Publisher's Synopsis
The author, Robert Kimbrough, starts from a definition of androgny as full realized humanity - a state rarely attained and only ever fleetingly. Thus androgyny is an ideal goal, one of the earliest and most pervasive images of humanity, found in the creation myths of all creatures, a vision of unity and harmony extending beyond the gender-based limitations of the physical self. Shakespeare's word for this is "kind." Androgyny is the acceptance of our human kind-ness.;Coleridge located the radical placement of androgyny when he remarked, "The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous," a truth acknowledged by Virgina Woolf in A Room of One's Own, in which she constantly returned to Shakespeare's "unity of mind" as the great example of androgyny realized. Carolyn Heilbrun gave this concept life in "Toward a Recognition of Androgyny" (1973) - a work in which she noted a "few fugitive observations" about "Shakespeare's androgynous vision." Kimbrough shares Heilbrun's belief that Shakespeare's plays are filled with signs of the androgynous vision that was coming into focus in Renaissance England.
