Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England

Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England

Korda, Natasha

Hardcover

Series: New Cultural Studies

Shakespeare

ISBN10: 0812236637
ISBN13: 9780812236637
Publisher: Univ Of Pennsylvania Pr
Published: Aug 5 2002
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

Shakespeare's Domestic Economies explores representations of female subjectivity in Shakespearean drama from a refreshingly new perspective, situating The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello, and Measure for Measure in relation to early modern England's nascent consumer culture and competing conceptions of property. Drawing evidence from legal documents, economic treatises, domestic manuals, marriage sermons, household inventories, and wills to explore the realities and dramatic representations of women's domestic roles, Natasha Korda departs from traditional accounts of the commodification of women, which maintain that throughout history women have been trafficked as passive objects of exchange between men.

In the early modern period, Korda demonstrates, as newly available market goods began to infiltrate households at every level of society, women emerged as never before as the keepers of household properties. With the rise of consumer culture, she contends, the housewife's managerial function assumed a new form, becoming increasingly centered around caring for the objects of everyday life--objects she was charged with keeping as if they were her own, in spite of the legal strictures governing women's property rights. Korda deftly shows how their positions in a complex and changing social formation allowed women to exert considerable control within the household domain, and in some areas to thwart the rule of fathers and husbands.

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