The re-presentation of historical women in English Renaissance drama

Abstract

This study demonstrates that English playwrights fashioned the selves of historical women according to contemporary conventions of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. Playwrights such as Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Dekker and Middleton participate in the process of historiography as they appropriate and modify historical sources, subjecting those sources to processes of criticism and transformation. These playwrights use some of the same methods as contemporary historians and chroniclers--the drawing of analogues and parallels, allegorizing historical people, telescoping a lifetime into a fable. However, primarily they re-present stereotypical postures--especially ones that govern a female's behavior and sexuality--for their particular effects in performance. By re-presenting the interplay of several contemporary discourses, these dramatists formulate rhetorical responses to rhetorically constructed conventions, exposing the gaps inherent within those conventions. They thereby complicate the epideictic function of both literature and history; the ambiguities within the dichotomy of praising virtue and condemning vice become visible. Furthermore, all the dramas in this study caution the audience against accepting conventional postures as authentic. In representing postures through performance the playwrights are able to promote, remodel, resist, or otherwise make social commentary. Each of the female characters is presented as a political being who displays political motivations, skill, and savvy for which she is criticized, condemned, or destroyed. By depicting each female character as unable to separate her private from her political body, the playwrights complicate the paradoxical notions of female rule. Through extreme posturings of female behavior, these playwrights demonstrate that motherhood or marriage and monarchy are incompatibie. Finally, each of these plays challenges the boundaries of "innocence," "virtue," and "righteousness" by allowing the female figures to be viewed as having sinned and as having been sinned against. Dramatic productions, then, do not necessarily imply more artificiality or fictiveness than do written histories or chronicles. Instead drama highlights the essentially fictive quality of the historical endeavor. Both drama and history should be seen in a continuum of interpretation. As such, this dissertation presents a more refined apparatus for defining history and for reading and understanding competing versions of truth representation.