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 hhingesinges 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 .. ((JuneJune ):): –– 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 pro- duction, 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 dis- course. 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 subor- dination 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 mod- ern 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. Like the woman who praises them, Penthea’s “married maids” can be interpreted as products of the power that grounds feminine subjectivity in Ford’s Sparta. ey are representatives of a system “relentlessly marked by a fi gure of turning, a turning back upon oneself or even a turning on oneself” (Butler ). ey need no fathers, brothers, or husbands to regulate their lives; they regulate themselves.
| Death and the Married Maiden | Can Butler’s “fi gure of turning” be eff ectively represented onstage? In Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, William B. Worthen argues powerfully that most contemporary classical actors, trapped within the paradigm of Stanislavskian realism, see dramatic “‘character’ as the transparent mimesis of human being in the world, rather than say, as an interested, rhetorical representation of subjectivity, a limited model of agency” (). Within this context, it initially seems unlikely that a con- temporary production like Michael Boyd’s e Broken Heart could body forth the “limited model of agency” that governs gender identity in Ford’s playtext. After all, Boyd and his designer, Tom Piper, situated the action in a lavish early modern court. eir costuming and staging choices, heav- ily infl uenced by Verna Ann and Stephen Foster’s arguments about the relationship between Ford’s playtext and the Elizabethan succession crisis,² underlined the parallels between the Spartan Princess Calantha and Queen Elizabeth. Such a framework potentially classed Boyd’s Broken Heart withwith those nostalgic stagings Worthen describes as mere “hose-and-doublet” aff airs that locate meaning in the museum-world of the past rather than in struggles (such as those around gender identity) that aff ect the present (“Drama” ). However, the reception history of the production suggests the limited application of such historicist, pièce-a-clef readingsreadings toto thethe contemporarycontemporary stage. Most reviewers of Boyd’s Broken Heart igignorednored ititss hihistoricalstorical rrefer-efer- ences, haunted instead by its measured, bleak restraint. Even without a classical setting, Boyd’s version presented a Sparta dominated by stoical restraint and courtly ritual. Its agonized characters strove fi ercely to mea- sure up to their own ideals of virtuous behaviour. ey were led by the beautiful Princess Calantha (Olivia Williams), who seemed to fl oat above the debates of her society in a glittering cloud of well-bred hauteur and grace. She stood upright among men; often they knelt to her. Under her infl uence, even the coarse encounter between Calantha’s ladies-in-waiting and the returning soldiers Lemophil and Groneas (.ii.–) was played as a stately court dance. Although Sparta was marked from the fi rst by the misogynist discourse to which this scene gave voice, its ceremonies continually asserted the possibility of harmonious exchange between the genders. us, Boyd’s production reinforced, rather than occluded, the
See Verna Ann and Stephen Foster, “Structure and History in e Broken Heart: Sparta, England, and the ‘Truth,’” (): –. Foster and Foster were cited in the theatrical programme provided to audiences of the Boyd production ( Swan, ).
| Barker | F 2 “A stranger here in court, my lord”: Calantha (Olivia Williams) presents Penthea (Emma Field- ing) to the court, attended by Prophilus (William Houston). Photo: Malcolm Davies. By permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
playtext’s tension between gender confl ict and the “acting out” of norma- tive social codes. e extent to which it enabled a feminist interpretation of that tension became clear with the entry of Emma Fielding’s Penthea into the courtly arena. Clad in stark white, she looked disturbingly slight and emaciated beside the tall, elegant princess who presented her to the assembly (Figure ). Her austere, almost wizened fi gure contrasted sharply with the childlike quality of her face, as did what Greg Walker described as the “deep rasp- ing groan” of her voice (). If Williams’ Calantha was a perfect fl ower of courtliness, Fielding’s Penthea seemed a compendium of contradictions precariously held together. She was visibly the outsider Calantha suggested when she told Ithocles that his sister was a “stranger here in court, my lord” (.ii.). If the court had managed to negotiate or conceal the fi ssures in
