While Shakespeare did not create rebellious feminists in the modern sense of the term, nevertheless it is fascinating to see the variety of ways his heroines operate in, rebel against, attempt to rule, or are crushed by a hierarchical, male-oriented social structure.
Shakespeare's Unruly Women examines the ways in which the Victorian period interpreted Shakespeare's characters according to their own notions of what it meant to be a woman. It includes material from the late 18th and early 20th centuries but focuses primarily on the ways in which Shakespeare's heroines were appropriated into the moral, literary, and theatrical cultures of the 19th century. It looks at specific heroines, and at the turn-of-the-century psychoanalytic commentary occasioned by the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in 1916.

Shakespeare's Unruly Women

Arts & Photography

Dolan, Frances E.

Roberts, Jeanne Addison

Ziegler, Georgianna

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Folger Shakespeare Lib

Shakespeare's English Comedy: The Merry Wives in Context

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Univ of Nebraska Pr

Socrates is said to have thanked the gods that he was born neither barbarian nor female nor animal. His words conjure up the image of a human being, a Greek male, at the center of the universe, surrounded by "wild" and threatening forces. To the Western imagination the civilized standard has always been masculine, and taken for granted as so until recently. Shakespeare's works, for all their genius and astonishing empathy, are inevitably products of a culture that regards women, animals, and foreigners as peripheral and threatening to its chief interests. "We have been so hypnotized by the most powerful male voice in ourl anguage, interpreted for us by a long line of male critics and teachers, that we have seen nothing exceptionable in his patriarchal premises," writes Jeanne Addison Roberts.If the culture-induced hypnosis is wearing off, it is partly because of studies like The Shakespearean Wild. Plunging into a psychological jungle, Roberts examines the distinctions in various Shakespeare plays between wild nature and subduing civilization and shows how gender stereotypes are affixed to those distinctions. Taking her cue from Socrates, Roberts transports the reader to three kinds of "Wilds" that impinge on Shakespeare's literary world: the mysterious "female Wild, often associated with the malign and benign forces of [nature]; the animal Wild, which offers both reassurance of special human status and the threat of the loss of that status; and the barbarian Wild populated by marginal figures such as the Moor and the Jew as well as various hybrids."The Shakespearean Wild brims with mystery and menace, the exotic and erotic; with male and female archetypes, projections of suppressed fears and fantasies. The reader will see how the male vision of culture—exemplified in Shakespeare's work—has reduced, distorted, and oversimplified the potentiality of women.

The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender

Dramas & Plays

University Of Nebraska Press

Socrates is said to have thanked the gods that he was born neither barbarian nor female nor animal. His words conjure up the image of a human being, a Greek male, at the center of the universe, surrounded by "wild" and threatening forces. To the Western imagination the civilized standard has always been masculine, and taken for granted as so until recently. Shakespeare's works, for all their genius and astonishing empathy, are inevitably products of a culture that regards women, animals, and foreigners as peripheral and threatening to its chief interests. "We have been so hypnotized by the most powerful male voice in ourl anguage, interpreted for us by a long line of male critics and teachers, that we have seen nothing exceptionable in his patriarchal premises," writes Jeanne Addison Roberts.
If the culture-induced hypnosis is wearing off, it is partly because of studies like The Shakespearean Wild. Plunging into a psychological jungle, Roberts examines the distinctions in various Shakespeare plays between wild nature and subduing civilization and shows how gender stereotypes are affixed to those distinctions. Taking her cue from Socrates, Roberts transports the reader to three kinds of "Wilds" that impinge on Shakespeare's literary world: the mysterious "female Wild, often associated with the malign and benign forces of [nature]; the animal Wild, which offers both reassurance of special human status and the threat of the loss of that status; and the barbarian Wild populated by marginal figures such as the Moor and the Jew as well as various hybrids."
The Shakespearean Wild brims with mystery and menace, the exotic and erotic; with male and female archetypes, projections of suppressed fears and fantasies. The reader will see how the male vision of culture—exemplified in Shakespeare's work—has reduced, distorted, and oversimplified the potentiality of women.

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Books by Roberts, Jeanne Addison