Female Characters in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama Master’S Diploma Thesis

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Bc. Petra Spurná

Female Characters in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Pavel Drábek, Ph. D.

2012

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank my supervisor doc. Mgr. Pavel Drábek, PhD. for his patience and his valuable advice. Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 1

2. Ancient Greek and Roman Influences ...... 9

2.1 Ancient Greece ...... 9

2.1.1. Women and their Social Position ...... 10

2.1.2 Women and Theatre ...... 14

2.1.3 Women and Tragedy ...... 15

2.1.4 Euripides ...... 18

2.1.5 Euripides in Early Modern England ...... 22

2.2 Roman influence ...... 25

2.2.1 Virgil ...... 25

2.2.2 Ovid ...... 28

2.2.3 Seneca ...... 31

3. Italian Influences ...... 39

3.1 Defences of Women ...... 40

3.2 Ludovico Ariosto ...... 43

3.3 Tragicomedy and Pastoral ...... 48

3.4 Transporting Tragicomedy: Commedia dell’Arte ...... 52 4. The Early Modern England ...... 56

4.1 Elizabethan Era ...... 56

4.1.1 The History of English Drama ...... 61

4.1.2 University Plays ...... 65

4.1.3 University Wits ...... 70

4.1.4 William Shakespeare ...... 75

4.2 Jacobean Era ...... 81

4.2.1 Jacobean Revenge Tragedy ...... 83

4.2.2 City Comedy and Domestic Tragedy ...... 92

5. Conclusion ...... 95

Works Cited ...... 97

Résumé (Czech) ...... 102

Résumé (English) ...... 103

1. Introduction

The Elizabethan and Jacobean times were important for the English drama – especially because it did not exist as a proper literary genre before the sixteenth century.

It evolved from the church liturgy through Miracles and Moralities, to Interludes, short plays with simple plots. But all these dramatic “genres” provided nothing more than stock characters. The important step came with the influence of Classical drama. At first it was the Latin drama because no translation was needed and the plays were also better preserved, but later in the sixteenth century the Greek plays were discovered and through translation into Latin or through Italian adaptations they got to England. The writers started to imitate the classical plays and thus all the great ancient heroines appeared in the Early Modern drama. And while the playwrights were trying new improvements, the plays were performed in front of audiences who played an important part in deciding what kind of comedies or tragedies should be written. The use of Latin became less popular, so the first proper plays in vernacular appeared. But the evolution of drama was not so simple. It mirrored socio-political background, religious and philosophical thoughts and – in the case of female characters – the position of women and men in the patriarchal society. The aim of this thesis is then to follow this evolution of female dramatic characters and to prove that every step in the evolution was important and that the continuity of Classical and Early Modern worlds together with the still existing strong influences of the Medieval Ages were the conditions needed for this evolution.

This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is called “Ancient

Greek and Roman Influences”. It is divided into two subchapters regarding the two countries end eras which they describe. The Greek subchapter is then divided into five

parts – “Women and their Social Position” provides background for the Greek drama – during the fifth century BCE the first drama developed in Athens and it is important to understand the social position of women in those times because the female characters that emerged in this period oftentimes provided a critical standpoint to some of the social problems. This part describes the changes connected to women‟s social status – in this era they became a marginalised group restricted to the private sphere. Also the philosophical trends described women as inferior to men – the Pythagoreans invented the division of the Universe into binary oppositions and created thus a long-lasting argument for the deficiency of women and their morals. This division also led to appearance of double standards for male and female behaviour. The second part,

“Women and Theatre” describes the reality of women as theatregoers. While they were restricted from many public events, they were allowed to go to a theatrical festival called the Great Dionysia. This festival was important as the greatest dramatists of the era competed with their plays to gain popularity and prizes. The fact that women were allowed to these performances shows that as a part of the audience they could be addressed by the dramatists. The third part is called “Women and Tragedy” and it discusses the problematic issue of a female character becoming a protagonist of a play – women were supposed to stay in the private sphere, the oikos, while the plays were set outside the oikos – it means that the female character has to transgress her gender role and step out into the public sphere. When that happens, she becomes masculine in her behaviour, which is enacted through language and the values she honours – this practice questioned the validity of binary opposites and gender division – if a woman was able to act as a man than the gender attributes seemed to be social constructs rather than something inherent in the sex. The fourth part called simply “Euripides” deals with one of the greatest classic dramatists who was also described as a social critic even by his

contemporaries. His plays were popular yet did not achieve many awards and a possible reason for this fact can be his interest in marginalized groups of the society – women and slaves. He gave them voice and features (or even virtues) that were not generally attributed to them and he also showed that the social status is not natural but imposed by the culture. The last part of the Greek subchapter deals with the appearance of

Euripides‟ plays in the Early Modern era and their influence. The whole subchapter is greatly indebted to the authors of the Introduction to the Women on the Edge because they provided extensive background information for the research on Greek theatre and women – many works on Greek drama leave out women not only as an important historical group that was the first to live in the strictly divided world of patriarchal power, but also as dramatic characters, even though they were the originals for many later characters. And without Euripides‟ comments on the social status of women put into the mouths of his female characters it is a question if there would be any strong and outspoken female character created even hundreds of centuries later.

The Roman subchapter is divided into three parts – “Virgil”, “Ovid” and

“Seneca”. These authors were selected as the most influential for the appearance of a fully developed female character in the Early Modern period. While their works were not concerned with the real lives of Roman women, there is no introductory part about the position of women in their time. And, on the other hand, while these authors became influential for their formal and technical improvements of the genre, these are not included in this thesis because they were not important for the development of female characters. The first part of this subchapter describes Virgil‟s greatest achievement concerning a female character – his Dido, the queen of Carthage, as she is described in his famous work, the Aeneid. Virgil‟s Dido inspired Christopher Marlowe when he created Dido, Queen of Carthage, which was an important play for the development of

English drama. The part about Ovid describes a poet who “actually liked women as a sex” (Griffin 59). Ovid created many female characters in the Metamorphoses or the

Heroides and provided interesting advice to women in his controversial Ars Amatoria.

He was very influential even in the Middle Ages because of various misinterpretations of his texts that enable the critics to see him as a moral author. The third part focuses on

Seneca who is actually the only dramatist from this group of Roman authors. He was influenced by both Virgil and Ovid and in his choice of stories there is a vivid influence of Euripides who was in Seneca‟s time a part of the classical canon. Even though his characters were different from those of Euripides, certain similarities can be traced in the plays. Seneca was very important for the Early Modern drama in Italy and England

– many Latin plays were written in Senekal style and even later plays written in vernacular were still created in accordance with this model. Seneca, as well as Euripides and Ovid, wrote a story of Medea, and Virgil and Ovid both wrote a story of Dido – these two female characters are very important for the development of Early Modern dramatic female characters: in the Medieval times there was no place for angry women

– Court poetry was about love between fair ladies and their knights, religious works were dealing with lives of saints and martyrs and moral treatises were about condemning women as whores who cannot control their passions. There were no stories about women passionately in love, of women who killed their children or themselves to make the men they loved suffer, and even if there were such stories, the women were obviously not portrayed in a way that would gain sympathy for them and understanding for their deeds.

The second chapter is called “Italian Influences” and deals with the innovations in the genre that appeared in Italy in connection with the Renaissance Humanism that was born there. It is divided into four subchapters. The first is called “Defences of

Women” and together with the second subchapter on Ludovico Ariosto includes information from Pamela Benson‟s book The Invention of the Renaissance Woman.

Benson created an extensive account of various works defending women written both in

Italy and in England and describes methods that were used to create certain models of women. In the first subchapter there are the two main methods described – methods of creating an “extraordinary” woman and an “exemplary” woman. While the extraordinary woman is masculine, thus capable of doing great things as men, but is different from other women, the exemplary woman shows female abilities and virtues and the method of defending women this way claims that every woman is able to do the same great deeds as the famous example in question, if she is given the same opportunities. The defences of women are important because women had to gain attention in reality to become important in the fictional world – just as Euripides was pointing to certain problematic issues, the authors of the defences were highlighting areas in which women were undeservedly diminished. Ludovico Ariosto, whose work is described in the second subchapter, belongs to the group of defenders who mix those above mentioned methods, yet he is consistent in his belief that both sexes are interdependent and equal. He introduces in his Orlando Furioso a new kind of a female character – a self-reliable woman facing the ultimate question – to what extent is she defined by her sex and to which by her abilities? Ariosto also promotes the idea that a woman, to be virtuous, needs to be supported by the society and by her husband, because without trust it is hard to keep her reputation immaculate – where there is no trust, there even a false slander can cause enormous harm. This subchapter contains also a commentary on the poet-female patron relationship. The fourth subchapter called

“Tragicomedy and Pastoral” describes the Italian influence on dramatic genres. While the pastoral was invented as a new genre, tragicomedy already existed but its value was

questionable – Italian theoreticians and dramatists engaged in a rather heated discussion but the tragicomedy was already gaining popularity among the audiences and new discoveries of Greek dramas provided proofs that the first drama was generically complex. These genres were important for the evolution of female characters because pastoral plays were often centred on a female protagonist and tragicomedy provided more space for verisimilitude – even though even tragicomedy has its stock characters, women became more believable than pathetic tragic heroines or comic shrews. The last subchapter concerning Italian influences is called “Transporting Tragicomedy:

Commedia dell‟Arte” and describes how female actresses changed the plays performed by commedia dell‟arte troupes and how these plays got to England and influenced

English dramatists.

The third chapter is called “The Early Modern England” and deals with the history of English drama and with new accomplishments in the Renaissance period. It is divided into two subchapters – “Elizabethan Era” and “Jacobean Era” – and each subchapter is further divided into smaller parts. The first chapter includes introduction to the era of Queen Elizabeth I. It describes her self-fashioning as an androgynous sovereign to escape the problematic position of a female ruler. She is not androgynous only in terms of masculine identity and feminine body. She created a Cult of the Virgin

Queen to promote her feminine side and it became as prominent as her assumed masculinity. From the methods described by Pamela Benson, Elizabeth preferred to be portrayed as the extraordinary woman, which did not help to elevate the social position of women in general – as much as she did for the female characters by creating her Cult and encouraging writers to create powerful fictional women based on her Majesty, she did nothing for the contemporary women, except for the fact that any public expression of hate towards women was not recommended when a woman was sitting on the throne,

so the misogyny of the Jacobean era survived during this period unnoticed. The first subchapter contains four parts – the first part is called “The History of English Drama” and describes the evolution of the genre from church liturgy, through Miracles,

Moralities and Interludes to the first plays written in vernacular in the first half of

Queen Elizabeth‟s reign. The second part is called “University Plays” and describes the different evolution of drama in the university towns – because they were not cathedral towns, the basic drama evolving from liturgy was not an important influence in Oxford and Cambridge, while the classical plays were influential enormously. University scholars defended their performances as important for the educational purposes and argued against professional troupes who performed for money and provided base entertainment – yet the connection of university drama and professional drama was inevitable because some university alumni became professional writers. The next part,

“University Wits”, focuses on these alumni – mainly on John Lyly for his importance for the development of comedy, and Christopher Marlowe for his tragedies. Lyly focused on women as an important part of his audience and it was mirrored in his plays.

He also added romance to the comedies which enabled women to play a more important part in the plot. Christopher Marlowe brought Virgil‟s Dido to the Early Modern

England and created a strong, emotional character that influenced many others. In his other tragedies women do not play such a crucial part but in his Tamburlaine he created a new kind of romance – based on the courtly romance, he switched from the combination of a faithful knight and a beautiful lady to a more powerfully balanced couple of a conqueror and a woman who strives for her own goals. The fourth part of this chapter is called “William Shakespeare” and it focuses mainly on different critical readings of his characters, because there already are many analyses and theoretical disputes concerning them to leave a space to write something new. While feminist

readings can be exaggerated because of the fervour to prove that Shakespeare‟s female characters were mere constructs of patriarchal society, there exist also readings that are quite misleading – mainly because the author is not sufficiently acknowledged with the historical background of the period.

The second subchapter concerning the Jacobean era starts with introduction to the problematic reign of James I – while Elizabeth‟s androgynous self was a success,

James‟ version was a failure. Adding a feminine side to a masculine king seems unnecessary and his proclamation that he is (just as Elizabeth was) married to the kingdom degraded his male subjects into the position of a wife. According to many critics this problematic position of men created a need to suppress women even more to keep the previous patriarchal hierarchy. To this need is connected the subject of the first part of this subchapter – “Jacobean Revenge Tragedy”. The striving to keep the old order of the society, the destabilised binary oppositions, because men were diminished, too, created two versions of repression of female characters – the first is milder – idealization of women – the second is violent – misogyny in its worst, having female characters raped or/and decapitated. Even though the idealization does not seem as powerful as the misogynist treatment, it is used to objectify women and to further support the division of women into chaste virgins and whores. The last part focuses on new genres – city comedy and domestic tragedy. These genres became very popular because they lacked the bombast of previous tragedies and they portrayed stories of characters in contemporary settings – it provided the audience with better understanding and sharing the experience with the characters. These genres dealt with relationships between men and women and changed the previous romances into stories resembling more the Restoration drama then the Renaissance one.

2. Ancient Greek and Roman Influences

The influences of Ancient Greek and Roman writers are important because the whole idea of the Renaissance is the rebirth of the Classical era – the rebirth of its art, its literature, its philosophy centred on ethics, its interest in the human. Only four authors were chosen to represent this great era – Euripides, Virgil, Ovid and Seneca – because they created female characters that outlived their times and were reborn in the

Early Modern period in the plays of Italian and English writers.

2.1 Ancient Greece

The Ancient Greek drama from the fifth century BCE is the original drama – this fact is assumed mainly because “there is no evidence for the existence of, e.g., Chinese,

Indian, or Japanese drama as early as the fifth century BC.; and Egyptian ritual did not develop into drama proper” (Miller 126). N.P. Miller in his “The Origins of Greek

Drama: A Summary of the Evidence and a Comparison with Early English Drama” claims that the Ancient Greek drama has many origins and that it can be compared to the English Renaissance drama in its development: “However much an artist is influenced (as he must be) by the conventions and inheritance of his own age, we should remember that the inheritance will include conscious intelligence and individual genius, as well as primitive ritual and superstition” (Miller 126). The origins are, among others, religious rituals and processions and vulgar native farces, “perhaps including mythological burlesque” (Miller 128). Tragedy as a genre was “a part of a religious festival; its chorus was of much greater antiquity than its actors, and, to begin with, had the finer and more important part” (Miller 135) and the “subject-matter tended generally to be drawn from the heroic legends for the simple reason that there almost alone, for the moment, could the poet find inspiration for his dramatic thinking” (Miller 136). The

comedy then evolved from satyr-plays under the influence of the quickly developing genre of tragedy. Then the “material, the context, and the genius came together” and in

“486 BC the first comedy was produced at the Great Dionysia” (Miller 136), a dramatic festival which was previously focused only on tragedy, and the great period of Ancient

Greek drama could begin.

Ancient Greece is a period that brought to the literary history many important writers and theorists, but not all of them were sufficiently challenging for the cause of development of female characters. However, among those playwrights whose plays survived at least through the Middle Ages, there was one important author, who was even by his contemporaries described as a sort of social critic – Euripides. He belongs together with Aeschylus and Sophocles among the greatest dramatists of the 5th century

BCE.

