This dissertation attempts to fill a void in early modern English drama studies by
offering an in-depth, cross-gendered comparative study emphasizing representations of
women’s discursive agency. Such an examination contributes to the continuing critical
discussion regarding the nature and extent of women’s potential agency as speakers and
writers in the period and also to recent attempts to integrate the few surviving dramas by
women into the larger, male-dominated dramatic tradition.
Because statements about the nature of women’s speech in the period were
overwhelmingly male, I begin by establishing the richness and variety of women’s
attitudes toward marriage and toward their speech relative to marriage through an
examination of their first-person writings. A reassessment of the dominant paradigms of
the shrew and the silent woman as presented in male-authored popular drama—including
The Taming of the Shrew and Epicene—follows. Although these stereotypes are not
without ambiguity, they nevertheless considerably flatten the contours of the historical
patterns discernable in women’s lifewriting. As a result, female spectators may have experienced greater cognitive dissonance in reaction to the portrayals of women by boy
actors. In spite of this, however, they may have borrowed freely from the occasional
glimpses of newly emergent views of women readily available in the theater for their
own everyday performances, as I argue in a discussion of The Shoemaker’s Holiday and
The Roaring Girl.
Close, cross-gendered comparison of two sets of similarly-themed plays follows:
The Duchess of Malfi and The Tragedy of Mariam, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and Love’s Victory. Here my examination reveals that the female writers’ critique of
prevailing gender norms is more thorough than the male writers’ and that the emphasis
on female characters’ material bodies, particularly their voices, registers the female
dramatists’ dissatisfaction with the disfiguring representations of women on the maledominated
professional stage.
I end with a discussion of several plays by women—The Concealed Fancies, The
Convent of Pleasure, and Bell in Campo—to illustrate the various revisions of marriage
offered by each through their emphasis on gendered performance and, further, to suggest
the importance of the woman writer’s contribution to the continuing dialectic about the
nature of women and their speech.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-08-8327 |
| Date | 2010 August 1900 |
| Creators | Van Note, Beverly Marshall |
| Contributors | Phillippy, Patricia |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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