Death and the Married Maiden: Performing Gender in the Broken Heart Roberta Barker Dalhousie University

Death and the Married Maiden: Performing Gender in The Broken Heart Roberta Barker Dalhousie University I. e Ghost Bride Most early modern tragedies end in multiple deaths, and many feature ghosts, but Michael Boyd’s staging of John Ford’s e Broken Heart (c.(c. ) at the ’s Swan eatre began with a haunting before the character who appeared as a phantom was actually dead. In the production’s pro- logue, the spectator encountered Orgilus (Iain Glen), gaunt and black-clad, playing on a lute (Figure ). He sang of the joys of marriage, of “Hearts by holy union wedded, / More than theirs by custom bedded; / Fruitful issues; life so graced, / Not by age to be defaced” (.iv.–). ese were pleasures he himself had lost. e Broken Heart hingeshinges oonn tthehe aabortivebortive betrothal between Orgilus and his beloved Penthea, destroyed when her brother Ithocles forces her into marriage with Bassanes. As Glen’s Orgilus fi nished singing, Boyd’s production evoked those broken nuptials. e frail, white-clad fi gure of Penthea (Emma Fielding) appeared, her face hidden by a bridal veil. Orgilus drew it aside to gaze at her face, but immediately his father Crotolon (Tony Britton) entered, speaking the fi rst words of Ford’s playtext: “Dally not further” (.i.). At this, Penthea turned from Orgilus and began to walk slowly upstage. Crotolon did not register her presence as she passed him, for she was not a bride of fl esh and blood, but a fi gment of Orgilus’ imagination—or a ghost. ESC .. (June(June ):): –– R B is Assistant Professor of eatre at the University of King’s College/Dalhousie University. Her recent and forthcoming articles explore issues of gender and performance as they relate to the plays of Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and Stoppard. She recently completed a facsimile edition of Common Conditions () for the Malone Society. Her book, Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, –, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in . With David R. Nicol, she is also working on stage and musical histories of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the New Variorum Shakespeare edition. F 1 e bereaved Orgilus (Iain Glen) sings his wedding song. Photo: Malcolm Davies. By permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. | Barker | e spectral quality of this initial image pervaded Boyd’s whole production, which Jack Tinker likened to “a deathly masque being played out.” Set in a lavish Caroline version of Ford’s Spartan court, it followed e Broken Heart’s’s recentrecent criticscritics byby emphasizingemphasizing thethe entrapmententrapment ofof Ford’sFord’s Michael Boyd’s characters within a kind of living death. After all, this tragedy sees its four leading characters accept death willingly, one of them with the frightening production affi rmation, “Welcome, thou ice, that sittest about my heart; / No heat can ever thaw thee” (.ii.–)..ii.–). SetSet in classicalclassical Sparta,Sparta, it portraysportrays men followed The and women who bear suff ering in silence until it kills them. Many critics have focused on the codes of virtue that govern these characters, tracing Broken Heart’s their relationship to ancient and early modern versions of stoicism; most argue that the play exposes the destructive eff ects of stoical philosophy on recent critics by Spartan society. In a recent article, Kristin Crouch cogently shows how the imagery of Boyd’s production supported such interpretations by depicting emphasizing the a world whose citizens “bury all unacceptable human experience, inner desire and emotional impulse under the weight of silence, stillness and entrapment of death” ().¹ Her analysis agrees well with that of R. J. Kaufmann, who describes the play as “Ford’s Waste Land,” and remarks that its “characters Ford’s characters are doomed by tragically narrow, nonorganic identifi cations of their own natures” (). within a kind of Yet if these identifi cations are narrow, they are also multiple, and not limited to the workings of stoical philosophy. During a crucial scene living death. between the playtext’s leading female characters, Penthea traces the con- fi nes of her own identity by describing how on the stage Of my mortality my youth hath acted Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length By varied pleasures, sweetened in the mixture, But tragical in issue. (.v.