2.1.1. Women and their Social Position

To understand Euripides‟ criticisms on behalf of the social situation of Athenian women of his era – and thus to understand also his creation of female characters and their influence on future plays – it is important to outline the women‟s situation and hint several problems that occur in Euripides‟ plays. In the heroic societies of the world of

Homer women had greater freedom – they were subordinated to men, but they were in charge of their own work and were oftentimes consulted in important matters.1 But in the 5th century BCE the situation became different. The type of government switched from monarchy to democracy and so did the power switched from women to men. In former monarchy the ruling body was a family and women were important members of

1 The situation of women in Ancient Greek society is described in detail in Women on the Edge – Introduction, part “III. Women in Athens”.

the royal or other aristocratic families. Their position in the society was given by the position of the family, but they were not restricted to the oikos, yet. When the monarchy gave its way to democracy, it brought many changes for women. Marilyn Katz in her

“Ideology and ʻThe Status of Womenʻ in Ancient Greece”2 quotes Karl Julius

Beloch‟s theory from Griechische Geschichte that the Ionians (Athenians belonged to them) were influenced by their neighbours in Asia Minor – they excluded women from the public sphere, the polis, and confined them to the private sphere, the oikos. Beloch claims that among non-Ionian Greeks this practice was not customary. By the fifth century the seclusion of women resulted in the popularity of hetairas – female companions (Katz 73). These women were courtesans – they were educated and men in their presence looked not only for sexual pleasure but also for “intellectual stimulation which they had sought at home in vain” (Katz 73). This social paradox is similar, or rather the same, as in the Early Modern Europe – women are not allowed to be educated

– and one of the reasons is their incapability of learning and lesser intelligence3 – yet there exist courtesans, who are not only educated women, but are also sought after by men, who are unsatisfied by the simplicity of their wives. It is only their marginal position in the society – being prostitutes – that makes the patriarchal societies of both eras acquiesce their education and accomplishments.

This paradox is connected to the ideology of gender that was in use in (or since) the Classical Greece. According to this ideology different behaviours and characteristics were attributed to men and women. A part of this ideology was the Pythagorean “table

2 Katz, Marilyn. “Ideology and ʻThe Status of Womenʻ in Ancient Greece.” History and Theory 31.4 (1992): 70-97. 3 For the criticism and support of female education in Early Modern Italy and England see Benson, Pamela. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman. Pennsylvania: Penn. UP, 1992.

of opposites” into which the philosophers divided the universe.4 The female is associated with “the many, unlimited, left, dark, bad; the male is associated with the one, limit, right, light, good” (Women 50). While masculinity and femininity are binary opposites, they define each other and “cannot be understood apart from each other”

(Women 50). If a man could not act according to his gender, he was laughed at as feminine. If a woman did not act according to her gender, she committed a violation of the rule by behaving as a male. In the 5th century BCE starts the tradition of degrading weak men as feminine and describing active women as a violation of nature, which was still very much in use in the Early Modern Europe. Back in the Classical Greece fulfilling one‟s gender role meant basically being heroic in the battlefield, capable in polis, helping friends and harming enemies for a man; and managing the household and being obedient to her husband for a woman. The drama played an important part in problematizing the female-male dichotomy – because in Greek, Roman and Early

English drama female roles were played by male actors, it pointed out that gender is performative rather bound to the sexes – if a man can behave as a woman with all gender-attributed details, it means that this performance of a gender role is not given genetically and that women could as well perform the male gender roles. This aspect of the all-male dramatic performance was probably a problem as big as the assumed homosexual influence it had on its audience.

There was a particular difference in the gender role of a 5th century Greek woman from that of a woman from the Early Modern times – a woman could achieve kleos (fame or glory) only when she “is least talked about among men, either with blame or praise” (Women 51). Because of this rule there is not much known about the

4 Women on the Edge pg. 50. The authors deal with this topic in a part of the Introduction called “Athenian Women and the Ideology of Gender”.

life of Greek women who lived according to their gender role – if they were not seen or even talked about, it is like they never existed. Euripides‟ female characters often transgress this rule and become if not famous, than at least infamous (Medea). So far it seems that in the position of women in the patriarchal society only a little was changed by the Early Modern era (apart from the above mentioned rule of not being spoken about, which was not in use anymore, but influenced the history of women to a great extent because without being deprived of a voice there would be no reason in trying to gain one), but there was another change – in the Classical Greece the virtue that was demanded of women was sōphrosunē, which meant a whole range of virtues: “self- control, self-knowledge, deference, moderation, resistance to appetite, and chastity”

(Women 52). Yet at the beginning of the Early Modern times women supporters had to prove in their literary proclamations that women are even capable of these virtues.5

Since the beginning of patriarchy, women‟s sexual appetites represented the biggest fear of their husbands, because the wives were in charge of bearing heirs to the husbands‟ estates – and the shift from “demanding” self-knowledge and moderation to “not being sure if women are capable of” resisting their appetites shows that two thousand years of historical events, new discoveries, new religions and philosophies did not make it any easier for women.

The characterization of feminine as bad, incapable and passion-driven, and masculine as good, reasonable and self-controlled brought many distinctions in moral standards for both women and men. One of these distinctions is the attitude towards infidelity – women have to moderate themselves and be chaste, while men can seek various kinds of pleasures with the hetairas. This double standard is commented on in several Euripides‟ plays, the criticism is oftentimes proclaimed by a female character

5 Pamela Bennson

outraged by this double morality.6 Nevertheless, he never produces a correction of this attitude and behaviour towards women, as it will be commented on later in this chapter.

2.1.2 Women and Theatre

Even though women were restricted from appearing in the society – which was applicable only to the higher classes who owned slaves, because women from lower classes had to go out to the markets or on various errands – they were allowed to the performances. Because “live theatre was not an elite art form but enormously popular”

(Women 27) and it was “an extension of their world, not an escape from it” (Women

29), even children, slaves and foreigners were allowed to attend. But free men had to pay for entrance for their wives and slaves, who then had to sit in the back, and the capacity of the theatre was not sufficient for the whole Athenian population, so it was the social hierarchy that decided who would get to see the performance. Nevertheless, there were religious activities and festivals in which women played a central role – in rituals for Gaia, Hestia, Hera, Aphrodite, Athena and other female goddesses, women

“celebrated their powers of sexuality and fertility” (Women 54). Very important was the worship of Demeter, because men were excluded from these purely female rituals just as women were excluded from various male activities. One exception to the range of female goddesses that were worshipped by women is Dionysos, a male god in whose worship women played an important part. To his worshipping belonged also the annual open-air Theatre of Dionysos (mentioned above as the Great Dionysia), where the plays of the best known authors Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were performed (among others whose names and works are lost). This particular festival is very important

6 Euripides„ Medea is an example of an outraged woman criticising the position of women in the society, after she is left by her husband who married another woman for the good of Medea and their children (Medea 214-66).

because it is not possible to prove with certainty that women were not banned from theatre performances in public arenas, but they were certainly allowed to this festival, due to the above mentioned importance of women in the cult of Dionysos. The proof for their presence at at least some of the performances can be found in comedies written at the time – there are comments on the bad influence of tragedies on women.7

2.1.3 Women and Tragedy

Even though women were marginalized in real life, on the stage they oftentimes took the central position. Yet because all the action in the classical plays occurs outside of the house, the female characters transgress the Athenian gender protocol, which says that upper-class women should not appear in a public discussion.8 Michael Shaw in

“The Female Intruder: Women in Fifth-Century Drama” comments on this transgression

– the coming outside always “implies that something is wrong inside the house which is driving her outside” (256). The woman has to feel betrayed by the society or by the men who should protect her and thus needs to get out of the oikos and get the retribution she seeks. Euripides‟ Medea says: “Women of Corinth, I have come out of the house to forestall criticism. [...] This unexpected blow has crashed down on my head, destroyed my spirit. [...] I‟ve lost my joy in life. [...] For he on whom my all depended, my own husband, turned [...] the evilest of men” (Medea 214-229). This declamation is a beginning of Medea‟s monologue, in which she criticizes men and the society for downplaying dangers that threaten women at home. She ends this monologue with a threat: “Elsewhere womankind is full of fear, a coward both in self-defence and at the sight of steel; but when she meets injustice in the marriage-bed, no mind exists that is

7 Aristophanes„ comedies, mentioned in Women on the Edge, Introduction, pg. 62 and 80 – mentioned that in Frogs the character of Aeschylus accuses character of Euripides that he puts on stage “women who long for illicit sex”. 8 Women on the Edge, Introduction, part “Women and Athenian Tragedy”

more bloodthirsty” (Medea 263-6). She summarizes the whole situation – while women tend to be weak and do not fight for their rights, when they are betrayed by their husbands, who are their only connection with the public world, they have to leave their place in seclusion and become active – in Medea‟s case with no mercy. This entering the outer space and acting for themselves makes women masculine and in many cases turn the men feminine. Michael Shaw in his essay describes how this transition happens: “(1) a man, acting as pure male, does something which threatens the pure female; (2) the pure female comes out of the oikos and opposes the male; (3) there is an impasse; (4) the female, taking some male attributes, acts; (5) a previously invisible feminine aspect of the male is destroyed; (6) there is a new formation, with male and female no longer pure” (Shaw 265-6). He claims that a similar pattern appears in other

Attic literary works, e.g. Oresteia by Aeschylus, Antigone, Trachiniai and Ajax by

Sophocles, and Alcestis and Medea (on which he described this pattern) by Euripides.

