Phyllis Rackin

Anti-Historians: Women's Roles in Shakespeare's Histories

No woman is the protagonist in a Shakespearean history play. Renaissance gender role definitions prescribed silence as a feminine virtue, and Renaissance sexual mythology associated the feminine with body and matter as opposed to masculine intellect and spirit. Renaissance historiography constituted a masculine tradition, written by men, devoted to the deeds of men, glorifying the masculine virtues of courage, honor, and patriotism, and dedicated to preserving the names of past heroes and recording their patriarchal genealogies. Within that historical record, women had no voice.

Shakespeare's Women: Performance and Conception (review)

The only slight criticism I might make concerning this significant and deeply engaging book is the wish for a longer postscript. Only two pages long, it concludes that the maternal body was “not historically passive . . . but dynamic, active and challenging; not the subject but the agent of history” and that maternities had a “far-reaching impact” on “the disciplines through which we have come to mediate our understanding not only of our origins but of our own human potential” (268–69). These are rousing words, but I am not sure that this optimism is totally earned. As I look at Vesalius’s illustration of a pregnant woman lying on a table in a theater of anatomy, as I think about conceptions of nature based on the woman’s fluid and essentially dehumanized body, as I imagine the unthinking malice directed at the women whose hair was placed in witch bottles, as I remember that Cleopatra was largely defamed rather than admired in this period (except for Shakespeare’s play, Caesar finally won), I don’t share this optimism. Instead, I feel a bit sobered about how the need to master women’s maternal bodies was central to knowledge or disciplines, as Laoutaris has so ably demonstrated. Mastery was not, of course, completely achieved, and early modern history is replete with women who showed imagination and agency. Both imagination and agency are inherent in the daunting task of mothering itself. But the tremendous power attributed to maternal bodies— a power that then required such extreme countermeasures to suppress it—came at a terrible price to women and men alike.

Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories

Part I: Making Gender Visible: A Re-Viewing of Shakespeares History Plays 1. Thoroughly Modern Henry 2. The History Play in Shakespeares Time 3. Feminism, Women, and the Shakespearean History Play 4. The Theater as Institution Notes. Part II: Weak Kings, Warrior Women, and the Assault on Dynastic Authority: The First Tetralogy and King John 1. Henry VI, Part I 2. Henry VI, Part II 3. Henry VI, Part III 4. Richard III 5. King John. Notes. Part III: Gender and Nation: Anticipations of Modernity in the Second Tetralogy 1. Richard II 2. The Henry IV plays 3. Henry V Notes. Bibilography. Index.