Shakespeare and the Nature of Women

Shakespeare and The Nature of Women, first published in 1975, inaugurated a new wave of feminist scholarship. It claimed that Shakespeare's plays offered a sustained critique of inherited male thinking about women, theological, literary and social. The book argued that the presence of the boy actor in Shakespeare's theatre created an awareness of gender as performance. Almost thirty years on, it continues to be the corner-stone of writing about women in this period and the spring-board for new research.