Drd. Mitroi Ramona
Powerful Women in Shakespeare’s World: Renaissance Feminism
(Femei puternice în lumea lui Shakespeare: feminism renascentist)
SUMMARY
Shakespeare’s plays have always appealed to women. Many believed that Shakespeare had
an uncanny ability to enter into women’s minds and hearts and to express their deepest
feelings. In the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish declared, “one would think that he
had been metamorphosed from a man to a woman”. Three century later, Carolyn Heilbrun
suggested that Shakespeare” because the greatest of artists, was the most androgynous of
men”. Women have often identified with Shakespeare’s female characters and with their
predicaments. Many of those characters seemed to offer encouraging role models many of
their stories seemed to imply protests against women’s oppression.
The history of women’s struggle for equality during the last two centuries is relatively well
documented; studies of women’s history often construct a meliorate narrative in which the
progress women have made in recent times represents the final stage in a long upward
trajectory. Women’s power and authority extended beyond the limits of their families. The
example of the Tudor queens Mary and Elizabeth is well known, and the ‘anomaly’ of
Elizabeth’s position has been endlessly noted; but they were not the only women who
exercised political authority.
Generations of women have found a source of their own empowerment in the power of
Shakespeare’s writing and in the cultural authority it carried. In the recent years, as we have
seen, the validity of these enthusiastic responses has been called into question by arguments
that mobilize the authority of history to insist that the original productions of Shakespeare’s
plays-written by a male author to be performed by an exclusively male company of playersexpressed an overwhelmingly masculine point of view. The most compelling of these
arguments rest on the fact that the presence of a male body beneath the costume of a female
character was never far from the awareness of Shakespeare’s original audiences.
In England, it was in the sphere of the drama that the Renaissance arts attained undisputed
supremacy. After the drama of the University Wits and first and foremost after Christopher
Marlow’s tragedies, it was for William Shakespeare to raise the level of dramatic art to
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heights unknown since ancient times, to make the English drama world famous throughout
the coming centuries, for Shakespeare’s plays have survived with peerless prestige to the
present day period. William Shakespeare’s dramatic works have ceased being the exclusive
pride of English literature. Through its greatness, its vitality and realism, through its
permanent human value and the excellence of its poetic expression, the Shakespearian drama
belongs to the treasure-house of word literature.
In proof of this assertion stand the translations of Shakespeare’s plays into al modern
languages, their repeated production on the best world stages, and their enduring success with
every new generation. Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies belong to the stock-repertory of
all great national theatres. Besides, Shakespeare’s drama as a whole exerted a most beneficial
influence on the growth of the drama in all European countries. Critics, playwrights of world
renown welcomed the translation of Shakespeare’s plays and their production on the national
stages of their countries. With insight and consideration, ranging from mere approval, critics
and literary historians have approached Shakespeare’s work, have attempted to throw light on
the innermost recesses of the Shakespearian creation and have set it as a model for their
national drama. It is worth noticing that William Shakespeare, the greatest dramatic genius of
the word, lived and wrote in the period prior to the capitalist epoch and the bourgeoisie
becoming the ruling class, namely before the Bourgeois Revolution in England, 1649.
Shakespeare was considered an example of the circumstance that the progress and flourishing
of arts are not dependent on the general advance of society.
*****
This thesis was thought as having a multidimensional approach. Besides dealing with framing
William Shakespeare in the great picture of Renaissance, though his universality is beyond
geographical limits, I have also thought of an interdisciplinary approach, trying to establish
a connection between the Age of Shakespeare in the Elizabethan world and the influence he
have projected on the following centuries until nowadays.