He offers a theory why this pattern exists – “in each of these plays, the male represents certain qualities, and the female counters, protecting certain qualities” (Shaw 266).

These qualities are for example love, hatred or profit. According to Shaw‟s theory members of the society should be fully human, but as the society evolves, certain qualities disappear – “a man is taught to keep a hard eye on his interests and to be wary of appeals to his emotions” (Shaw 266). The artist then has to restore the balance “to insure that the necessities of power do not make its holders mere creatures of power”

(Shaw 266). And to this purpose he uses women, who live secluded in the oikos and different qualities are important for them. By showing the opposition between these qualities and those selected by the political life he finds the harmony. Shaw then uses an interesting example – the Funeral Oration of Pericles – which contains this balance of qualities and that is why there are no women mentioned in it – “the true Greek ideal,

harmony of male and female, is achieved. There is no need for the woman to intrude into this society, because it has not betrayed her” (Shaw 266). According to this theory, female characters are only a sort of a tool to remind men of the qualities of love, care and mercy which are missing in their everyday lives in polis.

Other theories described in Women On The Edge include Aristotelian argument that the significance of women and family appears in mythology, because the legendary stories are about a few aristocratic families; the tragedies happens among close family members, so the importance of women is based on the position of women from the heroic times and their depiction in the myths rather than on the fact that they were important in real life. Or, another theory claims that tragedies offer warnings what would happen, if women were not suppressed by men. In that case Greek drama

“contains no information about the experience of real women” (Women 61) and the plays and their performances were a part of “the project of suppressing real women and replacing them with masks of patriarchal production” (Women 61). Another approach focuses on the complexities of representation of the gender division – even though the gender roles are sharply distinguished in theory, in real life and in tragedies the boundaries are not that sharp – and suggests that the tragedy has tensions between various binary oppositions built in in order to provide “an ideal environment for exploring these same tensions within contemporary Athenian society and ideology”

(Women 61). This theory seems to be in accordance with Euripides being described as a social critic – even in Ancient times the criticisms by Aristophanes and Aristotle show that Euripides wrote differently from his contemporaries.

2.1.4 Euripides

Euripides belongs together with Aeschylus and Sophocles to the three ancient tragedians whose plays survived and who are still critically acclaimed. In Women on the

Edge the authors focus on the number of his plays and add various interesting details.

According to the entries in the dramatic competition of the festival Dionysia, he competed twenty-two times. The playwrights competed with a set of three tragedies and one satire play, which means that he wrote at least eighty-eight plays that he used while competing in this festival. But he won only “five first prizes, one of them posthumously, whereas Aeschylus won thirteen and Sophocles at least twenty” (Women 65). According to the authors this fact is showing that while the audience wanted to see his plays performed (for twenty-two years), they were “reluctant” to appoint him for a prize – this may be because of his modern approach and controversies that his plays aroused. From all his works only nineteen plays survived (even though it is rather a large number taking into consideration that from works by Aeschylus and Sophocles only seven by each survived).9 Some of his plays – Ion, Helen, Iphigenia among the Taurians and

Alcestis – include “abrupt combinations of tones and happy endings for the central characters” (Women 66) and that is why these plays are called tragicomedies or romances.10

One of the important sources on Euripides and his works is the criticism incorporated by his contemporary, Aristophanes, in his comedy, the Frogs.

Aristophanes mocked Euripides for focusing on everyday matters, instead of on patriotic themes and traditional piety of Aeschylus (who was also mocked in the Frogs).

9 Women 66 10 This will be important later in discussing the importace of Greek influence of Early Modern writers from Italy and England.

Euripides is in this comedy also satirically linked with Socrates and other unconventional modern thinkers. His mock-character in the Frogs also claims that he made the drama democratic “by giving voice to women and slaves” (Women 68). These comments together with the actual texts of his plays are the reasons for calling

Euripides a social critic – he was focusing on the everyday lives from the point of view of marginalised social groups.

Aristotle, a century later, criticizes in his Poetics Euripides “more than any other playwright” (Women 69). He blames him for character inconsistency of some of his characters (Iphigenia in Iphigenia at Aulis), for “surprising and artificial plot twists”

(deus-ex-machina ending of Medea), for creating characters that are not “between the extremes of good and evil” (Menelaos in Orestes is “excessively immoral”), for portraying people as they are (instead of as they “ought to be” as Sophocles did), and for “inappropriate” putting of “intellectual speech in the mouth of a female character, since women should not be portrayed as too clever or courageous” (Women 69). The last criticism is interesting taking into consideration that Aristotle was such an influence in the Early Modern era – existence of both the play (Medea was translated into Latin in

1544 by George Buchanan11) and Aristotle‟s criticism of “too clever or courageous” female characters probably did not go unnoticed, especially when Aristotle after all these criticisms calls Euripides “the most tragic of the poets”.

Euripides‟ plays are different from works of his contemporaries – and important fact for this thesis – in several aspects: his characters are “depicted in close-up, examined carefully (often by the characters themselves), and made comprehensible in terms of their personal histories” (Women 75); they also “confront the mythic,

11 The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, pg. 364

sometimes fantastical, events of legend, and try to understand and respond to them in a down-to-earth way” (Ibid.). These aspects make his characters more believable, they add explanations to their behaviours. Euripides also re-examines various values, mainly masculine heroism, the norms of which are represented not only in male characters, but in women as well: “Heroism may consist of sacrificing oneself, like Alcestis; keeping one‟s cool and thinking quickly, like Helen; understanding the dreadful consequences of action and acting nonetheless, like Medea; or facing and accepting an absurd situation, like Iphigenia” (Women 75). Another important aspect of his characters is inconsistency between character and social status – slaves, women or aristocrats – suggesting that this status is not natural but “imposed by custom or chance”. He destabilizes social hierarchy for example by showing aristocrats in rags (Menelaos in Helen) or by letting slaves and women speak with noble eloquence. Euripides also has a distinguished attitude towards religion and gods (as seen in the above mention explanation of supernatural events in a down-to-earth way). While “tragedies by Aeschylus and

Sophocles raise basic, unanswerable questions about the nature of the gods and their relations with human beings, [...] Euripides accentuates tensions of Greek polytheism”

(Women 76). His views, as expressed in the Frogs, resemble those of Sophists.

Yet what is most interesting about Euripides‟ difference from his contemporaries is his focus on women. Out of nineteen preserved plays, thirteen have a female protagonist.12 The female characters are represented as “speaking from the women‟s point of view” and even thematically the plays deal with women‟s lives and their position in the society, their relationships with men. Among the problematic topics belong “women‟s social status as inferior to males, their use as objects traded between

12 Women on the Edge, Introduction, part “Women in Euripides,” pg.:80-3. All the information used in this paragraph comes from this particular part of the Introduction

males, the restrictions on their sexuality and social interactions and on their freedom to speak their minds, the social and sexual double standard, their lack of control over their children‟s destinies” (Women 81). Yet even though these plays look like they are a sort of feminist writings, it is not so – the women depicted by Euripides can be “violent, foolish, unjust. They can use rhetoric and deception to manipulate others and themselves. They can cause as much havoc and damage as male protagonists. What they cannot be is disregarded or eliminated” (Women 82). While this quote denies Euripides a position of a feminist writer, it does not mean that he was not important for the development of female dramatic characters – even if they are “violent, foolish, unjust,” as long as their wrong doings are showing a sort of mastery (planning, scheming, eloquent arguing for their cause) and have a certain psychological depth, they are fully developed and are attributed certain capabilities that the real women do not dare to strive for – they are seen and heard.