| Death and the Married Maiden | its codes of gender and identity, the arrival of this uncanny fi gure brought them explosively to the surface. The strict deco- III. “Such a One as Only You Have Made Me” e strict decorum of Boyd’s production, which “rarely off ered any conces- rum of Boyd’s sions to the spectator who wished to peer beyond the spectacle and seek motives and explanations” (Walker ), was particularly appropriate to production … Penthea, whose attitude has been described by Sharon Hamilton as one of “almost catatonic passivity” (). At fi rst sight, Ford’s Penthea seems the was particularly very epitome of a submissive wife. On her fi rst appearance, her husband off ers to deck her out in jewels and fi nery for her appearance at court. She appropriate to refuses modestly: Penthea, whose [M]y attires Shall suit the inward fashion of my mind; From which, if your opinion, nobly placed, attitude has Change not the livery your words bestow, My fortunes with my hopes are at the highest. (.i.–) been described Penthea’s use of the word “livery” here echoes Angelo’s speech in Shake- … as one of speare’s Measure For Measure, when the lecherous deputy bids Isabella prove her womanhood by “putting on the destined livery” (.iv.). Unlike “almost cata- Shakespeare’s recalcitrant novice, Penthea accedes to this command. She assures her husband, “I am no mistress. / Whither you please, I must tonic passivity.” attend; all ways / Are alike pleasant to me” (.i.–). Having become a victim of the marriage market, Penthea seems to have accepted servitude and refused agency over her own life. “Seems,” however, is the operative word. After all, Penthea’s deferential remarks come in response to her husband’s pleas that she follow her own desires. He bids her Choose thine own recreations, be a queen Of what delights thou fanciest best, what company, What place, what times. Do anything, do all things Youth can command, so thou wilt chase these clouds From the pure fi rmament of thy fair looks. (.i.–)
Penthea’s answer encapsulates the contradictions inherent in their rela- tionship: “Alas, my lord, this language to your handmaid / Sounds as would music to the deaf” (.i.–). In words of exquisite conduct-book correctness that profanely recollect Mary’s Ecce Ancilla Domini (Luke : ), she constructs herself as her husband’s “handmaid.” At the same time,
| Barker | she suggests how completely her heart is closed to his bidding. “Rule me as thou canst wish,” begs Bassanes (.i.); Penthea categorically refuses to rule. Her perfect (and, as her later actions show, sincere) obedience is simultaneously an act of defi ance. Many critics interpret the playtext in a manner that minimizes this defi ance. Anne Barton, for instance, describes Ford’s heroine as “the magnanimous and loving Penthea” () who refuses to “repay the insuf- ferable Bassanes in kind, to encourage Orgilus’ passion in the garden, or to revenge herself on her brother when the opportunity off er[s] itself” (). Such readings justly emphasize Penthea’s extraordinarily faithful adher- ence to a demanding code of conduct, but they applaud that adherence without noting the discursive contradictions it highlights. Emma Fielding off ered a more complex reading, performing both Penthea’s irreproach- able submission and thethe boilingboiling rresistanceesistance iinextricablynextricably bboundound uupp wwithith it. Her acting stayed carefully within the bounds of ritual and restraint imposed by the production’s style. Refusing to display herself at court, she told Bassanes in measured tones that she needed, “No braveries nor cost of art, to draw / e whiteness of my name into off ence” ( .i.–). She spoke with quiet disdain of “such (if any such there are) who covet / A curiosity of admiration / By laying out their plenty to full view” (.i.–). Her refusal to lay out her plentyplenty toto fullfull viewview waswas in strictstrict conformityconformity withwith social demands on a modest wife. Before she entered, the audience had heard Philip Voss’ Bassanes pant with possessive fear as he declared, “No woman but can fall, and doth, or would” (.i.); it had seen him try to cope with that fear by blocking his wife off from the eyes of the world. e behaviour of Fielding’s Penthea should have calmed his anguish, but its eff ect was the opposite. Voss’ Bassanes was panicked by her inscrutabil- ity. Trumpet-voiced and garishly overdressed, he was a man who did laylay out his plenty to full view; his whole identity had visibly come to revolve around his precarious possession of his beautiful young wife. But Penthea’s perfect façade refused to allow him access to her inner life; he was blocked off from exchange with her, and her submission folded him in the cloud of unknowing that gave rise to his brutal jealousy. For this spectator at least, their interaction provided a frightening spectacle of a powerful system of discourse undermining itself from within (Figure ). As Boyd’s production progressed, Penthea’s strict performance of ideal feminine submission continued, as did its paradoxically ruinous eff ects on male eff orts at control. In Ford’s playtext, it is not only Bassanes who trembles before Penthea’s determined purity. Encountering his erstwhile beloved, Orgilus cries to her, “I would possess my wife; the equity / Of very
| Death and the Married Maiden | F 3 “Rule as thou canst wish”: Penthea (Emma Fielding) and Bassanes (Philip Voss), attended by their ser- vant Grausis (Doreen Hepburn). Photo: Malcolm Davies. By permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
reason bids me” (.iii.–). He “reasons” that he and Penthea have been legally betrothed and that her enforced marriage to Bassanes is an injustice that does not deserve to be respected. But Penthea answers him with a stricter understanding of “the laws of ceremonious wedlock” (.iii.): How, Orgilus, by promise I was thine, e heavens do witness: they can witness too A rape done on my truth.… e virgin dowry which my birth bestowed Is ravished by another. My true love Abhors to think that Orgilus deserved No better favours than a second bed. (.iii.–, –) As Barton remarks, Penthea’s career discloses the contradictions knit into the structure of the early modern marriage market. In a system where
