Phyllis Rackin

Evelyn Gajowski

The Merry Wives of Windsor has recently experienced a resurgence of critical interest. At times considered one of Shakespeare’s weaker plays, it is often dismissed or marginalized; however, developments in feminist, ecocritical and new historicist criticism have opened up new perspectives and this collection of 18 essays by top Shakespeare scholars sheds fresh light on the play. The detailed introduction by Phyllis Rackin and Evelyn Gajowski provides a historical survey of the play and ties into an evolving critical and cultural context. The book’s sections look in turn at female community/female agency; theatrical alternatives; social and theatrical contexts; desire/sexuality; nature and performance to provide a contemporary critical analysis of the play.

New Critical Essays

The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism is a wide-ranging, authoritative guide to research on critical approaches to Shakespeare by an international team of leading scholars. It contains chapters on 20 specific critical practices, each grounded in analysis of a Shakespeare play. These practices range from foundational approaches including character studies, close reading and genre studies, through those that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s that challenged the preconceptions on which traditional liberal humanism is based, including feminism, cultural materialism and new historicism. Perspectives drawn from postcolonial, queer studies and critical race studies, besides more recent critical practices including presentism, ecofeminism and cognitive ethology all receive detailed treatment. In addition to its coverage of distinct critical approaches, the handbook contains various sections that provide non-specialists with practical help: an A–Z glossary of key terms and concepts, a chronology of major publications and events, an introduction to resources for study of the field and a substantial annotated bibliography.

The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism

To be a subject is to be able to speak, to give meaning. The Art of Loving interrogates the phenomenon of "theatrical subjectivity"--female protagonists as both subjects and objects on the early modern English stage and within the illusion of Shakespeare's tragedies. The disparity between females as acting, speaking subjects onstage and male protagonists' objectifications of them constitutes the dominating gendered irony of the dramatic texts. In Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra, Professor Gajowski argues, women are not portrayed as they are valued by men. Endowed with a self-estimation that is independent of masculine estimations of them, Juliet, Desdemona, and Cleopatra subvert Petrarchan, Ovidian, and Orientalist discursive traditions by which males construct females as gendered, colonized others. The independence of their self-evaluation from conflicting male desire and repugnance for them accounts for their "infinite variety." The uniqueness of Shakespeare's representation of heterosexual relations is his creation of female protagonists who are relational, yet independent, human beings. The empowered female protagonists of Shakespeare's comedies are rightly celebrated by "compensatory" feminist critics; the disempowered--even victimized--female protagonists of his tragedies are rightly noted by "justificatory" feminist critics. To view the marriages of the comic females as nothing more than submissions to patriarchy, Professor Gajowski contends, is to ignore the crucial significance in Shakespeare's texts of affiliative capacities of both sexes of the human animal. Accordingly, to view the deaths of the tragic females as victimizations by patriarchy--and no more than that--is to ignore the commentary that Shakespeare's texts make upon masculine impulses of possession, politics, and power. While feminist critics recognize the significance of dramatic representations of sexuality and affective relations, recent materialist/historicist studies consider representations of sexuality and affective relations significant only insofar as they are relevant to the manipulations of Elizabethan and Jacobean political power and mechanisms of economic exchange. The privileging of politics and power on the part of these critics constitutes a perpetuation and reinforcement of patriarchal values. It has the effect of putting woman in her customary place: marginalized, erased, subservient to the newly dominant male discursive traditions. It is antithetical, moreover, to a genuinely feminist discourse because it deprivileges relationships, denying the power that they play in cultures and in texts. It is the difference between proclaiming, Creon-like, that families are subservient to the state and comprehending the far more complex psychosocial truth that the state is constituted of families. To assume that structures of political and economic power have greater value than sexual and affective experience is to ignore the interpenetrating nature of public and private experience that Shakespeare's texts depict.

Female Subjectivity and Male Discursive Traditions in Shakespeare's Tragedies

The Art of Loving

This edited collection of essays by an international group of prominent Shakespeare scholars explores the implications of presentism, the "new kid on the block," theoretically speaking, for issues of sexual orientation and gender in Shakespeare's texts. Its twelve contributions include six essays that foreground sexual orientation and six essays that foreground gender issues. Grouped under three rubrics - Politics/War, Performativities, and Uncivil Unions - the collection also includes a Theoretical Frameworks section with essays by Professor Bruce Smith and Professor Phyllis Rackin and an Afterword by Professor Kathleen McLuskie. The collection offers crucial insights into our present professional, theoretical, political, and social moment, in addition to readings of particular Shakespeare texts. It places feminist and queer theory in dialogue with presentist, historicist, and materialist theory, as well as with each other.

Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare

Robert Ornstein

Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein is a tribute to one of the most prominent Shakespeareans in the last half of the twentieth century, past president of the Shakespeare Association of America, and author of Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery, and Other texts. Twelve original contributions by an international group of scholars, including some of the most prominent working in Shakespeare studies today, use a variety of theoretical perspectives to address issues of contemporary import in the dramatic texts. Janus-like, the collection suggests the directions of Shakespeare studies at the outset of the new millennium while considering their roots in the last.

Evelyn Gajowski

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