PROSPECTUS

Perhaps for good reason, relations between the sexes as portrayed by Shakespeare are not often discussed in terms of tolerance or intolerance. From the perspective of this book, in which tolerance is understood to require a possibility of making a choice against intolerance, the problem might be that in Elizabethan gender relations choice was not always a possibility. At the start of The Merchant of Venice, Portia, dominated by her late father's will, laments: ‘O me, the word “choose”’ (1.2.21–2). Some see early modern gender relations as the product of hierarchal or patriarchal ideologies determined by (or rationalising) oppressive and unjust social, economic, and legal arrangements beyond any individual's control. Much remains to be learned about such matters in connection with Shakespeare's time and culture.

From among such large questions a restricted but perhaps illuminating focus will be chosen for this chapter. This will be on Shakespeare's varied dramatic representations of men or women who react in ways specific to their dramatically posited situations to questions regarding gender and sexual relations. In some cases they manifest abnormal intolerance, and in others develop remarkable tolerance, relative to the possibilities available to them in Elizabethan culture.

Shakespeare, of course, had to frame his representations of gender interactions and attitudes within boundaries defined by his own society, although sometimes they were quite close to the edge of these boundaries, occasionally perhaps over the edge. Moreover, Shakespeare's transgressors of bounds are not always ‘contained’.