SOURCE: "The Women's Part: Female Sexuality as Power in Shakespeare's Plays," in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, edited by Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, University of Illinois Press, 1980, pp. 17-34.

In the following essay, Berggren surveys the woman 's role in Shakespeare's plays as an archetypal figure of innate power that elicits both fear and adoration in men.

Despite all the ink spilled on inventing fanciful histories for Falstaff with Mowbray, Hamlet at Wittenberg, and the like, it is Shakespeare's women, rather than his men, who have most consistently moved his readers to a peculiarly cloying, gossipy condescension. No one, after all, has written a book on the boyhood of Shakespeare's heroes, complete with illustrations, nor have critics ritually agonized over who deserves to be hailed as the manliest of Shakespeare's men. Even worse, the contagion spreads from contemplation of his...