Ann Thompson, Roehampton Institute

Most feminist critics have simply ignored The Comedy of Errors and Love's Labor's Lost: the bibliographies on these plays in the pioneering anthology, The Woman's Part (1980), are minimal,¹ and the number of items specifically devoted to them in the Garland Annotated Bibliography of Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism (1991) is still very low.² On one level, feminist critics are simply perpetuating the general critical neglect of the earliest works in the canon, whatever the genre, which is disappointing in itself if one had entertained hopes that something genuinely new was happening in Shakespeare criticism. It is indeed quite baffling that plays like Titus Andronicus and the Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy have not attracted more attention, with their strong but demonized women (Tamora, Joan of Arc, Margaret). The only exception amongst the early comedies has been, predictably enough, The Taming of the Shrew, which has been...