Ewelina
Topolska
Dr Vicente
Fores
Shakespeare
in performance
17th
December 2008
Women
within patriarchal discourse: “ The taming of the Shrew” and “Much
“ National bard” or simply “the Bard”:
these are honourable titles employed with reference to Shakespeare in a
multitude of articles, books and lectures delivered annually all around the world. Especially the
second name calls attention as implying universality of recognition of
Shakespeare’s grandiosity by all humankind, or at least by all its occidental
part. Still, this supposition might not necessarily be altogether true.
Among those who challenge Shakespeare’s
position as “the Bard” we find many feminist critics. Feminism, in its effort
to re-define the position of women[1]
and re-construct the reality resorts to questioning the traditionally respected
structures, one of them being the literary canon, or even further, the very
notion of canonicity. William Shakespeare, as one of the most prominent icons
of occidental culture, could not have escaped this relatively fresh, female-
centred type of analysis. As a result, his position of a universally
acknowledged authority has been destabilised, and some critics, like Kathleen
McLuskie ( 1985), fought to limit the sphere of Shakespeare’s representative
capacity of all humankind by renaming him as “The Patriarchal Bard”. This
essay’s aim is to investigate to what extent McLuskie’s label is applicable to
two of Shakespeare’s comedies: one relatively early, The
Taming of the Shrew ( 1593) and one included in the group of late comedies Much Ado About Nothing ( 1599)[2].
The very title of the first play deserves
a closer look. Even if a reader/ playgoer has no knowledge about the content of
the drama, the word “taming” gives him two important hints: 1. The argument of
the play is based on the process of dominating some object; 2. This object is
either an animal or is at least animalised. And indeed, both of these guesses
prove correct, since the main plot consists of
Petruchio’s taming activity exercised towards Katherine, and Katherine
is presented at numerous points through animalistic metaphors. The devices
employed here by Shakespeare find its well-established place in a broader
patriarchal tradition.
In his book Shakespeare and Masculinity ( 2000: 105) Bruce R. Smith explains
the Renaissance attitude towards women through an allegory of a map drawn in
1597 and illustrating places explored recently by English adventurers: Virginia
( 1585), the North-West Passage ( 1585-87) and the
The ethical ideal that governed these voyages of discovery is
emblematised at the bottom in the figure of a Christian knight (...), depicted
in triumph over five sorts of evil (...): Flesh at the knight’s feet, Sin to
his right, and the Devil to his left. Outside the frame to his right is the
World; to his left, Death. Flesh, Sin and the World, let it be noted, are all
personified as women; Sin is particularly arresting with her Medusa’s head and
serpent’s tail. In effect, the “Christian Knight” map of the world combines
chivalric ideals with Christian doctrine to provide an epic frame for
world-dominion as
Why is
it necessary for Petruchio to dominate Kate?
Why is it necessary for a Renaissance ( or traditional ) man to dominate
a woman at all? Smith (2000: 103), drawing on Derrida’s concept of masculinity
as a linguistic construct, argues that in the Shakespearean drama women play a
role of opposite selves against which a man defines his “I”. Given de Saussure’s statement that language functions
on the basis of oppositions[3],
it necessarily follows that any linguistic concept, including masculinity, must
reach its sphere of comprehension by rejecting the things it is not. “In the
case of early modern
The question of woman as Otherness
through which masculinity reaffirms itself is already widely addressed by
Simone de Beauvoir in her book, considered a milestone in the feminist theory, The Second Sex[5]
( 1949). Still, Beauvoir claims that not only the
femininity in our culture is opposed to the masculinity, but the very notion of
a woman exists only in relation to the man and has no independent content of
its own. Man stands for a universal person, for a human being. The only content
of femininity is the otherness, and this broad space may be filled with
anything according to male needs. For example, it may be filled with the notion
of nature as opposed to male- invented culture.
And
indeed, here we come again to the connection that Shakespeare and thousands of
other writers draw between woman and nature. As we have mentioned above, the
very title indicates the animalistic terms through which Katherine will be
identified throughout the play. The
first animalistic metaphor comes when
Katherine protests against forcing her into a position of “a stale” among possible mates (I.i.58).
