Abstract: This talk will demonstrate how Shakespeare shows that violence against groups like women, old people, Jews, and those engaged in same-sex relationships, is perpetrated not just by individuals but by social cooperation with those individuals. In his sonnets, he wrote in deeply personal terms about love between men, and he has a profound sympathy with resistance to people “dressed in a little brief authority.” This resistance emerges in many ways, including images and language drawn from devotion to the Virgin Mary, whose unqueening coincided with the unqueening of Henry VIII’s wives. 
 
Bio: Ruth Vanita is Professor of English and Co-director, South & South-East Asian Studies at the University of Montana. She is the author of many books, most recently the novel A Slight Angle (Penguin, 2024), and the critical work, Shakespeare’s Re-Visions of History: Social Collusion, Violence, and Resistance in Nine Plays (Primus, 2025). She has published two collections of poems, and another novel, Memory of Light (Penguin, 2020), which she translated into Hindi as Pariyon ke Beech (Rajkamal, 2021). Her other books include The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna and Species (OUP, 2022); Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India (Penguin, 2005; updated edition 2022); Dancing with the Nation: Courtesans in Bombay Cinema (Speaking Tiger, 2017); and Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry 1780-1870 (Orient Blackswan, 2012). She has translated several works from Hindi to English, including Mahadevi Varma’s My Family (Penguin, 2021) and Portraits from Memory (forthcoming Harper Collins, 2025), and Ugra’s Chocolate and Other Stories on Male-Male Desire (Duke UP, 2006). She co-edited the path-breaking Same-Sex Love in India (2000; Penguin 2008), and edited and translated On the Edge: A Hundred Years of Hindi Fiction on Same-Sex Desire (Penguin, 2023). Educated entirely in India, she taught for many years at Delhi University and the University of Montana. She co-founded Manushi, India’s first nationwide feminist magazine, and volunteered as co-editor for 13 years.