A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare

Dympna Callaghan, Dympna Callaghan

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118501207
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire de Shakespeare

The question is not whether Shakespeare studies needs feminism, but whether feminism needs Shakespeare. This is the explicitly political approach taken in the dynamic and newly updated edition of A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare.

• Provides the definitive feminist statement on Shakespeare for the 21st century
• Updates address some of the newest theatrical andcreative engagements with Shakespeare, offering fresh insights into Shakespeare's plays and poems, and gender dynamics in early modern England
• Contributors come from across the feminist generations and from various stages in their careers to address what is new in the field in terms of historical and textual discovery
• Explores issues vital to feminist inquiry, including race, sexuality, the body, queer politics, social economies, religion, and capitalism
• In addition to highlighting changes, it draws attention to the strong continuities of scholarship in this field over the course of the history of feminist criticism of Shakespeare
• The previous edition was a recipient of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award; this second edition maintains its coverage and range, and bringsthe scholarship right up to the present day

Part I
The History of Feminist Shakespeare Criticism

1
The Ladies’ Shakespeare

Juliet Fleming

On July 3, 1925, together with Lord Balfour and Rudyard Kipling, James Barrie was granted the freedom of the Stationers’ Company. The text of Barrie’s acceptance speech was printed the following morning in the London Times (and subsequently by Clement Shorter in a private edition of twenty-five copies). The speech, which posited the existence of an edition of Shakespeare newly sensitive to the needs of women, is here quoted at length:

The other sex – if so they may still be called – have long complained that his women, however glorious, are too subservient to the old enemy for these later days, as if he did not know what times were coming for women. Gentlemen, he knew, but he had to write with the knowledge that if he was too advanced about Woman his plays would be publicly burned in the garden of Stationers’ Hall. So he left a cipher, not in the text, where everybody has been looking for them, but in the cunning omission of all stage directions, and women, as he had hoped, have had the wit to read it aright, with the result that there is to be another edition, called appropriately “The Ladies’ Shakespeare.” For the first time on any stage, some fortunate actress, without uttering one word, but by the use of silent illuminating “business,” is to show us the Shrew that Shakespeare drew. Katherine was really fooling Petruchio all the time. The reason he carried her off before the marriage feast, though he didn’t know it, was that her father was really a poor man, and there was no marriage feast. So Katherine got herself carried off to save that considerable expense. On that first night in Petruchio’s house, when he was out in the wind and rain distending his chest in the belief that he was taming her, do you really think with him that she went supperless to bed? No, she had a little bag with her. In it a wing of chicken and some other delicacies, a half bottle of the famous Paduan wine, and such a pretty corkscrew. I must tell you no more; go and book your seats, you will see, without even Sir Israel Gollancz being able to find one word missed out or added, that it is no longer Katherine who is tamed.

Barrie is mimicking many of the various resources that women (or at least, those women who have wished to retain the poet as an object of affection and veneration) have repeatedly brought to the problem of Shakespeare. These include resources of editing, reading (both individually and in societies), and the development of character criticism; the adaptation of Shakespeare’s stories for specialized (usually juvenile or school) audiences; the performance activities of producing, acting, and directing; and women’s promotion of Shakespeare, within the heritage industry, as a man who loved women (it was, for example, with the crucial support of the Shakespeare Ladies Club that in 1741 a monument was erected to Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey, copies of which were subsequently placed in Stratford, and in Leicester Square).

Women have also been interested, as “The Ladies’ Shakespeare” suggests, to “reread,” “rewrite,” “refigure,” “re-vision,” or “decenter” Shakespeare – that is, to criticize the poet from a woman’s point of view while continuing to appropriate the cultural capital that accrues to his name. In this essay, I use the term “The Ladies’ Shakespeare” to describe both the imaginary text that is the object of Barrie’s joke, and the set of gestures whereby some critics have asserted a particularist, woman-centered interest in Shakespeare – and whereby other critics, taking such assertions at face value, have understood them to represent errors of judgment within Shakespeare criticism. Both as an essay and as a concept, “The Ladies’ Shakespeare” is intended to demonstrate that the “woman-question” within Shakespeare criticism is a reflex whereby such criticism recognizes and castigates itself: neither as essay nor concept does it therefore attempt to account for the differences of class, nationality, and ethnicity as these have recently become visible within feminist criticism, and as they continue to make their difference to the ways in which Shakespeare may be read, viewed, and valued.

As Barrie’s admixture of suffragist gender politics to Shakespeare criticism and performance suggests, women have regularly taken pleasure in, and understood the contemporary material benefits of, the enterprise of arguing the case for women’s special relation to England’s national poet. While women’s labor has contributed to the development of Shakespeare studies, the study and performance of Shakespeare may have helped to articulate the interests of (and hence offer benefits to) women as a group. In “Shakspere Talks with Uncritical People” (1879–91), Constance O’Brien imagined women gathering in small, informal groups to talk over characters “whose life seems as vivid as our own.”¹ Through such meetings, as well as through more organized Shakespeare study clubs and the distribution of what Elizabeth Latimer (herself a speaker on the study-club circuit) called their “fugitive Shakspearian Criticism,” women articulated social and intellectual communities that intersected, but were not entirely coincident with, those of their male counterparts. So the study of Shakespeare cemented the friendship of critic Anna Jameson and actor Fanny Kemble; Mary Cowden Clarke learned her love for Shakespeare from her tutor Mary Lamb, and conceived the idea for her Shakespeare Concordance (1845) at the Lambs’ breakfast table; Mary Lamb was encouraged to write Tales from Shakespear (1807) with her brother Charles by the publisher Mary Jane Godwin; the actress Helen Faucit wrote her volume On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters: By One Who Has Personated Them (1885) in the form of personal letters to her female friends; and Elizabeth Griffith was “stirred” to write The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (1775) by her desire to emulate Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769).