Subsequently she is labelled a “wildcat”
by Gremio (1.ii.194), to end up as “a bug” ( I.ii.198-208), the name given to
her by her future Hercules-like fiancé:
“Have
I not in my times heard lions roar?
Have
I not heard the sea, puffed up with winds,
Rage
like an angry boar chafèd with sweat?
Have
I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And
heaven’s artillery thunder in the skies?
Have
I not in a pitchèd battle heard
Loud
‘larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets’ clang?
And
do you tell me of a woman’s tongue,
That
gives not half so great a blow to hear
As
will a chestnut in a farmer’s fire?
Tush,
tush, fear boys with bugs!
Since
Hercules, the one who mastered the savage Queen of Amazons, will not be
bothered with a bug, Katherine must be re-shaped as some more worthy animal to
incite his, necessary for the building of the plot, taming talents. One of the
species appreciated by the Elizabethan gentry and commonly used for its entertainment at the courts,
especially country ones, was a falcon.
Thus depicting Katharine as this wild bird of pray makes her not only a worthy
rival, but also renders the metaphor easily readable to the audience. Petruchio
sounds very enthusiastic at the prospect of undertaking the taming job of his
haggard. After having arrived in
“Thus
have I politicly begun my reign,
And
“tis my hope to end successfully.
My
falcon now is sharp and passing empty,
And
till she stoop she must not be full-gorged,
For
then she never looks upon her lure.
Another
way I have to man my haggard,
To
make her come and know her keeper’s call,
That
is, to watch her, as we watch these kites
That
bate and beat and will not be obedient.
She
eat no meat today, nor none shall eat.
Last
night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not”.
A
couple of points in this “manifesto” deserve our closer attention. It opens
with evoking the notion of monarchy, which the Elizabethan public easily
applied to the current political situation; as Rackin ( 2000: 50) asserts, “
the ‘anomaly’ of
Other
question worth considering in this passage, which escapes many critics’, including the feminist ones’, attention, is that Petruchio not only
torments his wife mentally, but also breaks her with regular physical tortures,
not differing in anything from the ones applied to criminals in many prisons
throughout the centuries. By denying his wife food and sleep Petruchio brings
Katherine to the brink of physical exhaustion. In these conditions human
survival instinct makes us normally do whatever it needs to keep one’s life; in
this particular case, the requirement for surviving is total subjection to the master’s will.
Furthermore,
the hardships the man afflicts upon Katherine remit us again to the world of
animals. As we read in Hibbard’s “Introduction” ( 1982: 19) to The Taming of the Shrew “Falcons (...) were tamed (...) by being
denied sleep. The tamer watches the bird continually until it is subdued and
eventually gives way in the battle of wills that takes place between it and its
would-be master, to whom, if he succeeds in his purpose, it then becomes very
attached, or, as one Elizabethan writer on the subject puts it, ‘very loving to
the man’, which is just what Petruchio wishes Katherina to be”.
Still,
it is a good question if the word “love” can be applied in the context of a
victim and victimiser. Do we judge it normal to achieve somebody’s love through
inflicting acute suffering upon this person? In order to believe the emotions
Katherine develops toward her oppressor deserve the name of “love”, we would
have to assume she is an ardent masochist. Which is, by the way, what
patriarchal discourse assumes indeed about the whole womankind. Sigmund Freud,
one of its most influential theoreticians, linked masochism to femininity, as
opposed to essentially virile sadism.[6]
Taking into account the popularity and continuos re-vivification of that view
in non-feminist literature, psychoanalytical practice and in daily life, one
does not wonder why it is so common, even among female authors, to interpret
Katherine’s submission as a manifestation of love.
