1. The argument here formed part of a paper, " Othello and the Politics of Character," which I delivered at the University of Santiago de Compostella in 1987; it has been published in Manuel Barbeito, ed., In Mortal Shakespeare: Radical Readings (Santiago: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 1989). The problem I have in mind has been observed by Lena Cowen Orlin in a paper, "Desdemona's Disposition," which she has kindly allowed me to see; it was delivered to the Shakespeare Association of America in 1987. See also Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds., Rewriting the Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 141; Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 149-52; Dympna Callaghan, Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1989), pp. 91-93, pp. 116-17; and ch. 8.

2. Othello is quoted from the New Arden edition, ed. M. R. Ridley (London: Methuen, 1962).

3. Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), p. 195; cf. p. 327. Marvin Rosenberg says Desdemona has been seen as "a silly fool; an indelicate wanton; loving unnaturally; a sinful daughter; a deceiver; a moral coward; too gentle; a saint; a symbol" ( The Masks of Othello [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971], p. 305).

4. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night , ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975), 2.4.115; see Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters , 2d ed. (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 181-93.

5. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 149

6. Leonard Tennenhouse observes: "Shakespeare does not differ from Iago in terms of the basis upon which gender distinctions should be made" ( Power on Display [London: Methuen, 1986], p. 126). See also Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 68; McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists , p. 150.

7. Janet Adelman, "'This Is and Is Not Cressid': The Characterisation of Cressida," in Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether, eds., The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), p. 140. However, Adelman believes that Desdemona "remains a vigorous and independent character, larger than Othello's fantasies of her" (p. 140).

8. Sigmund Freud, "Some Character-Types Met within Psycho-Analytic Work" (1916), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works , ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), pp. 318-19;

reprinted in Alan Sinfield, ed., "Macbeth": A New Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1992).

9. E.g. A. W. Verity, ed., Macbeth (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1902, reprinted twenty-two times by 1952), pp. xxx-xxxiii. More recently, see Juliet Dusiberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975); Joan Larsen Klein, "Lady Macbeth: 'Infirm of purpose,'" in Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, eds., The Woman's Part (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 241-44; David Norbrook, " Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography," in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Univ. of California Press, 1987), p. 104. However, Simon Shepherd turns the argument around, suggesting that Lady Macbeth mistakenly imagines that she must kill off the female in herself in order to be the partner Macbeth needs: her tragedy derives from this confusing of social and biological definitions of maleness ( Amazons and Warrior Women [Brighton: Harvester, 1981], pp. 38-39). Tennenhouse avoids "ascribing a psychological cause" to the presentation of Lady Macbeth ( Power on Display, p. 128), and Jardine regards her as frankly incredible, a ''nightmare" ( Still Harping, pp. 97-98).

10. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930; London: Methuen, 1949), p. 11. Cf. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904; London: Macmillan, 1957).

11. L. C. Knights, "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" (1933), in Knights, Explorations (London: Chatto, 1946).

12. Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (1930; London, Methuen, 1961), p. vii; M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions in Elizabethan Tragedy (1935; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 50, 54. On these earlier critics, see pp. 109-10, and John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 9-12, 18-22.

13. Barbara Everett, Young Hamlet: Essays in Shakespeare's Tragedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 103.

14. John Bayley, Shakespeare and Tragedy (London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 184, 164-66.

15. See Lenz, Greene, and Neely, Woman's Part ; Irene G. Dash, Wooing, Wedding and Power (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1981). I have addressed aspects of this approach in chapter 2.

16. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance , p. 327.

17. Jonathan Goldberg, "Shakespearean Inscriptions: The Voicing of Power," in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 118-19.

18. Catherine Belsey, "Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies," in Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares , pp. 187-88; Julia Kristeva, "Women's Time," Signs 7 (1981): 13-35.

19. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), pp. 25, 79-80, 82; see also pp. 42-43.

20. William Nigel Dodd, "Metalanguage and Character in Drama," Lingua e Stile 14 (1979): 135-50, pp. 136, 143-44; alluding to Peter Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1956),

ch. 1. Dodd also discusses "out of character" speech to the audience, and ambiguous instances.

21. Belsey, Subject of Tragedy , p. 38 and ch. 2, with reference to Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI , ed. Andrew S. Cairncross (London: Methuen, 1964), 5.6.80-91.

22. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 31, 35-38. I discuss Hamlet partly in this light in chapter 9 below.

23. Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), p. 81, and ch. 3.

24. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy , 2d ed., p. xxxii; and see ch. 10.

25. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy , p. 7.

26. Jacqueline Rose, "Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure, " in Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, p. 102.

