SOURCE: “Fathering Herself: A Source Study of Shakespeare's Feminism,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, Fall, 1998, pp. 269-90.

In the following essay, McEachern examines differences in Much Ado about Nothing and King Lear as compared to their original sources and contends that the changes Shakespeare made reflect his questioning of patriarchal authority and his desire to examine its root causes.

The collaboration of critical methods suggested by the title of this essay might appear a rather unlikely, even forced, proposition. Source study and feminism are a strange pair: the first is largely interested in finding in Shakespeare verbal echoes of earlier texts, the second committed to discovering in Shakespeare a foreshadowing of particular political identities. Certainly, in considering “Shakespeare's feminism” (a debatable, and surely anachronistic, construction), the prospect of looking to Shakespeare's sources for the origins of any political understanding of “the woman's part” seems to offer little promise; behind...