| Barker | betrothal and marriage ceremonies each constitute formal commitments, both of her contracts “are legally and emotionally binding. Each one contaminates and nullifi es the other” (). Orgilus has the eternal—and legal—pledge of her heart, which Bassanes to his huge distress will never be able to usurp. But Bassanes has the legal—and eternal—possession of her body. By her own reckoning, Penthea belongs to everybody and nobody—most certainly not to herself. In Boyd’s Broken Heart, her position was communicated in a theatri- cal vocabulary at once restrained and brutal. When Fielding’s Penthea bid Iain Glen’s desperate Orgilus, “Lend your hand” (.iii.), he gave a sharp sigh of longing and relief, audible even on the archive video of the production. She knelt with him, as if to renew their vows of love, but as soon as he kissed her hand she sprang to her feet and put as much distance between them as she could. Twice over the course of the scene, her hands fl apped out from her sides in a despairing gesture toward herself. First they seemed to conjure the potential body that might have participated in her blighted love when she remembered “from what … fortune I am fallen” (.iii., ellipsis and emphasis added). Next, they motioned with corrosive self-disgust toward her actual bodybody wwhenhen sshehe rremindedeminded OOrgilusrgilus that her virginity was “ravished by another” (.iii.). Her physical being had become the site of her loathed and insoluble dilemma; possessed by Bassanes, it now divided her from Orgilus forever. Perhaps the most painful thing about this scene in performance was the spectacle of Orgilus crumpling under the force of Penthea’s rationale. As soon as Penthea recognized him, she reproached him with his failure to respect their society’s misogynous ideal of virtuous behaviour: I have not given admittance to one thought Of female change since cruelty enforced Divorce betwixt my body and my heart. Why would you fall from goodness thus? (.iii.–, empha- sis added)
When he persisted in his attempts to touch and plead with her, she took her logic to its last degree and threatened to call his “former protestations lust” (.iii.). Fielding spat out this last word so viciously that Glen sobbed out loud; for the man who had boasted of his “holy and chaste love” (.i.), this was the worst possible imprecation. He cried, “I would possess my wife” in terrible desperation, and to her cold “Is that all?” responded revealingly: “Why, ’tis the all of me, myself” (.iii.–). Faced with Penthea’s strict self-defi nition, which left no space for the restoration of this lost “me,”
| Death and the Married Maiden | Orgilus discovered that he had no identity left. Well might Penthea sigh as he groped his way off the stage: “Alas, poor gentleman. / ’A looked not like the ruins of his youth, / But like the ruins of those ruins” (.iii.–). At the midpoint of e Broken Heart sshehe mightmight havehave saidsaid muchmuch thethe same of her brother, Ithocles. By the time we see him with Penthea in Ford’s playtext, the successful young soldier has fallen hopelessly in love with the unattainable Princess Calantha. His experience of love has forced him to grapple with his sister’s suff ering, which he now sees as analo- gous to his own. He refers to his existence as “this chaos of my bondage” (.ii.), a phrase that speaks both to his loss of a clear, stable sense of self and to his entrapment within a form of “thraldom” like Penthea’s slavery within marriage. Begging his sister to heal the breach between them, he insists that her forgiveness will somehow free him from the self that wronged her. “I consume / In languishing aff ections for that trespass; / Yet cannot die,” he tells her (.ii.–); “And till thou wilt forgive, I must endure” (.ii.). e man who had claimed so much power over his sister’s identity now confesses her ppowerower over him. Like Bassanes and Orgilus, Ithocles has come face to face with his desperate dependence on the woman who once “belonged” to him. As in her scenes with Bassanes and Orgilus, however, Penthea here insists on her continuing subjection to male authority in a manner that denies any male eff ort at exchange. In Boyd’s production, Ithocles tried to cajole his sister into taking a brighter view of her situation and was met with the tightly controlled rage that was the hallmark of Emma Fielding’s performance. In tones of hatred and self-loathing, Fielding’s Penthea described herself as “[s]uch an one / As only you have made me: a faith- breaker, / A spotted whore” (.ii.–). She greeted Ithocles’ horrifi ed reaction with a sharp insistence on her (and his) culpability: “Forgive me; I am one / In act, not in desires, the gods must witness” (.ii.–). She went on to explain, with the condescending, step-by-step clarity of a schoolmistress dealing with a maddeningly dull pupil, that “she that’s wife to Orgilus, and lives / In known adultery with Bassanes, / Is at the best a whore” (.ii.–). Bowman’s earnest and unheroic Ithocles, described by Greg Walker as “a slow-witted, harmless man” (), was jarred into the muttered realization, “After my victories abroad, at home / I meet despair” (.ii.–). Penthea had forced him to see that his act of gender inscrip- tion had trapped them both within roles that allowed for no escape. In Ford’s playtext, Ithocles’ eventual, halting confession of love for Calantha seems to bring his sister to the point of forgiving him, of iden- tifying with him and of trying to help him in his courtship of Calantha.
