Fathering Herself: A Source Study of Shakespeare's Feminism

Abstract

THE COLLABORATION OF CRITICAL METHODS suggested by title of this essay might appear a rather unlikely, even forced, proposition. Source study and are a strange pair: first is largely interested in finding in Shakespeare verbal echoes of earlier texts, second committed to discovering in Shakespeare a foreshadowing of particular political identities. Certainly, in considering feminism (a debatable, and surely anachronistic, construction), prospect of looking to Shakespeare's sources for origins of any political understanding of the woman's part seems to offer little promise; behind critical assertion that finds Shakespeare's portrayals of women remarkable lies unarticulated suspicion of rare if not unprecedented quality of his cultural voice. In other words, assumption of Shakespeare's uniqueness presupposes a differentiating context, and it is in relationship to conception of source as cultural context that I would like to consider Shakespeare. Traditionally relationship between Shakespeare and his literary sources, which source study examines, has been imagined as linear and determinative, an empirical matter of subtractions and additions, in which Shakespeare finds and rejects or accepts details of plot structure, character, or style. I would like to re-imagine this relationship less as a transference of formal ingredients, with sources as sites of mere borrowings, than as a culturally determined reading by Shakespeare of contexts that he found provocative-or not provocative enough. Curiously it is this sense of a source as merely a site of borrowing that feminist criticism has unwittingly adopted in its effort to stake some ideologically consistent claim to Shakespeare. Until recently, feminist criticism of Shakespeare divided itself-and Shakespeare-into two seemingly incompatible ideological camps. Pioneering feminist forays into Shakespeare's canon, while seeking to compensate for bias in a critical tradition that has tended to emphasize male characters, male themes, and male fantasies as well as to develop a uniquely feminist criticism capable of searching out the woman's part, discovered in Shakespeare an apparent commitment to portrayal of liberated female characters, strong in voice and action. Shakespeare here be-