Nevertheless, Euripides only criticizes, he provides only a “rebuke of

(presumably) prevailing social attitudes that stops well short of recommending corrective action” (Gregory 160). Justina Gregory in “Euripides as Social Critic” argues that while he “goes out of his way to question received ideas, he is far less interested in emending the actual position of these marginalized members of society” (161). At this point it is interesting to get back to the fact that Euripides was connected to the modern philosophers, among others especially Socrates13. Socrates‟ method of finding the truth is founded on the basis of asking questions, not telling “the truth” or what is right, but letting the people find the truth inside them by trying to find the answer. By asking questions he queried the universal truths and public opinions his opponent believed in.

13 Socrates‟ philosophy is available in many encyclopaedias of philosophy, for example in Nails, Debra. “Socrates.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 26 Dec. 2009. Web. 20 Mar 2012.

So in light of this philosophy, Euripides‟ stating of problematic social issues and leaving the important questions unanswered does not necessarily mean his lack of interest in finding the solutions and starting changes in the society. On the contrary, it may mean that he was leaving his audience to find the solution, let what they saw and heard sink deep in their thoughts and come up with the answer. He could – just like the

Early Modern authors, who in the light of humanist thinking thought that they needed to teach people, to tell them how they should live correctly – simply write in accordance with the popular philosophical movement of his times.

2.1.5 Euripides in Early Modern England

Plays by Euripides were not only present in Early Modern England, they were also critically acclaimed. By that time Euripides was not only a “modern” author with strange attitudes towards marginalized members of society and with a difficult approach towards religion. He became, together with Aeschylus and Sophocles, a classical author.

His plays were studied already in Aristotle‟s time and by those two thousand years he became a member of the literary hall of fame. In the Early Modern times he was accessible and liked not only for “the angle at which Euripides stands to the orthodoxies of his own world” (Oxford14 363), but also because “the plays subject to the sharpest analysis the power of all forms of language to charm and persuade and transform the relations of strength and weakness” (Oxford 364). Euripides‟ works existed at first only in fragmentary translations – the formal disintegration of his plays “encouraged translators to pick and choose” (Ibid.). Many translations were of particular lyrics or

14 The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation by Peter France

passages, standing free or embedded into another text. Examples of this approach are

Roger Ascham, who embedded in his Toxophilus several lines from Euripides‟

Heracles; Charles Gildon, who later translated an argument scene between Agamemnon and Menelaus from Iphigenia in Aulis to provide a proof that this play was influential for Shakespeare‟s Julius Caesar‟s quarrel scene between Brutus and Caesar. The most important from these selective translators was Erasmus. In 1506 he published Latin translations of whole plays Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulis, but in his Adages he collected those “little nuggets of wisdom” (Oxford 364) from many classical authors.

Adages were published in many editions from 1505 to 1540 and were even later reprinted and translated. In his collection he included “exemplary utterances” from

Euripides‟ plays, such as a female character like Iphigenia, facing her death, saying

“Farewell dear light” (Oxford 364).

The only translations of classical Greek plays into English that survived from

16th century are two plays by Euripides. The first is a private translation in prose of

Iphigenia in Aulis by Lady Jane Lumley written about 1550. The other is Jocasta, a play performed at Gray‟s Inn in 1566, introduced by George Gascoigne and Francis

Kinwelmersh – it was an indirect translation of The Phoenician Women via an Italian adapted version by Dolce. Both these translations were not successful, so the plays were known rather from the Latin translations. From those are important those by Erasmus and translations by George Buchanan – he translated Medea in 1544 and his Alcestis was even performed in front of the Queen in 1560s15 (Oxford 364). He also wrote his own play, Jepthes, based on Iphigenia in Aulis.

15 This information, as well as other specific dates and names from this subchapter are quoted from The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation – it provides viable and interesting information about translations from various languages into English, from the earliest experiments to 20th century.

Louise Schleiner in “Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare‟s Hamlet” argues that William Shakespeare had access to plays by Euripides through Ben Jonson‟s library

– he “did own a two-volume 1581 Latin Euripides” and he also “owned the Greek

Scholia in septem Euripidis Tragoedias (Venice, 1534), including the commentary on

Orestes” (Schleiner 32). Jonson, who “took great pride in his learning and was consulted on scholarly matters” (Schleiner 33), was also able to read Greek (the author is suggesting that on the basis that he owned not only double column Greek-Latin books, but also books written in Greek with no translation). Schleiner also points out that even if Shakespeare perhaps did not read a whole play by Euripides in Latin, some of “the busier Latinist adapters among his fellow playwrights” (Ibid.) such as Jonson,

Marston, Chapman or Dekker probably did and through them the plays (Orestes in this particular study) gained his attention. In her study she is trying to prove that Hamlet is influenced by Euripides‟ Orestes mainly by drawing on some character similarities –

Hamlet and Orestes; Horatio and Pylades; Laertes as Ophelia‟s loving brother and

Orestes and his sister Electra. She also adds interesting details about the plot of Hamlet that cannot be derived from any other source on the topic but from the original Greek play. Although this discussion in particular is not very important for this thesis, it proves that there were means through which the plays of Euripides found their way to

Shakespeare – and if he was influenced when writing Hamlet, he might as well been influenced when creating one of his famous female characters.

2.2 Roman influence

From the rich literary history of the Roman Empire only three representatives were chosen for the purpose of this thesis: Virgil, Ovid and Seneca. Not only were their works accessible in the Early Modern times (both in Italy and England), but they were also important sources for the Early Modern drama and played a significant role in the evolution of female characters. The most influential were: Virgil‟s Dido from the

Aeneid; Ovid‟s mythical female characters from his Metamorphoses, his heroines in love from the Heroides and his love instructions from the Ars Amatoria – The Art of

Love; Seneca‟s dramatic characters were different from those by Euripides, even though they were often the same mythological heroines (as will be demonstrated later in this chapter when comparing the Greek and the Latin Medea), yet his plays were a great influence for the 16th century female dramatis personae.

2.2.1 Virgil

Virgil, the oldest from the three classical writers discussed in this subchapter, is famous mostly for his epic story, the Aeneid. It describes the journey of Aeneas, a

Trojan survivor, who is destined to travel to Italy and found Rome. A.J. Bell in “Virgil and the Drama” claims that the Aeneid seems to be written according to “rules belonging to the drama rather than to the epic” (458) and attributes this fact to the influential Poetics, in which Aristotle states that tragedy is superior to epic. Bell also refers to a theory of T.K. Glover, who argues that the story of Dido, the queen of

Carthage, is based more on Euripides‟ Phaedra and Medea than on Argonautica, a

Greek epic by Apollonius Rhodius. Bell adds to this his argument that Virgil was not only influenced by the Greek dramatic characters, but also by the “technical art” of the

Greek dramatists (458). To summarize these theories up, Virgil‟s epic poem seems to be rather a dramatic narrative based on Virgil‟s Greek literary predecessors.

In comparison with Homer, Virgil‟s male characters are “lacking individuality”

(Bell 462) and Aeneas becomes even “despicable” as a hero when he leaves Dido, because of his treatment of her – he lacks chivalry and any feelings for romance (Bell

463). The female characters, even though there are not many of them, are created in a much complex way and, as Bell states, “Virgil‟s fame in this respect will always depend on his creation of Dido and Camilla” (462). Dido is a leading character of the fourth book and Camilla of the eleventh. Camilla is a female warrior, who dies because she

“bluntly pursued in huntress fashion, and recklessly raged through all the ranks with a woman‟s passion for booty and for spoil”16 because she saw a Greek warrior in a wonderful armour and she wanted to take it – she did not see her death coming because she was blinded by greed. Michael Andrews claims this passage from the Aeneid to be a source for Shakespeare‟s Troilus and Cressida – when Cressida says “this fault in us I find: / The error of our eye directs our mind,” it is what Virgil thought of women.

Nevertheless, in Shakespeare‟s play it is Hector, who dies in a very similar situation as

Camilla – “what the archetypally patriarchal Virgil stigmatizes as a woman‟s passion becomes, in Shakespeare‟s play, yet another instance of an irrationality that is human, all too human” (Andrews 221).

