Introduction: Shifting Sisters
Author with Themes of Gender/Feminism
Authors who frequently address issues of gender or sexuality in literary works (individual works may also be tagged)
LHMP entry
In contrast with the backstories of cross-dressing women in Shakespearean drama, legal records of women wearing male clothing (either individual garments or complete outfits) were viewed harshly by civic authorities. The chapter opens with an exception: the case of Arabella Stuart cross-dressing to try to evade confinement and escape to the continent in 1611.
Margaret Cavendish was known as a playwright—though for reading consumption rather than stage performance—but not as a theatrical performer herself. But both her plays and her political activity can be seen as having significant overlap in communicating her views and promoting her husband’s positions. Both served as petitions for the ear of those in power to convince them of her opinions and wishes. However, as with the previous article, I feel like this one stretches the scope of the collection beyond what is of interest to my purpose.
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night draws on two prominent motifs of Italian theater: a cross-dressed heroine who provokes female desire, and the ideal of the Italian actress, who combined beauty and rhetorical skill. Shakespeare and other English playwrights backed off somewhat on the lesbian eroticism, but retained the image of a female character claiming power through performance and improvising, as manifested in Viola/Cesario’s ambiguous teasing banter with Olivia.
The premise of this article is that Shakespeare’s Loves Labors Lost is inspired by, and reflects, the prominence of women in Italian theater and in French salons who—as in the play—treated serious philosophical questions via banter and wit. Thus, even with no actual women on stage, Loves Labors Lost creates a strong female presence in English theater. The “French salon culture” of this era refers to the courts of Marguerite de Valois and Catherine de Medici, and predates the era most closely associated with the term “salon” beginning in the later 17th century.
The restoration of Charles II to the English throne brought the return of many royalist supporters from exile – an exile that left psychological marks within the culture they created. Themes of exile and return may have served to create a sense of continuing community that set them apart from those who had remained in England during the interregnum.
This article argues that the writings of Aphra Behn expressed these themes, both explicitly and implicitly, from a gendered perspective, but also in her work Oroonoko using racial passing as a type of exile.
The focus of this article, in Andreadis’s words is “a class of women and behaviors described by their contemporaries in ways that coincide with our modern ‘lesbian’.” There is still much uncertainty within that description as to how these women and their society understood these concepts, and Andreadis’s thesis is that as such behaviors begin to be framed in public discourse as transgressive, women who engaged in the same behaviors but wished to be viewed as “respectable” developed a coded language to express sexual feelings in the language of female friendship – a shift that Andreadis labe
Stepping back from the cynical take on “tender friendship” that developed by the end of the 17th century, this chapter looks at an example of the sincere version, via a deep dive into the life and work of English poet Katherine Philips. Half a century before Manley’s New Cabaland in contrast to Behn’s overt eroticism, Philips represents the “polite” culture of female intimacy...or does she?
When one of my summaries is basically a list of contents, either it means that the publication is really thin on relevant content, or it means that it’s so rich that you simply need to buy the book and put it in a cherished place on your shelf. This one is the latter. At least half the contents apply to women’s experiences (although it’s still true that the male-authored female-relevant content far outnumbers the female-authored male-relevant content) and the collection includes many of the oft-cited texts from the covered period. Far from all, but an excellent place to start.
Lanser opens her article with the bold hypothesis that “in or around 1650, female desire changed.” That there was a conceptual shift in gender relations reflected in literature, politics, religion, and individual behavior in which private intimate relationships between women became part of public life, and that this shift shaped women’s emergence as political subjects claiming equal rights.
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