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Citizen Shakespeare: Freemen and Aliens in the Language of the Plays (review)

already “in place” (73), readings of the sonnets that repeatedly cite Shakespeare’s contributions to a misogynistic Petrarchan tradition without considering alternatives expressed within the sequence, and the tendency to overlook the function of Shakespeare’s female (re)characterizations in the formation of the “universal feminine.” In each chapter, Rackin provides an alternative to the limiting assumptions she describes and thus offers brave new ways of seeing. Of course, as with any well-defined and brief study, this one has its necessary limitations. As a result, the survey of criticism in chapter 1 ends around 1996, about when the “challenge” to the “patriarchal narrative” was gaining force. (Readers who are concerned about datedness will find later studies in the valuable list of “Further Reading” at the end of the book.) Other limitations are felt because of the book’s place in the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series. While Rackin performs a beautifully suggestive close reading of Sonnet 130, a discussion that excludes mention of Richard Barnfield and Mary Wroth makes it seem as if innovations in Shake-speares Sonnets begin and end with that sequence, which such examples defy. There is also little room for dialogue with the work on women writers that complements the criticism Rackin cites. Yes, her notes and bibliography include the fine work of Lena Cowen Orlin and Margaret Ezell, but the research conducted in the archives by those in the Perdita Project (http:// human.ntu.ac.uk/research/perdita/index.html), for example, can only be of assistance in the endeavors, particularly those of chapter 2, Rackin envisions. In general, however, I can find little fault with this study that reexamines with a steady feminist eye the man who persistently claims our critical interest. In focusing on the question of Shakespeare and women in the twenty-first century, Phyllis Rackin has renewed a sense of the feminist agenda within the field of Shakespeare studies. Most importantly, she has done so for the next generation of scholars in an affordable volume that will be invaluable in the graduate classroom.