ABSTRACT
Feminist readings of English Renaissance drama invite us to understand the feminine in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as “a principle of Otherness,” which is “always something unlike and external to the Self, who is male.”1 In particular, the Renaissance assumption that language itself is fundamentally masculine would appear to foreclose the possibility that the speech acts of women can ever do more than ratify the superior verbal authority of men. At the same time, as Elizabeth Harvey has shown in her discussion of appropriations of female voices by male authors in non-dramatic English texts, a significant phenomenon in classical and Renaissance literature is the production of texts that “although written by male authors . . . are voiced by female characters in a way that seems either to erase the gender of the authorial voice or to thematize the transvestitism of this process.” This phenomenon, which Harvey calls “transvestite ventriloquism,” “accentuates the issues of gender, voice, and authorial property in ways that illuminate . . . Renaissance conceptions of language and their relation to the gendered subject.”2 In this discussion, I propose to explore the way in which Shakespeare constructs a heroine whose eloquence surpasses that of the male characters and who deploys that eloquence in order to establish her own and, by extension, other women’s discursive authority. In doing so, I will also be posing the riddle of a male author’s privileging a female voice as a comedic strategy.
