ABSTRACT
The first wave of twentieth-century feminist Shakespeare criticism focused on the comedies, especially the ones with cross-dressed heroines, to theorize a theater in which female spectators could find liberating images of powerful, attractive women who violated gender restrictions and were rewarded for those violations with admiration, love, and marriage-a Utopian fantasy in which gender identity was as changeable as the theatrical costumes that transformed boy actors into female characters. The romantic comedies were doubly satisfying to these feminist critics because they answered desires for personal liberation without disturbing the dominant gender ideology of our own time. The stories they told resolved early modern social conflicts in marriage; and in so doing, they also helped to produce the modern ideological construction of heterosexual passion as the basis for the ideal nuclear family, held together by the love between husband and wife, the avenue for personal self-fulfillment and the foundation for the good order of society. In recent years, feminists have considerably revised this early account of the comedies, recognizing the sobering persistence within them of patriarchal power, the temporary nature of the heroines’ holiday freedoms, and the price which heterosexual marriage usually exacts from women at the plays’ ends. Nonetheless, Shakespearean comedy is still generally viewed as the genre with the fullest roles for women and the most optimistic view of their autonomy and power.
