V Hollywood:' asserted Time magazine in its 1998 cover story about the future of the feminist movement.1 Less controversial is that in the past ten years Shakespeare, too, has "gone Hollywood," garnering an unprecedented amount of airtime as a screen sensation. What I wish to explore here is the extent to which Shakespeare's rise in Hollywood and feminism's alleged retreat to Hollywood are related, focusing on the distinctly cinematic backlash against women in recent Renaissance-period films and Shakespeare adaptations featuring transgressive female characters. Period films such as Elizabeth (dir. Shekar Kapur, 1998) and Dangerous Beauty (dir. Michael Herskovitz, 1998) and Shakespeare adaptations and spinoffs such as William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (dir. Michael Hoffman, 1999) and Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998) purport to dramatize striking exceptions to Renaissance rules of gender decorum, presenting us with heroines who succeed as politicians, poets, and even players. However, the kaleidoscopic view of female subjectivity purveyed by these films is eclipsed by their more powerful fetishization of sex-the power to deny or to enjoy it-as the heroine's only legitimate means of career advancement. Thus, while seeming to offer an array of politically-enabling identifications for the spectator, these films reduce their female characters to so many layers of easily removed clothing and invest their costume dramas with the imprimatur of History or, worse, Shakespeare. By contrast, Artemisia (dir. Agnes Merlet, 1997) and Titus (dir. Julie Taymor, 2000), two tragedies directed by women, resonate as inspiring if ironic exceptions to these antifeminist appropriations of the life, times, or works of William Shakespeare, subscribing to a politics of representation that explores the possible futures envisioned by cyborg feminism.