Moffat 1

Jacob Moffat

Professor Jeff Pietruszynski

Lit-519-Q2973

21 February 2016

A Divided Duty:

Luce Irigaray and the Lack of a Feminine Divine in Shakespeare

Throughout his plays, William Shakespeare famously describes the stage as a metaphor

for life, suggesting that the men and women are merely actors playing their roles. In As You Like

It, Jaques declares that “All the world’s a stage, /And all the men and women merely players”

(As You Like It 2.7.146-147). Similarly, Antonio, describing his sadness in The Merchant of

Venice, laments, “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,/A stage where every man must

play a part,/And mine a sad one” (The Merchant of Venice 1.1.81-83). For four hundred years

this metaphor as permeated our culture, but before we accept Shakespeare’s assertion that the

stage is an apt metaphor for the world, we must ask why Shakespeare has created a world almost

devoid of mothers. Shakespeare’s plays are strikingly lacking in mothers, and in mother-daughter

relationships in particular. While Shakespeare offers what appears to be deep insight into human

nature, we must carefully consider the implications, both on the plays and on the cultures those

plays have influenced, of the absence of mothers and powerful, mature women in Shakespeare’s

work.

Feminist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray argues that the absence of the mother-daughter

relationship is not unique to Shakespeare, but instead that it is unsymbolized throughout western

culture. Irigaray describes the “absence of linguistic, social, semiotic, structural, cultural, iconic,
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theoretical, mythical, religious or any other representation of that relationship” (Irigaray,

Speculum 71; as cited in Whitford, 1991, 76). Unlike the mother-son and father-son relationships

that are enshrined in Christianity, as well as throughout Shakespeare, Irigaray asserts that there is

no maternal genealogy. As a result, women are left with no divine image to emulate. While men

have the image of Jesus, women are left in a state of dereliction—in the absence of God. In the

absence of a feminine symbolic order, women are forced to attempt to conform to feminine

ideals constructed within the patriarchal symbolic order, which ultimately leads women to

attempt to conform to unattainable ideals. A close textual analysis of the ways in which the

absence of a feminine symbolic is manifest in the tragic outcomes of the women in both Othello

and Hamlet displays the ways in which Shakespeare perpetuates and reinforces the patriarchal

social order, creating a patriarchal, rather than universal, philosophy. Both Desdemona and

Ophelia literally lack a mother-daughter relationship, and they also suffer from the absence of a

symbolized feminine divine. As a result, both are forced to conform to contradictory patriarchal

expectations placed on daughters and wives. Despite their noble attempts to live up to

unreasonable ideals of loyalty and chastity thrust upon them by men, both Desdemona and

Ophelia are left in the state of dereliction because they see no symbolized feminine divine.

While there are some mothers in Shakespeare: Lady McDuff, Lady Capulet, Gertrude,

Volumnia, and Hermione, their presence on stage is most notable for its brevity. Mary Beth Rose

points out that there is a particular lacuna of mothers in the major plays. She notes that mothers

are conspicuously absent from The Tempest, King Lear, Othello. The Merchant of Venice, and

Measure for Measure, as well as the six most celebrated romantic comedies (Rose 292). This

absence has not gone unnoticed, as scholars have proffered hypotheses focusing on the

demographic, legal, and theatrical conditions of Elizabethan England in order to explain the lack
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mothers on Shakespeare’s. The simplest explanation emerges from the fact that theater

companies consisting completely of male actors, meaning that all female roles were portrayed by

young men and boys. The argument follows that young men could successfully portray young

women, but they would have a hard time presenting a convincing portrayal of a serious, mature

woman. Therefore, playwrights would limit the use of large roles for mature women. The

argument has little logical power, however, given that older female characters such as nurses and

nuns appear throughout Elizabethan theater. Therefore, the absence of female actors does not

explain why Shakespeare largely chose to exclude mothers from the plots he created. Instead, the

absence of female characters is a continued reflection of the lack of cultural or iconic reflections

of a feminine divine as described by Irigaray. If we look more closely at the reality behind the

metaphor that all the world’s a stage, we see in Shakespeare a theater in which female actors are

physically absent from the stage and in which the plots of the plays are primarily devoid of

maternal characters. The world that Shakespeare creates on stage is doubly devoid of what

Irigaray refers to as a “social or cultural representation” of a maternal genealogy. If we consider

the nearly godlike status attained today by actresses and the characters they portray, this absence

in Shakespeare reflects a stunning and culturally enduring lack of a symbolic feminine divine.

