Women of will : following the feminine in Shakespeare's plays
/ Tina Packer.
- First edition.
- New York : Alfred A. Knopf , 2015
- 312 pages ; 25 cm
A Borzoi book.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-312).
Tina Packer offers an exploration - fierce, funny, fearless - of the women of Shakespeare's plays. A profound, and profoundly illuminating, book that gives us the playwright's changing understanding of the feminine and reveals some of his deepest insights. Packer constructs a radically different understanding of power, sexuality, and redemption. Beginning with the early comedies ( The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors ), Packer shows that Shakespeare wrote the women of these plays as shrews to be tamed or as sweet little things with no definable independent thought, virgins on the pedestal. The women of the histories (the three parts of Henry VI ; Richard III ) are, much more interesting, beginning with Joan of Arc, possibly the first woman character Shakespeare ever created. As Packer turns her attention to the extraordinary Juliet, the author perceives a large shift. Suddenly Shakespeare's women have depth of character, motivation, understanding of life more than equal to that of the men; once Juliet has led the way, the plays are never the same again. As Shakespeare ceases to write about women as predictable caricatures and starts writing them from the inside, embodying their voices, his women become as dimensional, spirited, spiritual, active, and sexual as any of his male characters. Packer shows that Shakespeare's imagination, mirrored and revealed in his female characters, develops and deepens until finally the women, his creative knowledge, and a sense of a larger spiritual good come together in the late plays, making clear that when women and men are equal in status and sexual passion, they can - and do - change the world.