Table of Contents:
  • Notes on contributors
  • Preface to the second edition
  • Introduction
  • Part I. The history of feminist Shakespeare criticism: 1. The ladies' Shakespeare; 2. Margaret Cavendish, Shakespeare critic; 3. Misogyny is everywhere
  • Part II. Text and language: 4. Feminist editing and the body of the text; 5. Made to write 'whore' upon? Male and female use of the word whore in Shakespeare's canon; 6. A word, sweet Lucrece confession, feminism, and The Rape of Lucrece
  • Part III. Social economies: 7. Gender, class, and the ideology of comic form Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night; 8. Gendered gifts in Shakespeare's Belmont: the economies of exchange in early modern England
  • Part IV. The great Indian vanishing trick / colonialism, property, and the family in A Midsummer Night's Dream: 9. Race and colonialism; 10. Black ram, white ewe: Shakespeare, race, and women; 11. Sycorax in Algiers: cultural politics and gynecology in early modern England; 12. Black and white, and dread all over: the Shakespeare Theatre's Photonegative Othello and the body of Desdemona
  • Part V. Performing sexuality: 13. Women and boys playing Shakespeare; 15. Lovesickness, gender, and subjectivity: Twelfth Night and As You Like It; 17. Duncan's corpse
  • Part VI. Religion: 18. Others and lovers in The Merchant of Venice; 19. Between idolatry and astrology: modes of temporal repetition in Romeo and Juliet.
  • Part VII. Character, genre, history: 20. Putting on the destined livery: Isabella, Cressida and our virgin/whore obsession; 21. The virginity dialogue in All's Well That Ends Well: feminism, editing, and adaptation; 22. Competitive mourning and female agency in Richard III; 23. Bearing death in The Winter's Tale; 24. Monarchs who cry: the gendered politics of weeping in the English history play; 25. Shakespeare's women and the crisis of beauty
  • Part VIII. Appropriating women, appropriating Shakespeare: 26. Women and land: Henry VIII; 27. Desdemona: Toni Morrison's response to Othello; 28. Woman-crafted Shakespeares: appropriation, intermediality, and womanist aesthetics; 29. A thousand voices: performing Ariel.