Scholars have also suggested that Shakespeare and other Elizabethan playwrights

conflated mothers and fathers into a single character because that was what Elizabethan law

effectively did to mothers in society. Elizabethan law dictated that a married woman forfeited her

agency and identity; she could not bring suit, her husband held rights and profits over any land

she owned, and she was not the legal ward of her children. In his work The Crisis of Aristocracy,

Lawrence Stone sums up the legal status of an Elizabethan wife: “By marriage, the husband and

wife became one person in law—and that person was the husband” (Stone; quoted in Rose 293).
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Therefore, the mother became legally invisible. Scholars suggest that the absence of mothers on

stage might reflect a sort of “dramatic economy” in which fathers and mothers are conflated into

a single character reflecting the legal standing of husbands and wives. However, scholars such as

Mary Prior and Susan Amussen have recently discovered that women had far more legal agency

than had previously been assumed, suggesting that the absence of mothers on stage is not

reflective of legal realities (Rose 292-294). The corresponding demographic arguments that

might excuse the lack of mothers in Shakespeare suggest that many mothers, in fact, died in

childbirth. One in four wives died in the first fifteen years of marriage, which is more than twice

the rate of husbands, leaving many families motherless, offering a practical explanation for the

corresponding lack of mothers in the plots of the plays. However, Peter Laslett, in The World we

have Lost, has contradicted these demographic findings, suggesting that “over half of the girls

marrying for the first time were fatherless” (Laslett; quoted in Rose 294). While the theatrical,

demographic, and legal arguments emerging from Elizabethan culture offer some compelling

points regarding the lack of mothers, none provide an adequate explanation for significant

absences of mothers on the Shakespearean stage.

In attempting to explain the absence of mothers in Shakespeare, Mary Beth Rose moves

beyond the cultural explanations above to argue that Shakespeare offers a conservative

representation of motherhood in Elizabethan England which corresponds closely to the

theoretical approach suggested by Irigaray. The absence of a symbolic mother-daughter

relationship is not unique to Elizabethan England; it is a fundamental piece of western discourse

and patriarchal philosophy. Margaret Whitford introduces Irigaray’s work by describing that

“What [Luce Irigaray] sets out to do in her work is to expose the foundations of patriarchy and in

particular to show it at work in what has traditionally been taken to be high discourse of
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universality and reason: philosophy” (Whitford 10). Irigaray originates her work in the

assumptions of Jaques Lacan’s mirror theory and specularization. She argues that “all of western

discourse and culture displays the structure of specularization, in which the male projects his

own ego on to the world, which then becomes a mirror which enables him to see his own

reflection wherever he looks.” She goes on to describe the deleterious effect on women, who “as

a body/matter are the material of which the mirror is made, that part of the mirror which cannot

be reflected, the tain of the mirror for example, and so never see reflections of themselves”

(Whitford 34). The absence of mothers in Shakespeare reflects, not the particular cultural

conditions of Elizabethan England, but a continued patriarchal denial of feminine power.

Western discourse has long attempted to deny the power of mothers, offering myths such as

Athena emerging from Zeus’ head and Eve from Adam’s side in order to suggest that women

emerge from men rather than the obvious biological realty of birth and motherhood. The entire

discourse attempts to suggest that “women were of secondary importance in conception, vessels

of imperfect, inchoate matter awaiting the perfected form supplied by male seed, female sexual

pleasure was thought to be necessary for procreation” (Rose 299). Mothers in public view,

therefore, represent a distinct threat to patriarchal power. While many Shakespearean comedies

present powerful female characters, such as Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Rosalind in As

You Like It, those characters wholly give up their power at the end of the plays, submitting

absolutely to male authority in marriage. They relinquish their male disguises that provide them

freedom in society and align their interests completely with their husbands. Essentially, they

disappear at the end of the play, offering their husbands the public role in society while taking

the nonthreatening role of nurturing children in private. Rose concludes that the plays reflect a

deference to the Oedipal plot, “which posits the sacrifice of a mother’s desire as the basis of the
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ideal society” (Rose 313). Rather than emerging from demographic or legal realities in

Elizabethan England, the absence of mothers in Shakespeare is consistent with patriarchal

insecurities with maternal power present throughout western discourse, and as Shakespeare’s

plays have developed symbolic and cultural power themselves, they have functioned to

perpetuate those insecurities with maternal power. Therefore, Shakespeare’s plays continue to

present a dangerously patriarchal philosophy, one that continues to leave women in a state of

dereliction.

