Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy: A Study of King Lear, Othello, the Duchess of Malfi and the White Devil

by Dympna Callaghan

Drawing on recent developments in critical and psychoanalytic theory, this feminist study offers a radical reading of gender in Renaissance tragedy by looking at constructions of the category "woman" through language, ideology and subjectivity, thereby challenging the notion that key heroines of 16th- and 17th-century drama can be seen as representations of Renaissance womankind.

Genres: Nonfiction

187 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1989

About the author

Dr. Dympna C. Callaghan is Professor of English at Syracuse University. Her expertise is in the playwrights and poets of the English Renaissance. She was President of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2012-13.

Callaghan has held fellowships at the Folger, Huntington, and Newberry Libraries, at the Getty Research Centrer in Los Angeles, and at the Bogliasco Center for Arts and Humanities in Liguria, Italy. She is a member of the editorial team of A/S/I/A, the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive and and co-editor of the Palgrave Shakespeare book series.

Reviews

[Molières · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating, lucid deconstruction of the fundamental “other” of Renaissance tragedy. Especially interesting exploration of the idealisation and denigration of women serving to uneasily maintain a status quo within the tragic play- the feminine ideal best represented as voiceless and eventually dead.

“The possibility of the dislocation of gender difference necessitates an endless reiteration of the discourses… constructing a category of woman that is always placed just outside it, at the point of tragic transgression.”