Less clear, within Barrie’s parody, is the fact that self-directed humor has also been characteristic of women’s approaches to Shakespeare. In 1896 Emily Bissell (Priscilla Leonard) published an antisuffragist article in the conservative Century Magazine which has obvious affinities with Barrie’s speech. Claiming to be an account of a lecture given in a Twentieth-Century Women’s Club, “The Mistaken Vocation of Shakespeare’s Heroines” charges Shakespeare with having put his female characters in the wrong plays (“in a word, ladies, with these heroines in their appropriate places, there would have been no tragedies at all among Shakespeare’s works!”). To prolonged applause, and cries of “Down with Shakespeare!” the speaker reassigns the female roles of an author she considers “well-meaning, but inadequate – blind to the true powers of Woman and the illimitable wideness of her sphere.” Mrs. Lauch Macluarin also anticipated the tone of Barrie’s address in a paper delivered to the Dallas Shakespeare Club in 1897. Beginning from the premise that “Shakespeare has told us everything, about everything, that is, and was, and is to come,” Macluarin pretends to search for the figure of the business woman in his plays, before finally forgiving Shakespeare for his omission of the character. For “how could he anticipate her, great man that he was, any more than he could the typewriter and the phonograph and other pleasant and surprising things we have?” Bissell and Macluarin republished their essays in the American Shakespeare Magazine, the journal of the largely female-staffed Fortnightly Shakespeare Club of New York. Mocking themselves as lady Shakespeareans, Bissell, Macluarin, and the women who laughed with them explored what was not in Shakespeare primarily in order to demonstrate and enjoy their familiarity with what was there. Even as this strategy stakes its claim to some part of the cultural territory that is Shakespeare studies in the late nineteenth century, however, it hints at the pleasures of a criticism that, departing from strict textual considerations, is free to ask not what women can do for Shakespeare, but what Shakespeare can do for women.

The essays of Bissell, Macluarin, and Barrie are written from a culturally conservative position which uses the specter of a ludicrous and anachronistic feminist criticism to deflect attention, both from a serious consideration of women’s rights, and from a critical analysis of the premises of Shakespearean criticism itself. It is the argument of this essay that if the extravagancies that Barrie attributes to “The Ladies’ Shakespeare” have been legible within woman-centered criticism of Shakespeare, they have been equally legible within a more general appreciation of Shakespeare as that has been developed both within and beyond the academy. I am suggesting that in “The Ladies’ Shakespeare,” and in subsequent attacks on feminist approaches to the plays, scholars and others attempt to distance themselves from the undesired consequences of some of their own readings of Shakespeare by projecting them onto women. Conducted by men or by women, such readings begin from the unexceptionable premise that literary criticism necessarily responds, in however mediated a form, to current political concerns. The criticism that follows is itself what Marx called “ideological” to the extent that it attributes to acts of intellection (such as Shakespeare’s, or its own) the power to change the circumstances of men’s and women’s lives. The fantasy that is “The Ladies’ Shakespeare” is not the fantasy of women alone – it is the productive and necessary fantasy of all those who have allowed themselves to read Shakespeare as if it mattered to do so. I am proposing, then, that the specificities of woman-centered criticism as mocked by its detractors are almost always standing in for the specificities of Shakespeare criticism in general as these are recognized and disavowed by its own practitioners – laugh at “The Ladies’ Shakespeare,” and “The Ladies’ Shakespeare” laughs at you. But my argument is twofold, for if there is nothing particularly unusual, subjective, or particularist about the grounds on which woman-centered criticism of Shakespeare proceeds, then such criticism cannot be distinguished, for good or ill, from that which surrounds it. That is to say, there is no feminist criticism of Shakespeare, but thinking makes it so.

I

Women’s deployment of the critical resources of editing, character criticism, performance, adaptation, and the promotion of Shakespeare has been largely and variously governed by the assumption (questioned by Macluarin, and mischievously dramatized by Barrie when he pretends to read Shakespeare as a suffragist avant la lettre) that Shakespeare’s plays can and should be made to speak to present concerns. According to “The Ladies’ Shakespeare,” the plays anticipate the affective needs of future generations, and to find those needs met is consequently to read Shakespeare “aright”:

Shakespeare has heard that he is to be understood at last. … They say that a look of expectancy has come over the face of the statue in Leicester Square. If the actress who is to play the real Katherine has the courage to climb the railings, while the rest of London sleeps, she may find him waiting for her at the foot of his pedestal to honour her by walking her once round that garden, talking to her in the language not of Petruchio, but of Romeo.

After three centuries of immobilization, Shakespeare is to be “understood at last,” his intentions reanimated by a feminist sympathy that is here imagined as the product of a complex process of identification between Shakespeare and the women who love him. The term “identification” indicates the psychological process whereby a subject assimilates an attribute of another person, and is transformed, wholly or part...