Material girls: Gender and property in Shakespeare

Both legal and literary discourses register the conflicts and issues current in a culture. However, while law is written to order society, literary narratives, especially drama, are often disruptive, offering subversive alternatives to the dominant hegemony. English Land Law prescribed all land tenures, inheritance practices, and distribution of marriage property provisions in England throughout the Renaissance and early modern years. William Shakespeare used England\u27s most native law to structure plot, to represent character, to redefine genre, and to orient his earliest audiences to their own milieu within the world of the play. For Shakespeare\u27s contemporary playgoers Land Law functioned as a signifying system, grounding these audiences in familiar territory while the play transported them to other cultures, other times. For example, Shakespeare\u27s use of Land Law in Antony and Cleopatra--a play of forty-seven scenes that move from Egypt to Rome and back--directed his seventeenth-century playgoers to identify their own fierce land market in the barter of countries and continents by the triumvirate. Using Land Law as an integral discourse in his texts, Shakespeare was able to make all politics--from the marriage market of Padua to Caesar\u27s world conquests--local politics for his contemporary audience. Land Law functions clearly in Shakespeare\u27s construction of female characters, defining them according to the legal material laws that restricted actual early modern English women. Some female Shakespearean characters, such as Isabella in Measure for Measure, conform to the economically passive role that Land Law prescribed. Others do not. Early in the pastoral As You Like It, Rosalind recognizes the legal alternatives she must act on to regain her inheritance and direct it to her line of descent. Understanding Land Law, the discourse so integral to the legal material culture that produced Shakespeare\u27s plays, culminates in this study\u27s fresh readings of five Shakespearean texts: As You Like It, Measure for Measure, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew, and Antony and Cleopatra