| Barker | In Boyd’s production, even this moment of apparent hope was caught in the gridlock of Penthea’s self-defi nition. When Bowman’s Ithocles stam- mered out Calantha’s name in response to Penthea’s insistent demands, it seemed that he was losing his last inch of agency. On hearing that he Penthea’s mad- had lost his heart to the princess, Fielding produced from her thin little girl’s chest the cackle of a fairy-tale evil queen. She forced her brother to ness and death see her situation as a refl ection of his impending tragedy: “Suppose you were contracted to her, would it not / Split even your very soul to see exemplifi ed her father / Snatch her out of your arms against her will[?]” (.ii.–). en she pronounced Penthea’s apparent about-face—“We are reconciled” the complex (.ii.)—in a tone of satisfi ed venom in which it was impossible to fi nd genuine reconciliation. Ithocles’ patriarchal misstep was still so much at relationship the core of his sister’s construction of her world that she could only further its tragic consequences. between mas- Exactly how she would do this became clearer as Boyd’s Broken Heart spiraled toward its conclusion and Penthea herself sank into madness and culinist dis- death. In Ford’s playtext Orgilus describes his beloved’s descent into mad- ness in an ambiguous formulation, telling Bassanes that Penthea is “left course and the a prey to words” (.ii.)..ii.). ManyMany criticscritics hahaveve had diffi c ulty culty w itwithh Or Orgilus’gilus’ description: Spencer comments that “the phrase is strained” (), while woman who J. C. Maxwell proposes emending “words” to “madness” to clarify the sense (). Another (anonymous) critic praises it for a “queer, simple, asserted her- and expressive phrase, which suggests that Ford’s heroines are better word- less; for them, to speak is to be mad” (“John Ford” ). In Boyd’s Broken self through it Heart, the “words” that preyed on the mad Penthea were the words that constructed her paradoxical identity as a “married maid.” Her madness and even as she suc- death exemplifi ed the complex relationship between masculinist discourse and the woman who asserted herself through it even as she succumbed cumbed to its to its demands. When Fielding’s Penthea lost her reason, it seemed at fi rst that her demands. madness had expelled her from her carefully constructed world of silence and restraint into a realm of uncontrollable speech and action. Ever before characterized by slow, measured movements, she entered her mad scene at a run. Her hair, until this point scraped severely back, now straggled down about her face; her pristine white dress was soiled.³ Her fi rst act was
e resemblance to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, a more familiar early modern mad- woman whose insanity is similarly linked to open expressions of sexuality, grief and rage, was not lost on the production’s reviewers. Kate Bassett, for example, tartly asserted that Emma Fielding “loses it in the mad scene, as the play trans- mutes into Hamlet Rehashed.”
