SOURCE: Luckyj, Christina. “‘A Moving Rhetoricke’: Women's Silences and Renaissance Texts.” Renaissance Drama 24 (1993): 33-56.

In the following essay, Luckyj relates Renaissance notions of female reticence as decorum or defiance to the silence of women in King Lear, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida.. She contends that sixteenth-century conduct book writers' ambivalent views of feminine silence are reflected in Shakespeare's plays.

It is therefore useless to trap women into giving an exact definition of what they mean. … They are already elsewhere than in this discursive machinery where you claim to take them by surprise. They have turned back within themselves, which does not mean the same thing as “within yourself.” They do not experience the same interiority that you do and which you mistakenly presume they share. “Within themselves” means in the privacy of this silent, multiple, diffuse tact.

—Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One”

In the...