https://orcid.org/0009-0004-6442-7086
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James W Stone, Shakespeare and Gender: Sex and Sexuality in Shakespeare’s Drama. Arden Shakespeare. By Kate Aughterson and Ailsa Grant Ferguson, Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 75, Issue 4, Winter 2024, Pages 343–345, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quae044
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Kate Aughterson and Ailsa Grant Ferguson range compendiously across Shakespeare’s women, from the witty resistances of Beatrice, Rosalind, and Kate; to heroines like Cordelia and Desdemona, condemned to succumb to anxious male sexuality; to mothers like Margaret of Anjou and Hermione, who refuse to fall. The pendent focus of this book is men who either blame their weakness on “effeminization” or aggrandize themselves by deploying misogyny aggressively. The authors’ exposition of gender dialectics comprises four waves (and more than four decades) of feminist gender criticism.
The confusion of male and female is the analytical fulcrum of the book. Richard II’s “masculine identity in a male body politic is threatened by womanishness” (49). Here and elsewhere in the book, the authors remark that the vagina is one of the referents of the word “nothing,” a word that Richard and Queen Isabel use in lyrical descriptions of the state into which they have fallen. “Femaleness is a state of absence, of nothingness, existing only in relation to a lack of male ‘something’” (47). In one of two “Interludes” featuring the perspectives of theatrical practitioners, the authors interview director and lead actor Adjoa Andoh about her production of Richard II at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (2019). All the actors and crew were British women of color, and the production spoke back against Brexit, the scandalous treatment of Windrush immigrants, and other colonial insults that allied their sufferings with those of the king and queen.
