Unsex Me Here : Female power in Shakespearean tragedy

Recent new historicist accounts of the theatricality of power in early modern culture have often neglected issues of gender and sexuality despite the fact of four decades of female rule and the pervasiveness of images of female sexuality in cultural discourses on theatricality and power. This study of four early Jacobean Shakespearean tragedies--Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus--reveals intimate connections between early modern culture\u27s conceptions of power and its notions of female sexuality. Specifically, early modern constructions of the state as a family together with the concept and practice of a theatrical monarchy aligns the women in these tragedies with contemporary definitions and practices of power. In addition, reading these plays against a variety of other cultural discourses on women reveals glaring contradictions between various discourses on women and the possibilities for female power signalled by those inconsistencies. Reversing current notions of discontinuous identity or postmodern subjectivity as disempowering in denying agency, this dissertation seeks to redefine female agency and asserts that the intrinsic contradictions in representations of women open up the possibilities for female power. By highlighting their constructedness as theatrical creations, the discontinuities inherent in female characters in these plays signals a subversive site for empowerment in a culture which saw inconsistency and theatricality as constitutive of power