Mothers, Broken Nuptials, and Man's Estate

Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies ofMaternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (Routledge, 1992). Mothers are either conspicuously absent from Shakespeare's plays or appear in problematic relation to the protagonist sonsin plays like Hamlet and Coriolanus. Taking us back to Renaissance theories of conception, child-rearing, and gender, Adelman at how Shakespeare's works reflect anxieties about maternal pewer and fears of its femninizing effects.

Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (University of California Press, 1981). A study of the psychological and social dimensions of Shakespearean manhood and the difficulties faced by Shakespeare's male characters in achieving masculine identity within the demands of a patriarchal world.

Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of theElizabethan Theatre (University of Chicago Press, 1996). Montrose lakes issue with new historicist critics who see Shakespeare's plays as reinforcing the absolutist, order-driven ideotagy of Tudor rule. His book includes an especially valuable essay on the Elizabethan gender system.

Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (Yale University Press, 1985). Chronologically reading plays like Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well thatEnds well, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Winter's Take, Neely relates Shakespeare's recurrent dramatization of broken nuptials to society's contradictory attitudes toward the complicated blend of power and subordination that characterized the status of women.

Karen Newman, Fashioning Femminity and English Renaissance Drama (University of Chicago Press, 1991). New man examines late sixteenth-century representations of women.

Gail Kern Paster. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Discipiines of Shame in EarlyModern England (Cornell University Press, 1993). This book examines how Renaissance men and women understood and experienced their bodies.

Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker, editors, Women, Crime, and the Courts in Modern England (University of North Carolina "Press, 1990. These essays on the relationship between the law and women's lives are invaluable in helping a ern reader understand the particular legal predicament of the women depicted in plays like Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well, A Winter's Tale, and Othello. Through extensive quotation of women's testimonies from court documents, the book gives rare access to the voices of middle-and lower-class women of Shakespeare's time.

Boose and Pip