Both Othello’s Desdemona and Hamlet’s Ophelia serve as perfect examples of women

left in a state of dereliction as the result of not having a literal or symbolic mother-daughter

relationship. Men have a symbolic image of God, and more symbolically they can see

themselves in that image. Jesus, as the son of God, offers a divine image for men. Irigaray

describes the relationship between father and son, between man and god, as a vertical symbolic

relationship. The vertical symbolic relationship constructs a male identity and forms a

patriarchal social contract that mediates horizontal relations between men. Hamlet, for example,

idolizes the image of his father, a noble King, and he attempts to fulfill that image himself.

Hamlet sees his father as godlike, describing him as “A combination and a form indeed/Where

every god did seem to set his seal/To give the world assurance of a man” (Hamlet 3.4.70-73).

While Hamlet fails to live up to the image of father, he is very clearly presented with a divine

image to emulate. His relationship to that image is central to his actions. His views of and actions

towards Claudius and Laertes are almost completely dictated by the way he sees his own father.

Rather than conform to the expectations of those around him, he looks to his father as a role

model for his own actions.

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Ophelia and Desdemona have no such image; they do not have living mothers, and their

societies do not offer them the divine images, such as Jesus, offered to men. Women are outside

of the symbolic order and therefore do not have vertical relationship that which would and

should be represented in the mother-daughter relationship. Women do not have a matriarchal

social contract that mediates vertical or horizontal relationships. As a result, women are forced

to function within the confines of the patriarchal social order, one in which they become a mirror

that reflects the ego of men, primarily fathers and husbands, rather than pursuing a unique

feminine identity (Whitford 78-79). Both women are forced to navigate the world in accord with

the patriarchal expectations placed upon them and the results are tragic. Desdemona’s first

appearance in Othello places her in the Duke’s council in Venice, a setting that is completely

defined by patriarchal power, one in which she must defend her decision to elope with the

Moorish general. From the outset, she adopts a position of rebellion against societal norms

which dictate that a daughter’s marriage be arranged by the parents. Even ignoring her decision

to marry an inappropriate or unnatural husband, Desdemona’s elopement is a punishable

transgression. Brabantio asks a telling first question of his daughter: “Come hither, gentle

mistress./Do you perceive in all this noble company/Where most you owe obedience?” (Othello

1.3.205-207). The question suggests that Desdemona does not have a choice in whether she is

obedient, only to which man she owes obedience. The demand places Desdemona in an

impossible position even before she says a single word in the play; she can either betray her

husband by pledging obedience to her father or betray her father by declaring her love for

Othello. She responds with notable craft, declaring “My noble father,/I do perceive here a

divided duty” (Othello 1.3.208-209). Rather than defend her actions as an act of independence,

she says that she acts as all women have before her:
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I am hitherto your daughter. But here’s my husband.

And so much duty as my mother showed

To you, preferring you before her father,

So much I challenge that I may profess

Due to the Moor my lord. (Othello 1.3.214-218)

While Desdemona effectively defends her actions, her declaration of loyalty to Othello demands

that she betray her father. Her choice is not a new one; as she describes in explanation to her

father, it is the same choice all women are forced to make. The only divine symbolic image

culturally offered to women is that of Mary, the virgin mother, but her image is impossible for

women to fulfill because they cannot practically remain chaste while also becoming a wife and

mother. Without a realistic powerful and present maternal figure to supersede this sole divine

female image, women are forced to conform to the impossible patriarchal standards for female

behavior that dictate complete loyalty to both lover and father. The demands leave the women in

a state of dereliction, serving to reflect men’s egos rather than aspiring to a unique image of a

feminine divine.