| Death and the Married Maiden | to fl ing her arms around Orgilus, snatching the passionate embrace they had so long been denied. It seemed that the audience was at last about to see the “real” Penthea, the uninhibited inner self the men around her had hitherto sought in vain behind the mask of her exquisite propriety. But what was the nature of this “real,” mad self? At the height of her madness, Ford’s Penthea cries out to Ithocles, [T]ruly, brother, My father would have picked me out a husband, And then my little ones had been no bastards. But ’tis too late for me to marry now, I am past child-bearing; ’tis not my fault. (.ii.–).ii.–)
Haunted by Penthea’s stifl ed longing for Orgilus, these words let her audi- tors into what might be considered the inner sanctum of her self. But they also reveal how deeply that “inner sanctum” is subjected by her sense of helpless submission to her brother and her guilty conviction that her mar- riage to Bassanes is adulterous. In one of the most harrowing moments of Boyd’s production, Fielding’s Penthea cried, “’Tis not my fault” with the agony of a woman trying to convince herself and her hearers of something she could not believe. After she embraced Orgilus she broke away from him, racked with sobbing. e theatrical audience was not watching a naturalistic depiction of liberated interiority; rather, they were witness- ing Penthea’s continued acting-out of her society’s deeply contradictory construction of feminine virtue. Boyd’s treatment of the physical causes for Penthea’s decline empha- sized the relationship between her internalization of social demands and her ultimate destruction. In Ford’s playtext, when Ithocles asks Penthea’s ladies about the source of her ravings, they admit that she has not slept for ten days, adding that “We cannot any way pray her to eat” (.ii.)..ii.). e reception of Boyd’s Broken Heart suggesuggestssts tthathat it hahass bbecomeecome almoalmostst impossible for us to understand such a refusal of nourishment without reference to the eating disorder, anorexia nervosa. Reviews of Boyd’s production continually returned to this theme. Roger Foss described “the virginal Penthea’s slide from despair to anorexic anguish”; Nicholas de Jongh spoke of “Emma Fielding’s magnifi cent, anorexic Penthea”; and Clive Hirschorn explicitly linked eating disorder to social helplessness, depicting Fielding’s Penthea as a “sacrifi cial virgin … carried off by a sev- enteenth-century version of anorexia nervosa.” In the scholarly literature, even so distinguished a critic as Anne Barton taps into these assumptions when she writes that Penthea “gives way to the anorexic’s ‘terrifi ed pas-
| Barker | sion for purity’” (). Such formulations are dangerously anachronistic. ey limit the meaning of women’s fasting in early modern drama to the meanings associated with anorexia in our own time, most particularly to the belief that women starve themselves because of “fear and disgust at the appetites” (MacSween ). Penthea’s references to her pitiless fasting certainly relate it to disgust with her own sexuality. In one chilling passage, she speaks of herself in the third person, reasoning that since her blood was seasoned by the forfeit Of noble shame with mixtures of pollution, Her blood—’tis just—be henceforth never heightened With taste of sustenance. Starve. (.ii.–).ii.–)
ese words engage with the early modern cultural conviction, familiar from many conduct manuals, that fasting will help to tame excessive feminine sexuality. us, in e Instruction of a Christian Woman (), Juan Luis Vives enjoins “moche fasting … whiche dothe nat feble the body, but brydell hit and presse hit downe and quenche the heate of youthe” (sig.Fv), and Bartholemew Batty suggests in e Christian Man’s Closet () that a virtuous young girl “so eate, as that shee may be alwayes an hungered” (). But Penthea’s clinical use of the third person to describe her own starvation, as if she herself were the conduct book writer and her dying body merely the object of her rhetoric, suggests that her self-starva- tion might involve a more complex cultural process than that sketched in the manuals. In John Ford’s Political eatre, Lisa Hopkins links Ford’s use of food imagery with the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church that was so embat- tled in the England of his day ( passim). Her argument draws Penthea into a sphere of religious signifi cation that has productive implications for our interpretation of her fasting. In Holy Feast and Holy Fast, CCarolinearoline Bynum argues that female fasting in Catholic Europe often functioned, not only as an act of obedience to masculine demands on female behaviour, but also as an assertion of control on the woman’s part. Medieval holy women, she concludes, “manipulated far more than their own bodies through fast- ing. ey manipulated their families, their religious superiors, and God Himself” (). In this context, self-starvation was both an accession to cultural demands and a statement of woman’s control over herself and those around her. If, as writers such as Eamon Duff y and Alison Shell have suggested, Catholic practice haunted Reformation England in complex
