Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays

How does a woman become a whore? What are the discursive dynamics making a woman a whore? And, more importantly, what are the discursive mechanics of unmaking? In Women and Shakespeares Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal, Cristina Len Alfar pursues these questions to tease out familiar cultural stories about female sexuality that recur in the form of a slander narrative throughout William Shakespeares work. She argues that the plays stage a structure of accusation and defense that unravels the authority of husbands to make and unmake wives. While mens accusations are built on a foundation of political, religious, legal, and domestic discourses about mens superiority to, and rule over, women, whose weaker natures render them perpetually suspect, womens bonds with other women animate defenses of virtue and obedience, fidelity and love, work loose the fabric of patrilineal power that undergirds masculine privileges in marriage, and signify a discursive shift that constitutes the site of agency within a system of oppression that ought to prohibit such agency. That womens agency in the early modern period must be tied to the formations of power that officially demand their subjection need not undermine their acts. In what Alfar calls Shakespeares cuckoldry plays, womens rhetoric of defense is both subject to the discourse of sexual honor and finds a ground on which to shift it as women take control of and replace sexual slander with their own narratives of marital betrayal.