There is a tendency in modern feminist critics of Shakespeare to detect paternalism, even misogyny in most of Shakespeare presentations of women, supposedly epitomized in Katherine’s speech as a dutiful wife at the end of Taming of the Shrew, whereby she continues to dominate the stage while professing humility (a delicate irony). Yet almost all Shakespeare’s women are tough. Katherina initially beats up her tutor and her sister (who also proves a shrew). In Much Ado Beatrice verbally savages practically every man she meets. Rosalind sneers at Orlando in As You Like It. In All’s Well Helena tricks Bertrand. Cordelia precipitates diplomatic disaster by affecting to dislike her father King Lear on a public occasion. Desdemona runs away from her father to the alien Othello. Viola deceives practically everybody in Twelfth Night. Cressida is fickle to Troilus. Most of the women in Henry VI are overambitious and ruthless. Coriolanus’s mother Volumnia is a tyrant. Cleopatra is a consummate manipulator of Anthony and others. Isabella is obsessively virgin in Measure for Measure, while the ladies in Love’s Labour’s Lost are uniformly ruthless sexually. Emilia in Two Noble Kinsmen likes women more than men and hates to marry. Just to mention of Lady Macbeth us sufficient. There are a few aimiable females in Shakespeare (but often inconspicuous, or mistreated): Blanche in King John, Helena in Dream and Hermione in Winter’s Tale. But Miranda, Ophelia, and Juliet are all dominated by males. Portia is only typical of the more typically tough, manipulative women Shakespeare really admires, not their pathetic husbands and lovers like Bassanio whom Portia humiliates in Act V of Merchant of Venice. In his humorous instructions about The New Art of Writing Plays in This Age Shakespeare’s contemporary in the Spanish theatre, Lope de Vega, determined that successful women’s roles in Renaissance drama should be thus dominant, cunning and skeptical: “How woman oft beguiles! How full of slyness is her treacherous breast!” He may have teasing his readers, but strong women are part of Shakespeare’s appeal then and now. No doubt if an upper-middle-class mother marries a workman, your father, and your own wife is eight years older than you are, you are accustomed to being bossed around.

However, the fact of being played by males may have contributed to a more assertive, even aggressive tone in Shakespeare’s female roles, which makes them excellent vehicles for actresses possessed of just this dynamism. Looking over the great names following the first Shakespearean performance with an actress, playing Desdemona, in 1660. There is great energy and colorfulness in personalities such as Mary Betterton, Nell Gwynn, Peg Woffington, Dorothy Jordan, Sarah Siddons, Fanny Kemble, Charlotte Cushman, Ellen Terry, Ada Rehan, Peggy Ashccroft, Janet Suzman. There performance of Shakespeare’s female roles had enormous stage and social impact hardly suggesting marginal status in the plays.

Another issue arises from the divergence between Elizabethan and modern audience reactions to a female role. One basic concern is the discovery of the Elizabethan audiences’ attitude to having boys play women’s roles, something explored in the rebuilt Globe Theatre. Seventeenth-century Londoners were probably completely at ease with the convention, as Samuel Pepys revealed in describing a Cockpit Theatre performance of The Loyal Subject (by John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s colleague), in which “one Kynaston, a boy, acted the Duke’s sister, but made the loveliest lady I ever saw.” (F.E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion, 269) Such evidence is confirmed by our most recent discoveries at the rebuilt Globe Theatre. Reviewing the implications of stage experience at the third Globe Pauline Kiernan in Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe has noted how recently “studies have focused on what is perceived to have been the homoeroticism of the boy actor in the original staging of the plays when women were forbidden from acting on a public stage in England.” (55) Despite the modern critical perspective that sees boys in themselves as potential objects of sexual excitement on or off stage, it appears that most Elizabethans did not see boys in female costume on stage as primarily exciting on homosexual grounds, or even as disturbing challenges to sexual identity (despite the claims of militant Puritans). Such responses reflect primarily the late-twentieth-century anxiety about gender that contrasts with earlier classic treatments of the youth of macho figures such as Achilles, or Hercules with Omphale, or the female costume of the heroes in Sidney’s Arcadia, etc.