If Virgil‟s “achievement” in creating a strong female character in Camilla‟s case

– besides the fact that she is a warrior, which brings in a rather literal meaning of

“strong” – is not really outstanding because of his patriarchal “stigmatization”, then the

16 Michael Andrews in “Virgil‟s Camilla and the Death of Hector” quotes this passage from the eleventh book of the Aeneid from Virgil, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harward UP, 1940).

creation of Dido, the queen of Carthage, is undoubtedly more successful. This accomplishment lies in Virgil‟s ability to create “within an epic of grand historical scope an intimate tragedy of a woman in love” (Gill 145). She appears for the first time in the first book of the Aeneid and her story ends in the fourth book, of which she is the main character. She falls in love with Aeneas, but because she swore to never love again after her husband was murdered, she is trying to stop the passionate feelings but is unsuccessful. One day when during a hunt they are interrupted by a storm, Dido and

Aeneas hide in the same cave and become intimate – Dido calls their relationship marriage to ease her feelings of guilt. When Aeneas is reminded by Mercury that he has to go on to Italy and fulfil his destiny, he decides to leave Dido. She is enraged, but he, made insensitive by the will of gods, tells her he never married her and has to leave.

Later in the night, Dido commits suicide. Her character goes through a whole range of moods – she is madly passionate, loving, suspicious, enraged and, at last, desperate.

The story was used in the 16th century by Christopher Marlowe in his play Dido,

Queen of Carthage. Even though he changed some aspects of the story, his Dido is at first “the bewildered woman and the suppliant queen” and later turns into “the triumphant conqueror who has, literally, taken Aeneas prisoner” becoming “resourceful and proud” (Gill 152). But before this side becomes dominant, “the woman in love reappears” and in the parting scene she is “near-hysterical” and “swiftly changing tactics” (Ibid.) to hold Aeneas back. Marlowe follows Virgil‟s pattern of making Dido a woman of emotions, moving on a wide scale of them, making the reader or the audience understand her decisions, while Aeneas is left unmoved, controlled by the gods.

Marlowe was not the only writer who was inspired by Virgil‟s work – as A.J.

Bell says, he “became afterwards the direct or indirect original of half the Renaissance epics of adoration and love” (462). But it is rather difficult to distinguish properly the

sources of later works, because Virgil was an important influence even on his contemporaries – among them, Ovid.

2.2.2 Ovid

Ovid, who lived between the times of Virgil and Seneca, is praised for many of his works – the Metamorphoses (a narrative poem consisting of fifteen books), Ars

Amatoria (a love elegy – basically instructions how to get and keep a lover) and

Heroides (poetic letters from heroines to their beloveds) are the three of his works that will be, to a different extent, commented upon later in this chapter.

In his Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), Ovid describes various ways how one should behave to make someone attracted to them. Especially interesting is his advice to women – they should take care of their body, they should recognize their weak points and hide them and, on the other hand, they should take advantage of their fortes. This method is applied even to a sexual intercourse – or rather the wooing part that precedes it. But he not only encourages the girls to hide the bad sides and show off the flattering aspects (or as would Ben Jonson in his play The Silent Woman say: to deceive men), he also “enjoins his feminine disciples not to neglect their minds, to add gifts of learning to attractiveness of person, to pursue the liberal arts and study Greek and Latin because as they grow older, the body will decay but these will endure” (Barish 219). In The Art of

Love it is quite vivid, as Alan Griffin fittingly points out, that “above all, Ovid actually liked women as a sex – something that cannot be taken for granted in the case of many other Latin poets” (Griffin 59).

Griffin praises Ovid especially for his Metamorphoses. He defines him, in comparison with Virgil, as a poet able to “select the significant moment in any story or episode and impress it vividly on his reader‟s imagination” (68). He supports this argument by an example from the story of Pygmalion – when he comes home and, unaware that Venus heard his prayers, starts caressing his statue and she, under his gentle touches, becomes alive. Griffin also compliments Ovid for his portrayal of

Byblis, for “nowhere in ancient literature is the psychology of a woman on the edge of sanity so well painted” (68) as in this story of a woman who falls in love with her twin brother, tries to resist her love as unnatural, but in the end is unable to fight against her passion. But Ovid is not praised only for picturing unnatural love; he was also able to – without comparison in the ancient literature, as Griffin states again – portray the love of a married couple and especially the wife‟s love for her husband in the story of Ceyx and

Alcyone – after he dies on a ship, she commits suicide by jumping into the sea, but the gods pity them and transform them both into halcyon birds.

His ability to portray various kinds of love is also proved in the Heroides – a set of letters from different heroines to their lovers, which was actually his first work. In these letters are hidden the stories of for example Phaedra and Hippolytus, Dido and

Aeneas, Medea and Jason, and Sapho and Phao. These letters contain “the whole spectrum of passion – love, scorn, tenderness, submission, regret, hate, lust. It reveals a special understanding of women and their moods. It shows the ability to analyse and present complex personalities and relationships” (Griffin 61).

Ovid shares with Euripides something of his reputation of a controversial writer

– he was sent to exile for the last decade of his life and there is a supposition that his exile was connected to his Ars Amatoria. Griffin argues that Ovid‟s punishment from

the emperor was harsh – he was a man of the city and his exile was a deserted place in

Romania – so that the offence must have been personal. There is a possible explanation

– the emperor‟s granddaughter, Julia, was sent to exile in the same year – for infidelity.

Many critics, Griffin among them, think that the emperor, known for his sort of

Victorian attitude towards morals, was displeased by this kind of literary works and thought that they inspire unchaste ideas.

Nevertheless, “the Elizabethan age, the Renaissance, and the Middle Ages had no doubts about Ovid‟s merits as a poet and storyteller” (Griffin 58). He even became a part of the school curriculum: “extensive reading and memorizing of the

Metamorphoses was almost universally required in sixteenth-century grammar schools”

(Bate 21). The influence of his work was according to literary critics so extensive that

Jonathan Bate wrote a whole book only on Shakespeare and Ovid. He claims that “all fifteen books of the Metamorphoses make themselves felt in [Shakespeare‟s] works in the form of mythological allusions and borrowings of phrase” (Bate 23). One particular influence of Ovid‟s work is based on the fact that he “dramatizes others, most notably victims of desire, many of them women” (Bate 5). These women (among them for example Medea) “are among the models for the soliloquizing that is the distinctive activity of Shakespeare‟s most admired characters; the Ovidian dramatic monologue and the Shakespearian soliloquy create the illusion that a fictional being has an interior life” (Bate 5).

On the other hand, his Ars Amatoria were still problematic even in the Early

Modern times – not only this work of Ovid was not a part of the curriculum, it became a reason for condemning Ovid as wanton – the sixteenth century was a period in which

“ways of reading Ovid underwent radical transformation, as a newly unapologetic delight in the poetic and erotic qualities of the Metamorphoses came to compete with

the predominant medieval practice of moralizing and even Christianizing them” (Bate

25). While reading Ars Amatoria as moral or Christian would be difficult, the

Metamorphoses reached this kind of misinterpretation during the Middle Ages, but “the allegorizing and moralizing of Ovid‟s often explicitly erotic tales was an interpretative device that enabled his poetry to retain currency and escape suppression in an age when all education and most art was dominated by the precepts of Christianity” (Bate 25). Yet his works did not “escape suppression” for good – in 1599 “the Archbishop of

Canterbury and the Bishop of London ordered a translation of Ovid‟s love poems to be publicly burned” (Griffin 57). Richard F. Hardin states four reasons for Ovid‟s fading popularity in the seventeenth century: there were changes in taste and interest in the post-Renaissance period that made the Metamorphoses less desirable as a “mythological handbook” or as a collection of love poems (mainly because there was an increase of literary works written in English, so he was no longer needed); Ovid as an author

“suffered by comparison” with newly discovered, especially Greek, literary works;

Classical literature became less influential on the modern writing; and mythology became “devalued” in the schools because of the Christian reaction to everything pagan.17

2.2.3 Seneca

Seneca is the youngest from these three Roman writers. He lived and wrote during the era of the emperor Nero, which was a dangerous time for a dramatist – Mario

Erasmo in Roman Tragedy: Theatre to Theatricality describes how the Roman

Emperors associated themselves with ancient heroes or kings – Tiberius associating

17 In Hardin, Richard. “Ovid in Seventeenth-Century England”. Comparative Literature 24.1 (1972): 44- 72.

himself with Atreus and Nero with Thyestes, in particular. During these times dramatists wrote many versions of this ancient story about twin brothers and for some of them their literary attempts ended fatally – Erasmo mentions a story of M. Aemilius

Scaurus, who wrote one of the versions of the story of Atreus and, while his story was

“probably no more critical of the emperor than other versions then in vogue” (Erasmo

112), he was accused by Macro, a Praetorian prefect, for criticising the emperor

Tiberius in certain passages of the play, and the emperor reacted also in a mythological allusion saying he would make him “an Ajax” which meant he would make him commit suicide – which probably happened because Scaurus died the same year of his play‟s performance. This anecdote is important to portray the era and how in those times the politics played a considerable part in the life of a dramatic author (as will be later important in the Elizabethan and Jacobean times).

