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Shakespeare and Women situates Shakespeare's female characters in multiple historical contexts, ranging from the early modern England in which they originated to the contemporary Western world in which our own encounters with them are staged. In so doing, this book seeks to challenge currently prevalent views of Shakespeare's women-both the women he depicted in his plays and the women he encountered in the world he inhabited.
Chapter 1, "A Usable History," analyses the implications and consequences of the emphasis on patriarchal power, male misogyny, and women's oppression that has dominated recent feminist Shakespeare scholarship, while subsequent chapters propose alternative models for feminist analysis. Chapter 2, "The Place(s) of Women in Shakespeare's World," emphasizes the frequently overlooked kinds of social, political, and economic agency exercised by the women Shakespeare would have known in both Stratford and London. Chapter 3, "Our Canon, Ourselves," addresses the implications of the modern popularity of plays such as The Taming of the Shrew which seem to endorse women's subjugation, arguing that the plays--and the aspects of those plays--that we have chosen to emphasize tell us more about our own assumptions than about the beliefs that informed the responses of Shakespeare's first audiences. Chapter 4, "Boys will be Girls," explores the consequences for women of the use of male actors to play women's roles. Chapter 5, "The Lady's Reeking Breath," turns to the sonnets, the texts that seem most resistant to feminist appropriation, to argue that Shakespeare's rewriting of the idealized Petrarchan lady anticipates modern feminist critiques of the essential misogyny of the Petrarchan tradition. The final chapter, "Shakespeare's Timeless Women," surveys the implication of Shakespeare's female characters in the process of historical change, as they have been repeatedly updated to conform to changing conceptions of women's nature and women's social roles, serving in ever-changing guises as models of an unchanging, universal female nature.
- Sales Rank: #1037659 in Books
- Published on: 2005-08-04
- Released on: 2005-08-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.30" h x .50" w x 8.00" l, .49 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 168 pages
Review
"Phyllis Rackin's own contributions to Shakespeare in this book make for a witty, interesting, and frequently compelling read. Overall, this volume not only challenges Shakespeare specialists but can also reach and educate strong upper-level undergraduate students interested in the construction of women's roles in Shakespeare's plays and beyond."--Laura Feitzinger Brown, Sixteenth Century Journal
"Phyllis Rackin has provided us with a deftly defined casebook for the reconsideration of feminist criticism in the twenty-first century that looks to the future through a clear articulation of that criticism's past.... In each chapter, Rackin provides an alternative to the limiting assumptions she describes and thus offers brave new ways of seeing.... [Rackin] reexamines with a steady feminist eye the man who persistently claims our critical interest. In focusing on the question of Shakespeare and women in the twenty-first century, Phyllis Rackin has renewed a sense of the feminist agenda within the field of Shakespeare studies. Most importantly, she has done so for the next generation of scholars in an affordable volume that will be invaluable in the graduate classroom."--Shakespeare Quarterly
"Believing that historical research can provide rich resources to revitalize feminist criticism (if one looks for them), Rackin ably and amply points the way. She examines the place(s) of women in Shakespeare's world; the tendency to shape the canon in the reader's own image; the powerful truths Shakespeare offers about women (notably in Cleopatra) and life, truths evident despite or sometimes because of the use of boy actors; Shakespeare's 'complicated negotiation with the Petrarchan tradition' in the sonnets, which succeed, while addressing both sexes, in enabling women to think and feel honestly about themselves; and the continuous contemporaneousness of Shakespeare's women. The 'Further Reading' section is a vein of rich ore. Essential."--Choice
About the Author
Professor Phyllis Rackin has taught Shakespeare at the University of Pennsylvania for forty years. A former President of the Shakespeare Association of America, she has published three books on Shakespeare as well as numerous scholarly articles on Shakespeare and related subjects in anthologies and in such journals as PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Shakespeare-Jahrbuch. Her awards include an ACLS fellowship and a Lindback award for distinguished teaching.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
The Economic and Social Forces Shaping Shakespeare's Women and Women in the Contemporary World
By Sandra Adickes
In Shakespeare and Women, Phyllis Rackin examines representations of women in historical contexts ranging from their introduction in the early modern English world to their staged presentations in the contemporary Western world. In the process Rackin challenges assumptions that currently influence efforts to understand Shakespeare's representations of women.
