The denial of the feminine: Shakespeare's lost daughters in Simon Gray's Butley

The prolific Simon Gray is perhaps best known for his plays about the riddles and anomalies pf middle-class and academic life. He was educated at Trinity body Cambridge, and spent twenty years as a lecturer at Queen Mary community In Butley, Gray draws on this experience to depict the frustrations and posturing endemic to certain academics who have not at any time found meaning in teaching and research on the contrary continue to do so as an exercise in futility and bitterness.

Butley depicts the terminal travail of a disheveled, despairing, and misanthropic don, Ben Butley who has failed upon every level of his