The present project emphasizes the increasing interaction between the concepts of class,
culture gender and cross gender, as seen in selected Shakespearian plays. All these aspects
have the role of placing Shakespeare in the much wider context of comparative literature,
including its reception into Romanian culture, through Mihai Eminescu’s eyes. In this regard,
the paper was concentrated upon three main directions of study, which are complementary:
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
The cultural dimension focuses on the characteristics of the English history, culture
and society during the Renaissance in the context of time. Another aspect is the
reception of Shakespeare’s works in Romanian culture and in the world, by analysing
the influence Shakespeare had over the centuries.

The linguistic approach presents the importance of the translations of Shakespeare
plays into other languages, pointing out the dynamic that produces the literary and
theatrical changes, and their impact on the audience of the last decades.

The performance component deals with the adaptations of some Shakespeare’s plays
by internationally playwright and directors, both theatrical and for the big screen.
By using the tools of a comparative and multicultural approach to literature, we have defined
the basic notions of the Renaissance ideology and Humanism, establishing the connection
with other representative writers of the Renaissance. We identified Shakespeare’s position
along the timeline of literature, and determined the basic notions of Shakespearian criticism,
emphasizing the impact of his works and the importance of his translations in other languages.
Moreover, we have adapted the concepts of identity, class, culture and gender as features of
the multicultural approach to Shakespeare’s work in order to identify the misogynist elements,
and the dimensions of the numerous adaptations of Shakespeare by dramatists and stage
directors.
Considering the complexity of the topic, and the three main complementary approaches, the
cultural, linguistic and performance direction, my paper is limited by certain restrictions that
must be applied. In this respect, it could not be covered the whole spectrum and complexity
of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, being mostly emphasized aspects of race, and gender
during Elizabeth’s reign, even if Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, or Macbeth were written and
staged during the reign of James I.
The structure of my thesis developed itself during the process of elaboration. SECTION I:
Thinking on Shakespeare, contains the theoretical considerations necessary for the critical
discourse, followed by other three sections subdivided into chapters. SECTION II:
Renaissance in England, explores the way in which Renaissance and Humanism developed
over the time, emphasizing the scholars who had an impact during the period up to the
beginning of Humanism and of the Renaissance, defining their specific characteristics.
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SECTION III: Historical Fact and Feminist Interpretation, reveals that women had
prominent roles, and as well as the men, were in some measure the authors of their own
theatrical selves, though the most recent feminist literary scholarship includes reminders that
the period was fraught with anxiety about rebellious women, particularly through language.
Medieval and Renaissance women also wrote scripts for many plays ranging from liturgical
drama to aristocratic and royal entertainments. SECTION IV: Powerful Women in
Shakespeare’s World, reveals that despite the ample evidence of a history of women’s
oppression, in Shakespeare’s world, women’s power and authority extended beyond the
limits of their families. The analytical dimension of my thesis covers the direction of my
research. The interdisciplinary study covers three types of methodological accuracy: the intradisciplinarity, meaning the analysis and research within disciplines in the humanities, the
multi-disciplinarity, analysis and research by one scholar within other discipline, and pluridisciplinarity, organised by team from several disciplines. Thus we can explain the recourse
to Renaissance sociology and race and gender studies. The CONCLUSIONS round up the
analysis and the bibliography lists the different editions of Shakespeare’s plays resorted to as
primary sources, while the secondary sources, alphabetically ordered mention the critical
studies used. The Bibliography mentions some of the editions of Shakespeare’s work resorted
to as primary sources, and the secondary resources points out the critical studies used.
In SECTION I: Thinking on Shakespeare, we explored the need for culture, the importance of
finding the inner necessity for beauty. But beauty is seen as relative, as a product of history
reproduced by education, and in order to observe an object of art, to see its beauty you need
to possess a cultural background. Pater considers the Renaissance as the outbreak of the
human spirit, a cultural ideological movement. The flowering of poetry in the 14th century
England, witnessed a decline in the 15th century when poets seemed they were not able to
reach the greatness of the founder of English poetry: Geoffrey Chaucer. During the 16 th
century, English poetry benefited a great deal by the humanistic literature of Italy.