Having
examined the major implications of the first part of the comedy’s title, we can
proceed to investigating the hidden, or, on the contrary, at moments totally
overt content of the word “shrew”. Looking up the word in the most up-to date
version of Cambridge Dictionary[7], we come across two main explanations: 1. “an
animal like a small mouse but with a longer pointed nose and small eyes” ,
which evokes again the animal imagery; 2. an unpleasant woman who is easily
annoyed and who argues a lot. The latter
meaning corresponds exactly to the 16th century use of the word, “
the woman given to railing or scolding” ( Hodgdon 2007).[8] This image of Kate is enhanced by the use
throughout the play of the derivatives of the word “shrew”, that is “shrewish”
and “shrewd”. Those “originally meant ‘rascally’ or ‘villainous’” (Hodgdon
2007). And indeed, Katherine is at the beginning given to villainous
behaviours: she does not only use a language that does not become a maid, but
also resorts to physical violence, for example beating her sister Bianca (
II.i. 1-22). Many commentaries avoid considering the question why Katherine
behaves like that, taking for granted her savage nature and logically ensuing
legitimacy of Petruchio’s taming
practices. However, they might be other reasons. Fiona Shaw, an actress
interpreting Katherine in Jonathan
Miller’s production in 1987, sees in Katherine’s maniacal behaviour “the
voice of pain in the community” ( Rutter 1989: 9). The woman, being rejected by everyone
including her own father, as we can see clearly illustrated in I.i.102-104 when
Baptista invites home only one of the daughters, and faced with the “inability
to be outside one’s own situation” ( Rutter 1989: 9) engages in household
aggression as maybe the only thing that allows her to act. This hypothesis
finds its support in Frances E. Dolan’s
approach to accounts of domestic crimes committed by women as “one set of
scripts in which women could be cast as
agents, albeit in problematic terms (Dolan 1994:5).
Another
possible explanation of Katherine’s
violence, that is choosing physicality rather than intellectuality, is that
through most of the play she is virtually denied the use of language,
especially in its directive function[9]:
all her opinions and requests are simply ignored first by her father, then by
her suitor and his servants. On that point it is very valuable to learn about
the impressions of the actresses that performed Katherine’s role, as the ones
who know their character best. Above mentioned Fiona Shaw comments on her role
thus: “Surely we’re trying to find out at the beginning what we mean by
‘shrew’. Supposing we said ‘shrew’ equals ‘noisy one’. Along comes a man to
tame the noisy one. And for almost five acts we never hear her speak”. Another actress, Paola Dionisotti, who was
cast for Katherine’s role in 1978 Michael Bogdanov’s production, shares these
impressions: “I wanted the play to be about Kate and about a woman
instinctively fighting sexism. But I don’t really think that’s what the play is
about. It’s not the story of Kate: it’s the story of Petruchio. He gets the
soliloquies, he gets the moments of change. All the crucial moments of the
story for Kate, she’s off stage” ( Rutter1989: 1). This subjective opinion find
its reflection in numbers: Petruchio speaks 158 times throughout the play,
whereas his wife only 82 times, which is roughly a half[10]
and not significantly more than her father, Baptista Minola, considered a
secondary character: 68. The man who comes to tame Katherine takes away her
ability to speak. Because within the patriarchal discourse only men are
expected to speak, that is to be active. Women are expected to provide the
contrastive passivity, which manifests itself through silence and obedience.[11]
Those who speak are whores.
And
indeed, one of the meanings of Kate’s label, although frequently overlooked by
literary critics, is exactly “a promiscuous woman” ( Traub 1991: 98). Also her very name, “Katherine” includes a
sexual pun. In Elizabethan times “cut” was a slung word for today’s “cunt” (
Macguire 2000: 69). This reading of the protagonist’s name is confirmed
especially by Grumio’s comment on his master’s taming practices ( II.i.107-10):
“(...)I'll
tell you what sir, an she
stand
him but a little, he will throw a figure in
her
face and so disfigure her with it that she
shall
have no more eyes to see withal than a cat.
You
know him not, sir.”
“Eye”,
as we read in Thomson’s edition of the comedy (1984:73), is explained by E.
Partridge, the author of “Shakespeare Bawdy” as one of many euphemisms for the
vagina. So what does really the taming of the “cat” consists in? Is it possible
that essentially the taming of
Katherine, the “wildcat”,
consists in taming her “cut”?
