Shakespeare’s Women: Performance and Conception (review)

During the last forty years, Shakespeare’s female characters, especially those who appear in male disguise, have attracted considerable attention, largely because of their relevance to our own concerns about gender and sexuality. To David Mann, this scholarship needs to be refuted because it is ahistorically distorted by present preoccupations. In the end, Mann’s arguments are less than convincing, but some of them raise useful challenges to currently received wisdom about Shakespeare’s female characters.

Mann castigates feminist and gay critics for focusing on Shakespeare’s supposed gender politics, rather than on the ways Shakespeare exploited the cross-dressed convention as a dramatic medium. Ironically, however, Mann’s own argument is heavily inflected by his own gender politics—so much so that his analysis is often reduced to self-contradiction and incoherence. In disputing the validity of feminist criticism, for instance, he insists that in Shakespeare’s theater, neither the male actors who played women’s roles nor the playgoers would have had “any profound commitment to the female character being represented” (202). When female characters are mistreated, he contends, “The cries of fear are not those of real women imaginatively conceived in a situation of any authenticity, but those of cross-dressed performers for whom inevitably there will be an element of male salaciousness, whichever roles they play” (188). In refuting gay readings, however, he insists that the male body would have disappeared from spectators’ consciousness as they responded to the represented body of the woman.

The book is not without virtues. Mann never loses sight of the fact that Shakespeare was a working commercial playwright, and he contextualizes his discussions of Shakespeare’s work with numerous references to plays written by his predecessors and contemporaries. Mann’s own experience as an actor and director keeps him alert to the possibilities (and impossibilities) of performance and produces convincing arguments about a number of contested issues and interpretations (his perceptive discussion at the end of chapter 4 on Lady Macbeth’s changing role is one example). In the case of the female characters, he points out that post-Shakespearean interpretations are often colored by the unacknowledged influence of the fact that female roles have long been performed by women. In response to earlier critics who believed that the characters’ cross-dressed disguise would have been easier for male actors, Mann makes the credible point that “breeches roles” would actually have been more demanding, since they required “the performer to communicate a continuous sense of femaleness underneath his male appearance without any of the usual aids but merely through inflection and gesture” (53). (Although I’m not convinced that the “sense of femaleness” had to be “continuous,” the point is generally well taken.)

Many of these arguments have been made before, but they are worth repeating, and the book also brings together a considerable body of useful information. A thirteen-page bibliography documents an impressive range of reference. An appendix lists the number of speaking female roles, the total number of lines spoken by female characters, and the length of the largest female role in each of the 205 extant plays written for the adult repertory between 1500 and 1614. Table 1 (32) compares the number of female speaking roles in adult plays produced during the years 1589 to 1614 to those in children’s plays from 1599 to 1611 and Restoration plays dating from 1660 to 1700.

Readers should be warned, however, that Mann’s information is not always reliable. On the first page, for instance, he states that “the evidence for women performing in public [in England] before 1660 is uncertain.” Later, he refers to “the hermetically sealed world of Elizabethan all-male theatre” (131). Near the end of the book, he briefly concedes that there was “perhaps some constituency, at any rate, of female spectators” (215), but his arguments throughout are based on the assumption that early modern playgoers were male. All this is difficult to square with the...