“‘Silent, not as a foole’: Shakespeare’s Roman Women and early modern tropes of feminine silence”

This chapter discusses Shakespearean instances of feminine Roman silence that simultaneously exemplify and defy the time-honored idea of an impotent female silence. Traditionally regarded as a passive female virtue, the condition of silence was reexamined by early modern English culture, which also affected contemporary readings of classical and mythological figures that were considered female role-models. Shakespeare’s Roman women are certainly subjected to silence, but they also fight it, heroically embody it and skillfully use it to speak their voice and empower themselves. This chapter shows how Shakespeare appropriated silence as the passive ideal of female Romanitas in order to question this cultural value and redefine it from its very source, according to the contemporary rhetoric of silence. The female Roman standpoint provides Shakespeare with a safely “exotic” metaphoric context (the Roman one) and with a fertile marginal and subservient perspective (the female one) through which he can discuss the imposed, self-imposed, and performed silences of early modern English subjects.