From one of the country’s foremost experts on Shakespeare
and theatre arts, actor, director, and master teacher Tina
Packer offers an exploration—fierce, funny, fearless—of the
women of Shakespeare’s plays. A profound, and profoundly
illuminating, book that gives us the playwright’s changing
understanding of the feminine and reveals some of his
deepest insights. Packer, with expert grasp and perception,
constructs a radically different understanding of power,
sexuality, and redemption.
Beginning with the early
comedies (The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of
Verona, The Comedy of Errors), Packer shows thatShakespeare wrote the women of these plays as shrews to
be tamed or as sweet little things with no definable
independent thought, virgins on the pedestal. The women of
the histories (the three parts of Henry VI;
Richard III) are, Packer shows, much more
interesting, beginning with Joan of Arc, possibly the first
woman character Shakespeare ever created. In her
opening scene, she’s wonderfully alive—a virgin, true, sent
from heaven, a country girl going to lead men bravely into
battle, the kind of girl Shakespeare could have known and
loved in Stratford. Her independent resolution collapses
within a few scenes, as Shakespeare himself suddenly turns
against her, and she yields to the common caricature of his
culture and becomes Joan the Enemy, the Warrior Woman, the
witch; a woman to be feared and destroyed . . .
As Packer turns her attention to the extraordinary
Juliet, the author perceives a large shift. Suddenly
Shakespeare’s women have depth of character, motivation,
understanding of life more than equal to that of the men;
once Juliet has led the way, the plays are never the same
again. As Shakespeare ceases to write about women as
predictable caricatures and starts writing them from the
inside, embodying their voices, his women become as
dimensional, spirited, spiritual, active, and sexual as any
of his male characters. Juliet is just as passionately in
love as Romeo—risking everything, initiating marriage,
getting into bed, fighting courageously when her parents
threaten to disown her—and just as brave in facing
death when she discovers Romeo is dead. And, wondering
if Shakespeare himself fell in love (Packer considers with
whom, and what she may have been like), the author observes
that from Juliet on, Shakespeare writes the women as if he
were a woman, giving them desires, needs, ambition,
insight.
Women of Will follows Shakespeare’s
development as a human being, from youth to enlightened
maturity, exploring the spiritual journey he undertook.
Packer shows that Shakespeare’s imagination, mirrored
and revealed in his female characters, develops and deepens
until finally the women, his creative knowledge, and a sense
of a larger spiritual good come together in the late plays,
making clear that when women and men are equal in status and
sexual passion, they can—and do—change the world.
Part master class, part brilliant analysis—Women of
Will is all inspiring discovery.
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