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

Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood is a strikingly rich addition to the growing body of scholarship on Shakespeare and early modern childhood. Deanne Williams fully demonstrates ‘how Shakespeare created girl characters and defined the idea of girlhood over the course of his career, shaping and inspiring subsequent literary and cultural representations of girls and conceptions of girlhood’ throughout late seventeenth-century English culture (2).

As Williams explains, ‘Shakespeare typically uses the term “girl” when a character’s relationship to authority is complicated or troubled’ (4). In Shakespeare’s early plays, ‘girl’ is ‘a label for a young woman’s independence, willfulness, and resistance’, but by the end of his career, ‘girl’ becomes a character ‘who exhibit[s] bravery and integrity in the face of misfortune’, as well as an insult for males (6). Thus, for Williams’s purposes, girl ‘is not limited to chronology or biology’ (6). Rather, ‘the variety of meanings attached to “girl” in the early modern period offer [sic] a range of possibilities and contexts … that were not so much contradictory … as creatively and imaginatively enabling’ (5–6). Such a capacious definition allows Williams to study an entire range of girls, including Joan La Pucelle, Ophelia, Queen Isabella, and even Romeo and Macbeth, as well as historical girls inspired by Shakespeare’s works.

Williams’s purposes are threefold: to examine ‘girl characters (usually performed by boy actors), historical girls (both as they are represented by Shakespeare and how they represent themselves), and the idea of the “girl” itself as a rhetorical construct’ (6). She accordingly divides her study into three sections: ‘Shakespeare’s Girls’, ‘Stages of Girlhood’, and ‘Writing Girls’. Williams begins by focusing on those girls who are ‘peevish and perverse’, which is to say girls who not only ‘perform their status as girls, but also, through resistance and mutability, … become themselves’ (25). She first considers the contradictory representation of Joan La Pucelle (Joan of Arc) in 1 Henry VI. In wearing a soldier’s armour, La Pucelle recalls the origins of ‘girl’ as a term for both female and male children (23). ‘La Pucelle’s identification as a “girl” through her acts of resistance’, explains Williams, ‘highlights the enabling variety of possibilities and associations attendant upon girlhood in the early modern period’ (24). Silvia and Julia in The Two Gentleman of Verona are characterized as ‘peevish’ and ‘perverse’ by disobeying their father, as is Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew, whose independence frustrates ‘an expectation of daughterly submission’ (36–7). Williams concludes the chapter by turning to Romeo and Juliet, suggesting Shakespeare introduces a ‘new’ kind of girl: while Juliet is a ‘character whose mutability and movement, flexibility, resistance, and transformative creative imagination, dramatize the limitless possibilities of girlhood itself’, Paris and Romeo too emphasize such possibilities when they are ‘transformed into “girls” through their relationship with Juliet’ (50). It is these characters’ love that is peevish and perverse, since as Williams avers, ‘Romeo’s experience of love for Rosaline serves as a set of variations on a theme of perversity, … the Nurse compares him to Juliet’, and ‘[i]magining Romeo apotheosized after her death, Juliet turns him into a figure associated with the feminine night, as opposed to the traditionally masculine sunlight’ (50).

Chapter 2 is an historical and biographical study of the child-bride as depicted by Queen Isabelle de France in Richard II. After reminding readers that the historical Queen Isabelle married Richard II in 1396, when she was seven and he twenty-nine, Williams invites us to imagine ‘Shakespeare’s version of this character through her historical counterpart, no longer glossing over the reality of her age, and instead consider how Shakespeare’s dramatization of medieval child marriage both challenges our expectations about girlhood and broadens our understanding of medieval and early modern girls as dramatic characters, as well as historical individuals’ (53). After a clear and fascinating discussion of medieval child-brides in England, Williams provides a close reading of the queen as a girl...