Almost fifty years have passed since Juliet Dusinberre’s Shakespeare and the Nature of Women ‘officially’ inaugurated feminist Shakespeare scholarship in 1975, and this school of criticism continues to be a productive and influential approach, granting a by now widespread gender-conscious way of selecting, rewriting, editing, reading, performing, teaching and investigating Shakespeare’s work.
Focusing on women’s voices and silences, from an intercultural and intersectional perspective, this issue aims on the one hand at contributing to Christina Luckyj’s goal ‘to make it more difficult to refer unthinkingly to early modern women as ‘chaste, silent and obedient’ (‘A Moving Rhetoricke’. Gender and Silence in Early Modern England, 2002:7), thus challenging what Phyllis Rackin calls ‘the pervasive scholarly investment in Renaissance misogyny’ (“Misogyny Is Everywhere”, in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan, 2016:62). On the other, it intends to shed new light on the remarkable but often neglected voices (and or silences) of women in crucial areas of Shakespeare’s afterlife, such as criticism, translations, and editions of his work.
We are interested in papers of 5,000-6,000 words on topics including, but not limited to: the role of women in Shakespearean criticism; women editors of Shakespeare; feminist takes on Shakespeare; film and performance studies; character analysis; models of femininity; pragma-stylistic studies of female strategies; women translating Shakespeare’s work.
Authors are invited to register and upload their submissions by the deadline of 30 June 2023. Early submissions are welcome and will expedite the reviewing process. Only papers fully complying with what is required by the Journal (see Guidelines) will undergo the double-blind peer review process.