| Death and the Married Maiden | ways, then Penthea’s self-starvation might plausibly be read in terms of this frightening form of social dialogue. Fielding’s performance in Boyd’s e Broken Heart rrecalledecalled DDonnaleeonnalee Frega’s argument that woman’s self-starvation can be “a powerful and erotic (if dangerous) form of discourse” (), as well as Elisabeth Bronfen’s belief that dying may function as “women’s one eff ective communicative act, in a cultural or kinship situation otherwise disinclined towards femi- nine authorship” (). As Elizabeth Schafer remarked, Fielding presented Penthea’s fasting “as a gesture of anger and aggression” (). Her weep- ing and the fl ailing fi sts with which she intermittently beat at her own body suggested her self-condemnation, but the overriding note of her performance in the mad scene was rage turned outward against the men around her. She spat the words, “I loved you once” (.ii.).ii.) malevolentlymalevolently at Orgilus; she forced her grief-stricken brother to join her in a jagged parody of the stately dancing beloved of the Spartan court. Her fasting and madness did not allow her any liberation from the self into which she was locked—but they did prprovideovide her wwithith a fformorm of didiscoursescourse tthroughhrough which she could make the men around her understand their collaboration in her tragedy. At one of the most charged moments in Ford’s playtext, Penthea “pointspoints at Ithocles”⁴ and speaks for Orgilus’ benefi t: [B]ut that is he— And yet he paid for ’t home; alas, his heart Is crept into the cabinet of the princess; We shall have points and bride-laces. Remember, When we last gathered roses in the garden, I found my wits; but truly you lost yours. at’s he, and still ’tis he. (.ii.–).ii.–) Fielding’s gesture towards Ithocles was implacable. All along she had insisted, not only on her own fateful place in Sparta’s ideological structure, but also on the entrapment of the men around her. Her fi nal indictment of her brother determined the destinies of those men, ensuring that Ithocles’ fate would be sealed by his oppression of her and that Orgilus would affi rm his identity as wronged lover by taking up the role of avenger. “She has tutored me,” Glen’s Orgilus responded wonderingly; “Some powerful inspiration checks my laziness” (.ii.–)..ii.–). HHee wwouldould ccarryarry ooutut hherer commands, trapping and murdering Ithocles at the very moment of the
is emphatic stage direction appears in the fi rst quarto edition of e Broken Heart, perhaps inscribing theatrical practice of the period.
| Barker | latter’s engagement to Calantha and paying for his deed with his own life. Clearly, Penthea’s madness refl ected not only woman’s loss of agency, but also her powerfully self-willed reproduction of “male” power.
IV. “ e Stage of my Mortality” Even faced with that reproduction, some around Penthea continue to resist the titanic force of her conservative imagination. Foremost among them is Princess Calantha. e pivotal encounter between the two women dur- ing which Penthea constructs her chilling image of herself as a player on the stage of her own mortality is dominated by Penthea’s will, a spoken testament through which Penthea insists upon her demanding construc- tion of feminine virtue. Calantha responds with somewhat back-handed compliments, reducing the will to “harmless sport / Of mere imagination” (.iii.–). She rrefusesefuses ttoo aassentssent ttoo PPenthea’senthea’s dicdictumstums on tthehe bleaknessbleakness of existence. Instead, she answers crisply, “Contemn not your condition for the proof / Of bare opinion only” (.v.–). If another woman can stand so fi rmly apart from some of the most governing assumptions of Spartan society, dismissing them as “bare opinion,” is Penthea’s then an isolated tragedy? Certainly, Calantha is sharply critical when Penthea reveals her desire to shape the princess’ identity by “bequeath[ing her] in holiest rites of love / Mine only brother Ithocles” (.v.–), responding, “What new change / Appears in my behaviour, that thou darest / Tempt my displeasure?” (.v.–). Unlike Penthea, Calantha has consistently refused to relinquish power over herself; now she refuses to relinquish it even to another woman. As Boyd’s Broken Heart showed,showed, however,however, Calantha’sCalantha’s self-commandself-command did not necessarily allow her to escape Penthea’s will. Olivia Williams’ Princess sat in regal splendour throughout Penthea’s disquisition. Her voice hardened from noble kindliness to cold rebuke when she realized Penthea’s matchmaking intentions, and her last words, “Lady, / Your check lies in my silence” (.v.–), were a curt dismissal which off ered no glimmer of encouragement to Penthea or to Ithocles. Yet Fielding’s Pen- thea—lit very brightly in this dim scene and more uncanny than ever—left Calantha’s presence on a note of triumph, murmuring, “My reckonings are made even” (.v.). Calantha had fi nnallyally rerespondedsponded t oto P ePenthea’snthea’s insistence on her own impending death, not only with tears, but also with an unmistakably misogynist construction of those tears: “Now, beshrew thy sadness. / ou turnest me too much woman” (.v.–). Compas- sion, uncontrollable emotion, tears—and the sense that these qualities are “womanly” and unacceptable: these are the chinks in Calantha’s royal
