Over the last quarter-century, feminist criticism of Shakespeare has greatly expanded and enriched the range of interpretations of the Shakespearean texts, their original historical location, and subsequent reinterpretation. Characteristically, it weaves between past and present, driven by a commitment to both intervene in contemporary cultural politics and to recover a fuller sense of the sexual politics of the literary heritage. Collecting together essays that offer detailed accounts of particular plays with others that take a broader overview of the field, this New Casebook showcases the...

Moving adroitly between historical context and modern critical problems, this study explores the intertwining of politics, sexuality, and the social order in Measure for Measure.

Voicing Women offers fresh, theoretically inspired readings of women Renaissance writers, as well as detailed critical introductions and notes. It reveals the extent of the material restraints on women's expression in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, illustrating the difficulties faced by women writers and their strategies to overcome them. The use of female voices in male-authored texts and the different ways in which the body is portrayed by male and female writers is discussed in detail, and there are revelations about the religious and political contexts of the women's work. This...