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Rating: 
Summary: Wishful Guess Work
Review: Joy Leslie Gibson's handsome book is a strange mixture of useful fact and wishful guess work. Her early chapters are terrific - she summarises in an accesable and interesting way the work of early scholars and extends it by examining the sumptuary laws and dress standards of Elizabethan England. I feel she is on less steady earth when applying her assertion that the breathing patterns of Shakespeare's major speeches for women were written with boy actors in mind. As a foundation she asks the reader to accept that all punctuation in the plays is unrepresentative of the authors intentions - including the 1623 First Folio (ignoring the fact that the two editors were actors who had worked with the author since 1593!) and then arbitairily replaces it with an assumption that the thought patterns of the speeches can be understood without them and breath points established. Essentially she removes one set of punctuation that does not fit her thesis and replaces it with one that does - of her own making. She also makes some doubtful assertions about the women's roles always being shorter than their male counterparts, ignoring roles of such depth, range AND length as Juliet and Rosalind. Some great material let down by some questionable use of information.
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