| Death and the Married Maiden | armour through which Penthea slips the name of Ithocles. In the process, though she fails directly to undermine the princess’ insistent self-determi- nation, she succeeds in nudging Calantha toward the dangerous position Ford’s of the chaste Spartan wife. When Orgilus murders Ithocles, Calantha, by now Ithocles’ betrothed, Calantha is a fi nds herself in a position that stretches her self-construction to the break- ing point. As the news of her father’s, her friend Penthea’s, and fi nally brilliant self- her lover’s, deaths are brought to her, she dances on among the revelers at Euphrania’s wedding in a determined re-assertion of all the principles fashioner to the of order and harmony the dance implies. Her actions seem to speak her triumph over the derogatory images of femininity that she and Penthea last. She stages have negated all along. Charles Lamb certainly thought so, swooning at her “holy violence against her nature” (). e same admiring response herself in a to Calantha emerges from within the playtext: “She has a masculine spirit,” affi rms Bassanes (.ii.)..ii.). CalanthaCalantha herselfherself associatesassociates herher fortitudefortitude withwith spectacular masculinity rather than femininity, declaring “Be such mere women, who with shrieks and outcries / Can vow a present end to all their sorrows, / ceremony. Yet live to vow new pleasures, and outlive them” (.iii.–)..iii.–). HHowever,owever, we are not watching a clear-cut appropriation of male identity on the princess’ part. Calantha also reinscribes her feminine position, insisting on the necessity of her marriage in a nation which “cannot brook / A feminate authority” (.iii.) and thenthen “new-marry[ing]“new-marry[ing] him whosewhose wifewife I am,” the dead Ithocles (.iii.)..iii.). OOncence aagain,gain, tthehe ccontradictionsontradictions iinn tthehe Spartan construction of feminine virtue surface in a manner that rapidly proves fatal. Ford’s Calantha is a brilliant self-fashioner to the last. She stages her- self in a spectacular ceremony, simultaneously coronation, marriage and funeral, that affi rms not only her own identity but also the identities of the men and women around her. In the process, however, she inscribes both her own death and the death of the tenuous “feminate authority” she has achieved. She parcels out her kingdom to a handful of men, but consigns her two waiting-women, one to marriage, the other to the per- manent virginity of “Vesta’s temple” (.iii.),.iii.), withoutwithout consultingconsulting them.them. At the last, Calantha affi rms the destructive gender norms of the play’s beginning. Like Penthea, she imagines men as active rulers and women as passive brides or maidens. Refusing to position herself among changeable “mere women,” but all the while speaking her feminine need for a husband “whose abilities / Can better guide this kingdom” (.iii.–),.iii.–), sshehe fi nallynally constructs herself as one of the “virgin wives” so praised by Penthea. She avoids misogynist constructions of feminine vice through strict faithful-
| Barker | ness to oppressive and contradictory constructions of feminine virtue. Like Penthea, Calantha seals this identity with her own death. “ is is a testament,” protests Bassanes as he hears Calantha’s fi nal words; “It sounds not like conditions on a marriage” (.iii.–)..iii.–). IInn tthehe eend,nd, CCalantha’salantha’s ““will”will” is not the will to negotiate with the realities of the Spartan court, but the last will that locks those realities into place. Boyd’s staging of e Broken Heart made thisthis pointpoint withwith bleakbleak clarity.clarity. Olivia Williams’ Calantha entered the fi nal scene dressed in gorgeously embroidered white. A fairy-tale Princess Bride, she knelt before a white- covered altar and then rose with magnifi cent composure to deliver her “testament.” In a moment, however, she drew aside the white cloth to reveal that the “altar” of her coronation was actually the coffi n of Ithocles. Open- ing it, she bent over his corpse with barely-controlled grief: “[N]ow I turn to thee, thou shadow / Of my contracted lord…. / … / Death shall not separate us” (.iii.–,.iii.–, ).). isis coup-de-theatre suggested the reality that underlay Calantha’s performance of power: beneath the royal trappings was the coffi n that symbolized the virgin princess’ dwindling into wife- dom and death. After taking “one kiss on these cold lips, my last” (.iii.),.iii.), Williams walked centre stage to assume her fi nal ceremonial pose. “Crack, crack,” she cried to her heart (.iii.)—and.iii.)—and immeimmediatelydiately it did. For many, this was the most haunting moment in Boyd’s haunting production. Peter Holland responded to its depiction of “Calantha’s abso- lute authority over her body with its instantaneous obedient response,” describing Williams’ delivery of the cry “Crack, crack” as “one of the most extraordinary and appalling sounds I have ever heard in the theatre” (). Again, this powerful image embodied the multiple contradictions in the Spartan lady’s identity. Calantha’s commanding voice contrasted with its self-destructive command. Her glittering wedding-coronation gown jarred with the self-abnegation of her fi nal gesture as she fl ung out her arms crucifi xion-wise. In thismise-en-scène, power to fashion the self was power to accede to a construction of feminine virtue that, for Calantha as for Penthea, could be perfected only in death.
V. “Without Distinction”: Dreaming the Impossible Dream Reviewing Boyd’s production in the Financial Times, David Murray noted with some surprise that “ e Broken Heart isis actuallyactually a minorminor nnationalational treasure.” But what meanings, what social value, can this most unremit- tingly dark of early modern tragedies hold for spectators today? After all, one might argue that Ford’s playtext is implicated in the same acts of reinscription it so pityingly and frighteningly depicts. It opens with a Pro-
| Death and the Married Maiden | logue which constructs the play in opposition to the “jests, fi t for a brothel” which incite “vulgar admiration” (ll. –). e Prologue opines that What Such low songs, Tuned to unchaste ears, suit not modest tongues. e virgin sisters then deserved fresh bays meanings, what When innocence and sweetness crowned their lays. (ll.–) social value, can Such terms imagine an ideally decorous play not far removed from the ideally decorous wife of Penthea’s speeches to the jealous Bassanes. At the this most other end of the playtext stands the song Calantha pens for her own death, with its conclusion that “Love only reigns in death; though art / Can fi nd unremittingly no comfort for a broken heart” (.iii.–)..iii.–). FordFord seemsseems toto concludeconclude thatthat his play’s tragedy—the fact that “love,” and its commensurate harmony dark of early between the genders, is achievable only in death—is inevitable. A glance back at the Prologue from this vantage point may leave readers with the modern trag- uneasy feeling that e Broken Heart aaskssks art,art, likelike women,women, toto behavebehave withwith decorous restraint in the face of a situation it is powerless to change. edies hold However, the fate of e Broken Heart in MichaelMichael Boyd’sBoyd’s productionproduction shows how even apparently conservative early modern texts can work in for spectators our own time as impassioned protests against oppressive gender systems. Boyd cut both the Prologue and the play’s fi nal song; instead, he began today? with an image of Orgilus’ and Penthea’s frustrated nuptials and ended with Calantha’s terrifying death-cry and collapse. His production prob- lematized the decorum with which these Spartans lived up to—and died of—the demands of their society. It explored the deathly motions of a set of identities struggling with, but unable to separate themselves from, the social roles assigned to them. In the process, it invited the spectator to look again at the personae she took for granted, the identities into which she was locked. Faced with Calantha’s extraordinary, “masculine” restraint at the end of Ford’s e Broken Heart, Bassanes asks, “And wherefore should I pule, and, like a girl, / Put fi nger in the eye? Let’s be all toughness, / Without distinction betwixt sex and sex” (.ii.–)..ii.–). IItt iiss tytypicalpical of SSpartanpartan mimisog-sog- yny that Bassanes’ dream of a world without gender distinctions should reject girlishness and call for a reversion of both genders to those “tough” characteristics associated with masculinity. But the very presence of the phrase, “Without distinction betwixt sex and sex,” seems signifi cant in a playtext that teeters between the reinscription and the critique of oppres- sive gender norms. Like Penthea and Calantha, the text is haunted by the possibility of a freedom it can scarcely articulate. Appropriately, then, the
| Barker | idea of the brides Penthea and Calantha might havehave beenbeen hauntedhaunted thethe margins of Boyd’s e Broken Heart whilewhile bbodiesodies hhopelesslyopelessly iinscribednscribed by a brutally confl icted construction of femininity took centre stage. By faithfully representing the married maiden’s deadly constancy, Boyd’s production engendered spectatorial resistance to her tragically narrow view of feminine identity. rough the ruined bodies of its characters, it pleaded for an end to binary distinctions betwixt sex and sex.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr Martin Wiggins, the late Doreen Brockbank, Mary Stewart Burgher and all the eye witnesses of Boyd’s production who shared their impressions with me for their many helpful insights. Many thanks also go to Karin Brown and the staff of the Shakespeare Centre Library for their very generous and patient assistance.
Works Cited
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