Phyllis Rackin recently brought up the question of future directions for feminist Shakespeare criticism. Both of these monographs provide possible responses to Rackin's timely call, offering insightful explorations into representations of socially marginalized, yet symbolically central, groups of women during the early modern period. While ostensibly tackling very different topics, the authors’ treatment of gender, sexuality and textuality speaks to a common goal of making visible these early modern women and their social and political contributions to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.
McNeill questions the traditional categories of maid, wife and widow, which both period conduct manuals and later critics alike have used to classify women and their attachments to people, households, trade and country. She contends that rather than overturning these categories, we should complicate them and look also at the economic and ‘occupational’ roles that women held. Doing so enables a more specific understanding of poor women in particular, who ‘shift in and out of marriages, households, and employments’ (p. 3) and who are necessary – if undervalued – parts of a transforming social system. For McNeill, ‘the drama provides a living document of the changing economic conditions of .–.–. “early capitalism,” which forced poor women to shift into the limited freedom of provisional labor and then shifted them back into bondage in the workhouse and plantation’ (p. 3). She analyses these social moves through examining the ‘words for women’ located in the texts that dramatize them (p. 13). Exploring plays, pamphlets, conduct books, court records and more, she provides a fascinating look at the diverse roles poor women played, both onstage and in their daily lives.
If one is looking for a thorough interpretation of Shakespeare's plays in particular, however, her book's title is something of a misnomer. While she presents extended readings of spinners’ work songs referenced in Twelfth Night and the difficulties of identifying and placing the women in the legal system of Measure for Measure, more attention is given to other early modern dramas, such as Dekker and Middleton's Roaring Girl. The study undoubtedly is rich in historical material, but at times seems to neglect a comprehensive reading of any given play and its evaluative import among the contexts she provides. Still, her coverage of the gendered economics of the textiles industry, bastardy laws, news culture, masterless women and the mapping of city spaces, and women transported from Bridewell to the Virginia colony, aptly highlights how the drama of the period reflected, responded to and resisted the shifting movements of these poor women.
Ephraim, in some ways, takes up a similar notion of ‘shifting’ in her study of Jewish women and dramatic representation in the sixteenth century. She examines how Elizabethan plays make use of Old Testament stories, and the symbolic value of Jewish queens, mothers and daughters especially, to confirm and strengthen the understanding of the Bible, and to ensure the primacy of the scripture-based Protestant faith. This transformed and translated textual meaning is also figured by reading the queen's body itself into these female roles: Ephraim is ‘interested in how Elizabeth's subjects imagined the queen as a body through which to articulate and examine their own relationship with the Hebrew scripture’ (p. 2). And yet, while dramatic portrayals of Deborah, Susanna, Rebecca, Jephthah's daughter and others seem to offer access to Jewish bodies and wisdom, they fundamentally resist assimilation by being ambiguous, shape-shifting and deceptive characters. Their social and textual meanings cannot be understood simply, frustrating Christian viewers and readers who had ‘an encompassing cultural desire to take possession of the scripture’ (p. 5). Ephraim moves through models of monarchical and maternal authority and ends with a thoughtful analysis of the ways Jewish daughters are represented as both sacrificial and resistant agents of cultural change. She provides compelling readings both of lesser-known texts (such as The Historie of Jacob and Esau) and of more canonical pieces (such as The Merchant of Venice) and is careful to qualify her argument where evidence is more suggestive than conclusive. Especially in the chapter on George Buchanan's Jephthes Sive Votum Tragoedia, she resists the impulse to come up with ‘a tidy conclusion’ (p. 91). While perhaps less provocative as a result, this should be seen as a critically expansive move. Indeed, her comparative analyses of biblical texts and exegesis, stage plays and royal pageants demonstrate convincingly the many ways Jewish women were made to represent a ‘crisis about scriptural interpretation’ (p. 7) and the Queen's role in mediating it. Building on significant studies of Jews and Judaic scriptural influence in England by Debora Shuger, James Shapiro, and Lisa Lampert, Ephraim's argument contributes important observations about the sexual, political, and religious significations of Jewish women on the Elizabethan stage.
