Gender

The gender category has become a crucial site for questioning established notions about writing in the English Renaissance, helping to uncover marginal/ized voices in a number of early modern literary and non-literary texts. Despite the historically dominant male writer model, a signi cant body of scholarship has illuminated the ways in which texts, and play-texts in particular, far from being isolated creations of solitary authors or ‘minds’, must be considered a product of numerous and different material processes. Such processes of production include a diverse range of situations, mediators, and individuals who have often been silenced by a speci c gender code and hierarchical system. This contribution explores the ways in which, while the ‘gender gap’ in authorship practices in Shakespeare’s time is undeniable, many of his plays are actively engaged with a mindfulness of women as subjects, and not mere objects, of acts of reading, interpretation, and to an extent authoring.