'HOUSEHOLD BUSINESS': DOMESTIC PLAYS OF EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

The domestic play flourished on the English popular stage during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its roots were predominantly native, rather than classical, and its mainspring was the staging of domestic conflict among English characters from the middle ranks of society. 'Household Business' traces the genre's origins in the cycle plays of medieval England and examines its aesthetic configurations in relation to extra-literary discourses and practices that underwrote ideologies of private life. At a time when the orthodox view of the family defined it as the foundation of the social order, a number of domestic took a more critical perspective, stressing the con- tradictions and struggles that attend marriage and the patriarchal family. In addition to well-known domestic dramas such as A Woman Killed with Kind- ness, Arden ofFeversham, The Witch of Edmonton, and A Yorkshire , Viviana Comensoli analyses less well-studied plays such as A Warning for Fair Women, Two Lamentable , and The Late Lancashire Witches. The book also provides an extensive and timely assessment of domestic , demonstrating how plays such as The London Prodigal, The Fair Maid ofBristow, and The Honest Whore (Parts I and II) resist homiletic paradigms in favour of a more dialectical dramaturgy.

VIVIANA COMENSOLI is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She has published widely on Renaissance and culture, and is the co-editor of Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism (University of Toronto Press 1998) and of Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage (University of Illinois Press 1999). THE MENTAL AND CULTURAL WORLD OF TUDOR AND STUART ENGLAND

Editors

Paul Christiansen Camille Slights D.R. Woolf VIVIANA COMENSOLI

'Household Business': Domestic Plays of Early Modern England

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1996 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada

Reprinted in paperback 1999

ISBN 08020-0733-3 (cloth) ISBN 08020-8297-1 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Comensoli, Viviana Household business : domestic plays of early modern England (The mental and cultural world of Tudor and Stuart England) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-80200733-3 (bound) ISBN 080208297-1 (pbk.) 1. Domestic drama, English - History and criticism. 2. English drama - Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 - History and criticism. 3. English drama - 17th century - History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PR658.D65C651996 822/.3O9/355 C96-931485-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For Elaine This page intentionally left blank