SOURCE: Bartels, Emily C. “Strategies of Submission: Desdemona, the Duchess, and the Assertion of Desire.” Studies in English Literature 36, no. 3 (1996): 417-33.

In the following essay, Bartels suggests that Shakespeare and Webster give their female characters real voices by making their speech acceptable through a cover of submissiveness or compliance. Contrasting the seeming meekness of Desdemona with the assertiveness of the Duchess, Bartels maintains that the characters share in representing on stage the possibility of female self-assertion.

Chaste, silent, shamefast, and obedient—these have become the buzz words in feminist discussions of early modern women: the dictates of an anxious patriarchal network, intent on regulating inevitably unruly female voices and bodies; the signs that women, continually accosted by sermons, marriage tracts, conduct books, communal rituals, and laws espousing these terms, really could not have had a renaissance.¹ Renaissance women seem to have known it too. Why is it that...