Shakespeare
Phyllis Rackin profile
T 3-6
Shakespeare and Women: Twentieth-century feminist criticism has run the full gamut in its estimates of Shakespeare's female characters--celebrated at one extreme as the visionary creations of a protofeminist genius, deplored at the other as the repressive fantasies of a "patriarchal Bard." The focus of this course will be an issue implicit in many of these debates-- the relationship between Shakespeare's fictional portraits of female characters and the lives of real women, both in his world and in ours. For although Shakespeare's female characters were dramatic fictions, produced by a male playwright for performance by male actors, they still appealed to the tastes of female playgoers in his own time, and they have played important roles ever since in shaping our understandings of women's roles in life. The course will be divided into three sections: (1) an examination of the actual women Shakespere would have known--the women in his family and the women he would have encountered on the London streets, at court, and among the audiences in his playhouse. (2) A study of representative female characters in Shakespeare's plays, who, although they cannot be seen as simple, mimetic reproductions of the actual women in Shakespeare's world, are best understood in historical context because their roles were shaped by the conventions of dramatic genres, by the material conditions of Shakespeare's theater, and by the tastes of a heterogeneous but increasingly sophisticated audience. (3) An examination of the afterlife of Shakespeare's female characters, focusing on the ways they have participated in subsequent history, not only changing in response to changing cultural imperatives but also helping to shape changing conceptions of what it means to act like a woman. Course requirements: a review article on recent criticism and scholarship and a substantial paper (along with a class presentation) on a play or topic relevant to one of the three subjects listed above.
updated 2006-10-18