Shakespeare’s dramatic work reflected the social and political events of the age of English
Renaissance. Shakespearian drama mirrored the greatness and the weakness, also the
conflicts and the contradictions off that time. He was influenced in his writing of the
traditions of classical and medieval literature, or legends handed down by words or told by
widely read popular books.
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We also deal with the famous “question of authorship”, with the scarcity of biographical data
concerning Shakespeare, which added to the fact that Shakespeare sprang from the common
country people and lacked higher education led to the so-called “Shakespeare Controversy”.
Shakespeare’s plays have been attributed to various noted men of the period in which
Shakespeare lived. As it has been amply proved by experts, all these theories are wholly
ungrounded and spring from the mere thirst after sensational discoveries, from the desire to
drag down a great poet and dramatist of genius from his pedestal. In view of the chronology
of the plays and taking into account the changes in Shakespeare’s outlook on life as it might
be inferred to some extent from his work, as well as the progress of his style, Shakespearian
criticism is also made bearing in mind the changes that occurred in the social and political
conditions under Queen Elizabeth and her successor James Stuart I.
Shakespeare’s poems are less prized than his dramatic works, though they should not be,
because they reveal glowing love pictures that furnish a number of fresh pictures of natural
scenery with plenty of suggestive details. They were written in stanza form and testify the
poet’s mastery of words. Essays and books have been written on love and yet, few have
managed better to epitomize the essence of devoted love than Shakespeare did in brief but
highly suggestive images, the elusive, the abstract take shape and become a well-defined
reality thanks to Shakespeare’s metaphors. There are certain dominant images in
Shakespeare’s sonnets, some are related to the arts, to music, painting or to sculpture. They
hint at the poet’s sensitiveness regarding arts, as well as at the high esteem in which arts were
held during the Renaissance.
SECTION TWO: Renaissance in England, presents the reality of that time from economic,
social, historical and political point of view. Shakespeare faced life realistically, and in some
of his plays he mirrored the darker sides of life, especially in his historical plays. Shakespeare
reveals the darker sides of the current reality – loathsome figures of kings, blood thirsty
usurpers, men led by their immoderate ambition, vain feudal lords ready to cause ruin of their
country in order to satisfy boundless ambition. Besides the typical features recorded by
history, Shakespeare’s historical characters are also endowed with traits peculiar to his own
contemporaries. By depicting events of the historical past, Shakespeare obviously alludes to
the circumstances of his day. That is why the chronicles should be understood in close
connection with his own time. Shakespeare’s treatment of the historical themes is by no
means accidental, as it is a treatment peculiar to a playwright who produced his plays in the
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period in which the bourgeois English nation and the bourgeois national culture of England
were being established. These circumstances account for Shakespeare’s taking an interest in
his country’s history and endeavours to render it in artistic images. He sought for inspiration
in Holinshed’s chronicle, in the legends handed down in earlier dramas. The historical events
recorded in the chronicles refer to 14th and the 15t century. In Shakespeare’s plays, these
events unfold against the social background of Shakespeare’s own time, the chronicle of the
English kings is joined to a vast motley picture of the lower classes to which belong the other
characters in the historical dramas. In transfiguring the chronicles, Shakespeare also lent them
a modern cast so that their message suits the conception of the rising social class, the
bourgeoisie.
