Feminist scholars of English Renaissance drama have long celebrated heroic females in comedies, but Naomi Liebler points out that many have overlooked female tragic heroism, reading it instead as "female victimage," evidence of pervasive misogyny on the part of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

"It is not difficult to see what makes female tragic heroes tragic," said Liebler, "but what makes them heroic? Do men own the title of 'hero'? Applying research in literary and cultural history, linguistics and feminist theory, I argue that the female protagonists in these plays are heroic in precisely the same ways as their more notorious masculine counterparts."

Liebler will address these questions and discuss her theory when she presents "Wonder Woman, or The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama" at the Presidential Invited Faculty Address on Wednesday, March 24, at 3 p.m. in Memorial Auditorium.

"The Presidential Invited Faculty Address was instituted as a vehicle for showcasing the remarkable achievements of our own faculty members," said Richard Lynde, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs. "Professor Liebler, an internationally respected Shakespeare scholar, is a worthy successor to her distinguished campus colleagues and I'm looking forward to a presentation that will be informative, thought-provoking and enjoyable."

Editor of The Female Tragic Hero in Renaissance English Drama, author of Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre and co-editor (with John Drakakis) of Tragedy, a collection of theoretical essays on the genre, Liebler also has published numerous articles on Shakespeare and modern European and American drama, and this semester she is participating in a Folger Institute Seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Q. How is it that female heroes have been overlooked in tragedy?
A. People look for what they hope to find. It all depends on who's looking. Scholars who are not looking for a feminine hero in tragedy won't find it. Critics see what they want to see.

Q. What led you to question the female role in English Renaissance drama?
A. After I wrote my first book, in which I mapped the model for a tragic hero, I realized I had not talked about the female hero. Females are heroic in exactly the same ways males are heroic, so I used the same map for the female tragic hero as I used for the male.

Q. Tell us about your participation at the Folger Institute Seminar.
A. Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research facility and the Folger Institute provides seminars and colloquia on a wide range of topics. I travel to Washington every week to participate in a 10-session seminar, "The Making of Shakespeare(s)," which ends in mid-April. Directed by Coppélia Kahn of Brown University, the seminar involves research and a series of debates about the construction of Shakespeare as "the Bard"--a process that began almost as soon as he died and hit its full stride in the mid-19th century. We address writing and nationhood, discourses of race, the literary and theatrical marketplace, authorship, intellectual property and the formation of the English canon.

Q. What's next for you in terms of research projects?
A. The research I'm conducting now is in early modern prose fiction, a new genre for me. Exploring at the Folger some 20 years ago, I came across an unedited edition of an early modern prose romance in two parts dating back to 1596 titled The Seven Champions of Christendom by Richard Johnson. Although the title notes seven patron saints of seven nations, Johnson primarily recounts the valiant and not-so-valiant deeds of St. George. St. George's exploits occurred mostly in Egypt, not England. As early as the late Elizabethan period, England is deeply interested in the Muslim world. Part two imagines the further exploits of the sons of these patron saint/heroes.

I am interested in how an apprentice in an unspecified craft comes to write a two-volume work that explores the creation of national icons.This text is particularly interesting in that it was pitched to the working classes--apprentices and craftsmen--and has important implications for the growth of literacy and the literary marketplace in early modern England.

Two projects will emerge from my research: one is a collection of essays on early modern prose fiction by myself and other scholars in the United States and Canada; the other is a critical edition of Johnson's wonderful prose romance, which I would like to make available to readers anywhere, not just those with access to special research collections like those at the Folger, the Huntington and the British libraries.

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