ABSTRACT
Lizbeth Goodman in her essay 'Women's Alternative Shakespeares and Women's Alternatives to Shakespeare in Contemporary British Theater', claims that in Shakespeare there are comparatively few parts for women and these are mostly supporting roles, not leading ones (Goodman, 206). I found myself involuntarily protesting against this pronouncement, only to realise I was fresh from yet another close reading of Anna Jameson's Characteristics of Women (1832) in which both power and dominance had been granted even to such apparently 'negligible' female roles as those of Ophelia in Hamlet, Miranda in The Tempest and Perdita in The Winter's Tale. As Nina Auerbach points out, Anna Jameson was the first writer within a tradition of Shakespearean criticism, to free the women in Shakespeare's plays completely, both from their marginalisation within the predominantly male criticisms of the texts, and from their domination by the heroes and plots within the plays. Auerbach writes: 'Jameson's colony of mythic women frees its heroines from the plays in which they are generally subordinate to the heroes and the demands of the plot ... allowing them to exist perenially in the conditional tense. "In the convent ... Isabella would not have been unhappy"' (Auerbach, 211). Contemporary critics while also noting this phenomenon did not find it nearly as acceptable as Auerbach does. An 1855 review of Jameson's Commonplace Book titled 'Writings of Mrs. Jameson' in the Gentleman's Magazine asks of her Characteristics of Women: 'Her women - ... are they Shakespeare's women? Beautiful creations as they are, we thank her for them, but to us they seem HERS rather than HIS' ('Writings of Mrs. Jameson', 133).
