Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (review)

In a short pamphlet entitled "Second Thoughts About Othello" the Ghanaian-British actor Hugh Quarshie writes that after seeing several well-known black actors play Othello, he was "left with a nagging doubt. . . .When a black actor plays a role written for a white actor in black make-up and for a predominantly white audience, does he not encourage the white way, or rather the wrong way, of looking at black men?" ¹ Dympna Callaghan's book Shakespeare Without Women meditates at length on the fact that every single role on the Shakespearean stage was written for a white man. It asks us to consider the political and philosophical consequences of the physical absence and insistent representation of certain peoples on Shakespeare's stage, especially women, Africans, and the indigenous Irish. The transvestitism of the Shakespearean stage has received much critical attention in the past two decades, cross-racial representation almost none. One of Callaghan's major achievements in this book is to make it impossible to think about one in isolation from the other. The second is her insistence that we reconsider the widespread assumption that visibility and representation necessarily connote social and political power. Reminding us that in bastardy legislation, men were conveniently invisible, and women were the focal point, Callaghan asks us whether mere visibility in any political, social, or theatrical process can be taken as a straightforward index of power: "presence cannot be equated with representation any more than representation can be equated with inclusion" (9). Thus, she suggests, we should neither read the actual absence of women or Africans as actors on early modern stages as entirely negative nor interpret their representation on these stages in terms of"positive" or "negative" images. Instead we should examine the webbed interrelations between the political, philosophical, historical, and theatrical dimensions of "representation."

All theatrical representation depends on the absence of the persons it represents. The absence of a real king from the stage does not indicate a lack of royal power, whereas the absences of women, Africans, and the Irish from Shakespeare's stage do suggest their marginalization in early modern English society. However, each of these marginalized peoples were differently positioned, socially and on the stage; all of them, Callaghan suggests, need to be understood in relation to the dynamics of emergent capitalism in the period, in which "crucial aspects of power and economic exchange become invisible" (5). Women and femininity were crucial to the production of racial difference, both on the stage and in the culture at large. Callaghan draws attention to the significance of white makeup, which was used by male actors on the public stages in the production of stage femininity, as she does to the role of aristocratic women in producing and controlling certain images of blackness in royal masques. But women were present in large numbers in the audience to gaze upon, internalize, or contest the way they were represented on the stage, unlike Africans or the indigenous Irish. Moreover, "In that there are restrictions on English women's cultural representation within their own culture, the form taken by women's exclusion from the production of representation in early modern English culture is markedly distinct from the situation of Africans and Irish within cultural representation" (21).

Callaghan uses this distinction brilliantly in the fourth and (to my mind) best chapter of this book, "Irish memories in The Tempest." Here she suggests that the connection between Ireland and the play's island can be built precisely by paying attention to "the play's resolute nonspecificity, its haziness and imprecision on matters of both geography and, especially, . . . of history; its deliberately bad memory" (100). Callaghan looks hard at what is missing or out of focus in the play in order to trace "the echoes of suppressed Irish culture and the...