About the Book:

Shakespeare Without Women is a controversial study of female impersonation and the connections between dramatic and political representation in Shakespeare's plays. In this exhilarating and provocative book, Dympna Callaghan focuses on the implications of absence and exclusion in several of Shakespeare's works: She discusses:

• the exclusion of the female body from Twelfth Night

• the impersonation of the female voice in the original performances of the plays

• racial impersonation in Othello

• echoes of removal of the Gaelic Irish in The Tempest

• the absence of women on stage and in public life as shown in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

This bracing book challenges us not to bemoan the absence of women and racial others in Shakespeare's plays, but to determine what such absences meant in their historical context and why they matter today.

Dympna Callaghan is Professor in the Humanities and works on early modern English Literature at Syracuse University, New York. Her books include Shakespeare Without Women, and she has written widely on feminism and Renaissance Literature.