As
Valerie Traub observed ( 1995:121) “it is by now a commonplace that Shakespeare
was preoccupied with the uncontrollability of women’s sexuality; witness the
many plots concerning the need to prove female chastity, the threat of
adultery, and, even if female fidelity is not a major theme of the play, the
many references to cuckoldry in songs, jokes and passing remarks”. Moreover, as
the feminist analysis of patriarchal discourse made obvious, violence ( and
Petruchio uses psychical as well as physical violence throughout the whole
play) is connected to men’s inability to deal with the female sexual desire (
Stanton 2000: 98). Petruchio, as Ann Thompson’s has noted “not the only
Shakespeare’s hero to assume a woman with spirit must be unchaste” (Shakespeare
1984: 92) , logically doesn’t want his wife to be “CUTherine”. By
the act of renaming the protagonist, her suitor takes away her original, unruly
and threatening identity and confines her within the limits of the
man-reasserting femininity.[12]
He says:
“For
I am he am born to tame you Kate,
And
bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate
Conformable
as other household Kates.”( II.i.265-7)
Katherine
is a challenge to Petruchio, and defeating her confirms his male dominance. It
is important to pay attention to the word “household’ appearing in the tamer’s
utterance. Peter Stallybrass in his essay “
The
condition of “closed mouth” is certainly fulfilled by Bianca, Katherine’s
sister, the female protagonist of the secondary plot, who throughout the whole
play takes part in the discourse only 29 times, compared to Gremio’s 58,
Hortensio’s 70, Lucentio’s 61 and Tranio’s 90. Bianca, as her very name
suggests, is seen as “chaste”. However, according to the rule of uncontrollability
of female desire, even she, the supposedly obedient daughter, is not to be
trusted: she engages in a clandestine relation with her disguised tutor,
Lucentio. As we are in the world of comedy, the play requires a happy ending.
And, effectively, Baptista happens to approve of his daughter’s choice and the
couple ends up united in a conjugal bond.
Bianca’s
position as the protagonist of the secondary plot with respect to the
utterances allowed to her onstage seems anyhow better than the position of
Hero, the protagonist of the primary plot of
“Much Ado About Nothing”. Hero opens her mouth only 44 times. If we
contrast it with Claudio’s 125, Leonato’s 120 and Don Pedro’s 135 we can
suspect, even being ignorant of the argument, that she plays a role of a
commodity ( also Katherine’s and primarily Bianca’s lot) in the hands of the
surrounding men. And that definitely is the case. Hero is a typical example of
what G. Rubin (1975) identifies as “traffic in women”, consisting in men
exchanging women with the aim of strengthening their homosocial, patriarchal
network. In I.i.174-7 Benedick and Claudio talk directly about buying Leonato’s
daughter. It is very significant that the only male figure who stands in
defence of the girl from the very beginning when she is falsely accused of
adultery is the Friar, who due to his profession remains outside the network.
Even Leonato, Hero’s father, against the evidence of common reason and his
experience readily believes Claudio’s words and proposes to kill his daughter
himself ( IV.i.125-7). This scene proves Bruce R. Smith’s statement that
“Shakespeare’s plays are full of testimonials to the primacy of male
friendship” ( Smith 2000:61). The famous
playwright continues at that point a long philosophical tradition: “For
Aristotle and for his successors Cicero, Montaigne and Bacon, friendship
between men who are social equals constitutes the most important human bond
there is”. Leonato is disposed to kill his own daughter in order not to blemish
it.
The
scene of accusation teaches us also another lesson, the one we have already
seen in the case of Bianca: no woman, no matter how pure she seems, is to be
fully trusted. Shakespeare again draws on the protagonist’s name to show the male
audience how appearances may fool them. In IV.i.99-103 the bridegroom
reproaches Hero her supposed duplicity saying:
“O
Hero, what a Hero hadst thou been,
If
half thy outward graces had been placed
About
thy thoughts and counsels of thy heart!
But
fare thee well, most foul, most fair! farewell,
Thou
pure impiety and impious purity!”
Mihoko
Suzuki (2000:131) provides a very interesting comment on that part:
These lines anticipate Troilus’s outburst in Troilus and Cressida concerning the two Cressidas, one his and
true, the other Diomed’s and false, and indicate the ubiquitous strategy of
Shakespearean heroes to construct women as promiscuous and duplicitous,
literally double. In fact, Shakespeare indicates the link between the stories
of both Troilus and Cressida and Hero and Leander when he has Benedick refer
mockingly to “Leander the good swimmer” along with “Troilus the first employer
of pandars” as those whose name “run smoothly in the even road of a blank
verse” ( V.ii.30-40). The reappearance of “another Hero” ( V.iv.61) at the end
of the play reveals, however, that her doubleness does not signify her
duplicity, but rather, the violence of patriarchal culture’s construction of
women as duplicitous, which makes it necessary for Hero to experience a
symbolic death in order to reclaim her reputation as a maid’.