–) With these words, Penthea seems to turn on her rapidly failing life in a motion of self-condemnation that is also a motion of self-defi nition—and of self-dismissal. is paper explores that paradoxical motion as it was performed repeatedly by Penthea and by other characters throughout Michael Boyd’s production of e Broken Heart, where Ford’s “stage of mortality” became the stage on which a fatally confl icted discourse of gender was exposed for the death-trap it was. e appearance of Penthea’s “ghost” epitomized the theatrical strategies that facilitated this exposure in See also Barbour, pp. ff . | Death and the Married Maiden | a production whose restrained style defi ned a world deeply infl ected by regulatory ideals. No performance encapsulated that world’s contradic- tions more perfectly than Fielding’s “pale, still Penthea who [gave] you the feeling she only need pull a tiny pin to activate the grenade she ha[d] become” (Nightingale). Wafting about the stage as a visible reproach to the system that had constructed her, she off ered a fearful illustration of the potentially destructive power of a woman obedient to masculinist discourse. With its elaborate costumes and self-conscious historicity, Boyd’s production might have seemed nostalgic and conventional. Watched with Penthea’s ghost always in mind, it showed how the engagement between an early modern playtext and a contemporary theatre can work to unveil the fatal power of oppressive gender ideologies over the subjects they found. II. Virgin Maids and Married Wives From the fi rst, the discourses of gender that govern Ford’s e Broken Heart aarere ddeeplyeeply ccontradictory.ontradictory. e play’splay’s primalprimal scene,scene, introducedintroduced byby Ithocles’ enforcement of Penthea’s marriage and obsessively revisited in various forms throughout the play, is that of a man’s assertion of power over a woman’s will and body. Many of Ford’s characters—almost all of them male—respond to such acts of power by repudiating them with the assertion that women should be granted liberty of choice. Yet beneath their apparent liberality fl ows an undercurrent of misogyny expressed in Orgi- lus’ controlling relationship with his sister, Euphrania; in Bassanes’ jealous rages against Penthea; and even in the play’s one playful scene (.ii.–), which involves two returning soldiers who convince themselves that women enjoy being spurned. is misogyny is continually discredited, for the women of Ford’s Sparta are among the most conspicuously virtuous in early modern drama. But it is also reinscribed, for their virtue proceeds from a refusal of any identifi cation with those other women whom they defi ne according to constricting and even demeaning constructions of feminine identity. Penthea strenuously rejects any “thought / Of female change” (.iii.–). e playtext’s other major female character, Princess Calantha, draws an explicit boundary between herself and those “mere women” whose Niobe-like tears conceal their ability to survive the deaths of loved ones (.iii.)..iii.). CodedCoded by thethe same dreaddread of femalefemale fi ccklenesskleness tthathat disrupts the liberality of the play’s men, these women gain identity from their strict subjection to the ideals of obedience, constancy and chastity. Judith Butler’s analysis of e Psychic Life of Power cancan helphelp usus to understand the workings of this process of subjection. Butler argues | Barker | that “a subject is not only formed in subordination, but that this subordination provides the subject’s continuing condition of possibility” (). For her, “power that at fi rst appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity” (). Her insistence that “the subject is the modality of power that turns back on itself; the subject is the eff ect of power in recoil” () is borne out in Ford’s playtext, and particularly in the discourses of Penthea and Calantha. At one point in their encounter, Penthea praises Virgin wives, such as abuse not wedlock By freedom of desires, but covet chiefl y e pledges of chaste beds for ties of love, Rather than ranging of their blood; and next …[M]arried maids, such as prefer the number Of honourable issue in their virtues Before the fl attery of delights by marriage. (.v.–) As T. J. B. Spencer notes in his edition of the play, Penthea “seems to be contrasting ‘virgin-wives’ (who chastely bear children to their husbands) and women who are married to virginity (and who prefer virtue to the delights of marriage)” (). Both constructions are shaped by early modern gender discourses that stress the need to control woman’s notoriously wide-ranging desires and to place her at the disposal of one man, be he husband or father. But Penthea’s discourse troubles such constructions by insisting on a feminine virtue so strict it is actually diffi cult to express through patriarchal categorization. Within traditional patriarchy, the terms “virgin wives” and “married maids” are paradoxes—paradoxes that Penthea wants feminine identity to inhabit. Her portrait of “married maids,” in particular, suggests something of the nature of these paradoxes. ese maids reject “the fl attery of delights by marriage.” Clinging to a strict ideal of virtuous female chastity, they produce “honourable issue” by replicating that ideal in their society. By achieving this feat of reproduction without help from a male partner, however, their virtuous behaviour threatens to exclude men altogether.

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