SECTION THREE: Historical Fact and Feminist Interpretation, gives a realistic picture of
the life of middle classes and of the middle class environment. Shakespeare drew abundantly
from the memories he had treasured up in his youth at Stratford. His excellent scenes from
the citizens’ everyday life in a small province, the portraits of the citizens and their wives
unmistakably prove Shakespeare’s familiarity with the life and the people he brought on the
stage. His farcical comedies effects are obtained by means of grotesque situations and coarse
speech suiting the sense of humour of the late 16th century audience in England. Falstaff, the
most popular of Shakespeare’s comic characters, was restored again to life, thanks to Queen
Elizabeth who loved it in Henry IV so much that she desired to see Falstaff in love in another
play. At her command, within a fortnight, Shakespeare wrote another play with Falstaff as
leading character. The outcome was The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Falstaff is the
comic victim of his infatuation for Mrs. Ford, a bourgeois citizen’s wife. This circumstance
leads to highly farcical situations in which Falstaff is always duped. After having been made
a laughing-stock and exposed by Ford and Page, Falstaff is finally forgiven. He is the most
ludicrous of all the characters in the farce, is not only the parasitic knight, the coward and the
drunkard delineated in Henry IV, but also the elderly man ludicrously infatuated with passion
for Mrs. Ford. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor is the only one to
treat so exclusively of English county society. It is a true and telling picture of that society in
Shakespeare’s days. The fact that Shakespeare wrote down The Merry Wives of Windsor in a
hurry greatly accounts for the comedy being almost entirely written in prose. There is hardly
any poetry at all in this comedy meant to amuse and satirize the middle classes and their way
of life. The comedy enables us to catch a glimpse of the citizens’ way of life in a small
township. We learn how a well-to-do wife spent her time: running her home, seeing to her
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laundry, chatting with her neighbours. Thus we learn about the citizens’ fondness of pastimes
such as hunting venison, and merry-making in the woods, and about their disapproval of
fortune-tellers and witches.
Remembering that there is no humanity abstracted from concrete historical situations, that
man is always a particular man, the product of a definite stage in the development of human
society, Shakespeare’s positive man cherishes the highest and fullest aspirations that could
possibly been achieved in the definite situations of England at the turn of the 17th century.
This conclusion does not belittle Shakespeare, it only proves that Shakespeare’s conception
of man, advanced and noble as it was, had also inherent limitations of his historical period.
The past is brought nearer to our own day. With Shakespeare the past is not a picturesque
pageant seen from without, but a present sounded from within until its very essence. Thus,
the past becomes reality, in point of psychology. Shakespeare had the rare gift of endowing
his characters with life, whether historical figures or imaginary ones, with the attributes of
living men. All critics have agreed on the point that Shakespeare had a supreme gift of
distinguishing characters or instilling life into them and make them think, feel and act with
the same diversity that is found in the real life among real men.
For example, the contrast between imperial Caesar and republican Brutus is made prominent
by means of the contrast between their respective wives as relevant in two parallel scenes.
Each has chosen the wife that suits his own character. As the Renaissance women, Portia and
Calpurnia are deeply concerned for their husband’s safety, both kneel to urge their point upon
their respective husbands. Both Brutus and Caesar agree to their wives requests. Yet within
this apparent similarity, there are essential differences. Portia is dignified and considers
herself as Brutus’s equal, she trusts her husband and claims her right to share her husband’s
cares and responsibilities. Brutus cannot accept his wife’s kneeling, for he thinks highly of
his wife. In the end Brutus agrees to Portia’s request; his words sound like an apology for his
having waited to be asked to confide in his wife. Calpurnia, on the other hand is a submissive,
weak woman, she tries to prevail upon her husband by flattering him, she goes on her knees
beseeching Caesar not to go out that day. He breaks his promise unhesitatingly for fear of
being ridiculed by the senators.
Section IV: Powerful Women in Shakespeare’s World, reveals that despite the ample
evidence of a history of women’s oppression, in Shakespeare’s world, women’s power and
authority extended beyond the limits of their families.
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Women possessed considerable economic power, not only through inheritance from fathers
and husbands, but also by virtue of their own gainful employment. Women lower on the
social scale earned their livings, not only as servants, but also in a variety of trades that took
them outside the household. In Shakespeare’s world, inequalities between men and women
were taken for granted. Sanctioned by law and religion and reinforced by the duties and
customs of daily life, they were deeply embedded in the fabric of culture. However, the
gender hierarchy in Shakespeare’s time coexisted with a hierarchy of status and rank, which
was also rationalized by theology, and by history as well.
