Shakespeare’s Feminist Critics

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The tragedy of too many college courses on William Shakespeare these days is that students may be learning more about literary criticism than the Bard himself. “The fact is, even if you sign up for a course with ‘Shakespeare’ or ‘Faulkner’ in the title, there’s absolutely no guarantee that you’re going to be taught English or American literature,” argued Dr. Elizabeth Kantor in her 2006 Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature.

“On the contrary, the professor is all too likely to make use of the literature to indoctrinate you in some ideology that’s worse than irrelevant—that’s positively hostile—to the literature you’re ostensibly studying…The professor’s own politics…will be the real content of the course.”

Thus, the irony did not escape this correspondent when a sick female professor requested that her male colleague read her essay on Shakespeare’s misogyny in her stead at the most recent Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention.

“I’m too old to be a boy actor, but you’ll have to imagine this as a kind of transvestite performance,” joked Professor Gary Taylor, standing in for his colleague, Professor Celia Daileader. Both teach in the English Department at Florida State University (FSU). Professor Taylor continued, reading her paper,

“In this paper I [Daileader] hope to shed new light on the debate about Shakespeare’s gendered politics by contrasting his work with that of his sometimes collaborators John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton. I will proceed by way of something we might call a ‘feminist boxing match,’ a sort of million-dollar-baby meets Shakespeare in love. Or, if you prefer a less pugnacious metaphor, we may call it a feminist face test in which we will be tempted away from bardolatry and treated all in the way to some very lyrical praise of women.”

Professor Daileader’s paper compared Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado about Nothing, and Antony and Cleopatra with The Tamer Tamed by Fletcher and Middleton’s The Roaring Girls and A Lady’s Tragedy.

Taylor quoted Daileader’s intention to “simply outline important points of contrast between Fletcher’s play and Shakespeare’s;” She provided the following comparison.

The Taming of the Shrew	The Tamer Tamed
“Husband tames wife.”	“Wife tames husband.”
“Wife deprived of food, sleep, clothing, sex.”	“Husband deprived of sex. Women feast and drink.”
“Wife isolated, women pitted against women.”	“Female solidarity triumphs.”
“Women wager on female behavior.”	“Men wager on male behavior.”
“Wife kneels to husband.”	“Husband fakes death and is ‘raised’ by wife.”
“Final speech promotes male supremacy.”	“Epilogue advocates due equality.”

“This is almost too easy,” Daileader’s article argued. “You may object precisely on these grounds…However, the fact remains that theatre audiences care about plot.”

In her book, Kantor reflected on why theoretical interpretations of Shakespeare may damage students’ learning: “At least, if you’ve never read Shakespeare you can always read him later. But if you’ve taken a ‘theory’-driven Shakespeare course, you’ve been given a kind of anti-Shakespeare vaccination.”

She continued, “You already know that the plays are full of racist and patriarchal structures—that’s what you’ve been taught to look for when you read. You’ll never take Shakespeare seriously as a source of insights into human nature, or the meaning of love.”

Such students may be receiving the short end of the deal. According to one anonymous poster on ratemyprofessors.com, “[Daileader] has you read a play a week, which wouldnt [sic] be so bad if we were discussing the actual plays in their entirety instead of highlighting a few passages that display how Shakespeare hated women.”

“In this case, don’t take Daileader if all you know of gender theory is that sex and gender are not synonymous,” comments another poster. “Lively debates, biting sense of humor.”

Much Ado About Nothing

“For Shakespeare’s defense, it could be said that he himself revised Shrew when he wrote Much Ado About Nothing,” argued Daileader in absentia. “This comedy…presents an outspoken female character, Beatrice, but tames her only through love when she falls for a man witty enough to be her match. But for all Beatrice’s spunk the best she can do in a crisis is cry ‘Oh, God that I were a man!’ and urge her sweetheart to draw his sword on her behalf.”

Full disclosure: Much Ado About Nothing is this correspondent’s favorite play. And Daileader’s analysis is rather one-sided.

If “plot” is what audiences care about, as she asserts, then it is important to remember that not just Beatrice, but also the male Benedick, is tricked into falling in love—and both are merrily, and equally, ridiculed by their friends.

The central messages of the play revolve around pride, not unlike Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Claudio, fooled into believing that Hero is no long a virgin, spurns her, is told of her death, and does not relent in his righteous pride until the pain of her loss overcomes him. (Hero’s father, Leonato, offers Claudio the opportunity to marry his “niece,” and after Claudio marries the veiled woman before him, he finds that it is actually Hero).

As for Beatrice and Benedick: they do not fall in love until they “overhear” deliberately placed comments by others that lead them to believe they are wildly in love with each other. Shakespeare thereby demonstrates how unsubstantiated claims of unrequited love, passed through the “innocent” medium of eavesdropping, can trick the most proud of minds into falling in love. But don’t trust me, watch for yourself….