Women's matters

This study reframes and reassesses longstanding questions about politics in the history plays of William Shakespeare in order to take into account attitudes toward ruling and unruly women in late sixteenth-century England. Exploring these plays within their historical and political contexts, Levine brings to bear on questions of politics an array of contemporary materials: Tudor chronicles, polemical tracts, apocalyptic history, succession debates, and court pageantry. Reading the playtexts alongside these "sources," she attends to the ways in which Shakespeare's staging of gender interprets - and adjudicates - differences between chronicle history and the concerns of the nation-state in the 1590s. In using feminist political analysis to open up the complexities of these early plays, Levine also demonstrates the value of reconsidering works that have long been marginalized in Shakespeare studies.