expressions ranged from fear to contempt.¹³ Far from actively soliciting or passively accepting the attentions of the Greek men, Cressida silently resisted them with gestures that seemed the modern equivalents of those catalogued by William Gouge in 1622: “a frowning brow, a lowring eie, a sullen looke, a powting lip, a swelling face” (278). Ulysses' interpretation was contradicted by the stage image, and conveyed only the disappointment of the lecherous voyeur whose titillating proposition has been foiled by the combination of ugly physical resistance and verbal acumen displayed by Cressida. However, several critics felt that this extreme conception of Cressida as rape victim was inconsistent with her subsequent betrayal of Troilus for Diomed and sacrificed some of the character's psychological complexity;¹⁴ as Michael Coveney put it, “It is one step from here to Dryden's 1679 version in which Cressida pretends to be seduced by Diomedes in order to escape the Greek camp” (Financial Times 7 May 1986). This reading of Cressida's resistant body continued to appropriate her—this time for an overtly feminist project; ironically, it sacrificed her to a masculine fantasy of woman as chaste. More subtle and more complex was Amanda Root's interpretation for the recent (1990) production at the Swan. “Knowingness and naivety, calculation and vulnerability flicker confusingly across the face, at once pert and innocent” (Taylor, Independent 30 April 1990); the reviewer's use of paradox suggests a Cressida beyond easy definition. Analogous male experiences framing the kissing episode further problematize it. Ulysses reads Diomed's body language as he approaches with Cressida:

'Tis he, I ken the manner of his gait,
He rises on the toe. That spirit of his
In aspiration lifts him from the earth.

(4.5.14-16)

An audience, having just heard Diomed's declaration that he will “answer to [his] lust” with Cressida (4.4.132) may suspect that something less lofty than his spirit is rising. A few moments after the kissing scene, Achilles silently peruses Hector's body and claims to have “quoted” it “joint by joint” (4.5.232-33). Hector replies forcefully:

O, like a book of sport thou'lt read me o'er;
But there's more in me than thou understand'st.

(4.5.239-40)

Cressida is allowed no such rejoinder to Ulysses' perusal of her body. But the repeated concern with bodies as texts open to the misconstruction of readers casts further doubt on Ulysses' gloss on Cressida. And, while Cressida's silence ultimately offers no effective defense against masculine coercion, it does offer her a subject position from which that coercion can be interrogated.

Male, humanist discourse represents speech as human agency and subjectivity, and silence as erasure, negation, repression. In casual language the association between women and silence is almost always a pejorative one: the epigraph to Jean Elshtain's Public Man, Private Woman quotes Richard Hooker: “Posterity may know that we have not through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream”; the editors of New French Feminisms dedicate their volume to “all the writers and translators of these texts, without whom silence and absence would continue.” Feminism stages its assault on silence, since historically women were “enjoined to silence, discouraged from any form of speech which was not an act of submission to the authority of their fathers or husbands” (Belsey 149). The instrument of power has always been repression, a reduction to silence. Or has it? In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault questions the current assumption “that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression” (6). In his view, “more important was the multiplication of discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (18). What Foucault says here of sex could well be said of women in the seventeenth century; both were “driven out of hiding and constrained to lead a discursive existence” (33). The greatest weapon in the patriarchal arsenal was the injunction, not to silence, but to speech. Even as they pay lip service to inherited notions of women's modest “silence,” the conduct books denounce it as subversive.

When, in plays like King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida, women keep their silence, they occupy a space defined by contrary male impulses of fear and desire. Enjoined to remain mute as a sign of chastity to allay male fears, the Renaissance woman at the same time provokes those fears by becoming either unfathomable or openly resistant. Too often women's silences in Renaissance plays have been either ignored or appropriated by critics, thus reproducing the assumptions of those Renaissance conduct books which equate silence—at least sometimes—with acquiescence. Yet just as those conduct books also envisage women's silence as a space for subversion, so criticism should attend to the multiple possibilities in its “moving rhetoric.” “Her silence, / Methinks, expresseth more than if she spake” (4.1.9-10), says Bosola of the duchess of Malfi. Perhaps it is finally through silence that women—in the theater, at least—can respond to being silenced.

