San Antonio College Library

"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...

Focusing on five Shakespeare plays, this book offers a fresh approach to the complex choices and decisions the women characters must face. Author Irene G. Dash scrutinizes stage productions over the centuries. Her exciting discoveries show the subtle ways the characters have been changed. By comparing promptbook versions from the eighteenth century to the present with the texts, Dash reveals how contemporary attitudes, spilling over into the theater,...

"Phyllis Rackin challenges a number of current assumptions about Shakespeare and women, including the women in his family, the women who worked in the London theatre industry, the female characters in his plays, and the dark lady of the sonnets. She argues that the current scholarly emphasis on patriarchal power, male misogyny, and women's oppression may tell us more about ourselves than about the world Shakespeare inhabited and the worlds he created...

Publisher's description: Linking The Faerie Queene with early modern conduct manuals, romances, dedicatory epistles, and devotional literature, McManus examines the poem's depiction of women's interpretive strategies and argues that female readers were expected to exercise considerable autonomy as they endorsed, adapted, or resisted the texts that sought to fashion them as "chaste, silent and obedient."