Canonical Misogyny : Shakespeare and Dramaturgies of Sexual Violence

Argues that Shakespeare’s plays are dramaturgically misogynist and that surface-level interventions cannot remediate them or make them ‘feminist’.

If misogyny is a systemic problem, then in order to understand its influence on canonical works like Shakespeare’s, those works must be investigated at their systems level – in other words, at the level of their dramaturgies. This landmark study arises from an eight-year practice-as-research (PaR) investigation of sexual violence and rape culture through Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Moving between analytical and critical-reflective voices, and prioritising knowledge arising from and questions generated by the author’s embodied investment in this PaR work, Canonical Misogyny focuses on dramaturgy as a site of ideology and meaning-making. It seeks to address the ways in which contemporary theatre allows producers of Shakespeare to represent gendered violence in unethical and irresponsible ways. It also demonstrates how failures to make meaningful dramaturgical interventions in early modern plays result in the tacit (or even explicit) glorifying and/or trivialising of their problematic approaches to consent and agency, which intersects with questions of race, gender, sexuality and class.