Sanctioned by law and religion and reinforced by the duties and customs of daily life, they
were deeply embedded in the fabric of culture. However, the gender hierarchy in
Shakespeare’s time coexisted with a hierarchy of status and rank, which was also rationalized
by theology, and by history as well. Already legendary when Shakespeare produced his
version of her story, the powerfully ambivalent Cleopatra he had staged drew on a variety of
sources. These included the Roman writers who had defined her as Eastern, barbarian, “harlot
queen” and the fifteenth and sixteenth century predecessors who had identified her with
threatening power of women’s insatiable appetite as well as the antitheatrical polemicists
who had insisted on the deceptiveness and corruption of Shakespeare’s own theatrical
medium. The combination of erotic power and political authority that had made Cleopatra
such a troubling figure to Romans and humanists alike might also have struck a responsive
chord in Shakespeare’s original audiences: they had, until very recently, lived under the sway
of their own powerful queen. For twentieth-century American filmgoers, by contrast,
Cleopatra had to be reduced to a fetishized female body, adorned in spectacular costumes for
the pleasure of male spectators and the emulation of other women. Her motivation is clear
and simple: to pleasure her man. In the 1963 Joseph Mankiewicz production, for instance,
Cleopatra’s suicide is no longer staged as a demonstration of her royalty. Instead of ordering
her women to show her like a queen, Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra says she wants to be seen
by Antony, as he first saw her. Katherine Eggert observes, the film “domesticates Cleopatra
into a spectacular mannequin” who intends to give pleasure only to her man.
As Georgianna Ziegler pointed out, Shakespeare’s female characters were imagined to
conform to Victorian ideals of female behaviour. She notes that even Lady Macbeth was
redeemed as a good, Victorian wife, a woman whose “ambition was all for her husband”. If,
as Ziegler argues, “Lady Macbeth, with her aggressiveness and murderous instincts turned to
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madness, was one of the most difficult of Shakespeare’s heroines for the nineteenth century
to appropriate”, she has proved remarkably adaptable to twentieth-century understandings of
feminine psychology. Mary McCarthy, wrote in the 1960s, Lady Macbeth was clearly
recognizable in temporary terms as: “a woman and has unsexed her, which makes her a
monster by definition... the very prospect of murder quickens an hysterical excitement in her,
like the discovery of some object in a shop – a set of emeralds or a sable stole – in which
Macbeth can give her and which will be outlet for all the repressed desires he cannot satisfy.
She behaves as though Macbeth, through his weakness, will deprive her of self-realization;
the unimpeded exercise of her will is the voluptuous end she seeks”. McCarthy’s references
to “hysteria”, repressed and unsatisfied desires that are clearly sexual, and a lust for the
glittering objects of conspicuous consumption mark her diatribe as a mid-twentieth-century
period piece; but it, no less than the Victorian apologia cited by Ziegler, measures the
character against modern norms of wifely behaviour. “Her wifely concern”, McCarthy
charges, is “mechanical and far from real solicitude”. She regards her “as a thing, a tool that
must be oiled and polished”.
Despite the three centuries that separated Dryden’s Cleopatra from the Victorians’ and Mary
McCarthy’s Lady Macbeth, and despite the manifold differences between the roles of the two
characters and the play worlds in which Shakespeare set them, all were judged by reference
to the paradigmatic modern embodiment of female virtue, the good wife. Dryden’s Cleopatra
may have engaged in an illicit alliance with Antony, but, like all good women- she was
designed by nature for marriage and domesticity as “a wife, silly, harmless household dove”.
The Victorian’s Lady Macbeth may have been guilty of regicide, but, like all good women,
she was motivated by ambition of her husband’s advancement. Mary McCarthy’s Lady
Macbeth was monstrously unwomanly because she was ambitious only for herself.