The dominant view of women's history is that their achievements in medicine, government, economics, religion, law, and education constitute a triumph over the "dismal past." The reality, Rackin contends, is more complex. Although women in Western democracies can vote, they are not included in high elective offices. By contrast, in Shakespeare's time female monarchs ruled England and Scotland, but women were excluded from universities and the learned professions, they lost control of their property when they married, and were subject to beatings by their husbands. Nevertheless, aristocratic women managed great estates and held economic power comparable to that of modern CEO's, while women on lower social levels were active in trades that today are predominantly male.
Rackin traces the connection between the popularity of Shakespeare's plays to the forces affecting the social and economic position of women. This connection is made forcefully in the contrasting shifts in popularity of The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Despite the lack of evidence that The Shrew was popular when it was first presented, recent scholarship has often been based on the assumption that the play presented contemporary beliefs regarding the place of women in marriage. In recent years, The Shrew has bcome one of the most frequently produced of Shakespeare's plays, and has drawn more ciritical and scholarly attention than any other of Shakespeare's early comedies. Rackin suggests that modern popularity of The Shrew "says more about our society's biases than those of Shakespeare's audience," and cites support for the play by 20th century male critics who responded "wistfully" to the imposition of Petruchian discipline on a rebellious wife. Merry Wives, which presents a more tolerant attitude toward the place of women in marriage, was extremely popular in its early history. It was one of the first of Shakespeare's plays to be revived on stage when theatres reopened after the Restoration, and it remained popular through the 18th century. Its reputation then declined while the reputation of The Shrew grew. The shift, in Rackin 's view "suggests that more of the same culltural forces have been involved." Falstaff is humiliated and punished for past misdeeds by the Windsor wives. He becomes, in Rackin's words, "a beached whale," a transformation intolerable to male critics. That the play addressed the concerns of women suggests the reason for its loss of esteem in a scholarly tradition dominated by men.
Throughout Shakespeare and Women, Rackin reveals the conditions that shaped Shakespeare's women' lives. These conditions and the present history of the world in which women live contribute to their experience of the plays. Rackin believes that this reexamination can help women to free their imaginations from the stereotypes that shaped the characters of Shakespeare's women, and ultimately lead them to a reconsideration of the conditions that shape women's lives in the contemporary world.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Great, insightful, handy
By CG
Great, well-written scholarly book on Shakespeare's female characters and how Elizabethan patriarchy shaped (or didn't shape) the playwright's interpretation of their sex and relations with men. Offers great insight into the Elizabethan time with lot's of historical background and examples. Rackin definitely did her homework with this one. She does drone on at times, but the material is very rich and great for scholarly papers on Shakespeare that are centralized in feminist/historicism theories.
Book is quite compact making it very accessible and easy to carry around as well. Great for college students alike (undergraduate and graduate).
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Great Monograph for Research
By K. Imwalle
In Shakespeare and Women, Phyllis Rackin explores Shakespeare’s representation of women throughout history and challenges the assumptions that mold our understanding of Shakespeare’s exemplifications of women historically. Rackin also emphasizes the need to place these conventions into an historical context in order to accomplish a full understanding of the perception of the female characters. She situates herself in the conversation of Feminist criticism by including histories that other scholars have missed or purposely left out in regards to the theatrical presentation of women on Shakespeare’s stage. Rackin’s most interesting argument is that the history of women and their oppression in Shakespeare has been oversimplified and is full of misconceptions. Her examples from the primary plays alongside the criticism of other scholars, both from Shakespeare’s time and present day, allow for an effective argument overall. However, she fails to acknowledge any accordance with other feminist scholars, giving the impression that all other critics are naive to the real history of women, which is unlikely. Regardless, Rackin presents a compelling and interesting view on the way women should be perceived in the realm of Shakespeare.
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