Reading Room - Gender

Feminism, gender studies and 'queer theory' now constitute a huge sub-discipline within Shakespeare studies. The following studies provide excellent starting-points:

Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origins in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (1992) – psychoanalytic criticism at its best

A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare , edited by Dympna Callaghan (2000) – collection of essays with wide range of approaches, historical, psychological and theatrical

Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (1996)

Phyllis Rackin, Shakespeare and Women (2005)

Bruce Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (2000)

There are hundreds more fine books on Shakespeare, but anyone who reads The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works from cover to cover and then devours a reasonable proportion of the above will have earned the right to consider themselves an exceptionally highly informed Shakespearean.