If women are false, their physical
reactions are also suspicious. When Hero, labelled by Don Pedro “ a stale”, the
animalistic reference we have seen already in the case of Katherine, begins to
blush and lament on hearing the unfair accusation, her reactions are ridiculed
and dismissed as simulation, whereas Claudio’s tears are not questioned for a
while. ( IV.i.34-42, 150-4, 170-5). As
Laurie E. Macguire (2000:64) explains, it happens because men, socialized not
to weep, even nowadays, as one of a reports have shown, are taken more
seriously when doing so then women, who are allowed to shed tears more
frequently and copiously. “In the Renaissance, women’s tears were viewed as
part of a complex and misunderstood system of female fluids ( menstruation,
lactation, urination), but the bottom line was that female lachrymosity was not
to be trusted”, she adds. In the two comedies we analyze here we find more
examples of this distrust. In Induction.
(Ind. i. 120-4) the Lord instructs the player so:
“And
if the boy have not a woman’s gift
To
rain a shower of commanded tears,
An
onion will do well for such a shift,
Which
in a napkin being close conveyed
Shall
in despite enforce a watery eye”.
Also Katherine
accuses her younger sister of using a trick to gain her father’s sympathy
(I.1.78-9):
“A
pretty peat! it is best
Put finger in the eye, an she knew why.”
Of the four important heroines that appear in
the discussed comedies Beatrice is the only one that does not cry at any moment
of the play. She is strong, independent, talkative: intervenes in the discourse
106 times. As we have already mentioned, open mouth equals promiscuity in the
patriarchal worldview; many allusions to Beatrice’s unhappy love-affair with Benedick in the past
give us a hint that of the three roles a woman could assume in the early modern
society, a virgin, a wife and a whore, Beatrice is cast in the last one.
This
interpretation of her figure is reinforced by the song Balthasar performs in
II.iii.63-78. It alludes to Beatrice’s situation after Benedick has left her,
and recommends she engage in the “hey nonny nonny” activities:
“Sigh
no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never:
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.
Sing no more ditties, sing no more,
Of dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
Since summer first was leafy:
Then sigh not so, & c.”
There are two other suggestive
moments in the play. When Beatrice complains in III.vi.61 of her illness “I’m
stuffed cousin; I cannot smell”,
Margaret mocks her saying “A maid, and stuffed! There’s goodly catching
of cold”, the latter “stuffed” meaning pregnant, as Zitner’s gloss explains us
( Shakespeare 1998). Such a joke could not appear in the gentlewoman’s mouth
with reference to Hero; still, Margaret dares applying it to Beatrice, which
suggests us that Beatrice’s behaviour might justify it.
Another
time when Beatrice is reproached her adulterous tendencies is when, before the
wedding takes place, Benedick comments
(V.iv.123-4) “ There is no staff more reverend than one with a horn”;
simultaneously, this phrase testifies again to Shakespeare’s ubiquitous fear of
cuckoldry.
There
are significant resemblances between the figure of Katherine and Beatrice. MAAN’s heroine is, like Petruchio’s fiancé, called “shrewed” and “curst”
( II.i.17-8). The shrewish behaviour indubitably needs rectifying. Still, this
time it is not one person, but a group of courtly plotters that manage to bring
the unruly woman “to her senses”. Overhearing Hero’s and Ursula’s conversation
in the arbour, the protagonist gets scared of her image of “Lady Disdain” and
promises to “tame” herself, just as social convention requires her to do
(III.i.107-12):
“What fire is in my
ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemned for
pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell; and maiden pride, adieu.
No glory lives behind
the back of such.
And, Benedick, love on. I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to
thy loving hand.”
Let us notice that at this point the
idea of female friendship is being discarded: Hero participates in an intrigue
against Beatrice, just as Margaret betrays her mistress. Even if the play does
not compromise the idea of female friendship totally, as opposed to The Taming, since it is Beatrice who
wants to eat Claudio’s heart in the market place for her cousin’s sake (IV.i.30-7),
the loyalty between women is seriously challenged by the examples of two
betrayals. Girls in both plays stand alone against the society, being deprived
not only of friends, but also of the supportive figure of the mother. Men, on
the other hand, not only have friends, but usually there is a paternal figure (although
not necessarily a biological father, as in the case of Claudio) backing them
up. One might argue that Benedick betrays his male friendship for the sake of
love when he promises to challenge Claudio for his slander; still, it is to be
minded that due to new circumstances the act remains unfulfilled, and the true
breach not made.
