Status Updates From Roman Shakespeare (Feminist...

on coriolanus:

"'There's no man in the world / More bound to's mother,' Volumnia claims. [...] In the play, 'bound' implies not just a specific moral obligation, but a connection equally physical and emotional that bespeaks the totalizing indebtedness of son to mother."

happy mother's day

on a&c:

"It is undeniable that, as Cynthia Marshall has recently argued, 'Wounded, bleeding, and lacking agency, Antony takes on a typically feminine position [and]... troubles an audience's notions of what it means to be a (masculine) hero.' But that is precisely the point. That Antony fails to perform his suicide effectively exposes it AS a performance."

dr coppelia kahn dropping "the wheel has come full circle" into an essay that is already making me insane should register as a hate crime

also on julius caesar:

"In the orchard scene, Portia concedes her inferiority as a woman, but nonetheless seeks entitlement to the constancy of a man, first through descent from her father [...] next, through affiliation with Brutus [...] Men mutually confirm their identities as Roman through bonds with each other. Brutus can trust Portia only as a man."

on julius caesar:

“As long as Brutus sees himself in another man’s eyes, he is a Roman, whole and coherent. But when (in act 2, scene 1) Portia reflects a different image of him as divided and troubled, that Roman identity is, however fleetingly, compromised.”

"Tracing Virgilian parallels, Jonathan Bate points out that 'as in the Aeneid, the main threat to [Titus] is an exotic woman from a rival empire,' and that 'Virgil's Lavinia, the mother of early Rome, becomes the mutilated daughter of late Rome" i'm beginning to foam at the mouth

"The only members of the family whose destiny is to leave it, [daughters] are thus made liminal, and turned into creatures of passage."

on lucrece:

"As Michael Platt points out, Lucrece can be seen as a 'brief epic' resembling the Iliad or the Aeneid in centering on 'the destruction and foundation of cities.' Lucrece's body stands in the place of Troy; on its ruins is the new republic Rome built."