Honour Killing in Shakespeare. By Loraine Fletcher

Abstract

As Loraine Fletcher admits, “Shakespeare Our Contemporary” arguments of the sort advanced by Jan Kott and numerous later critics can easily misfire, or else trivialize the plays they seek to rescue for modern eyes and minds (85). Yet, when it comes to the violent victimization of women through false accusations bred in the soil of misogyny, today’s world daily restages Elizabethan and Jacobean plot-lines—in metropolitan centers as much as in distant borderlands. Britain’s National Police Chiefs’ Council reports that, in 2020–2021, 120 women died in the UK alone as a result of domestic violence, more than two per week, with most aged between 25 and 54 years and “the most common cause of death being by a sharp instrument” (https://news.npcc.police.uk/releases/domestic-homicides-show-no-significant-increase-during-lockdown-says-new-police-report). In Honour Killing in Shakespeare, Fletcher blames the ingrained patterns of a patriarchal culture that fixed in minds, norms, and laws “an entrenched image of women as frivolous, stupid or weak, and therefore prone to infidelity” (189). Hence the persistence and recurrence of honor-killing itself—or else its threat and thwarted preparation—by outraged lovers, spouses, or parents in Shakespeare’s plays, from Titus Andronicus to All is True (Henry VIII). Like many critics, Fletcher places the plays’ author decisively on the side of empathy and enlightenment. Shakespeare makes us “spectators at a judgement” where “misogyny itself” is on trial (310). In every case that matters, “we know the woman is wrongly accused” (19) of fornication or adultery. The playwright consistently “rejects the narrative of female weakness and deceit” (328). He forces his audience to “confront the madness” that spurs deluded angry men to destroy innocent but “embattled women” (328). A dedicated debunker of the “Eve stereotype,” Shakespeare presents his female characters as “candid and loyal”—with some “notable exceptions” (211). Even so, no one can accuse Lady Macbeth of failing to support her spouse.