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This is the first scholarly study devoted to Shakespeare's girl characters and conceptions of girlhood. It charts the development of Shakespeare's treatment of the girl as a dramatic and literary figure, and explores the impact of Shakespeare's girl characters on the history of early modern girls as performers, patrons, and authors. "Deanne Williams ventures into largely unexplored territory in this fascinating and important study of girlhood and its implications in Shakespeare. The book is challenging, well argued and continuously interesting, and reveals something genuinely new about Shakespeare." - Stephen Orgel, J. E. Reynolds Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University, USA "With great lucidity and authority, yet a nicely light touch, Williams draws together an immense amount of research into the cultural history of pre-modern girlhood to frame original and insightful arguments, which are developed with impressive clarity. This outstanding book gave me a fresh perspective on ways of reading Shakespeare's girls and a new appreciation of some familiar works." - Kate Chedgzoy, Newcastle University, UK "Deanne Williams provides the first sustained account of "girlhood" in Shakespeare's plays, one that is performative rather than essentialist. Girl characters performed by boy actors, performances by girls in masques and other private theatricals, and girls as writers and performers inspired by Shakespeare's girls, are surveyed to show compellingly how "girlhood" emerged as a significant formation in the early modern period. From "la Pucelle" to the birth of baby Elizabeth at the close of Henry VIII, from Macbeth, who describes himself as a "baby of a girl," to the thirteen-year-old masque writer Lady Rachel Fane, Williams excavates a history that has long been ignored but has come into its own." - Karen Newman, Brown University, USA "Williams radically reframes common notions of girlhood as a marginal, interstitial state, interpreting it rather as the cultural site of creative and potentially radical possibilities. Moving from girls as characters in the Shakespeare canon to historical girls empowered by Shakespeare to perform and create roles for girls, Williams reveals how those roles can be innovative and liberating. Anyone interested in gender, in Shakespeare, or in Shakespeare's engagement with the problematic of gender will find this book fresh and compelling." - Coppelia Kahn, Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies, Brown University, USA.
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