Abstract
Donne said of women: ‘To make them Gods is ungodly, and to make them Devils is divillish; To make them Mistresses is unmanly, and to make them servants is unnoble; To make them as God made them, wives, is godly and manly too.’1 Straddling like a Colossus a range of attitudes to women which stretch from Petrarch and the Ovidian religion of love to the medieval querelle des femmes, from the Humanists to the Puritans, Donne criticises from a social standpoint an idea of woman created by poetry.
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© 1996 Juliet Dusinberre
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Dusinberre, J. (1996). Gods and Devils. In: Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24531-4_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24531-4_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-64139-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-24531-4
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