The female characters we encounter in Shakespeare’s plays are not the same ones that
appeared in the original productions. In the theatre, we rarely see them portrayed by male
actors, but even in reading the women we imagine represent the end product of over four
hundred years of modernization to redefine their roles in terms of new conceptions of
women’s nature and women’s roles in the world. Not all of Shakespeare’s women have
changed to the same degree: in some cases they have been easily recruited to serve as role
models- both positive and negative – for women born hundreds of years after their original
creation.
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In other cases, they have required more updating because the fit between the roles they
originally had and the roles post Shakespearian readers and revisers have imagined for them
is less than seamless. An examination of the roles that have been most drastically reshaped
both in theatrical production and in readers ‘comments can tell us a great deal about the
history of women’s roles in the disparate worlds in which the plays have been performed and
read. Paradoxically, however, this implication of Shakespeare’s female characters in the
process of historical change has tended to occlude their own historicity, as they served, and
continue to serve, in ever-changing guises as models of an unchanging, universal female
nature.
It is also important to recognize that this process of updating Shakespeare’s female characters
and the consequent occlusion of their historical difference did not begin with postShakespearian revisers. Shakespeare himself often updated the women he found in his
historical sources to shape their roles in forms that made them recognizable in term of his
own contemporaries’ expectations about women’s behaviour and motivation. These changes
offer a revealing glimpse of the contested and changing gender ideology that shaped
Shakespeare’s original audiences’ conceptions of women’s proper roles, not only in the plays
they went to see but also in the lives they lived.
Probably the most obvious manifestation of the way the updating of Shakespeare’s female
characters both bespeaks and obscures their historical location can be seen in theatrical
costume. Illustrations of eighteenth and nineteenth and even early twentieth-century
productions of the plays almost always look outdated. In their own time, the costumes and
sets these illustrations depict were undoubtedly designed to provide the most appropriate
possible realizations of the characters Shakespeare created, but in ours they look like quaint
period pieces, and the period to which they belong is not that in which the plays were
originally set or produced but that of their own production. Clearly what it shows us is not the
way the characters were originally conceived but the ways they were imagined in times and
places that are now unmistakably marked as distant, both from our world and from that of
Shakespeare.
Illustrations of recent productions, by contrast, tend to obscure their own historicity, coming
to us either as “authentic” recreations of the plays’ original productions or their historical
settings, or else as manifestations of the timeless contemporary of Shakespeare’s
representations of universal human experience.
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Mountains of evidence have been adduced in support of both accounts of Elizabeth’s reign –
the older and more popular emphasis of her remarkable success as a monarch and the recent
scholarly emphasis upon the disabilities produced by her gender that haunted her entire reign.
Evidence about the ordinary women Shakespeare would have known as a boy in Stratford –
upon-Avon is harder to come by; but in this case as well, alternative descriptions can be
constructed. Scholarly accounts of Shakespeare’s youth and family focus on men, such as his
father and schoolmaster, partly because of the greater visibility of men in surviving records,
and probably also because of the modern scholars’ own greater interest in their activities.
The Conclusions, emphasize the idea that like all humanists, Shakespeare placed man and
human society, man’s lofty aspirations regarding his social and moral existence in the very
centre of his drama. It would be wrong to claim Shakespeare’s realism as a mere faithful
reflection of events and delineation of certain historical personages. This paper tried to follow
the growth of Shakespeare’s genius, both as a poet and a dramatist, to analyse his trend of
thought and his mood as far as can be interfered from his plays, and to point out some
prominent traits of Shakespeare’s artistry in the respective works. The Shakespearian drama
mirrored the life of Shakespeare’s age, meaning the life of Renaissance England, its greatness,
its conflicts and contradictions.
