Shakespeare and Gender: Sex and Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Drama. Arden Shakespeare. By Kate Aughterson and Ailsa Grant Ferguson

Kate Aughterson and Ailsa Grant Ferguson range compendiously across Shakespeare’s women, from the witty resistances of Beatrice, Rosalind, and Kate; to heroines like Cordelia and Desdemona, condemned to succumb to anxious male sexuality; to mothers like Margaret of Anjou and Hermione, who refuse to fall. The pendent focus of this book is men who either blame their weakness on “effeminization” or aggrandize themselves by deploying misogyny aggressively. The authors’ exposition of gender dialectics comprises four waves (and more than four decades) of feminist gender criticism.

The confusion of male and female is the analytical fulcrum of the book. Richard II’s “masculine identity in a male body politic is threatened by womanishness” (49). Here and elsewhere in the book, the authors remark that the vagina is one of the referents of the word “nothing,” a word that Richard and Queen Isabel use in lyrical descriptions of the state into which they have fallen. “Femaleness is a state of absence, of nothingness, existing only in relation to a lack of male ‘something’” (47). In one of two “Interludes” featuring the perspectives of theatrical practitioners, the authors interview director and lead actor Adjoa Andoh about her production of Richard II at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (2019). All the actors and crew were British women of color, and the production spoke back against Brexit, the scandalous treatment of Windrush immigrants, and other colonial insults that allied their sufferings with those of the king and queen.

This book cites some commonplaces but does not rest content with them; it breaks new ground, even when the authors anatomize topics that are familiar to many Shakespeareans, such as cross-dressing in the comedies, the representation of marriage in the problem plays, and the different approaches to representing male and female madness in the tragedies. The “Gendering Madness” chapter focuses on Hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet’s madness is melancholy, cerebral, and perhaps an antic disposition put on in play in order to fool the watchful court. Ophelia is the “quintessential dramatic template of tragic and visceral female madness” (127), “passive, abject, a victim of her weaker mind” (128). Hamlet’s sexual abusiveness and harassment of Ophelia in Act 3 engender her fragmented, bawdy songs as she approaches death. Ophelia’s despairing songs resist misogyny. The chapter ends with a compelling analysis of the madness of the Jailer’s Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen, whose mad songs and near-drowning are subjected to the Doctor’s proposed “sex cure” that threatens her chastity.

Chapter 7 focuses on space, sex, and gender, employing fourth-wave contemporary feminist geography. In The Comedy of Errors, male liberty “is defined by business beyond the home” and “Shakespeare plays out fantasies of female power over a husband and male anxieties about the spaces his wife inhabits” (184). Adriana and the Abbess contest efforts of male characters to dominate public space. Table 7.1 traces the location, scene by scene, of the gender distribution in Twelfth Night, in which the cross-dressed Viola crosses back and forth between the male court of the Duke and the domestic space of Olivia. In Measure for Measure, attempts to punish sexual misconduct publicly, in the prison and in the streets of Vienna (and in the private confessional), are open to dispute and resistance despite the disguised Duke’s efforts to see and to control all sexual conduct in his realm. Authority’s paranoid regulation of sexual liberty, the play’s “three hetero-patriarchal marriages imposed from top-down” (190) and the insistent and repetitive “public shaming of female bodies” (189) are radically questioned, both by the play itself and by the authors of Shakespeare and Gender. Table 7.2 offers a scenic analysis of Antony and Cleopatra, detailing the alternation between Rome and Egypt and their markedly different gender norms. Aughterson and Ferguson describe Cleopatra’s secluded monument at the end of the play as “a phallic symbol of public space appropriated as female” (197). It is a refuge from the public spaces dominated by Caesar, such as the battlefields and the Roman streets where he intends to lead the defeated Cleopatra in triumph. As she prepares to die, Cleopatra and her female servants “re-create the monument as a safe female space in which alternatives to Roman notions of colonization and power are articulated” (198). The chapter concludes with a discussion of how Marina in Pericles speaks out against the physical space of the brothel and the streets where prostitutes ply their trade. She refuses to be bound by the conventions and clichés of the spaces that surround her.

Shakespeare and Gender will be a useful book for teachers. Each chapter ends with a rubric of enumerated conclusions, another rubric of questions and exercises for further work, and a short annotated list of further reading. The bibliographies at the end of each chapter, combined with the list of productions cited at the end of the book, indicate how thoroughly the authors mine the gendered approaches to the plays in recent years. Some of the well-chosen historical resources (excerpted in shaded boxes) include a ballad about hen-pecked husbands; Edward Jorden’s A Briefe Discourse of the Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) on female hysteria; Innocent Gentillet’s analysis of the king’s two bodies; John Norden’s Vicissitudo Rerum (1600) on the physiology of the four humors; Helkiah Crooke’s anatomy of the one-sex model; Philip Stubbes inveighing against cross-dressing in the theater; Rachel Speght and Aemilia Lanyer on the legacy of Adam and Eve; Queen Elizabeth exhorting her troops to defeat the Spanish Armada; and Thomas Bright on melancholy.

This instructive and insightful book would not have such admirable breadth of coverage were its authors not succinct. Key passages, quoted liberally, are followed by close-reading analysis that is sharp, quick, and concrete. The tropes and conventions of femininity and masculinity in Shakespeare’s works (and within their historical contexts), and the ways that Shakespeare himself and intersectional gender criticism disrupt these conventions, are unpacked with both objective analytical rigor and engaged intervention—establishing a strong foundation for potential future fifth-wave feminists and gender critics.