Though it might first appear that Desdemona contends with this divided duty because she

has eloped with an inappropriate husband, the impossible decision that Desdemona faces is

duplicated on the Shakespearean stage in a wide variety of situations, all of which place

daughters in conflict with fathers or with husbands/potential husbands. In Hamlet, Polonius

essentially demands the same decision of Ophelia as Brabantio demands of Desdemona. He

declares: “I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth/Have you so slander any moment

leisure/As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet./Look to ’t, I charge you. Come your
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ways” (Hamlet 1.3.140-144). While Hamlet and Ophelia are not yet married, all indications

suggest that the love between the two is sincere and will result in marriage. Ironically, over

Ophelia’s grave, Gertrude comments “I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife;/I

thought thy bride-bed to have decked” (Hamlet 5.1.255-256). Polonius forbids the relationship

because the potential lack of chastity in his daughter could do damage to his reputation; he is

concerned she will “tender [him] a fool” (Hamlet 1.3.118). Polonius’s ego, the image of himself

he sees reflected in her actions, dictates his demands on her behavior. Poloinus’ fears and

assumptions of a woman’s actions prove to be unfounded, but little good does that do Ophelia as

she succumbs to madness, a concrete reflection of her state of dereliction.

Without a maternal genealogy to dictate female behavior, women are stuck in this

patriarchal contradiction that forces men to see women as dishonest despite their earnest attempts

to prove otherwise. Rather than serving as a force that bonds the new husband and wife together

or that proves a daughter’s loyalty, the decision between father and lover forces men to see

women as capable of dishonesty. Desdemona’s betrayal of her father sets up Othello to believe

that she is potentially dishonest. Brabantio warns Othello: “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes

to see./She has deceived her father, and may thee” (Othello 1.3.333-334). Though he responds,

“My life upon her faith,” the seed has been planted that Desdemona is capable of betraying a

man. Othello is able to reject Iago’s insinuations that Desdemona is unfaithful until Iago reminds

Othello that “She did deceive her father, marrying you” (Othello 3.238-240). The effect on

Othello is almost immediate, as Iago’s reminder “hath a little dashed [Othello’s] spirits”

(3.3.250). Desdemona sacrifices her relationship with her father in declaring her love for Othello,

but Othello cannot see beyond the fact that she is capable of deception. His response suggests

that no action could have convinced him of complete honesty. Margaret Ranald, in her article
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“The Indiscretions of Desdemona,” explains that “Desdemona has, of course, the gifts of natural

virtue, but they are not enough, because, as was said of Caesar's wife, ‘A woman must not only

be free from that fault, but also from all suspicion thereof.’ And it is on the evidence of her

misinterpreted actions that Desdemona is convicted at the tribunal of Othello's justice” (Ranald

134) Othello’s logic highlights the impossibility of patriarchal expectations placed on

Desdemona and women in general. Ranald’s reference back to Caesar displays that this standard

for women has endured throughout western culture, unmitigated because no matriarchal social

contract exists. If Desdemona’s divided duty is a reflection of the actions of her mother and the

history of women before her who have been forced to contend with a decision between loyalty to

father and husband, then the patriarchal social contract dictates that all women are destined to be

seen as disloyal. Their act of pledging loyalty to a husband demands that they betray a father.

Ophelia’s case proves that pledging allegiance to father over lover yields the same

damning result. Making the opposite decision from Desdemona, Ophelia chooses to obey her

father and betray her lover, acting the part of the good Christian daughter; she simply declares, “I

shall obey, my lord” (Hamlet 1.3.145). Like Desdemona, Ophelia attempts to obey the men in

her life; she just chooses her father rather than Hamlet. The result of Ophelia’s decision is

ultimately the same as Desdemona’s. Perhaps Ophelia’s level of obedience is an extreme case

because Polonius uses her as a form of bait in order to advance his position as the King’s

advisor, but even before he has a sense of her complicity in her father’s plan, Hamlet questions

Ophelia’s honesty. “Ha, ha, are you honest?” (Hamlet 3.1.113). A women’s honesty in

Elizabethan culture was tied tightly to her sexuality, so Hamlet is essentially questioning her

chastity or sexual fidelity. Thus, Ophelia’s obedience to her father leaves her answering

accusations of being sexually liberal. By obeying her father, she has to endure Hamlet’s
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accusations that women are “breeders of sinners” and make “monsters” of men (Hamlet 3.1.132

and 150). The standard for absolute obedience placed on Ophelia by Hamlet looks strikingly

similar to the unrealistic standard for Desdemona held by Othello. The choice to obey father over

lover yields the same result as choosing lover over father; rather than proving her honesty and

goodness through her obedience, Ophelia’s loyalty to her father still leaves her no choice but to

prove her ability to disobey a man.

