Abstract
Shakespeare is sometimes blamed because he expected woman to be beautiful and biddable in a male-dominated world. How unreasonable of him! His heroines, we are told, perpetuate the male myth of woman, as sanctified by the Bible and the marriage-vows of the Church of England; in so far as his feminine ideal was imprinted upon the consciousness of Europe, and later of the world, he was at least as guilty of the enslavement of woman as St Paul, who wrote that ‘the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church’ (Ephesians 5:23).
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Reference
See Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience (ed. 1961) pp. 76–7.
See A. L. Rowse, Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age: Simon Forman (1974).
Quoted from Joseph G. Price, The Unfortunate Comedy: a study of ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’and its critics (Liverpool, 1968) p. 41.
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© 1989 E. A. J. Honigmann
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Honigmann, E.A.J. (1989). All’s Well That Ends Well: a ‘feminist’ play. In: Myriad-minded Shakespeare. Contemporary Interpretations of Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19814-6_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19814-6_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-19816-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-19814-6
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