"The Matter of Difference presents feminist criticism of Shakespeare as a group project in the ideal sense: a dialogue continually defining and refashioning itself in its own terms. . . . By concentrating on materialist practices as Wayne broadly defines them, the most interesting essays refuse to take repressive symbolic systems at face value and instead move beyond the analysis of encoded oppression to uncover in a range of Renaissance cultural practices new possibilities for assessing gendered and agency in the past."--Mary Beth Rose, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 4,