Seneca was greatly influenced by Euripides, Virgil and Ovid. Elaine Fantham in

“Virgil‟s Dido and Seneca‟s Tragic Heroines” argues that it is Virgil‟s influence on

Ovid what blinds the critics of Seneca to the fact that he was influenced by the Virgil‟s original and not only by Ovid‟s representation of the same story in the Heroides and the

Metamorphoses. The subject of this influence is the above mentioned book four of the

Aeneid and the character of Dido in particular. According to Fantham, the arguments

“for expecting some reminiscence of Virgil‟s great queen” in Seneca‟s heroine,

Phaedra, and her tragic passion for her step-son, Hippolytus, are “the acknowledged supremacy of Virgil's reputation as a poet in Seneca's generation, and Seneca's own fondness for quoting the Aeneid” (1). On the other hand, she sees Euripides‟ influence in a rather detailed analysis of various metaphors used by Seneca which resemble those used by Euripides in his Hippolytus, such as the simile of a rock in the sea for resistance to persuasion (Fantham 3).

To elaborate more on the influence of Euripides or on the differences between the two authors, it is useful to pay closer attention to the texts – the Medea written by

Euripides and the Medea by Seneca are good examples for the analysis because they deal with the same storyline. The first difference that is easily perceived from the beginning is the Chorus – in Euripides the Chorus is represented by Corinthian women who side with Medea and understand her anger; in Seneca the Chorus is represented by

Corinthians (probably both sexes, it is not further developed) and they side with Jason and his new wife, their princess. The other differences or similarities are connected to the characters and their behaviour. Euripides‟s Jason is a despicable character – as it was stated in the part about Euripides, Jason betrayed his wife Medea and that is why she needs to step out of the oikos, to get her revenge. So far it is the same even in

Seneca‟s case, but the two Jasons differ in character to a great extent. Euripides‟s Jason left his wife to become a part of the Corinthian royal family. He argues that he wanted the best for his children. But when he comes to see Medea after his marriage to the princess, he offers her money and his influence to help her and their children to find a good place to live – they are exiled because Medea is a threat to the royal family. This scene is accompanied by another dialogue between Jason and Medea, when she persuades him that she is not angry anymore and wants the children to stay with him because exile is not fit for them. Jason promises he will try to persuade his new wife, but all in all he does not seem as a loving father who betrayed his wife so that his children would live a better life. He seems unmoved by the fact he will lose them all and rather angry that she did not follow his plan and threatened the royal family.

Seneca‟s Jason, on the other hand, seems sorry for the things turning out this way.

There is a hint that he might have been forced by the king, who picked him to marry his daughter. He wants his sons to stay with him because, as much as he would like to give

them to her, he is a father and he simply cannot do that. He also seems more helpless –

Medea begs him for a safe place to go but he does not know about any place where she would be welcomed – there is a stark comparison with the “older” Jason, who offers her

“to give with an unstinting hand, and introduce you to my foreign friends, who‟ll treat you well” (612-14). Seneca‟s Jason does not have any friends and has reached an impasse – he cannot leave with her and he cannot help her. Euripides‟ Jason can help her but his attitude is too outrageous for Medea to accept anything and instead, she plans to murder him and his new bride.

Another contrasting pair of characters is the two kings. But this example works the opposite way – mainly to support the above mentioned characters of Jasons.

Euripides‟ king Creon wants Medea to leave his country – this is a result of Jason‟s insufficient pleading: “I kept on trying to dispel the anger in King Creon‟s raging heart;

I wanted you to stay” (455-6). Nevertheless, the king still wants her to leave. He is afraid that she would harm his family and only promises her a day to set all her things in order. Seneca‟s Creon is a different person. He wanted to “rid” him “of this outrageous pest by the sword‟s means” (179-80) but in this case Jason was persuasive enough: “the prayers of my daughter‟s husband prevailed. I have granted her life” (183-4). Euripides‟

Jason is facing a milder version of Creon, yet he is not successful in helping her, while

Seneca‟s Jason has to deal with a fiercer Creon and is able to change her sentence from death to exile.

The most different – and yet the most same – characters are the Medeas.

Euripides‟ Medea is, together with the Chorus, angry not only for her case but she is fighting for the whole womankind saying: “Of all those beings capable of life and thought, we women are most miserable of living things” (230-1). She is outraged that

her husband left her without consulting it with her (if she is to believe that he did it for her good) and she does not want to see him again. She wants to kill their children because it would ruin him – but not because of his love for them, rather for the social aspect of ruining his “house” – but she is also afraid that if she leaves them, they will be killed by the Corinthians: “There‟s no way this can be – that I should leave my sons alive to suffer outrage from my enemies. In any case it‟s necessary that they die; and since they must, I‟ll kill them – I who gave them life” (1060-4). In this case she sounds more like a father, who being afraid his enemies will get to his family, kills them with his own hand. This moment is not the only one in which Euripides‟ Medea acts as a man. In her brilliant “dialogue” with herself, before she kills her sons, she is divided into a feminine and a masculine part – the feminine part, a mother, wants to save her sons, talks about how she will not be able to see them growing up and getting married, but then she switches to a masculine part, the avenger, who dreads nothing more than being “his” enemies‟ laughing stock and talks about the great ancestor, the god of Sun, and about the famous royal family from Colchis. The masculine part wins and together with the children symbolically kills also Jason‟s wife.

Seneca‟s Medea is different. She is angry only because of what happened to her.

She gets no support from the Chorus, which erases the social-criticism part of the older version. She wants Jason to leave with her – they came together, they should leave together – but he knows of no place to go, so he is not willing. She often seems to be angry more at the Corinthian royal family, blaming them for her misfortune, than at her husband – which is working because this Jason is the helpless but still caring one. She decides to kill the sons only to hurt Jason – when he during their dialogue talks about being their father, she realizes what will be her next move: “thus does he love his sons?

„Tis well! I have him! The place to wound him is laid bare” (549). But even though her

story evolves in the same course, Seneca depicted her differently in one special aspect of her character – when Euripides‟ Medea plans to destroy Creon and his daughter, she only talks about using poison because she will have time to escape, while if she went to kill them in their sleep with a sword, she would be captured. But Seneca added the aspect of mythological witch; he highlighted her pagan origins in this description of her preparations: “she seizes death-dealing herbs, squeezes out serpent‟s venom, and with these mingles unclean birds, the heart of a boding owl, and a hoarse screech – owl‟s vitals cut out alive” (731-4). Also in her “dialogue” before killing her sons (which was preserved from the older version) she is different – the two parts arguing are an avenging wife and a sorrowful mother – both parts are female, so when the avenger wins, the deed is still done by a woman. And this woman is even worse than Euripides‟ masculine Medea – while the older version takes the dead bodies with her and does not want to give them to Jason, whom she hates beyond measures, this Medea not only kills one son downstairs and then drags the other still alive with her on the roof, where she kills him, too, she also throws the dead bodies from the roof on her husband, who wants to bury them. For a woman such a handling of the dead bodies of her children is profane in comparison with Euripides‟ Medea who hugs them tightly.

