Female Sexuality in Shakespeare

Question
Compare and contrast the representation of female sexuality in Cymbeline, the
Sonnets, and one of the plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II,
Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure or King Lear.

Both Cymbeline and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (AMND) are both set in a patriarchal environment where both genders grapple for control. Valerie Traub defines the distinction between gender sex and gender behavior as “Sex refers to the . . . biological distinctions between male and female bodies. Gender refers to those meanings derived from the division of male and female . . . the attributes considered appropriate to each: ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’” (Valerie Traub, “Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare” p129) Patriarchy indirectly opposes this source of the meaning with male leaders moderating their control with their own male qualities. However, this thinking needed a stern control over the attribution of suitable behavior for each sex, signifying that gendered meanings “exist primarily as constructions of particular societies.” (Valerie Traub, “Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare” p129)One display of this control contained in both plays is the orderly arrangement of female sexuality, a classification distinguished from the sexual characteristics of connecting explicitly to “erotic desires and activities.” (Valerie Traub, “Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare” p129) Margreta de Grazia claimed “nothing threatens a patriarchal and hierarchic social formation more than a promiscuous womb,” (Margreta de Grazia, “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays,p106) and pivotally, both plays examine the supposed risk of unrestrained female desire. Also, the sexual relationships existing in the Sonnets appear to subvert stereotypical gender ideas founded in the initial poems. A view held in Cymbeline by both Posthumous and the king was that the appealing neutrality of the speaker's master-mistress questions the

Bibliography: * Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) * William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in The Norton Shakespeare, ed * Peter Holland, “Introduction” to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) * Penny Rixon, “A Midsummer Night 's Dream,” in Shakespeare: Texts and Contexts, ed * Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) * Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997) * William Shakespeare, “The Sonnets and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’,” in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008) * Bruce R * Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) * Marvin Hunt, “Be Dark But Not Too Dark: Shakespeare’s Dark Lady as a Sign of Color,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed