ABSTRACT
For approximately the last two decades, feminist criticism has provided an invaluable discourse for understanding and appreciating Shakespeare’s plays and poems. To be sure, pro-feminist interpretations of Shakespeare and other Renaissance texts can be found long before this. In 1589, Jane Angar’s Protection of Women protested both "Euphemism (male-controlled discourse) and men’s unfounded notions about women," according to Simon Shepard (1981, item 166). Since 1700, there have been numerous appreciations of Shakespeare’s women, both for their imaginative and their intellectual powers. In his Notes on Othello (1765), Dr. Johnson observed: " ... the soft simplicity of Desdemona, confident of merit, and conscious of innocence, her artless perseverance in her suit, and her slowness to suspect that she can be suspected, are such proof of Shakespeare’s skill in human nature, as I suppose, it is vain to seek in any modern writer." In our own century, George Bernard Shaw, who envisioned himself a feminist advocate, denounced Shakespeare’s Shrew (see Lise Pedersen, 1977, item 50) and thought he could improve upon Antony and Cleopatra. A plethora of studies from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s have assessed the female character types that Shakespeare drew upon, as illustrated by Celeste Turner Wright’s article on "The Amazons in Elizabethan Literature" (Studies in Philology 37 [1940]: 433-56).
