SOURCE: John, David G. “Margarete von Parma in Goethe's Egmont: Text and Performance.” In Queering the Canon: Defying Sights in German Literature and Culture, edited by Christoph Lorey and John L. Plews, pp. 126-41. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1998.

In the following essay, John examines the role of cross-dressing in Egmont, asserting that it is “not always a matter of gender crossing, but can be a political transfer even within one sex.”

In her stimulating collection of essays, Outing Goethe and His Age, Alice A. Kuzniar includes a contribution by W. Daniel Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory: Political and Gender Cross(-Dress)ing in Goethe's Egmont.” This provocative treatment of the play reinterprets all of its major figures and concludes generally that the two principal females, Margarete and Klärchen, have been undervalued and misunderstood by critics, and that some of the males have received undeservedly positive interpretations. Wilson's...