My purpose is to assess, from a feminist standpoint, the current relations between new historicism and feminist criticism. I shall begin with two institutional moments: Stephen Orgel's reading of "Prospero's Wife" at the "Renaissance Man/Renaissance Woman" conference at Yale University in March 1982 and the meetings of the seminar on "Images of Gender and Power in Shakespeare and Renaissance Culture," chaired by Carol Thomas Neely and Lisa Jardine, at the World Shakespeare Congress in West Berlin in April 1986. Seen as coordinates, these two moments can help to define a vantage-point from which to consider both the present situation and the prospects for future interaction between new historicist and feminist approaches.