Book Review: Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (eds). <em>The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Ostovich's brilliantly layered analysis of The Magnetic Lady, however, we find Jonson staking out a position at the centre of patriarchal pretension, where women who slip from under male controls are shown to be stupidly transgressive, lascivious, duplicitous, 'leagued in a devilish compact', and inclined to infanticide ('The Appropriation of Pleasure in The Magnetic Lady', 106).But see also Simon Morgan-Russell's '"No Good Thing Ever Comes Out of It": Male Expectation and Female Alliance in Dekker and Webster's Westward Ho', where an alliance of 'citizen Wives' successfully establishes a powerful alternative to male homosociality, 83).Only occasionally, when women write for and about women, do they seem able to elide male claims of agency and dominion.Two late seventeenth-century women, for instance, found in the learning and rhetorical powers of Elizabeth I a viable model for women to emulate (Lisa Gim, '"Faire Eliza's Chaine": Two Female Writers' Literary Links to Queen Elizabeth'.)Harriette Andreadis, in 'The Erotics of Female Friendship in Early Modern England', works out with exquisite precision ways in which mostly high-born women in the late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-centuries allowed themselves to express female same-sex intimacy in the 'sexually evasive yet erotically charged language of female friendship' (241).See too, perhaps, Jessica Tvordi, 'Female Alliance and the Construction of Homoeroticism in As You Like It and Twelfth Night'.In life, if not in literature, however, even the remarkably successful and ferociously independent society of women founded by Mary Ward, though it was able to stave off episcopal authority and the constraints of women's religious communities for a time, was finally all but destroyed by papal power (Lowell Gallagher, 'Mary Ward's "Jesuitresses" and the Construction of a Typological Community').Nonetheless, as this anthology demonstrates so well, alliances in the early modern period formed by women, reinforced by the power of their own learning and intelligence, were able to accrue to themselves increased social and civic responsibility along with heightened realization of their own interior identities.

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