critical appreciation of siren song

Kirsch, Arthur. In tone, we have come a long way from male fantasies about women in the early comedies, but the paired, contrasting images of the "face [which] presageth snow" and the "soiled horse [going] to't with … riotous appetite," the image of woman as monstrously divided, belonging half to the gods, half to the fiend, link this speech clearly to many another speech in earlier plays. To call into question the chastity of a man's mother remains to this day a value-laden insult in our slang. In one of many types of attempts to "domesticate" the Dark Lady, readers of Shakespeare have persisted in identifying her with actual women such as Mary Fitton or the Italian musician Emilia Lanier. Emilia is less shrewd but more unselfish and more loyal to her mistress, but she sees her lady's predicament too late, and then bewails rather than remedies it; she can understand the cruder mind of Iago but hardly the noble passion of the princely Moor; and she fails in saving her lady's marriage, and so brings on tragedy. Her son, faced with the dilemma of choosing between affection for family and public honor (his word to the Volscians), chooses the affective bonds even at the price of his life. Glimpses of the nightmare that underlies that madness appear early—again, in Much Ado About Nothing—in Claudio's outburst against the "rotten orange" that his betrothed has become in his eyes: You seem to me as Dian in her orb, As many other mannish cowards have "Heaven comfort her!" Jealousy, you see. She has already parodied such swaggering performances in her role as Ganymede, so there is nothing left for Orlando but to offer himself, as he is, to another honest person. You can be as ruthless as you like, but somebody may be ruthless back. The inspired solo of the play's end reinforces this.             indeed? 'It's no wonder I'm so bitter and twisted …'.  weep? It opens the possibility of hearing the lines in a different way, sensing the possibility of real life anguish which lies behind the completely formal, fairy tale structure of the casket plot. But besides this, the speech, midway in the play, directs attention to the range of manliness exhibited, from the two Murderers to Duncan and from Macbeth to Macduff. But nature to her bias drew in that. They suspect that we are quite simply lying; that either we did cry at Love Story, or, that if we did condescend to read it, we would. Mortimer is happily married to Glendower's daughter, and the castrating savages of Westmerland's report are nowhere to be seen. Oliver and Jenny are no more likely to disrupt the social order than are Florizel and Perdita. For within the construction of the play, the speech in which Portia dismisses a list of suitors with witty set piece descriptions has to do more than express her character. Viola's history is the play we are watching, which is certainly not a blank but packed with events. Cleopatra as a royal personage seems to absorb their entire interest; for Shakespeare in these later tragedies seems to be using a more Classical technique of greater concentration on the major figures. When Rosalind dons curtle-axe and boar-spear to declare, "In my heart / Lie there what hidden woman's fear there will, / We'll have a swashing and a martial outside, / As many other mannish cowards have / That do outface it with their semblances" (As You Like It, I.iii. Rosalind-as-Ganymede reproduces the conventional invective against women for Orlando, and shocks Celia: You have simply misused our sex in your loveprate. Too craven to leave her monument to bid farewell to Antony, she insists that her dying lover be drawn up to her on a pulley. The error of our eye directs our mind.   dirge, Her wit is not, like Portia's, exercised in the service of sensible men engaged in the serious business of the world, nor are her jokes made at their expense. She wants him to be a more glorious version of what he himself wants to be. That is Shakespeare's description of the art of his precursors in Europe, but his own work is a generous celebration of the woman's part in man, and even more notably of the man's part in woman. Stand I condemned for pride and scorn SOURCE: "Playing the Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism and Shakespearean Performance," in Theatre Journal, Vol. Love's Labor's, perhaps Shakespeare's earliest play, had three such ladies; and one appears even in A Comedy of Errors, though it is Roman in both source and setting; and at the end of the playwright's career comes one in Henry VIII. In the handkerchief episode, furthermore, she plays a major part, and so, unwittingly, enrages him still more. Once more there is the simple problem of sheer length—Cleopatra's 670 lines come second only to Antony's 813, which makes her part formidable, but the disposition of the scenes makes the part more demanding than is Antony's since (a) within the divided worlds of Rome and Egypt Cleopatra has no physical part in the Roman scenes, and (b) once Antony is dead, the whole of Act V with the great climax of the play's ending—the high-water mark of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry—had to be borne by the boy-actress alone, a signal assumption of authority in that unknown player.   do New York: Methuen, 1988, 149 p. Includes discussion of Shakespeare's treatment of women characters in his plays in a larger context of gender issues in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater. 35-40). (3.1.191-201), The most fascinating aspect of Berowne's plight is his conviction that Rosaline is a lustful creature, one who "will do the deed / Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard." Makbeth, according to Holinshed, was regarded unfavorably for his cruelty, which was considered as much a drawback as Duncan's undue clemency. Young females are expected to temper their behavior to the vulnerability of the male, and those who fail to do so expose themselves to the censure of their peers. Good and evil are not so easily distinguished, nor male and female either. Sonnet 143 offers the most revealing example of the male sonneteer's helplessness when faced with female potency. The plays form a remarkable set—unique, in fact, in Shakespeare. For I did play a lamentable part. For by my soul I'll ne'er acknowledge thee, The array of possible character interpretations offered by The Merchant of Venice has certainly contributed to the drama's continued theatrical popularity. Octavius says that "[w]omen are not / In their best fortunes strong" and that "want will perjure / The ne'ertouched vestal" (III.xii.30-31), a misogynist observation that Cleopatra's behavior in this play largely justifies. 285, July, 1965, pp. "—articulates a far from comic fear present in full many a Shakespearian hero/husband. 113-114). My allusion to the anthology The Woman's Part will, I hope, further underscore my immediate concern: to extend the feminist critique of Shakespeare to contemporary theatrical practice. Cleopatra, like the Dark Lady and Tamora, violates the behavioral norms specifying that virtuous women should be chaste, silent, and obedient, but she never exhibits power except through her sexuality and never achieves recognition as a political figure. The insistence on meaning as single, fixed and given is thus a way of reaffirming existing values. Like the Ontario production of Troilus and Cressida, the Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Two Noble Kinsmen belied the sexism and elitism that the commentary attributed to the playtext, for Imogen Stubbs, as the Jailer's Daughter, created a heroic figure who was at once socially marginal and theatrically central. 72-3). Shakespeare has used a very similar structure to introduce Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (I.ii.9-16), for such witty set pieces were part of his dramatic raw materials, and part of his skill as a dramatist was to integrate such formal elements into the flow of narrative. In other words the scene has a structural function quite independent of Portia's character as a coherent human being. Yet, at the same time, it is the actress in Ophelia, the performer of femininity, who so enrages Hamlet. The divided action of the play made doubling peculiarly feasible. She has already told it once in this scene (lines 26-8), and she is here telling it again in hints so broad that even Orsino is able to pick them up once he has one more clue (V. i. As she knew by observing her sister monarch, Mary of Scotland, in a patriarchal society, marriage transforms even a queen's power. The three principals are Hippolyta, the Amazon queen who Theseus has conquered in a single combat; her sister Emilia, whose love for women underscores her suffering when Theseus orders her to marry the survivor of Palamon and Arcite's duel; and the nameless Jailer's Daughter, who fulfills her dramatic function in the main plot when she releases Palamon from her Father's prison and fulfills her function in the sub plot when, mad for unrequited love of the knight whom she has freed, she is seduced and thereby cured by a suitor who sleeps with her pretending to be Palamon. To privilege gender in a reading of Titus Andronicus is to valorize patriarchy. It is not obvious from a feminist point of view that, in so far as they seem finally to re-affirm sexual polarity, Shakespeare's comedies have happy endings.
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