27. Cf. Belsey, Subject of Tragedy, pp. 47, 51; McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists , p. 136 and ch. 6. For another argument about the realism of Shakespeare's characters, see A. D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis (London and New York: Methuen, 1983), pp. 80-100, 163-81. Nuttall allows my position when he acknowledges that Jack the Giant Killer is not real like Falstaff (p. 100), but I think he would disagree with me on how far Shakespearean characters are like Jack the Giant Killer.

28. Twelfth Night, New Arden ed., 2.1; 3.3; 3.4.356-79; 5.1.74-90, 216-26. Molly M. Mahood concludes her introduction to the New Penguin edition of the play (Harmondsworth, 1968) with the suggestion that Antonio's is "the true voice of feeling" and perhaps a "rare revelation" of Shakespeare's "personal experience" (p. 39).

29. Orgel, "Nobody's Perfect: Or, Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?" South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 7-29; Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Representing the English Renaissance" (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. 36.

30. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 67-68.

31. E.g., Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 207-9. According to Kahn, the play ends with "men and women truly knowing themselves through choosing and loving the right mate" (p. 211). However, Olivia is appreciated as the principal threat to gender hierarchy in the play by Jean Howard, "Crossdressing, the Theater and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England," Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 418-40. For the view that Viola is no real challenge, see also Clara Clairborne Park, "As We Like It: How a Girl Can Be Smart and Still Popular," in Lenz, Greene, and Neely, Woman's Part , p. 108 et passim.

32. E.g., Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 47-48.

33. See Jardine, Still Harping , pp. 78-80, 84-88, on some of the circumstances in which women might inherit and achieve some independence. I disagree with Stephen Greenblatt's expectation that courtship should be facilitated by the absence of males with whom Orsino would otherwise nego-

tiate; the play shows the opposite—that Orsino's courtship suffers from the absence of a sympathetic male to dominate Olivia on his behalf ( Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 68-69). Compare Portia in The Merchant of Venice, who is controlled by her father even after his death.

34. E.g. Richard P. Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 102; Howard, "Crossdressing," p. 432.

35. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, p. 238. See also Tennenhouse, Power on Display, pp. 63-68.

36. Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies,'" p. 41.

37. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., The Selected Plays of John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), 1.1.7-9.

38. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 244-45. Psychoanalytic criticism is likely to be reactionary here. For instance: " Twelfth Night traces the evolution of sexuality as related to identity, from the playful and unconscious toyings of youthful courtship, through a period of sexual confusion, to a final thriving in which swagger is left behind and men and women truly know themselves through choosing and loving the right mate"—so Kahn, Man's Estate , pp. 210-11.

39. Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (St Albans, Herts.: Paladin, 1974), pp. 76-79.

40. Callaghan, Woman and Gender , pp. 74-75 and ch. 5; see Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production , trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978); McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists , p. 154.

41. See V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language , trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York and London: Seminar Press, 1973), pp. 17-24, 95-106.

42. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes , trans. Timothy O'Hagan (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 207.

43. See William Witherle Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (1931; New York: Ungar, 1960); E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (London: Chatto, 1950); F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 169. The ending, Leavis continues, is "marvellously adroit, with an adroitness that expresses, and derives from, the poet's sure human insight and his fineness of ethical and poetic sensibility."

44. On the interinvolvement of the elements in a binary stereotype, see Homi Bhabha, "The Other Question," Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 18-36, p. 34; and Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture , pp. 116-21.

45. Jardine, Still Harping , pp. 75, 119-20, 184-85. See Orlin, "Desdemona's Disposition"; McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists , pp. 150-51.

46. Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies , pp. 128-30; see Measure for Measure , ed. J. W. Lever (London: Methuen, 1965), 5.1.95-104. Steven Mullaney argues that having to speak as Mariana helps Isabella internalize Angelo's view of her ( The Place of the Stage [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988], pp. 108-11).

47. Callaghan, Woman and Gender , p. 67.

48. Edward A. Snow, "Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello," English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 384-412.

49. Quoted by Karen Newman, "Femininity and Monstrosity in Othello ," in Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds., Shakespeare Reproduced (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 152.

50. On Adams, see Alfred Van Rensselaer Westfall, American Shakespearean Criticism, 1607-1865 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1939), pp. 224-26; and see Allan Bloom, Shakespeare's Politics (1964; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), ch. 3. An alternative, of course, is to deny that Othello is really black: so Henry N. Hudson, replying to Adams (see Westfall, pp. 252-53), and M. R. Ridley in the introduction to the New Arden edition of Othello , pp. l-liv.

51. Peter Stallybrass, " Macbeth and Witchcraft," in John Russell Brown, ed., Focus on "Macbeth" (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 198. According to the historians Boece and Buchanan, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth did have a son and he was killed by Macduff, David Norbrook points out (" Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography," p. 89).

52. See Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture , pp. 116-21; and on Man, Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy , 2d ed. (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), chs. 10, 16.