Barbra J. Bono writes Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare’s As You like It, is an article written on specific question she had while reading Shakespeare’s plays. Bono not only uses her own assumptions and predictions, but she also uses articles from others that help her support her ideas. She starts off the article by sating some questions she will answer and represent. The first question being “Does Shakespeare’s preoccupation, especially in the comedies, with strong female characters and an underlying complex of “feminine” concerns –sexuality and familial and domestic life—provide evidence for what Juliet Dusinberre calls “a feminism of Shakespeare’s time”?” The second question; “does literature and social practice of early modern period exhibit, as Stephen Greenblatt and Natalie Zemon Davis suggest, a theatricality, and ready embrace of role playing and social inversion, that nonetheless functions most often to test and strengthen traditional authority?”
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Chodorow brings up Freud as needing significant revising on both masculinity and femininity. Chodorow states that women become the “second sex” and men were sent out for education, while the women were more closely tied to the work of childbearing and motherhood. Bono adds in thoughts from Kahn, stating that Shakespeare works both show explicitly threatening women in tragedies, and the seemingly benevolent women of comedies that operate within a “universe of masculinits assumptions” about the nature of
Chodorow brings up Freud as needing significant revising on both masculinity and femininity. Chodorow states that women become the “second sex” and men were sent out for education, while the women were more closely tied to the work of childbearing and motherhood. Bono adds in thoughts from Kahn, stating that Shakespeare works both show explicitly threatening women in tragedies, and the seemingly benevolent women of comedies that operate within a “universe of masculinits assumptions” about the nature of