Are women capable of free choice in a society that denies them full personhood? This question, so central to feminist thought, has produced few satisfactory answers. In historical scholarship, women tend to appear as either exploited objects or rebellious subjects, victims of false consciousness or visionaries, silenced or uppity. Kathryn Schwarz's new book challenges these worn-out dichotomies by asking what it means for a woman to conform willingly to social conventions. What You Will approaches this question by looking at early modern conceptions of will—as a gendered and eroticized term, as a faculty of choice grounding political and social institutions, and as the playful, punning nickname of Will Shakespeare. The first half of the book is a far-reaching investigation of early modern theoretical frameworks, encompassing psychology, rhetoric, and gender. The second half turns to moments in Shakespeare's works when female figures enthusiastically embrace their sexually normative roles. Through this study, Schwarz uncovers a central paradox of female agency: women may be the most threatening when they are actively and enthusiastically conventional.

Schwarz approaches her subject using feminist/queer models of agency such as Foucault's “discipline” and Butler's “performativity” alongside early modern considerations of “will.” In her first chapter, she addresses the gendered language of Renaissance faculty psychology, which frequently personified the will as a feminine figure bound to obey her “husband” reason yet likely to be seduced by the wayward forces of passion or sensation. Schwarz observes that the function of this feminized will, which must convert the mandates of reason into outward action, mimics that of women, who translate the abstract demands of “heterosocial ideology” into the material production of offspring. Through their gendered personifications of will, early modern writers dramatized the central role feminine choice and desire play in the work of social/sexual reproduction. As Schwarz elaborates in her next chapter, on early modern rhetorical theory, female personifications of the will reveal the fundamentally metanymic significance of women, who participate in a network of relationships that reproduce the patrilineal order while also standing for sexual difference itself. The feminine will, as metonym, is for Schwarz “a figure that condenses the meaning of a system, and a drive that presses meaning beyond systemic constraints,” making women “signs of an order their significance exceeds” (61). Schwarz's third chapter then traces how misogynist discourse attempts to limit women's signifying power while also acknowledging that any attempt to eradicate the “feminine will would require an intrasocial bloodbath” (80).

The second half of the book, devoted to Shakespeare, offers exemplary moments of what Schwarz terms “volitional acquiescence,” in which “subjects . . . recognize and choose the roles into which they are prescribed” (26). In her chapter on the later sonnets, Schwarz offers a refreshing corrective to the critical commonplace that the genre objectifies the female mistress. Schwarz argues that by making “Will” a character, Shakespeare's sonnets create a female object “who knows what objectification means, and who thus unsettles the assumption that feminine sexuality is embedded in women but controlled by men” (136). The Dark Lady's “willful seeming” (139) reveals “autonomous masculinity as an untenable state. To be a man is to be a man with a woman; homosociality still works, but it does not work alone” (142). Lear, in turn, dramatizes what happens when the will is released from this homosocial frame: when Lear undermines his own sovereign authority, he sets feminine will loose “to circulate on its own terms” (201), unleashing the misogynist nightmare that is Goneril and Regan. More subversive than these villainesses, however, is Cordelia's choice to uphold the logic of contract—“I love your majesty/According to my bond”—in the midst of a crisis of authority. Once Lear has disowned Cordelia, her choice to go through with the marriage to France “unmoors her will from masculine decree” (187), exposing the unsettling role of female agency in maintaining the social order.

While Schwarz's Lear chapter illuminates a paradox of volition—that the will is “free” only to bind itself into contracts—missing (here, as well as in other chapters on Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well) is the historical dimension of this conundrum of agency. Cordelia's refusal of her father's exchange of love for land is also a refusal of a recognizably modern view of consent (well described by Victoria Kahn) in which emotions dictate rather than follow from contractual obligations. Much that remains obscure in What You Will could have been clarified with a greater focus on such historical dimensions of contract. According to Schwarz, “[A] basic premise of patrilineal order” is that “cultural self-perpetuation relies on feminine sexual choice”—a statement “obvious enough to go without saying” (4). The conclusion was not obvious to this reader, given the subtle and not so subtle forms of coercion that keep women in their place. Schwarz's assertion makes sense, however, in light of the Western marriage contract, which (in theory, sometimes) entails female consent. By making explicit the role of marriage in evolving notions of sexual contract, Schwarz could have strengthened her claim that “women act within a paradigm that cannot exclude their volition without making nonsense of itself” (33).

A better account of the historical stakes might also have justified why, in a study of feminine volition, Schwarz chose to focus on Shakespeare, while paying scant attention to other, especially female, literary writers. She explains, “Shakespeare highlights the intersection of established forms and volatile dynamics, through works that construct a belated relationship to generic conventions, and through the acute angles that link an idea of Shakespeare to Shakespearean texts” (17). But she does not explain how Shakespeare's treatment of genre is more pertinent than, say, that of Elizabeth Cary, whose Tragedy of Mariam questions whether a woman can willfully adhere to ideals of female virtue. It would be difficult, however, to anticipate all the ramifications of a study of such striking originality and ambition of Schwarz's book, which boldly asks how “small everyday acts . . . construct some link between absolute authority and individual meaning” to open up “a space in which subjection cannot be detached entirely from effective intent” (29). Facing this pressing yet seemingly intractable theoretical problem, What You Will delivers some fascinating solutions.