Disordered Appetites: Female Flesh in the Works of Thomas Middleton

DISORDERED APPETITES: FEMALE FLESH IN THE WORKS OF THOMAS MIDDLETON A dissertation submitted by Gregory M. Schnitzspahn in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English TUFTS UNIVERSITY May 2015 Copyright © 2015 by Gregory M. Schnitzspahn Advisor: Judith Haber ii Abstract This dissertation contends that Thomas Middleton’s plays and poetry exploit an early modern psychocultural anxiety focused on the insubstantiality of symbolic or linguistic constructs. More specifically, Middleton’s works consistently examine the manipulability and immateriality of patriarchally prescribed female social identities––such as maid, wife, and widow––that are based entirely upon a woman’s sexual or marital relations with men. Employing principles drawn from psychoanalysis and ecofeminism, I argue that this Middletonian preoccupation bespeaks a more widespread uncertainty in the period about symbolic structures intended to control or contain female bodies and the natural world. My analysis of Thomas Middleton’s work therefore points to conceptual technologies that were emergent in the early modern period and which continue to exert influence in the present day. In the introduction, I describe my guiding principles and theoretical apparatus by reading the typically Middletonian complications of marital and sexual identity in two plays, The Witch and The Phoenix. Chapter One moves to a discussion of female virginity in The Changeling, Middleton’s famous collaboration with William Rowley, and argues that the play taps into cultural anxieties about the potential unreliability of symbolic technologies for controlling female bodies and appetites. Chapter Two examines Middleton’s early work, The Ghost of Lucrece, and contends that this poem’s plaintive ghost uses images of iii female corporeality as a rhetorical weapon, unleashing great floods of blood, milk, and tears that strain the written language of the poem itself. The third chapter considers how, in The Widow, Middleton’s radical deployment of two early modern theatrical conventions, widow-hunting and cross-dressing, suggests the constructedness of gender, identity, and even human understanding of reality itself. The concluding chapter begins with a reading of remarriage in Women Beware Women before proceeding to a closing discussion of the profound ideological effects of literacy and print culture in early modern Europe. iv Acknowledgments A great many kind and intelligent people have helped me on the long path to the completion of this project. All of my mentors, friends, and colleagues from the English department at Tufts University deserve mention, but to list them all would be impossible. I would, however, like to name three fellow doctoral students––Barbara Orton, Claudia Stumpf, and Lai Ying Yu––who joined me in forming a dissertation writing group that proved instrumental in getting my work back on track after many years of medical and personal disruptions. Another close friend and colleague, Carolyn Salvi, helped with editing and feedback during the final steps of the writing process (and her infant daughter, Mohini, provided much joy and support). I should also acknowledge the contributions of Nolan Nicaise and Daniel Ciba, my time management consultants from the Academic Resource Center at Tufts. While working on my final revisions, two newer colleagues, Alexandra Carter and James Rizzi, kindly volunteered their time to help with proofreading, and both were present at the moment when I submitted the completed dissertation to my committee. The members of that committee, of course, deserve special thanks. I am grateful and honored that William Carroll, who first introduced me to the works of Thomas Middleton when I was an undergraduate at Boston University, agreed to serve as my outside reader. John Fyler has long been an excellent teacher and v mentor, consistently reminding me to look back to the literature and cultures that preceded the early modern period. Kevin Dunn has always gone out of his way to work with me and provide another perspective on our field. Finally, I cannot begin to express enough praise and gratitude for my advisor, Judith Haber. Although my work on this dissertation was slowed to a near halt at times, Judith remained kind, patient, and supportive. A true mentor and scholar, however, she never ceased to demand rigorous and polished work. I simply cannot thank her enough. In closing, I must also thank my immediate family who have always encouraged my artistic and intellectual pursuits without question. Mom, Dad, Doug, Radha, Isa, and Kieran, your love and support is a driving force behind the completion of this project. Finally, I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my uncle, Henry Schnitzspahn, who passed away while it was in progress. vi Table of Contents Introduction “The Disordered Appetites of Beasts.” 1 Chapter One, Maid “What the Act Has Made You”: Approving Virginity in The Changeling 52 Chapter Two, Wife “When Gods Did Reel What Goddesses Had Spun”: Revisiting the Past in The Ghost of Lucrece 105 Chapter Three, Widow “The Part that Overcomes the Lady” 149 Conclusion, and Wife Again “Great Mischiefs Masque in Expected Pleasures”: Remarriage and Print Culture in Women Beware Women 194 Appendix The Slippage of Symbolic Identity in Catherine of Aragon’s Tudor Marriages 223 Works Cited 229 vii In a maiden time professed Then we say that life is best. Tasting once the married life, Then we only praise the wife. There’s but one state more to try Which makes women laugh or cry: Widow, widow, and of these three, The middle’s best, and that give me. --The Witch (2.1.131-8) INTRODUCTION: The Disordered Appetites of Beasts He means nothing, he has no message; he is merely a great recorder. --T. S. Eliot, “Thomas Middleton.” Arguably, T. S. Eliot’s 1927 essay on Thomas Middleton for The Times Literary Supplement established the current era of serious Middleton scholarship, but within the critical landscape that the essay itself helped to create, many of Eliot’s observations now sound puzzling and contradictory, if not downright ludicrous. While Eliot acknowledged Middleton’s importance in both his literary criticism and his own poetry, he also clearly struggled to find some consistent message or meaning in the scant handful of plays that were then attributed to the early modern writer. Thomas Middleton, Eliot declared, “is merely the name which associates six or seven great plays” (445). Yet Eliot clearly admired those “great plays,” and his dismissal of Middleton as an empty authorial signifier seems very much at odds with his contention that this playwright “understood the female better than any of the Elizabethans” and that he could therefore produce “a real woman[,] as real indeed as any woman of Elizabethan tragedy” (445).1 Despite these potentially thrilling claims, however, Eliot continued to temper his admiration by insisting that Middleton’s work “remains inscrutable, 1. The second citation refers directly to Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling, discussed at length in Chapter One. Also, Eliot uses “Elizabethan” as a rough synonym of “Renaissance.” In the 1927 TLS piece he uses the term to refer to many poets and playwrights active after the reign of Elizabeth I including Webster, Fletcher, Shirley, Tourneur, and, of course, Middleton himself. Coincidentally, when Eliot mentions “Tourneur,” he might be thinking of the writer who penned The Revenger’s Tragedy, now widely believed to be Middleton, not Tourneur. Schnitzspahn 2 unphilosophical, interesting only to those few who care for such things” (445-6). With these perplexing comments, modern Middleton criticism begins.2 Now, nearly a century after Eliot first brought Middleton into the critical spotlight, perhaps the time has finally come for “those few who care for such things.” In 2007, exactly eighty years after The Times ran Eliot’s unsigned article on “Thomas Middleton,” Gary Taylor brought forth Oxford’s Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, an unabashed effort to persuade twenty-first-century readers that Middleton should be considered “our other Shakespeare” (58). Even more recently, in 2012, Taylor has argued that the Collected Works “necessitates a rebirth of Middleton criticism, allowing us to look with new eyes upon an unfamiliar canonical landscape” (“Unintroduction” 13). Certainly, this landscape would be unfamiliar to the towering figure of twentieth-century letters who once surveyed only an obscure and uninteresting “name” with a peculiar talent for understanding the female. But now, gazing through the “new eyes” of the Collected Works and informed by decades of social and critical progress, Celia Daileader argues that “even a casual glance at the Collected Works Table of Contents reveals Middleton’s feminist sympathies” (“Thomas Middleton” 466). 2. Middleton, of course, was never completely lost to obscurity in the 300 years between his death in 1627 and Eliot’s piece for TLS. In 1817, for instance, William Hazlitt discussed Middleton at length in his “Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth,” and he sounded somewhat like Eliot when he commented that “Middleton’s style was not marked by any peculiar quality of his own” (214). Nonetheless, as Gary Taylor stresses, Eliot’s influential essay, which appeared exactly 110 years after Hazlitt’s, “put Middleton in the literary canon, on the critical agenda, in the university curriculum” (“Lives and Afterlives” 55). As for Eliot’s acknowledgement of Middleton in his own poetry, the title of the second section of The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess,” undoubtably refers to Middleton’s play A Game at Chess, and Eliot’s own note to line 138 of his famous poem––“And we shall play a game of chess”––erases any doubt: “Cf. the game of chess in Middleton’s Women beware Women.” Schnitzspahn 3 Of course, Daileader’s statement may be intentionally provocative and bold, but it is also not so radically different from what Eliot wrote about Middleton and his “real women” eighty-five years earlier.

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