Feminist performance and Isabella's silence in measure for measureIn a chapter entitled "When is a character not a character?" Alan Sinfield argues that the female figures in Shakespeare's plays are not "characters" at all, since they do not possess a continuous and psychologically coherent inner life. Although roles such as Desdemona, Olivia and Lady Macbeth are written to suggest the presence of an uninterrupted inner consciousness, this impression collapses under the pressure of the plot's movement towards the conclusion, which reveals that the figures represent nothing more than a " disordered sequence of positions that women are conventionally supposed to occupy” (53) In order to preserve a textual organization that supports a particular gender hierarchy, female characters suddenly switch from one stereotypical version of femininity to another. without coherent connections between them. For example, despite their loquacity during the first acts, at the conclusion of the plays, as Sinfield notes, Shakespeare's women often “are silent at moments when their speech could only undermine the play's attempt at ideological coherence 'work" (73). Therefore, "the point at which the text is silent is the point at which its ideological project is revealed" (74). One of the most notable silences appears at the end of Measure for Measure, where Isabella, “the brave woman most spectacularly silenced when marriage is proposed” (74), fails to verbally react to the Duke's two offers of marriage. According to Sinfield, this lack of response occurs because Isabella is suspended between two conventional female roles, and the disjunction between them makes manifest the agenda of the text "......middle of paper...The Stratford Season, 1992." Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 477-83.Riefer, Marcia. “‘Tools of a More Powerful Member’: Constraining Female Power Measure for Measure.” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984): 157-69.Shakespeare, William. The complete works of Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. 4th ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.-----. Measure for measure. The Arden Shakespeare. Ed. JW Leva. London: Routledge, 1965.Sinfield, Alan. Fault lines: Cultural materialism and the politics of dissident reading. Berkeley: University of California P, 1992. Sundelson, David. “Misogyny and Government Measure for Measure.” Women's Studies 9 (1981): 83-91. Weil, Herbert S., Jr. “Stratford Festival Canada.” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 245-50.Williamson, Marilyn L. The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1986.