SOURCE: Kurtz, Martha A. “Rethinking Gender and Genre in the History Play.” SEL 36, no. 2 (1996): 265-87.

In this essay, Kurtz examines the role of female characters in such plays as Sir Thomas More, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry VI, and Woodstock.

Two concepts that have exercised considerable influence over criticism of Elizabethan drama in the past fifteen years are what might be called the hegemony of genre—that is, the idea that the ideological content of a play is predetermined and controlled by the dramatic genre to which the play seems to belong—and the Lacanian dualistic theory of gender in which masculine and feminine are seen as discrete and oppositional identities, the boundaries of which are never blurred and which can never overlap or unite. These two assumptions coalesce in the frequently reiterated premise that the history play as a genre is fundamentally antagonistic to women and the “feminine...