Notes

1. In Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, Lisa Jardine asserts that “to her father, Cordelia's silence is not a mark of virtue, but a denial of filial affection. … The audience must, I think, understand this as a moral mistake on Lear's part” (108). In Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts, Elizabeth Harvey also notes that “Cordelia's linguistic restraint … stands for a constellation of particularly feminine virtues” (132-33). I differ from both in arguing that feminine silence is itself a complex and unstable construction in early modern England.

2. The tail / tale pun lurks beneath the sexually obsessed Ferdinand's line to the duchess in Webster's Duchess of Malfi: “What cannot a neat knave with a smooth tale / Make a woman believe?” (1.1.339-40). And in the same scene Ferdinand implicitly links the tongue with the penis—“And women like that part which, like the lamprey, / Hath ne'er a bone in't” (1.1.336-37).

3. Catherine Belsey notes that John Phillip's early Play of Patient Grissell (1558-61) shows simply “the good example of her pacience towards her husband,” while the much later version of the story, The Ancient, True and Admirable History of Patient Grisel (1619) displays “How Maides, by Her Example, In Their Good Behavior, May Marrie Rich Husbands” (167).

4. Jill Levenson points out that “the western mind has again and again shown itself fearful of voids and stillness, the indefinite and the immense” (223).

5. See, for example, Troilus and Cressida (3.2.133), where Troilus understands Cressida's request to stop her mouth as a plea for a kiss, or The Duchess of Malfi (3.2.20), where Antonio stops his wife's mouth with a kiss. See also Much Ado about Nothing 5.4.97.

6. For this and other details of this production I am relying on both the prompt script, held by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon, and my own observations, based on a videotape of the production. In this case, the prompt script was altered for performance—at least on the night the videotape was made, when the actor's hand was placed over Lavinia's mouth.

7. The term is M. M. Bakhtin's, from Rabelais and His World, but is applied by Peter Stallybrass specifically to the female body, which is “naturally ‘grotesque’” (126).

8. This and other information about Brook's production comes from the prompt script, which is held by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon.

9. The play's critics usually assume that Marcus's speech dictates Lavinia's responses. Rudolph Stamm writes: “His next lines [‘Shall I speak for thee? Shall I say 'tis so?’] presuppose an unmistakable reaction of hers: a grave and meaningful nod or one of the more passionate forms of gestic assent” (261).

10. Philip McGuire invents the term “open silence” for a silence which is “textually indeterminate” (xix); when, in other words, the text itself offers no guidance as to how the silence should be interpreted on stage. In his view, a silence which is open in the text must always be closed in performance: “Isabella may in silence agree to or refuse to marry the Duke or she may refuse to make such a decision, but she cannot do all three simultaneously” (143; emphasis added). While I agree that such a moment calls for a decision on the part of actor or director, I cannot accept that indeterminacy cannot be represented on the stage. Anthony Dawson points out that “silences are … a sign of the indeterminacy of the text as a whole, of its refusal to yield univocal meanings” (320). Like performance itself, stage silence complicates and undermines attempts to fix or determine its meaning. McGuire's point that an actor cannot do everything at once should not lead us to oversimplify what an actor can do, or to represent as a failure what is really a strength. Isabella may agree to marry the Duke gladly, reluctantly, or resentfully, for example (to widen McGuire's range of options), but an audience may never be able to “read” her motives or feelings for doing so with certainty.

11. Jane Marcus also sees in Lavinia's story “a vivid image for the feminist critic” who must “‘wrest an alphabet’ from the ‘speaking text’ of women's bodies” (80)—echoing the now commonplace notion that women must struggle from silence into speech.

12. In his review, Harold Hobson complained that the play is “without a moral centre” since “the tearing out of Lavinia's tongue is criminally evil because the deed is wrought by a couple of Goths. On the other hand, the baking of two youths by Titus is condoned, because it is an interesting eccentricity of a lovable and ill-used old man” (Sunday Times 21 Aug. 1955).

13. For descriptions of the scene, see Stephen Wall, “Bridging the Homeric Gap,” Times Literary Supplement 12 July 1985: 775; Irving Wardle, “Full Attention on the Lovers Allows Brief Glimpse of Hope,” Times 27 June 1985; Michael Coveney, Financial Times 27 June 1985. I am also relying on my memory of this production.

