SHAKESPEARE’S FOREIGN WOMEN

• Main Authors: KEVIN ZHOU-SHEN KEVIN ZHOU-SHEN KEVIN ZHOU-SHEN CH, 陳奏賢
• Other Authors: RAPHAEL J. SCHULTE
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/58746848800480749595

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 英國語文學系 === 97 === This thesis explores Shakespeare’s representations of foreign women, and shows the relationship between the texts and their social contexts. The content of this thesis includes four chapter-length studies of gender and race in Shakespeare’s works, one each on Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Antony and Cleopatra, one on The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Othello, and the conclusion on The Tempest. In these works I discover that the images of Shakespeare’s foreign women, that are alienated and marginalized, are grounded in the interwoven relationships among the poetic and dramatic conventions, the geographical and exotic imagination, and the theatrical practices in the early modern period. Through an examination of the ways in which the foreign women are presented, how the texts’ elaborate strategies undertaken present the foreignness of the other reveals the anxieties of western male-dominant culture about being contaminated by the racial and gender other in the early modern period. The presences and the absences of the foreign women not only destabilize the cultural order the western white supremacy attempts to rebuild but also connote the Elizabethan and Jacobean anxiety of self-affirmation.