A Review of Women Talk Back to Shakespeare

This student-friendly volume of the new Routledge series “New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Culture: Confluences and Contexts” seeks to present examples of women “talking back” to Shakespeare through their adaptations and appropriations of his plays. The book succeeds in its objectives, offering first a very brief introduction to the literary practices of “talking back” to cultural authorities such as Shakespeare, followed by seven chapters, each focused on a specific novel or, in the first instance, avant garde musical-theatrical production. The chapters stand alone as analyses of (usually) the novel in question, but their accumulating and overlapping approaches also cohere to form a wider picture of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation.

The introduction, like the chapters that follow, is highly accessible. Student readers will find this section instructive, but so will mature scholars comfortable with Shakespeare’s plays but not familiar with the rich traditions of adaptation and appropriation that have grown out of the plays. In fewer than ten pages, Carney lays out a brief history of women’s adaptations of Shakespeare, identifies some key examples, and frames how she conceptualizes “talking back” to Shakespeare. “The works considered here are not all unmitigated critiques of Shakespeare’s plays,” she explains, “but they do insist on a re-examination of their aesthetic and ideological terms.” Some works talk back by offering sharp counters to the cultural authority that underpins Shakespeare’s plays, while others begin with a “less accusatory impulse to continue a conversation” or engage in a…