14. For criticisms of the way in which this scene was handled, see Michael Billington, “Victims of the time machine,” Guardian 8 May 1986; Irving Wardle, “Eccentrics in a monotonous war,” Times 7 May 1986; Michael Coveney, Financial Times 27 June 1985.

Works Cited

Asp, Carolyn. “In Defense of Cressida.” Studies in Philology 74 (1977): 406-17.

Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. London: Methuen, 1985.

Bevington, David. Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.

Brathwait, Richard. The English gentlewoman drawne out to the full body. London, 1631.

Campbell, Oscar James. Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Berkeley: U of California P, 1938.

Cary, Elizabeth, Lady. The Tragedy of Mariam. Ed. Barry Weller and Margaret Ferguson. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Cixous, Hélène. “Castration or Decapitation?” Trans. Annette Kuhn. Signs 7 (1981): 41-55.

———. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. New French Feminisms. 245-64.

Colie, Rosalie L. “The Energies of Endurance: Biblical Echo in King Lear.” Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism. Ed. Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1974. 117-44.

David, Richard. Shakespeare in the Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978.

Davies, Kathleen M. “Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage.” Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage. Ed. R. B. Outhwaite. New York: St. Martin's, 1981. 58-80.

Dawson, Anthony B. “The Impasse over the Stage.” English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 309-27.

Dessen, Alan C. Shakespeare in Performance: Titus Andronicus. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989.

Dod, John, and Robert Cleaver. A Godlie Forme of Householde Government: For the Ordering of Private Families, according to the direction of Gods word. London, 1612.

Duras, Marguerite. Interview, trans. Susan Husserl-Kapit. New French Feminisms. 174-76.

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Random, 1978.

Goldberg, Jonathan. “Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. London: Methuen, 1985. 116-37.

Gouge, William. Of Domesticall Duties. London, 1622.

Green, Douglas E. “Interpreting ‘her martyr'd signs’: Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 317-26.

Greene, Gayle. “Shakespeare's Cressida: ‘A kind of self.’” The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Carolyn R. S. Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980. 133-49.

Harvey, Elizabeth D. Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts. London: Routledge, 1992.

Henderson, Katherine Usher, and Barbara F. McManus. Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985.

Hogrefe, Pearl. Tudor Women: Commoners and Queens. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1975.

Hull, Suzanne W. Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982.

Irigaray, Luce. “This Sex Which Is Not One.” Trans. Claudia Reeder. New French Feminisms. 99-107.

Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

Jonson, Ben. Epicoene. Ed. Edward Partridge. New Haven: Yale UP, 1971.

———. Timber; or, Discoveries. Ed. Ralph S. Walker. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1953.

Levenson, Jill. “What the Silence Said: Still Points in King Lear.” Shakespeare 1971: Proceedings of the World Shakespeare Congress. Ed. Clifford Leech and J. M. R. Margeson. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1972. 215-29.

Marcus, Jane. “Still Practice, A / Wrested Alphabet: Toward a Feminist Aesthetic.” Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship. Ed. Shari Benstock. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 79-97.

McGuire, Philip C. Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare's Open Silences. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.

McLuskie, Kathleen. “The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure.” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Middleton, Thomas, and William Rowley. The Changeling. Ed. Joost Daalder. London: Black, 1990.

New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980.

Niccholes, Alexander. A discourse. of marriage and wiving. London, 1620.

Perkins, William. A Direction for the Government of the Tongue according to Gods Word. London, 1621.

Rose, Mary Beth. The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.

Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. G. Blakemore Evans, gen. ed. Boston: Houghton, 1974.

———. Titus Andronicus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1948.

Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 123-42.

Stamm, Rudolph. “The Alphabet of Speechless Complaint: A Study of the Mangled Daughter in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.” The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance. Ed. Joseph G. Price. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1975. 255-73.

Vives, Joannes Ludovicus. A very frutefull and pleasant boke called the instruction of a christen Woman. Trans. Richard Hyde. London, 1557.

Webster, John. The Duchess of Malfi. Ed. John Russell Brown. The Revels Plays. London: Methuen, 1964.

Whately, William. A Bride-bush; Or, a Direction for Married Persons. London, 1619.

———. A Care-cloth: Or a Treatise of the Cumbers and Troubles of Marriage. London, 1624.

Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984.

Yoder, R. A. “‘Sons and Daughters of the Game’: An Essay on Shakespeare's ‘Troilus and Cressida.’” Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 11-25.