SOURCE: Waller, Marguerite. “The Empire's New Clothes: Refashioning the Renaissance.” In Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, edited by Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley, pp. 160-83. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Waller argues that in “Whoso list to hunt” “male selfhood” is achieved through the “denigration and exclusion” of women.

I. an Observation

Recently, at the University of California, San Diego, where I had been visiting, two “new historicist” Renaissance scholars spoke on two successive days. The first day Stephen Orgel presented a masterfully detailed historical account of the instability of the Shakespearean text. The next day, Jonathan Goldberg gave an equally impressive, imaginatively structured and researched presentation concerning Hamlet and Renaissance handwriting. A third new historicist, Louis Montrose, was in the audience of both lectures. His elegant synthesis of theoretical and archival historicizing...