San Antonio College Library

Challenges popular beliefs about the estranged nature of Shakespeare's marriage to Ann Hathaway, placing their relationship in a social and historical context that poses alternative theories about her rural upbringing and role in the bard's professional life.

"A scandalously honest guide to the secrets of Victorian womanhood."--

This book offers a look at the lives of Elizabethan era women in the context of the great female characters in the works of William Shakespeare. Portia and Kate, Ophelia and Desdemona, Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth, the beautifully realized women in Shakespeare's plays continue to captivate us, relevant and revealing even today, centuries after their creation. They also offer us a window into the realities of daily life for women across the social spectrum...

"Shakespeare and The Nature of Women , first published in 1975, inaugurated a new wave of feminist scholarship. It claimed that Shakespeare's plays offered a sustained critique of inherited male thinking about women, theological, literary and social. The book argued that the presence of the boy actor in Shakespeare's theatre created an awareness of gender as performance. Almost thirty years on, it continues to be the corner-stone of writing about...

"This book explores for the first time how ordinary women of the early modern period in England understood and experienced their bodies. Using letters, popular literature, and detailed legal records from courts that were obsessively concerned with regulating morals, the book recaptures seventeenth-century popular understandings of sex and reproduction. This history of the female body is at once intimate and wide-ranging, with sometimes startling insights...