The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics.

Dympna Callaghan, Lorraine Helms and Jyotsna Singh. Oxford and Cambridge, MA.: Blackwell, 1994. 164 pp. $17.95. ISBN: 0-631-17798-1.

This volume is an impressive addition to recent feminist approaches to the English Renaissance. Taking its title from the witches' description of themselves in Macbeth, The Weyward Sisters constitutes not so much a comprehensive narrative as a series of discrete interventions. Although united by a joint interest in the materiality of Shakespeare's representations of femininity, Callaghan, Helms and Singh discuss their chosen subjects from particularized and contrasting viewpoints. The three essays in the book respectively attend to the figure of the prostitute, the ideology of romantic love, and the gendered dimensions of theatrical performance.

Perhaps the densest essay in terms of its material embeddedness is the first, Jyotsna Singh's "The Interventions of History: Narratives of Sexuality." In this stimulating piece, Singh argues that the repression of female desire is related to the prostitute's sexual labor. Beginning with an exploration of the historical displacements and demonizing attitudes that shaped women's identities in the period, Singh charts intriguing links between male sexuality and female virtue, and the brothel's discursive status and the theater's vexed reputation. It was at the theater, Singh demonstrates, that the contradictions informing the construction of the prostitute could be most fully apprehended. Accordingly, when discussing the drama Singh details the ways in which prostitute types such as Bianca, Mistress Overdone, Mistress Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet make visible the discrepancies inherent in gender roles, and the internal flaws that disrupt the smooth workings of the patriarchal mechanism. Singh's essay stands as a vital appraisal of the contemporary material pressures that assigned and produced sexual subjectivity.

For Dympna Callaghan, in "The Ideology of Romantic Love: The Case of Romeo and Juliet," a crucial partnership is shared between cultural embodiments of desire and nascent capitalism. Keen to develop alliances between apparently disparate disciplines, Callaghan shrewdly assesses some of the difficulties accompanying an unmediated reliance upon psychoanalysis and history before proceeding to her central thesis. Just as a unitary conception of "history" needs to be replaced by a more nuanced sense of contending "histories," so does Romeo and Juliet express not one ideal of romantic love but multiple discourses of desire. In the play, a range of constructions of sexuality jostles for prominence, an insight that allows Callaghan to read "desire," and its malleable properties, as key elements in women's material subordination.

In Lorraine Helms's "Acts of Resistance: The Feminist Player," material questions are extended to embrace the politics of early modern and twentieth-century theatrical convention. "In the theater, does the text belong to Ulysses or Cressida?" and "Does the actress enjoy trans-historical privileges?" are some of the questions with which Helms begins. Answers are forthcoming in the fine analysis of the social and sexual hierarchies involved in the performative experience. Concentrating on speeches from 1 Henry VI, Othello, Troilus and Cressida and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Helms locates in scenes of clowning and "gestic" manipulation a female "presentational counter-voice." By reading a number of Shakespearean moments against the grain, Helms agitates for a transformatory and theatrically active feminist practice.

The Weyward Sisters represents, then, an invigorating collective venture. The book furnishes an array of rich observations, which are nowhere more evident than in the discussions of editorial tradition and historical scholarship. A uniquely co-authored undertaking in Shakespearean studies, it addresses many of the issues neglected by an earlier historiography while also recognizing the singularity of specialized interpretations. The successful fusion of several methodological perspectives finally has important pedagogical implications: The Weyward Sisters sets high standards for the teaching and researching of the English Renaissance, and future reconfigurations of the period will find themselves much in the authors' debt.

MARK THORNTON BURNETT The Queen's University of Belfast