(Re)defining gender in early modern English drama

LAURA MARTÍNEZ-GARCÍA

University of Oviedo (Spain)

The essays included in this volume take different approaches and methodologies in their analyses. They range from Derrida’s theories on arche-violence, to Butler’s gender performativity and the concept of masquerade as a means to create and enact identity. Despite the apparent heterogeneity of the approaches, a variety of underlying ideas link them all together. The authors all regard early modern culture as a period in which there was a heightened awareness of the self and its constructedness, as essays focus on how gender identities are discursively created both on and off stage. Contributors view gender not only as a cultural construct, but also as articulated and consolidated through ‘performance’ or the repetition of certain actions.

The discussions opens with the section entitled “Negotiating gender off stage: patronesses, celebrities and playwrights,” which is focused on the use of a variety of theatrical strategies that go beyond the dramatic text and the stage to either question or buttress the established gender order.

Nora Rodríguez-Loro’s essay is an exploration of the rhetoric of the dedications addressed to Royal mistresses during the early years of the Restoration. Through the analysis of these texts, the author examines the ambivalent nature of the power held by Charles’s mistresses: while the dedications themselves hint at and enhance the social relevance and fame of both mistresses and authors, they also reveal the precariousness of their positions. Furthermore, her analysis of the discourse of these dedications as being grounded in the Neoplatonic conventions dismantles the apparent privileged position of the patronesses: the dedications highlight the importance of these women in terms of canonical ‘feminine’ traits and ‘virtues’ such as beauty, modesty, affability, sweetness, nurture and generosity, an idealised abstraction of the traditional model of womanhood, rather than a description of their real selves.

Anikó Oroszlán offers a study of the figure of Mary Frith, or Moll Cutpurse, one of the most intriguing personalities of the early 1600s: a pickpocket and notorious criminal, Mary was also a public figure whose antics and male attire entertained and outraged the public as much as any play. The essay contends, using Mary as an example and following Butler’s theories of performativity, that gender is not a biological given, but rather a cultural product and a performance, a series of repeated actions and behaviours that are learned rather than inherited. As argued in the chapter, the mere appearance of Mary and her visibility, both within the theatre – as a performer and a character– and in the public places where she carries out her roaring and thieving, evidence the arbitrariness and the (unsettling) flexibility of the categories man/woman, public/private.

The second part “Women Acting: Performance, Identity And Power” explores how different playwrights portray women, womanhood and sexuality, paying close attention to the binary opposition deviant/idealised femininity as embodied by Shakespearean Egyptian and Roman ladies, to quixotic females who challenge, more or less successfully, patriarchal norms and to the meanings of violence against the female body.

Manuel Vicente Calvo offers a study of the kind of womanhood embodied by Cleopatra’s maids in Antony and Cleopatra. The essay focuses on the construction and reconstruction of the ideal woman versus the aberrant through the dichotomies wild/tame, sexual/virginal, talkative/quiet, violent/meek and Roman/Egyptian. The opposition between Rome and Egypt provides a starting point: the author contends that Shakespeare’s Roman plays present a polarised construction of femininity where Rome embodies ‘masculine’ positive virtues and Egypt incarnates negative traits traditionally associated with women. The author chooses Cleopatra’s maids, Iras and Charmian, as his object of study, following the recent scholarly trend to move away from the dominant towards traditionally silenced voices.

Similarly, Miriam Borham Puyal studies the ambivalent approach to the established gender roles enacted on two of the first English plays to rewrite Don Quixote as a woman and outlines their lasting influence on future quixotic female characters. The author analyses Cartwright’s The Lady Errant (1636–7) and Steele’s The Tender Husband (1705) paying special attention to the female characters; she argues that both Machessa and Biddy are subversive women who, by adopting the tropes and modes of the literature they read, reject established gender roles and attempt a self-fashioning as powerful heroines.

Sara Vazifehshenas and Nahid Shahbazi Moghadam shift the focus from enacted subversion to enforced subjugation, through the analysis of the rape/seduction scenes in Middleton’s Women Beware Women, paying close attention to the meanings of violence against the female body and their relation to androcentric ideologies of gender. The authors argue that arche-violence, as defined by Derrida, serves as a tool employed by power to erase female agency through the threat of harm and sexual assault. Vazifehshenas and Moghadam state that rape not only robs women of their sense of self, but it also transforms them into eroticised objects to be possessed by men. The authors contend that stories of violation are a common motif in early modern drama, which reinforces the idea that rape was not a sexual crime, but rather a question of politics and ideology; thus, these stories of violence against women highlight how unbalanced power relations between the genders produce and perpetuate difference and oppression.

From on stage femininities the volume moves on to on stage masculinities in a third section entitled “Men On Stage: Buttressing and Questioning Notions of Manhood”. Two of John Fletcher’s plays are discussed with a particular emphasis on his portrayals of normative and aberrant masculinities and their connection with politics and social order.

Natália Pikli offers an examination of the influence of equine imagery on the (de)construction of male and female normative sexualities. Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen explores the dangers of romantic love, both for men and for women: the main plot portrays a man who, governed by unbridled passion, cannot exert control over himself or his horse and thus, suffers the fatal consequences; the subplot examines patriarchal anxieties over women’s sexual appetites and the means to curb them.

The fourth and last section, “Women (re)writing men: Aphra Behn on Masculinity,” focuses on a female playwright’s views on masculinity and the interaction between gender and politics explored in the previous section.

Jorge Figueroa Dorrego analyses the rakes in The Debauchee, arguing that Behn devises a far less glamourised version of the libertine than was customary during the Restoration. Whilst authors like Wycherley and Etherege presented witty, fashionable and charming characters like Horner, Figueroa Dorrego states that rakes in The Debauchee do not display the brilliancy of these portrayals. Not only do they lack verbal wit, social skills and even sexual potency, but they are also outmanoeuvred by their female counterparts, who exhibit greater agency and remarkable solidarity towards one another, as is typical of Behn’s works.

Ángeles Tomé Rosales, like Raquel Serrano Gonzalez before, studies the interplay of masculinity and politics in the subplot of The Revenge. Behn’s criticism of the wine merchant echoes her actual political stance, as the character embodies Puritan hypocrisy, the ambition of the nouveau rich and Whig ideology. According to Tomé Rosales, Behn’s public articulation of her political ideology is in itself transgressive in terms of gender, as it is a disruption of the boundaries that separated the ‘male’ public and ‘female’ domestic spheres.

This collection deliberately aims to offer a broad vision of how gender was (re)defined and (de)constructed in early modern England, arguing that, while literature is one among a network of forces that contribute to constructing identity and creating ideology, it should not be granted a privileged status or be positioned above material life. Indeed, the essays in this volume put forward the idea that it is only through the analysis of textual and non-textual performances, both on and off stage, that one can reach a better understanding of one of the most challenging moments in the history of England, a period characterised by remarkable social, political and economic instability.

Recommended Bibliography

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Bush-Bailey, Gilli. 2012. ‘ “Women Like Us?” ’ Comedy Studies 3 (2): 151–59.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. London: Routledge.

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Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. 2016. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Cordner, Michael, and Peter Holland. 2010. Players, Playwrights, Playhouses: Investigating Performance, 1660–1800. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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— — — . 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by A. Bass. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul PLC.

Erber, Ralph, and Maureen Wang Erber. 2016. Intimate Relationships: Issues, Theories, and Research, Second Edition. London: Psychology Press.