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Download Thesis This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Performing the Mistress The Emergence of the Modern Mistress on the Early Modern Stage Brooks, Victoria Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 30. Sep. 2021 Performing the Mistress: The Emergence of the Modern Mistress on the Early Modern Stage Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Victoria Brooks King’s College London 2018 1 Abstract This thesis explores the presentation of women in extra-marital relationships on the early modern stage, demonstrating how this modern understanding of the ‘mistress’ emerged performatively while its definition was still evolving. I will examine how playwrights utilise narratives of sexual coercion to represent how the chaste mistress of courtly love literature is sexualised before exploring dramatic representations of the ruler’s mistress. I argue that playwrights represent this ‘modern mistress’ by emphasising how her illegitimacy allows her to usurp the prerogatives and masculinity of male characters. The third chapter will be a case study of Anne Boleyn on the early modern stage, demonstrating how dramatists utilised a strategy of evasion to represent this personage which allowed them to produce a more nuanced portrayal. Finally, an exploration of women on trial reveals how dramatists exploit the possibilities of theatre to allow female characters who engaged in sexual relationships to argue against erroneous efforts to categorise them, demonstrating the inadequacy of pre-existing categories of womanhood and their ideological misuse by men. These trial scenes allow playwrights to demonstrate the significance of performance and how the theatrical arena allows for female characters to resist incorrect terminology that may be applied to them. The theatre therefore produced characters who occupy the social and cultural space of the ‘modern mistress’, creating a new category of womanhood in early modern drama. 2 Table of contents Abstract 2 Table of contents 3 Introduction 5 1. The Courtly Mistress ’ 8 2. The Modern Mistress 14 3. Mistress or Concubine, Courtesan, Whore 23 4. The Mistress in Drama 31 5. The Mistress in Criticism 38 6. Overview 48 Chapter one Transforming the Courtly Mistress on Stage: Theatre and Etymological Change 52 1. Sexualising the Courtly Mistress 61 2. a) Prioritising Consent 71 b) Performing Rape 77 3. Ambiguity in Scenes of Sexual Coercion 82 4. Theatrical Depictions of Rape 93 5. Post-Rape Behaviour 105 6. Conclusion 117 Chapter two The Ruler’s Mistress: Gender and Usurping of Prerogatives 121 1. a) The Prerogatives of a Queen 130 b) Usurping Queenly Prerogative in The True Tragedie of Richard III 138 2. Usurping the Role of the Councillor and Favourite 146 3. Usurping the Masculinity of a Ruler and his Subjects 165 4. Conclusion 193 Chapter three Representations of Anne Boleyn in Print and on Stage 196 1. Representing Anne Boleyn in Non-Dramatic Literature 205 2. Representing Anne Boleyn in Dramatic Literature 221 3. Henry VIII 225 3 4. The Queen and Concubine 250 5. Displacing Anne Boleyn with her Progeny 270 6. Conclusion 278 Chapter four Mistresses on Trial: Resistance to Inadequate Social Categorisation 281 1. Understanding Performance and Spectatorship 283 2. Use of Performative Spectacle in Trials and Audience Response 288 3. Church Courts: The White Devil and The Spanish Curate 291 4. The White Devil by John Webster 306 5. The Spanish Curate by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger 334 6. Conclusion 367 Conclusion 369 Bibliography 374 4 INTRODUCTION ‘[T]hose women, whom the Kings were to take for their Wives, and not for Mistresses, […] which is but a later name for Concubines’.1 John Donne’s sermon raises the question: did early modern writers consider the term ‘mistress’ to be synonymous with ‘concubine’? Was there no distinction? Moreover, what about related titles attributed to unmarried, sexually-active women in early modern England? Donne’s statement in fact provides a fitting example of the complexity involved in defining women’s sexual immorality in the early modern period, underlining the way definitions were changing rapidly in the period and inspiring my research into what exactly constitutes a ‘mistress’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Today we understand ‘mistress’ to mean ‘[a] woman other than his wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relationship’.2 Throughout this thesis I will utilise the phrase ‘modern’ or ‘sexual mistress’ to denote this understanding of the term. However, this was not the prevailing understanding during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This thesis will argue that the early modern theatre negotiated its way towards a shared understanding of a woman in an extra-marital relationship who is other than a whore, courtesan or concubine. It is my contention that whether or not they used the term ‘mistress’ in the modern sense – the word was acquiring its modern meaning across the period in question, and the theatres contributed to that change – the playwrights repeatedly represent 1John Donne, LXXX sermons (London: 1640), p. 642/ Iii5 ͮ. 2 Mistress’, Oxford English Dictionary Online <http://www.oed.com> [accessed 3 March 2012]. Subsequent references to this resource will be abbreviated to OED. 5 women who occupy the social or cultural space of the ‘modern mistress’ and in so doing they in effect created the ‘mistress’ performatively. In other words, it is through the theatre that the modern meaning of ‘mistress’ emerged in the English cultural lexicon. In this introduction I will address the meanings of ‘mistress’ as recorded in the OED and its usage in this period. I will demonstrate firstly that its prevailing meaning during the medieval era was in the context of courtly love; it then acquired ironic or euphemistic properties that undermined the supposed purity of this meaning, thus revealing how the term evolved to include the sexual dimension that characterises the ‘modern mistress’. The following section will illustrate how non-dramatic literature experimented with the meanings of ‘mistress’ while showing that the OED’s first recorded uses of the ‘modern mistress’ are incorrect. As I describe how the term became sexualised in early modern writings, I will address and dismiss Donne and others’ claims that ‘mistress’ was merely another term for ‘whore’, ‘courtesan’ or ‘concubine’. The next section will focus on the use of ‘mistress’ onstage, revealing how the word ‘mistress’ in both its courtly and modern incarnations was employed by playwrights. Consequently, frequent efforts are made to clarify which type of mistress is meant. The meaning of ‘mistress’ is thus shown to be unstable but increasingly seems to incorporate the sexual implication: dramatists are actively engaged in this transformation through their portrayal of female characters involved in extra-marital sexual relationships. I will then provide a survey of criticism addressing the representation of women and the cultural construction of gender in the period which provides the current context for my analysis, before outlining the structure of my thesis. 6 As this thesis provides a drama-centred alternative to the OED, it is worth analysing the plurality of meanings that ‘mistress’ encompassed between 1555- 1642. ‘Mistress’ has evolved and altered considerably since its first recorded use in approximately 1330: ‘To hir maistresse sche gan say that hye was boun to go / To the kight ther he lay’. This usage is cited under the first definition offered by the OED: ‘1. A woman having control or authority’. Similarly neutral or positive definitions following the woman in power motif predominated until the early fifteenth century, during which ‘mistress’ acquired romantic connotations: ‘5. a. A woman loved and courted by a man; a female sweetheart’. This definition is familiar to many medieval and early modern scholars of courtly love, but its current obsolescence is due to potential confusion with ‘7. Woman other than his wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relationship’. In the context of male-female relationships, it is the fifth and seventh meanings which dominated the early modern lexicon and it is these two usages that could cause potential confusion. It is necessary to address the frequent confusion of the
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