Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood by Deanne Williams (review)

In her new book Deanne Williams helps to amend the traditional belief that medieval and early modern English families placed little value on girls. Indeed, while girls were certainly victimized within early modern patriarchal social structures, many enjoyed affectionate relationships with their kin. Girls were also productive, necessary members of domestic economies and, at times, at least minimally educated. More specifically, Williams corrects what seems to be an unbelievable omission: a total lack of lengthy academic studies on girlhood in William Shakespeare’s plays. Although billed as a book on Shakespeare, half of Williams’s work here draws connections to other early modern professional playwrights and, importantly, girls who wrote pieces for performance, placing Shakespeare’s work within a broader early modern conversation.

Although she insists on the unique place of girls in early modern theatre culture, Williams provocatively suggests expanding “the figure of the girl and the subject of girlhood” in order to make both “relevant beyond the limits of gender as well as age, accessible to boys and men,” all the while preserving a sense of girlhood as a special identity for women, an identity that need not be considered temporary and that need not be forsaken as part of a healthy development into adulthood (14). Even as Williams marks out a space for the girl as special and worthy of consideration, she productively suggests that the flexible connotations of the term allow for a range of readings in dramatic work.

Importantly, Williams draws attention to the sixteenth century as a period in which “girl” began to refer solely to a female child. During the medieval period, “girl” could be used to describe a child of either sex. The term could imply the expected qualities of sweetness and innocence in an early modern female child, but it also carried connotations of eroticization and sex work, a point confirmed by contemporary dictionaries and their inclusion of terms such as “harlot” and “trull” as synonyms for “girl” (5). Shakespeare’s plays appeared at a moment when the gendered identity attached to girls was in flux, especially given the early modern practice of having boy actors play girls’ and women’s roles. Working with the plasticity in the term “girl” encourages a more complicated understanding of Shakespeare’s characters, however.

Take Joan of Arc’s position in Henry VI, Part 1, for example: Joan la Pucelle (pucelle another term that simultaneously carries connotations of innocence and experience) is given the moniker “girl” at two points in the play. One of the references to the character as a “girl” can be found as York and Warwick debate the merits of Joan’s pregnancy claim, a conversation that supports Williams’s sense of the term as both virginal and sexualized for the early modern mind (24). A consideration of this sexual duality and the gendered uncertainty inherent in the word “girl” allows for a broader, more engaging reading of the often androgynous Joan’s relationship to men and to larger structures of authority.

Shakespeare includes the term approximately sixty-eight times across his various works, usually in moments “when a character’s relationship to authority is complicated or troubled,” according to Williams, who sees the playwright’s use of “girl” shift within larger changes in his social milieu (3, 4). In her initial discussion of Shakespearean texts, Williams attaches keywords to specific girl characters, the keywords also selected from each respective play. Silvia is “perverse” in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, while The Taming of the Shrew’s Kate is “froward,” and Romeo and Juliet ’s heroine is “wayward” (43). All three terms are associated with religious disruption and upheaval, a point that Williams opens up in somewhat limited ways.

Most exciting in her work on Shakespeare is Williams’s discussion of Richard II’s Isabelle de France. Generally staged as an adult woman, despite the fact that the historical figure was a child who married at seven, Isabelle has overwhelmingly been treated by critics as...