What Do You Do With a Woman Warrior?: A Response to “‘Effeminate Dayes’”
Rackin, Phyllis
Early Modern Culture, No. 1 (2000)
Abstract
Banks and Holderness make a convincing argument that recent scholarship has probably overestimated both the oppression of women in Shakespeare’s world and the disempowerment of female characters on his stage. The paying customers in the playhouse included women as well as men, and even in the English history plays, Shakespeare often expanded the official story to make room for female characters and female speech (¶13; cf. Stages, ch. 4, Engendering, ch. 11). As they remind us, Shakespeare’s original audiences must have enjoyed the playful “effeminate” pleasures exemplified by the Welsh scenes in Henry IV (¶14; cf. Stages, pp. 170-74).
Their argument — that although “re-enactments of ‘our forefathers valiant actes’ may indeed have provided a contrasting source for the effeminate present . . . it was a present which many women and men must certainly have preferred” — transvalues Nashe’s nostalgic binary opposition between a heroic past and a degenerate, effeminate present, but does not displace it. For Banks and Holderness, the warlike past that Shakespeare found in the chronicles remains “masculine,” but it is now “brutal” rather than “heroic”; and the modern pleasures of peace and play remain “effeminate,” but are now exemplified by a “romantic scene of warriors and wives” invented by Shakespeare, which “counteracts the grotesque impression of women in the official record of events” (¶14). It seems to me that there is a good deal more ambivalence both in the historical record and in Shakespeare’s history plays than either Nashe or Banks and Holderness allow for and also that the picture becomes more complicated if we look beyond the Shakespearean text.
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