Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s Middle Comedies: A Generation of Criticism
- ‘Perfect Types of Womanhood’: Rosalind, Beatrice and Viola in Victorian Criticism and Performance
- The Stage Representation of the ‘Kill Claudio’ Sequence in Much Ado About Nothing
- As You Like It Adapted: Charles Johnson’s Love in a Forest
- Social Relations and the Social Order in Much Ado About Nothing
- Sexual Disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night
- Twelfth Night and the Myth of Echo and Narcissus
- ‘Smiling at grief’: Some Techniques of Comedy in Twelfth Night and Così Fan Tutte
- ‘My Lady’s a Catayan, we are politicians, Maluolios a Peg-a-ramsie’ (Twelfth Night II, iii, 77-8)
- The Importance of Being Marcade
- A Hebrew Source for The Merchant of Venice
- The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure: A Reconsideration
- Richard III: Antecedents of Clarence’s Dream
- Deep Plots and Indiscretions in ‘The Murder of Gonzago’
- ‘What is’t to leave betimes?’ Proverbs and Logic in Hamlet
- The Tempest: Language and Society
- Pictorial Evidence for a Possible Replica of the London Fortune Theatre in Gdansk
- A Year of Comedies: Stratford 1978
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study: 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate section
‘Perfect Types of Womanhood’: Rosalind, Beatrice and Viola in Victorian Criticism and Performance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Shakespeare’s Middle Comedies: A Generation of Criticism
- ‘Perfect Types of Womanhood’: Rosalind, Beatrice and Viola in Victorian Criticism and Performance
- The Stage Representation of the ‘Kill Claudio’ Sequence in Much Ado About Nothing
- As You Like It Adapted: Charles Johnson’s Love in a Forest
- Social Relations and the Social Order in Much Ado About Nothing
- Sexual Disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night
- Twelfth Night and the Myth of Echo and Narcissus
- ‘Smiling at grief’: Some Techniques of Comedy in Twelfth Night and Così Fan Tutte
- ‘My Lady’s a Catayan, we are politicians, Maluolios a Peg-a-ramsie’ (Twelfth Night II, iii, 77-8)
- The Importance of Being Marcade
- A Hebrew Source for The Merchant of Venice
- The Marriage Contracts in Measure for Measure: A Reconsideration
- Richard III: Antecedents of Clarence’s Dream
- Deep Plots and Indiscretions in ‘The Murder of Gonzago’
- ‘What is’t to leave betimes?’ Proverbs and Logic in Hamlet
- The Tempest: Language and Society
- Pictorial Evidence for a Possible Replica of the London Fortune Theatre in Gdansk
- A Year of Comedies: Stratford 1978
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study: 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
George Bernard Shaw, writing to The Daily News in 1905 to make clear his position on Shakespeare, claimed that the playwright had attempted ‘to make the public accept real studies of life and character in – for instance – Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well’ but had failed to overcome the public’s philistine preference for ‘a fantastic sugar doll, like Rosalind’. The eighth point of his polemic was ‘That people who spoil paper and waste ink by describing Rosalind as a perfect type of womanhood are the descendants of the same blockheads whom Shakespeare, with the coat of arms and the lands in Warwickshire in view, had to please when he wrote plays as they liked them.’
Shaw was attacking not a handful of eccentrics, but the main body of Victorian critical opinion in the theatre and out of it. It is the intention of this article to describe the principal features of this orthodoxy, and to examine some of its theatrical manifestations.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 15 - 26Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1980