Given that Irigaray’s argument that a symbolized mother-daughter relationship is crucial

to developing a matriarchal social contract to free women from the impossible bonds of

patriarchal expectation, we consider the experiences of Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet, because she

is the rare daughter who has a mother. In fact, Lady Capulet represents one of the very few

mothers in the entire Shakespearean canon who share the stage with her daughter. When Juliet

faces the same choice as both Desdemona and Ophelia, Lady Capulet has the opportunity to

mitigate patriarchal demands on a daughter; she can assert matriarchal power. However, when

her daughter is faced with the same decision between obeying father or lover, Lady Capulet

effectively disappears. “Here comes your father, tell him so yourself;/And see how he will take it

at your hands’ (Romeo and Juliet 3.5.124-125). Lady Capulet, in fact, declares that she is

voiceless and ineffectual in her marriage. “Talk not to me for I’ll not speak a word,/Do as thou

wilt, for I have done with thee” (Romeo and Juliet 3.5.202-203). Lady Capulet tacitly affirms

the fact that Juliet must make the decision that all women must make to either obey her father or

obey her lover. The result for Juliet begins with a harsh rebuke from her father: “Hang thee,

young baggage, disobedient wretch!/I tell thee what: get thee to church o’ Thursday,/Or never

after look me in the face” (Romeo and Juliet 3.5.165-168). While Juliet does not live long
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enough to suffer the same accusations of dishonesty suffered by Desdemona and Ophelia, her

decision leads to the same tragic end.

All three young women end up in what Luce Irigaray describes as a state of dereliction as

a result of the forced decision between obeying father or lover. Desdemona is forced to beg for

her life and is denied the simple request to “say one prayer!” (Othello 5.2.102). Ophelia is left

fatherless and verbally abused and cursed by Hamlet, and Juliet is forced to fain death in her

family’s tomb. Each of these three young women end up dying as a result of her divided duty.

Each play offers a unique explanation for the deaths of each woman, but taken as a whole, they

reveal a startling pattern of women forced to conform to a patriarchal social contract that

presents unattainable standards for women. The women lack a feminine divine, a symbolic

image of god in which they can see themselves. They literally lack a mother who can guide

them to a successful role in society, and figuratively they lack a female image of God in which to

see themselves. As a result, they attempt to fulfill the images of women presented to them in the

patriarchal social contract that sees maternal power and feminine sexual pleasure as a threat to

the ideal society. As long as women conform to a patriarchal order, they end fulfilling the

patriarchal need to sacrifice maternal power.

In the absence of a symbolic feminine divine, men and male egos are left to define the

roles of women in society. In Othello and Hamlet, Iago and Hamlet describe the potential roles

for women in the patriarchal social order, chillingly confirming Irigaray’s theories. After

slandering women by saying that “rise to play, and go to bed to work,” Iago goes on to defend

his assertion that society holds no noble position for a truly virtuous woman (Othello 2.1.128).

Searching for what a woman such as her could become, Desdemona asks, “But what praise

couldst thou bestow on a deserving woman indeed,” and Iago famously responds:
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She that was ever fair and never proud,

Had tongue at will and yet was never loud,

Never lacked gold and yet went never gay,

Fled from her wish, and yet said “Now I may,”

She that being angered, her revenge being nigh,

Bade her wrong stay and her displeasure fly,

She that in wisdom never was so frail

To change the cod’s head for the salmon’s tail,

She that could think and ne’er disclose her mind,

See suitors following and not look behind,

She was a wight, if ever such wight were—…

…To suckle fools and chronicle small beer. (Othello 2.1. 175)

Though Desdemona dismisses Iago’s response as the lame and impotent banter of an alehouse,

his conclusions ring true when put in the context of the outcomes of the women in Shakespeare.

Ophelia, Desdemona, and Juliet all attempt to conform to the description set forth by Iago, but all

three are predestined to fail because there is not a noble role that they can fill within a social

contract dictated by male egos.

Hamlet’s berating of both Ophelia and Gertrude reflects the same impossible patriarchal

social contract described by Iago. When his mother remarries, Hamlet demands that she should

be ashamed of taking a second husband; “O shame, where is thy blush?” (Hamlet 3.4.91). And,

he suggests that Ophelia should never marry. ”You nickname God’s creatures and make your

wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on ’t. It hath made me mad. I say we will have
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no more marriage” (Hamlet 3.1.156-160). Hamlet declares that a staid, silent marriage is the only

option for a woman, yet he cannot see any way that Ophelia can fulfill that role. Cherrell

Guilfoyle suggests a parallel to the allegorical angel and devil presented in The Faerie Queene.