In the early years of seventeenth century, as in the previous half century, a new society in
which women could demonstrate the value of qualities considered to be feminine:
compassion, temperance, charity, continued to be imagined in the context of ideas promoting
the kinds of social change that would enhance the status of women. The foundation on which
Renaissance feminism came to be constructed was inherently fragile, largely because the
theory used to advance arguments for women’s rights were philosophical and literary.
Changes in property law, models of production and control of trade affected the status of
women directly and critically, but they were rarely the subjects of feminist protest. The most
popular vehicles for feminist debate in the previous century had been such ostensibly
misogynist satires. Literature attacking the abuses of patriarchy did not consider the chief
impediment to women’s welfare in the kind of detail that would have made reform likely.
Whatever the jurisdiction, married women in particular suffered. They owned little in their
own right and of these limited portions controlled against nothing. The notion of shared
gender, the valorisation of the feminine, the presumption of an equality of some sort within
marriage and throughout society were ideas that helped to focus upon and to undermine
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certain of the assumption of patriarchy. But they did little to encourage an analysis of the
factors that contributed to the actual conditions in which women lived a return to a
consideration of the ideology of patriarchy – the pervasive, uncritical, an apparently often
unconscious acceptance of the inferiority of women – provided at least one feminist with a
chance to take note that her project had practically failed. By the turn of the century there was
a considerable London market for polemic on the woman question.
If materialist feminism treats experience as the location of cultural meanings and if it regards
meaning as a material practice, it necessarily acknowledges the importance of literary
criticism in the production of feminist analysis and feminist cultural history. Fiction is a
crucial site of cultural meaning in its political and historical difference. If the meaning of
woman is an unchanging and universal essence but a cultural construct, feminism moves and
alters with and between cultures. Most of the societies we know about have been decisively
patriarchal and in consequence woman has been the difference that specifies the limitations
of man.
Shakespeare’s culture is no exception and Shakespeare’s plays reveal with great subtlety the
shifts that language is put to in defence of a Renaissance masculinity which so engrosses
meaning to itself that it constantly risks of exclusions of its defining other. In Macbeth a man
is at various moments daring, not a coward, humane and not a regicide; he is human, a part of
nature, properly daunted by the supernatural; he is violent, and also capable of human feeling,
tears. The definitions and redefinitions lay claim to include nearly all human kindness in their
scope, so that only a tiny, domestic corner is left for the proper acceptable meaning of woman.
Woman means mother and Lady Macbeth playing innocently with her son, engaging and
vulnerable, and only marginally less naive than the child she is unable to protect. It means
breasts and milk and giving suck. All of them inevitably and hideously repudiated by a
woman who wants to intervene in the pubic world of history. And the play lays bare the
tragic consequences of this system of differences in the figure of Lady Macbeth unsexed and
driven mad, in Macbeth manly and ultimately despairing, and finally in Macduff fulfilling the
requirements of his manhood, by ominously reiterating Macbeth’s own initial display of
masculinity as he too presents the state with the severed head of a traitor.
Macbeth charts the disintegration of a culture which is haunted by images off women who
will not stay in place: women with bears, in possession of forbidden knowledge, who vanish
into air, and who refuse to confine themselves to the single, narrow meaning that difference
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allots to hem at a specific cultural and historical moment. It displays a world where no earthly
power can hold he meaning of woman in its patriarchally legitimated place, where the
signified breaks free of its moorings and shows itself unfixed, differed by a signified which
cannot master it. The play magnificently demonstrates the instabilities of a patriarchy which
confines woman to motherhood and promises to man everything else that it means to be
human.
Since culture is a material practice and literary criticism is itself a component part of culture,
then feminist criticism is a cultural phenomenon. It cannot be defined in advance in its
essential nature eternally and universally, sought out in earlier epochs and recognized in its
unchanging correctness. Feminist criticism takes a position at and in relation to a specific
cultural and historical moment. And in that sense it is necessarily a product of its own present.
At the same time, it is also an invention in the power relations which prevail at that present,
and in that sense feminist criticism is inevitably political.
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