Fortunately, as Kiernan notes, a normal heterosexual response to boys in female roles has been effectively validated by such a vivid example as that of Toby Cockerell in the role of Princess Katherine in the Henry V at the rebuilt Globe (1997), in which the pathos of the Princess’s situation as a prize of war was not deflected by male casting but if anything heightened by the male actor’s obvious sympathies with his role’s feminine anxieties. His awareness helped us to perceive the persona’s tension between political constraint, social propriety, and the historical original’s compulsive sexual attraction to King Henry. The latter circumstance is often ignored as a subtext of the script, despite Shakespeare’s explicit recognition of it (III.v.27-31) just after the princess has eagerly set about appreciating the sexual overtones of English (III.iv). Kiernan concludes “from the experience of seeing a young man in the part of Katherine in Henry V, it would seem that some recent scholarship’s evidence on the homoerotic effects on the original audience (apparently taking its cue from certain anti-theatrical pamphleteers of the period who railed against the provocative effects of male playgoers of boys dressed up as women on the public stage) may have to be reassessed.” (55) For example, Henry Jackson saw the King's Men perform Othello at Oxford in 1610, and wrote of the Desdemona in his diary, "She always acted the matter very well, in her death moved us still more greatly; when lying in bed she implored the pity of those watching with her countenance alone.” (Kathman, 264) When Jackson refers to the boy as "she," he effectively accepts the dramatic convention.

In this matter there seems to be a considerable divide in responses between some modern theorists on one hand and both Elizabethan and modern popular audiences on the other. Lope de Vega would argue that drama critics should recognize the authority of latter more than that of the former. In this context we must also reconsider feminist criticism such as Diane Dreher’s of Desdemona’s “servile” devotion to Othello. Kara Trojan writes: “Desdemona is so devoted to Othello she does not attempt to escape and save her own life when Othello intends to kill her. . . . Consequently, Desdemona’s tragic virtue to remain obedient to her husband is what ultimately leads her to her death.” (Trojan, 7) Such a view of excessive conformity to traditional female behavior may be invited by an exaggerated feminization of the role by a boy actor. However, just as a non-Jew playing Shylock with exaggerated “Jewishness“ might be considered offensive by a modern audience, so a boy playing a woman contemptibly might offend the substantial female element in Shakespeare’s audience, of which we know he was intensely aware because of his epilogues to As You Like It and All Is True, both of which address women in the audience directly as decisive influences on its response to a performance. A similar recognition of them comes in Celia’s bitter denunciation of just such misconduct by the boy playing Rosalind in her misogynistic exposition of female wiles to Orlando: “You have simply misus’d our sex in your love-prate. We must have your doublet and hose pluck’d over your heads, and show what the bird has done to her own sex.” (IV.i.200-3) The reference to stripping hints that the audience may be ironically amused by a reminder that it is a boy actor who has spoken lines against women and is thus a tainted authority.

In his development of Desdemona’s presentation, Shakespeare ultimately requires the boy actor to express her boldness, courage, and independence, but only through the veil of her initial conventional femininity. Lope de Vega is very firm about establishing decorum in initiating women’s roles: “Let ladies be in keeping with their character.” (246) As with so many other Shakespearean women, Desdemona’s role requires this creation of a plausible female persona, which may then be provocatively modified by a heroic if modestly expressed autonomy of judgment—though in the case of Lady Macbeth this extends to monstrosity. It is this paradox of the boy actor’s calculated surface femininity, transcended by each role’s evolution, which makes Shakespeare’s female roles so vital and attractive to women in seventeenth-century audiences (as reflected throughout the pages of The Shakespeare Allusion–Book). There is a continuous tension between a boy actor’s efforts to evoke a conventional feminine manner, while allowing for an unexpected bold autonomy to subvert it more like male adolescent bravado. Desdemona’s behavior illustrates this fascinating paradox throughout: she carries her commitments beyond the bounds of plausibility, as her father Brabantio establishes for us, before she even appears on stage:

A maiden never bold,
Of a spirit so still and quiet that her motion
Blush’d at herself: and she, in spite of nature
Of years, of country, credit, every thing,
To fall in love with what she fear’d to look on!
It is a judgment maim’d, and most imperfect,
That will confess perfection so could err
Against all rulers of nature, and must be driven
To find out practices of cunning hell
Why this should be. I therefore vouch again
That with some mixtures pow’rful o’er the blood,
Or with some dram (conjur’d to this effect)
He wrought upon her.
(I.iii.94-106)

These lines amount to authorial directions for the boy actor: that he should perfect his attractively feminine presentation (as illustrated by Pepys’ view of Kynaston) as a foil to a subsequent and surprising negation of it. Shakespeare continues to ensure spectator involvement with his female characters from moment to moment by doing precisely as Lope de Vega specified: defying audience expectations by such abrupt divergences from a successful impersonation of traditional femininity to something more akin to a masculine manner instinctive to the boy actor. This switch is often corroborated by adoption of masculine attire, which Lope also considers a useful provocative device for female roles. From such a desire to subvert expectations we owe Desdemona’s temporary recovery from asphyxiation only to proclaim herself guilty of her own death, before dying definitively. The boy actor has simply to enunciate the concise statement to astound the audience, just as does Cordelia’s abrupt refusal to flatter Lear, or Lady Macbeth’s assertion that she could dash out her child’s brains. Such unpredictable statements can only have their intended shock effect on the audience in a contrasting context of plausible femininity.