1. See Christina Luckyj for one of many recent examinations of this: ‘A Moving Rhetoricke’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 63.
2. However, it is wise to keep in mind Evelyn Gajowski’s point that “‘Chaste, silent and obedient”, the message that was endlessly repeated in early modern English household manuals, conduct books and marriage sermons, became a refrain repeated more often in contemporary scholarship’ (Evelyn Gajowski (ed.), Presentism, Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare (Basinstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009). p. 4).
3. See Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare without Women (London: Routledge, 2000)
4. Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
5. Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), for equally detailed, but contrasting, examinations of the cultural context and theatrical effects of this practice