Coppelia
Kahn argues that “the power over women given to men by patriarchy made man
paradoxically ‘vulnerable to women’ because ‘a woman’s subjugation to her
husband’s will was the measure of his patriarchal authority and thus of his
manliness” ( Rackin 2000: 49). Both plays we have analyzed in this essay show
the process of women’s disempowerment which reasserts the patriarchal
dominance. Although one might argue that Beatrice contracts marriage because of
love and hence on the basis of mutuality, her and other women’s subordinated
position is clearly shown at the end of the play, when the power of speech is
given exclusively to men. Benedick explicitly relegates his future wife to the
area of silence by saying “Peace, I will stop your mouth” ( V.iv.97). Hero’s
and Bianca’s mouth do not have to be forced close, but must be constantly
watched so that no major infraction of the patriarchal law is committed. However,
let us remember that
“All the world’s a play
a stage,
And all the men and
women merely players”
( As You Like It, II.vii.139-40).
If Shakespeare’s men and women are
players, it means that their identities are constructs built according to
certain politics, in this case a male-centred politics And what ensues is that
they can be changed. It is an interesting question if Shakespeare meant by this
phrase what one of the most influential feminist thinkers nowadays, Judith Butler, expresses through her concept
of performativity: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of
gender; ... identity is performatively constituted by the very
"expressions" that are said to be its results” ( Butler 1990: 25). This
essay was supposed to show how Shakespeare constructs the social/ gender roles
and fights to maintain them. Such an analysis is a necessary preliminary to
another level, which is reshaping the construct, retelling the stories and
finding in them elements which deconstruct them from the inside.
That is exactly what many female
literary critics try to do currently in order to reclaim Shakespeare for
themselves. There are numerous articles dedicated to looking for lesbian
elements in the plays, manifestations of female independence and power, internal
inconsistencies which invalidate the patriarchal rule within the play. Still,
the area which gives most opportunities for reclaiming Shakespeare for the
feminist audience is the very performance. Certain direction choices may, if
not erase totally, at least attenuate the severity of patriarchal directives
included in Shakespeare’s plays, so that we do not build and reaffirm unwanted
structures any more.
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last viewed 11.01.2008.
8.
Hodgdon B., 2007: Shrew-Histories, < http://www.shakespearetheatre.org/plays/articles.aspx?&id=571
>, last viewed 14.01.2008.
9.
Saussure, F.de, 1910: Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics,
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[1] And not only. In broader terms feminism
is interested in abolishing the binary system of victims/ victimizers, hence
its interest in all contexts where this dichotomy appears, e.g. racial or class
issues. See: Valerie Wayne, The matter of
difference ( 1991:3).
[2] For chronology of Shakespeare’s plays, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Shakespeare_plays
[3] “Strictly speaking there are no signs but differences
between signs.” Ch.VI, Ferdinand de
Saussure (1910) Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics ,
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/saussure.htm
[4] See: Rackin “ Misogyny is Everywhere” ( 2000:
41) or Erickson, Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves ( 1991: 73-4).
[6] See: http://www.enotes.com/psychoanalysis-encyclopedia/feminine-masochism
. For further information see Freud’s
New Introductory Lectures on psychoanalysis ( 1933).
[9] On the functions of language, see: http://philosophy.lander.edu/logic/form_lang.html
[10] For concordance, see: http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/characters/chardisplay.php
[11] On Freud’s adscription of passivity to the
femininity see: http://www.answers.com/topic/masculinity-femininity?cat=health
[12] As Anthony Fletcher has put it, “ It was
conventional, as we have seen, to assume men and women had clearly defined
roles indoors and out of doors...Feminity, as we have seem, was presented as no more than a set of negatives. The
requirement of chastity was, as we have seen, the overriding measure of female
gender. Woman not only had to be chaste but had to be seen to be chaste:
silence, humility and modesty were the signifiers that she was so” ( Rackin
2000: 43).