"your 'if' is the only peacemaker": the rhetoric of women's self-defense in Shakespeare's plays

Female characters and other socially subordinate characters in Shakespeare’s plays frequently use a particular conditional construction when speaking in self-defense. Their swearing takes a form similar to: "If I am guilty, then may terrible things happen to me" or "if I am guilty, then there is little goodness in the world." Shakespeare’s female characters use the conditional to couch their speech in deferential terms, which allows them to make otherwise unacceptable brazen assertions that contradict men in power. In this study, I examine the use of this construction in Shakespeare’s plays by Katherine and Buckingham in Henry VIII, Othello in Othello, Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. The heroines are talkative and rhetorically skilled, but their supposedly transgressive speech does not signify promiscuity or lack of virtue, as early modern discourses about female virtue, chastity, speech, and authority say it should. Shakespeare’s female characters successfully use rhetoric to recuperate their reputations and to expose the injustice of their male accusers. They are no less proficient rhetors than their male counterparts and use the same conditional construction that men sometimes use effectively in self-defense. Yet women cannot persuade the men in charge to alter their judgments when such a success would constitute a social change. Their failure is not due to any rhetorical deficiency; it indicates Shakespeare’s resistance to accepting the early modern notion that rhetoric gives people power to climb the social ladder, make social change, and even topple the powers that be. Rhetoric has the power to achieve its main goal and persuade, even on a large scale, but not, as some early modern scholars thought, to greatly increase a rhetor’s power or to change the world with victory after victory. If becomes Shakespeare’s way of acknowledging these characters’ subordinate positions but turning them into opportunities for eloquence; the powerless, regardless of gender, can speak just as well as the powerful and can skillfully use deferential language to express strong, brazen disagreement peacefully. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries