Women's Matters: Politics, Gender and Nation in Shakespeare's Early History Plays.

Nina S. Levine. Women's Matters: Politics, Gender and Nation in Shakespeare's Early History Plays.

Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998. 193 pp. $36. ISBN: 0-87413-654-7.

In her thoughtful and tightly-argued book Women's Matters, Nina S. Levine scouts out a viable direction for the next wave of feminist criticism in early modern studies. In the past few years, Barbara Hodgdon, Leah Marcus, Phyllis Rackin, Jean Howard, and others have engaged in especially fruitful dialogues on the role of gender in Shakespeare's history plays to establish, beyond a doubt, the centrality of women characters in what would seem to be traditionally masculine activities, such as conducting wars and statecraft. In the process, these critics have thoroughly explored such issues as the emerging divisions between "public" and the "private" domains, the association of aggressive masculinity with English nationalism, the influence of the gender anxieties surrounding the queenship of Elizabeth I on the representations of women sovereigns, the scapegoating of powerful women as witches, the essential interconnections between cultural constructions of the masculine with those of the feminine. On the surface , it would seem that there would be few remaining major chords left for feminist critics to play in Shakespeare's history plays.

Levine's discussion of the three Henry VI plays, Richard III, and King John incorporates the feminist insights of her predecessors into a web of causality drawing from a variety of arenas, such as the problems posed by uncontained aristocratic ambition and the dilemmas of dynastic succession. Following the lead of new historicist critics, Levine looks to Shakespeare's contemporary England to depict these history plays as "writing the present onto the past" (19). But the play's writings of their present took place in a context of past writings of historical events as well. For this reason, Levine considers most of these plays from a double perspective: in terms of a past representation of its events, often in a chronicle source, as well as in terms of an issue of concern at the time of its writing. Rather than mere precursors to the second tetralogy, Shakespeare's early history plays emerge from this reading as extraordinary windows into a political and ideological chaos which seems at once convincingly Eliza bethan and curiously modern.

In Levine's treatment of all three Henry VI plays, the negative stereotypes accurately delineated by feminist scholars are "tamed, and qualified, by political contexts" (23). In addition to the demonized Joan of Arc discussed in feminist criticism, Levine notes that 1 Henry VI places even more blame for England's troubles on its own aristocrats who act according to their own self-interests rather than for the good of the nation. Their juggling for positions of power parallels a contemporary problem with Essex and other ambitious participants in Elizabeth's Accession Day tilts. While agreeing that the ambitions of Eleanor Cobham of 2 Henry VI underlie the familiar witch-treason stereotype, Levine also notes that Cobham was entrapped by "a conspiring Lancastrian court" (48) which posed more of a danger to England than any of her necromancy. In this context, Levine discusses the revision of chronicle versions of Eleanor Cobham by John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, which turns to primary sources to question whether Cobham committed treason any more than did Elizabeth I, who was similarly accused. While Margaret of Anjou in 2 and 3 Henry VI is not explicitly identified with Elizabeth I, her queen-ship does bring up the issue of female rule. Again, whatever her evident flaws, the plays place equal or even greater blame for England's woes on York, who regards the country as his own property. Levine reads the Henry VI plays as sanctioning women's rule but only when in the nation's best interests, so that "sovereignty rests not with the monarch alone but with her subjects as well" (96).

In Richard III and King John, the subject turns to dynastic issues. Levine persuasively argues that in Richard III, Richard's simultaneous misogyny and dependence on women to consolidate his power through marriage points to a basic weakness in a patriarchy based on lineage. Richard's slander of the princes' legitimacy echoes the misogyny of the 1590s, a time of seditous rumors concerning the promiscuous sexuality of Elizabeth I. Elizabeth's failure to produce an heir casts a pall on the play's restoration of patriarchy through the marriage of the houses of Lancaster and York. Finally, in King John the question of whether Elizabeth had the right to "will" her crown to a successor is implicated in the contending royal claims of John (willed the throne by Richard I) and Arthur (who claimed the throne by primogeniture). Heavily debated by Catholics and Protestants alike in Shakespeare's day, the question was no more resolved in King John, where there was "no locus of authority" to make a final decision -- not th e crown, not the law. This lack of an authoritative center also underlay the "instability and uncertainty" of the 1590s which, however anxiety-inducing, also "offered Elizabethans a radical freedom to imagine both the state and the nation in their own terms" (22). These terms included, but were not limited to, gender.

Women's Matters clearly deserves to have won the University of Delaware Press competition for the best Shakespeare manuscript. Levine has succeeded in laying out a common ground between feminist and historicist approaches based on synthesis rather than compromise. As she notes, Shakespeare's early history plays are neither protofeminist works nor politically conservative texts (146-47). Without in any way detracting from the excellent feminist scholarship to which the field is deeply indebted, Levine's work breaks down a binary between women and patriarchy, to point out that Shakespeare's plays place substantial blame for political troubles not primarily on women, however subversive they may be, but finally on men. As Women's Matters balances issues of gender with and against other concerns, gender roles become both less and more important: less in the sense that Levine focuses less exclusively on gender as a primary determinant for the events of the plays; more in the sense that gender takes its proper plac e along with more overtly political determinants. Nina S. Levine's critical move seems to me to be at once sophisticated and sensible.