• Alaa .S. Muhsen

  Author

No doubt, William Shakespeare is an iconic figure who affects different fields of knowledge.
Although he has died four centuries ago, his plays still acquire the attention of a wide range of
scholars all over the world. Moreover, the world-view of Shakespeare varies from one generation
to another without a last consensus among them. So, to travel through four centuries of
conflicting ideas and opinions is not an easy task to do. On the one hand, Shakespeare is still
regarded as a controversial playwright whose plays’ ideas are liable to multiple interpretations
and because those ideas can be applicable to different cultures and societies.
As far as Shakespeare gender criticism is concerned, it is a doubly significant site of
exploration or innovations not only in literary criticism but also in gender criticism as well.
Feminist critics of Shakespeare find it difficult to arrive at an agreement about Shakespeare’s
attitude to women. As such, Shakespeare studies become a rich area of critical discussions and
oppositions. As Lynda E. Boose, an author who wrote extensively about Shakespearean studies
notes:
Shakespeare is a site of such competitive jostling because Shakespeare is a siteof enormous
cultural power. As such, he is not only a universally available butlikewise a dangerously charged
locale, where maneuvers for appropriation, displacement, erasure, and the institutionalization of
both cultural and academicprivileges are invested with a particular energy that makes the politics
within this field the more recognizable and, simultaneously, perhaps the more crucial to
recognize.

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