A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare.

Hopkins, Lisa

Edited by Dympna C. Callaghan Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000

The idea of a feminist companion to Shakespeare is an attractive one, and it has resulted in an attractive volume, pleasingly substantial and handsomely packaged. Dympna Callaghan sets the tone strongly in her introduction, where she comments that "this volume aims to push ahead with uncomfortable questions rather than to offer reassuring answers" (xiii), and concludes by observing that the last essay of the volume, Philippa Berry's "Between Idolatry and Astrology: Modes of Temporal Repetition in Romeo and Juliet," suggests the distance feminism has traveled from `images of women' "(xxix). Indeed, what primarily characterizes these essays is their diversity and the extent of the terrain they traverse: feminism is by no means all that is touched on here.

It is a pity that Callaghan, a very fine critic, did not provide an essay herself, but there is still much to enjoy. The best essays are driven not by ideology but by close, detailed observations of individual texts, and paradoxically tend to offer arguments that look, at the outset, like the precise inverse of those more traditionally associated with cruder and earlier kinds of feminist criticism. Thus, Katherine M. Romack's subtle "Margaret Cavendish, Shakespeare Critic" argues that Cavendish herself was in fact antifeminist, and Phyllis Rackin in "Misogyny is Everywhere" refreshingly and provocatively argues that "reminders that women were expected to be chaste, silent, and obedient probably occur more frequently in recent scholarship than they did in the literature of Shakespeare's time" (44). Mihoko Suzuki observantly compares the treatment of gender and class in Much Ado Abut Nothing and Twelfth Night with that in Arden of Faversham and A Warning for Fair Women, while Rachana Sachdev interestingly analyzes travel writings in conjunction with medical knowledge, particularly that centered on the practice of female circumcision, with special reference to The Tempest. Her argument ultimately becomes tendentious, but this is full of fascinating incidental facts and observations. Susan Zimmerman is equally fascinating on corpses and corpse lore in relation to Macbeth, and M. Lindsay Kaplan neatly and suggestively reads Jewishness and femininity against each other in The Merchant of Venice.

Other essays form pairs, and though it is clear that in some cases this cannot have been originally intended, it nevertheless leads to some suggestive conjunctions. Thus Margo Hendricks's" `A word, sweet Lucrece': Confession, Feminism, and The Rape of Lucrece," which has a particularly interesting section on confession, forms a neat twin with Joyce Green MacDonald's wide-ranging and subtle "Black Ram, White Ewe: Shakespeare, Race, and Women," and Jyotsna Singh's analysis of gift-giving in The Merchant of Venice sits well alongside Ania Loomba's stylish and sophisticated discussion of "The Great Indian Vanishing Trick--Colonialism, Property, and the family in A Midsummer Night's Dream." And there is a neat irony in having Denise Albanese's attack on Jude Kelly's photonegative Othello followed by Juliet Dusinberre's suggestion of universal cross-dressing. In conjunctions like this, this volume becomes more than the sum of its parts.

LISA HOPKINS is Reader in English at Sheffield Hallam University. Her most recent publication is Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life (2000). She is presently at work on a book called Shakespeare on the Edge.