The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies (review)

A note of mourning reverberates throughout The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies, which is dedicated to Sasha Roberts, a distinguished scholar and one of the contributors to the volume, who died in a road accident before the book was finished. The book is an elegy for the radical feminism of times past, yet the essayists brilliantly demonstrate how very much alive (“though much altered,” as the editor, Dympna Callaghan, observes) feminism is in early modern studies today.

Many essays are preoccupied with grief, mourning, and nostalgia as expressed within the period, as well as within feminism itself. Heather Hirschfeld and Frances E. Dolan discuss grief towards the loss of Catholicism in post-Reformation England, and they examine how it was represented on the stage. Hirschfeld analyzes how the mother in revenge drama performs a nostalgic type of penance denied to the avenging son. Dolan reads Hermione as a “vanishing Catholic” in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, ending her essay with a lament for the “vanishing feminist” and exhorting us not to “mourn” but instead to “seek out . . . feminism’s new manifestations” (229, 231). Deanne Williams traces the contours of mourning in her beautiful essay about Frances Yates, whose passion for scholarship was shaped by her grief for a brother (also a scholar) who died in World War I. Pamela Allen Brown offers a revisionist analysis of the “Persian Lady” painting at Hampton Court; one of its central meanings is as an allegory of mourning for an unwanted pregnancy. R. S. White gives an overview of feminist responses to the grieving Ophelia and her “changing destiny” (93). Gail Kern Paster, drawing on her own groundbreaking work in humoral theory, touches on the love melancholy that afflicted young women in the Renaissance, and she calls for a return to the categories of the body and the biological in feminist work, “without sacrificing our . . . interest in historical and cultural specificities” (332).

The specter of grief does not, however, haunt all the essayists in this book; many focus on other equally compelling emotions, such as love and female desire. Jennifer Panek studies the pleasurable dynamics of the marketplace for widows seeking to remarry when “traditional” gender hierarchy was “not expected” or even “desired” by would-be husbands (282). Identifying overlap between the marriage market and the middle-class market for learning, Patricia Parker illustrates how Bianca’s Latin translations in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew “forecas[t]” the shrewish behavior revealed at the end of the play (205). Jean E. Howard discusses the indistinct boundary between the “chaste” woman and the prostitute, a boundary further effaced in the “turning whore” city comedies of the period (133). Advocating for a reconsideration of the “all male” economics of the stage, Natasha Korda identifies how the theater depended on “informal” businesses often operated by women (268). Women developed business expertise in the literary marketplace, as well as in the theater, as Kimberly Anne Coles and Grace Ioppolo maintain. Coles demonstrates that the “pro-feminine expression” of Amelia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was a “marketing device” to help Lanyer compete against male poets for female patronage (151). Reading and transcribing Penelope Rich’s letters, Grace Ioppolo shows that Rich was “an expertly self-crafted master of rhetoric whose real skill was in provoking language rather than providing it” (320).

Jonathan Gil Harris, Sasha Roberts, and Kate Chedgzoy speculate on the possibilities and limitations of feminist theories. Harris persuasively argues for the “continuing value” of French feminist theory in his discussion of how Hélène Cixous’s theorizing of the female body can be put in dialog with Margaret Cavendish’s writings about matter and the body as open and “self-moving” (43). Roberts constructs an elegant argument for a feminist “new formalism,” reminding us that early modern women were fascinated by the play of poetic forms in their writing and reading practices. Chedgzoy...