“In Hamlet, the duality is used differently, but basically the same thing happens. Hamlet

abandons Ophelia, maligning her in the most brutal terms, because he assumes her to be

corruptor, at the least, on the first step downwards” (Guilfoyle 4). Though his actions suggest

that he would have liked Ophelia to betray her father in favor of her love for him, he chastises his

own mother for making that very decision by following her love of Claudius. Hamlet projects an

impossible duality of expectations on the women in his life. Like Iago, Hamlet offers no feasible

option for a woman to elevate herself above the position of submission to a patriarchal social

order that is threatened by maternity and female sexuality.

Even the most seemingly successful and powerful women of Shakespeare’s comedies,

such as Rosalind, Katherine, and Portia, end up as Iago describes, giving themselves to a man’s

authority and disappearing, as Lady Capulet does, to a voiceless and private motherhood.

Though one might argue that they are better off than Ophelia, Desdemona, and Juliet, they all

essentially disappear, either through death in the tragedies or by ceding their voices and agency

to masculine power in the comedies. Emily Bartels, in her article, “Strategies of Submission:

Desdemona, the Duchess, and the Assertion of Desire,” suggests that we might see some agency

within the role of wife, arguing that these women need not buckle to the duality offered by Iago

and Hamlet and instead be “good wives and desiring subjects, obedient and self-assertive, silent

and outspoken” (Bartels 419). She argues that perhaps these women are not losing agency but

instead could be “stag[ing] different selves” in order to gain agency through their husbands

power (Bartels 424). Bartels focuses her textual support mainly in Desdemona’s attempts to
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entreat Othello for Cassio’s reinstatement. Bartels looks closely at the way that Desdemona

wields her husband’s power as her own; “She (and Shakespeare) make clear from the outset that,

while the agenda is Cassio’s, at issue is her will and her right to a voice” (Bartels 425). Rather

than by being defeated by marriage and submission, she finds agency in her role; she finds voice

and power by performing the role of wife. However, the small bit of agency that Bartels

describes is found within the construct of the patriarchal social order, and that little bit of agency

did not keep Desdemona from being strangled by her husband.

Even the most positive interpretations of the fates Desdemona and Ophelia reveal the

deleterious effects of the absence of a maternal genealogy. Without a feminine divine, an image

of a mature woman with power and agency, the young women in Shakespeare eventually

conform to the demands of the patriarchal social order. Arguably the powerful portrayals of

young women such as Portia and Rosalind suggest that Shakespeare was not a misogynist, but

the absence of mothers and mother-daughter relationships reflects the long history of a western

discourse that fears maternity and female agency. Sadly, the cultural power of Shakespeare’s

work over the past four hundred years would have allowed him to have created the cultural,

societal, and iconic representations of the mother-daughter relationship that Luce Irigaray

suggests is necessary to create a feminine divine—to begin the creation of a matriarchal social

contract. Instead, Shakespeare perpetuates and reinforces a patriarchal social order that

continues, in subtle and not so subtle ways, to demand a divided duty of women today. While we

can continue to delight in the metaphorical beauty of Jaques’ famous musing that “All the

world’s a stage,” we must actively challenge the roles that so much of our culture has assigned

women to play.
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Works Cited

Bartels, Emily. “Strategies of Submission: Desdemona, the Duchess, and the Assertion of

Desire.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Vol. 36, No. 2, Tudor and Stuart

Drama (Spring, 1996), pp. 417-433

Guilfoyle, Cherrell. “’Ower Swete Sokor’: The Role of Ophelia in Hamlet." Comparative

\Drama, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 1980), pp. 3-17. 2 February 2017

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. Print.

Ranald, Margaret Loftus. “The Indiscretions of Desdemona.” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 14,

No. 2 (Spring, 1963), pp. 127-139. 2 February 2017

Rose, Mary Beth. “Where are all the mothers in Shakespeare?:Options for Gender representation

in the English Renaissance.” Shakespeare Quarterly 42(3), 1991, 291-314.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Barabara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Washington,

D.C.: Washington Square Press. 2004. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Barabara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Washington, D.C.:

Washington Square Press. 1993. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Othello. Ed. Barabara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Washington, D.C.:

Washington Square Press. 1993. Print.

Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Ed. Barabara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Washington,

D.C.: Washington Square Press. 2004. Print.

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Whitford, Margaret. Luce Irigaray, Philosophy in the Feminine. London: Routledge, 1991. Print.