ABSTRACT
The turn in Shakespearean criticism to matters of gender and sexuality takes place, as it does in most fields of literary criticism, around 1980. First conceived as analytical approaches that would enable revisionist accounts of Shakespeare’s texts, activist and resistant perspectives that had recently emerged in feminist and gay rights politics across much of the Western world were taken up by scholars. Groundbreaking books such as Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely’s edited collection The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (1980); Coppélia Kahn’s Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (1981); Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982); and Lisa Jardine’s Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983) initiated a groundswell of critical interest in elucidating representations and interrogations of gender and sex in Shakespeare’s œuvre. This chapter considers the diverse approaches brought to the subjects of gender and sexuality in early modern England at that time and since, and examines how these new seams of critical inquiry brought particular attention to economies of the body. In an attempt to think through why the turn to gender and sexuality continues to exert so much critical influence on scholarship concerned with Shakespeare and his work, our discussion will suggest that it is the complexity of understanding the early modern body and its crucial role as the embodiment of what Jean E. Howard calls “protocapitalist” value(s) that sustains those efforts to apprehend the historical development of sex/gender inequalities in the hopes they will be overturned (Howard 1994: 29).
