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In What You Will Kathryn Schwarz traces a curious pattern in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of femininity: women pose a threat when they conform too willingly to social conventions. Exemplary texts describe chaste women who kill their rapists, constant wives who make marriage a debilitating obligation, and devoted mothers who destroy the fitness of children. These cautionary tales draw attention to the more ordinary, necessary choices that take prescribed roles as a mandate for purposeful acts. For early modern narratives, writes Schwarz, intentional compliance poses a complex problem: it sustains crucial tenets of order and continuity but unsettles the hierarchical premises from which those tenets derive. Feminine will appears as a volatile force within heterosociality, lending contingent security to a system that depends less on enforced obedience than on contract and consent.The book begins with an examination of early modern disciplines that treat will as an aspect of the individual psyche, of rhetoric, and of sexual and gendered identities. Drawing on these readings, Schwarz turns to Shakespearean works in which feminine characters articulate and manage the values that define them, revealing the vital force of conventional acts. Her analysis engages with recent research that has challenged the premise of feminine subordination, both by identifying alternative positions and by illuminating resistance within repressive structures. Schwarz builds on this awareness of disparate modes and sites of action in formulating the book's central questions: With what agency, and to what effect, do feminine subjects inhabit the conventions of femininity? In what sense are authenticity and masquerade inseparable aspects of social performance? How might coercive systems produce effective actors? What possibilities emerge from the paradox of prescribed choice? Her conclusions have implications not only for early modern scholarship but also for histories of gender and sexuality, queer studies, and theories of the relationship between subjectivity and ideological constraint.

This essay traces corporeal recognition across a range of Shakespearean plays, focusing on moments at which a feminine speaker addresses or describes a masculine corpse in hyperbolic terms. Such rhetorical encounters neither affirm nor reinstate an authorized narrative of the subject who is lost. Instead they mobilize counterfactual histories and futurities, which disrupt the processes that absorb or discard individual persons in the name of collective survival. Through these ambivalent, melancholic, necrophilic engagements, excessive and often improper language reaches past static social forms to acknowledge the idiosyncratic vitality of flesh.

When Edelman writes of Hamlet, \"He establishes thereby the contours of a reproductive futurism bringing archive and anamnesis together in an ideology whose complicity with aesthetic education and therefore with the violence of aesthetic education not only shapes the text of Hamlet but also contributes to its privileged position as the paradigmatic literary work of modern Western culture\" (155-56), he returns us to the questions of ideology and canonicity that preoccupied, or more aptly haunted, the professional self-interrogations of the 1980s. \"3 Edelman's dissection of order evokes Jacqueline Rose's analysis of the link between psychoanalytic and literary criticism: \"Writing which proclaims its integrity, and literary theory which demands such integrity (objectivity/correlation) of writing, merely repeat that moment of repression when language and sexuality were first ordered into place, putting down the unconscious processes which threaten the resolution of the Oedipal drama and of narrative form alike.

Freinkel argues that because the rhetorical strategies of the will sonnets refuse to distinguish immediacy from citation, they render a key question unanswerable: \"Who is speaking in this poem, and whom is the language of the poem bespeaking (or interpellating)?\"6 Sonnet 136 can be read as a sexist slur (this lady is open to all comers), as a sexual homogeny (all men want the same thing), as a social hegemony (all men are the same thing), as a philosophical observation (when the soul is blind, the will runs wild), and as a theory of interpersonal subjectivity (you complete me). The effect is something like Judith Butler's theory of parody as transformative repetition, and something like Luce Irigaray's theory of mimesis as oppositional visibility; it is something, too, like Slavoj ?i?ek's strategy of over-identification.63 But perhaps Jonathan Dollimore's account of transgressive reinscription, the return of the repressed and/or the suppressed and/or the displaced via the proximate, resonates most closely: in displaying the participation of feminine subjects in the strategies that define them, the last 28 sonnets return those subjects to a place that they have never really left.64 Greene writes, to be sufficiently historical and poetic at once, interpretation ought to consider alternatives to the individualist conception of person (such as gender, class, and generation) as horizons of the lyric poem; to assess tropes and other fundamental features as determining the lyric's position in relation to events; and finally to explain the poem as a medium of social change in process.

Throughout All's Well, Helena plays prescribed roles: father's daughter, king's subject, husband's wife, heir's mother. The play explicitly produces its generic and social pleasures, but they cannot, perhaps, be accepted with equanimity from this all-too-open hand. \"The marriage that is ratified at the end of the play is presented not as a joyous lovers' union but as a compromised bargain, not as a happy ending but as a precarious beginning,\" 64 Neely writes, and both that beginning and its precariousness appear in Bertram's newly double vision and in Helena's own final appeal to authentic appearance.

The bond between sex and death is so familiar as to offer a chilly sort of comfort. Through figural reciprocity, each might palliate the graver dangers of the other: death is an auxesis that overstates the dissolution of sex; sex is a meiosis that undermines the finality of death. But these abstract mitigations are not secure, and a tic of notional literalism—as in Helena’s “I’ll follow thee and make a heaven of hell, / To die upon the hand I love so well” (2.1.243–44)—fuses linguistic convention to bodily risk.¹ The slippage between emblematic and corporeal modes is

This book takes up sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations of femininity, and traces a curious pattern: women pose a threat when they willingly conform to social conventions. Exemplary texts of the period tell stories of literal violence, describing chaste women who kill their rapists, constant wives who make marriage a space of enervating desire and debilitating commitment, and devoted mothers who destroy the fitness of children and the durability of patrilines. These mythologies of damage may titillate through their extravagance, but they also gesture toward the more common ways in which intentional virtue unsettles the tenets of heterosocial hierarchy. To explore

The claim of linguistic mastery is almost always a joke on the speaker, its punch line delivered in two familiar propositions: subjects are alienated by their constitution in language, and language exceeds the speaker’s intent. Early modern rhetorical theory highlights these predicaments through a gendered account of figurative speech. Here as in my discussion of faculty theory, I take seriously the feminization and sexualization of language, and consider how an impulse to populate intangible schemes with discrete and intentional figures connects specialized discourses to ideas about social contract. Patricia Parker gives a concise account of the link between linguistic and

In “The Alchemy of Style and Law,” Barbara Johnson recounts her experience of writing a commentary for the Harvard Law Review. The commentary addresses the last essay written by Mary Joe Frug, and in it Johnson takes up a sentence left unfinished at Frug’s death. Johnson poses the question, “How does this gap signify?” I sent my commentary to the Harvard Law Review for its round of editorial responses. When it came back from its first reading, the editors had changed “How does this gap signify?” to “What does this gap mean?” This is not at all the same question.

Shakespeare’s sonnet 136 offers a curiously heterogeneous meditation on will. Its final statement inspires speculations ranging from get-to-know-Shakespeare literalism to Joel Fineman’s claim concerning “the specific materiality of absence that regularly defines what is in a Shakespearean name.”¹ Gordon Williams, in A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language, cites its unsubtle puns to illustrate the use of “will” as genital slang.² The reference to lovers in remarkable yet unremarked number takes homosociality to an extreme, leading to Eve Sedgwick’s observation that “the men, or their ‘wills,’ seem to be reduced to the scale of homunculi, almost plankton, in a warm but