To summarize these two plays and their comparisons up, Euripides created a woman who felt betrayed and helpless within her social position, just as all the women of her times. Her husband is clearly aiming at better profit and his first wife is not profitable anymore. She is so outraged by his behaviour that she needs to punish him and his new family – even if this Creon is the milder one, he still does not want to help her as a betrayed woman and forces her to leave the country even though he knows she does not have a place to go and that she is the one who is hurt – he represents the society that does not care. When she kills her children, she becomes masculine – the

only way, how a woman can achieve a sort of justice in the society is by becoming a man and avenging herself.

Seneca, on the other hand, presents more intimate tragedy that is focused only on one family, on one woman. This woman is a witch capable of killing her children to see her husband in pain. She has no respect for the dead bodies of her children. Her husband seems to be a better character, even though he betrayed her and started thus the whole tragedy. Seneca‟s version does not make his female character even half worthy of sympathy in comparison with the Greek version, yet he still lets her leave unpunished after she avenged herself. Medea became in later centuries a model of a terrifying woman and a horrible mother, but in both plays her action is justified not only by her personal misfortune, but as well by her position in the society – even though the crime of Jason does not seem as awful as those of Medea, he betrayed people who had only him to support them and provide for them – women and children were marginalized groups in the societies of Ancient Greek, Rome and of Early Modern Europe as well.

In the seventeenth-century England, Latin plays were staged at schools. Seneca‟s

Phaedra was performed in 1546 at Westminster School. William Gager of Christ

Church, Oxford, was “the most enterprising practitioner of Latin plays”18 produced in

1591 this play by Seneca with several added scenes under the name Hippolytus. He used this play, in which he tried to “reinforce the portrayal of Hippolytus‟ purity”, in his

1591-2 vindication of the Classical plays as suitable for school performances. Gorboduc or The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville was

“the first play in the Senecan tradition in English” (Coffey 35). It was performed by gentlemen of the Inner Temple in 1561. Jasper Heywood translated Troades in 1559,

18 from Introduction to Phaedra by Michael Coffey ad Roland Mayer, pg. 34

the Thyestes in 1560, Hercules Furens in 1561 and John Studley translated

Agamemnon, Medea and Hercules Oetaeus in 1566 and Hippolytus a year later. The plays were printed separately and in 1581 Thomas Newton collected them together with other Seneca‟s plays into one publication.

3. Italian Influences

The Early Modern Italy was the centre of new thoughts stemming from the rebirth of classical knowledge in the framework of the medieval culture. The studies of classics turned scholars and artists from the religious world to the secular – the

Renaissance humanism brought, above all, the interest in individuality and in everything human. The shifts and changes caused by the new way of thinking and by turning the attention back to the ancient times were not only on the theoretical level – while

“humanism, in stressing the classics, made way for a new emphasis on the individual, on the dignity of man, and on human possibilities in general,” the urban societies “with their new social mobility, provided a practical counterpart to these theories, and arena in which they could be tested” (Gundersheimer 11). While in other parts of Europe the societies were still rather rigidly divided according to the medieval tradition, “the cities of Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were surely the most exciting cities in Western cultural history” (Gundersheimer 11-12). The modern urban societies of

Italy “left priceless heritage of achievements in the arts, literature, classical scholarship, archaeology, and historical and political thought, as well as impressive contributions in philosophy, economic theory and practice, and education” (Gundersheimer 12). The importance of Italian influences on England and the Early Modern English drama – and its female characters in particular – is undeniable because Italy was the first Early

Modern country to think about human possibilities – and not only those of men, but also about the possibilities of women.

3.1 Defences of Women

Italy, as the cradle of Renaissance and humanism and of the interest in human that evolved from that, is also the country where appeared the first literary attempts to defend women – to challenge “the central orthodoxy” that “woman‟s capacity for the cardinal virtues is partial, if it exists at all” (Benson 4). According to Pamela Benson, there were mainly two ways of defending women – seeing them as extraordinary or as exemplary. The first model sees women as being capable “in just the same ways men are because they are endowed with the cardinal virtues as men are and because they suffer no special disabilities because of their reproductive function” (Benson 4). Virtue is still only masculine, as well as the women “endowed” with it. But these women are not seen as violating the rules of nature (in comparison with Greek women who, as

“intruders”, acted against their gender roles when they left the oikos, but their

“masculine” behaviour was unnatural). This model praises women for actually not being feminine. Nevertheless, the capacity of being endowed with cardinal virtues was

“essential for good political action” (Benson 5), which means that women had right to enter the political life – “given the education and opportunity, women can play all the roles men can with equal skill, wisdom, and virtue” (Ibid.) Benson thus calls this group of women “independent” because they are not dependent on men for governance, both moral and political. The second model “transforms qualities traditionally considered liabilities into assets” (Benson 4). Women have specific female virtues and “they can be strong in a feminine way because of their reproductive function” (Ibid.). According to this model both sexes are capable of virtue, but they have to express exactly those appropriate to their gender. In this a masculine woman is violating the rules of nature.

But, there is a special explanation for this excess: “if this violation of nature is socially beneficial, it may be described as miraculous rather than as unnatural; the woman might

be described as temporarily containing a male soul within her female body” (Benson 5).

Except this supernatural explanation, this model usually sees feminine virtue as superior to masculine virtue and actually praises women for being female. Preferring feminine virtues (love and care) over the cardinal ones then could suggest that the political system should be redefined and should use the superior feminine virtues. But in the gender-divided society these feminine virtues were connected only to the private sphere

(taking care of the family) – the virtuous women would thus engage in the public sphere only during a crisis “when the boundary between the political and the domestic broke down and male spirit miraculously entered them” (Benson 5). Benson calls these women “interdependent” because they are capable of self-government but not of public- government.

But because of “the central orthodoxy”, writing to defend women, regardless of the chosen model, was problematic, even paradoxical: “because woman‟s inferiority to man was assumed, a text that proposed to defend her and praise her excellence or superiority was attempting to defend the indefensible and praise the unpraisable”

(Benson 3). And if the text was successful in doing that, it undermined the societal assumption – and many authors of these texts were not ready to do that. Because of this many of the texts do not only incorporate both above mentioned models, but also content defences of men. Women could not be equal to men, because “attributing the same kind of virtue to each sex did not necessarily mean attributing the same quantity of virtue to each” (Benson 5). This means that women are not equal and can remain excluded from the politics. And women could be in some feminine way superior to men, but they still cannot enter the politics, because “male political systems are necessary to govern the corrupt world and protect good women” (Benson 5).

Benson divides the authors of literary defences of women in three groups – the first group focused primarily and consistently on the first model, the “extraordinary” woman: the Italian humanist, Agostino Strozzi, and the English Catholic Henry

Howard; the second group focused on the “exemplary” woman: Bartolomeo Goggio, an

Italian humanist, and many English defenders of women; the third group provided

“mixed” defence: Castiglione‟s Cortegiano, Elyot‟s Defence, Orlando Furioso by

Ariosto and The Faerie Queene by Spencer. While most of them became marginal and forgotten, the works by Castiglione, Ariosto and Spencer were very popular. Benson states not only that The Faerie Queene is “deeply connected” to Orlando Furioso, but also that it is a “conspicuous refutation of Ariosto‟s handling of the woman problem”

(7). While Orlando Furioso focuses more on the first method – women being equal to men in their virtue – The Faerie Queene is dealing with the second one – feminine virtue being superior to the masculine.

Even though he was not mentioned above, Benson claims that the founder of

“Renaissance profeminism” is Boccaccio with his De mulieribus claris. It is a book consisting of stories about famous women, except for saints and martyrs because their stories were remembered by historians – they were the only group of women with documented past and the non-existence of other literary evidence of other famous women was the reason that brought Boccaccio to write this book. He aimed the lessons of his stories at both sexes and made it clear that the book is also for the male readership

– “if male historians have ignored women, they must be made to read about them” so that he would be able to change the historical record, as he states as his “goal” (Benson

17). Nevertheless, he does not blame the male historians for not recording the women‟s history and in comparison with later women defenders, he does not think that the fact that many women were nameless, even though their deeds outlived them, was because

the male historians leaved them out on purpose – that “troubled by female fame, men conspire to exclude women from history” (Benson 15). The women he chose for his book were of all kinds and they were “mixed together” in the book: “conventionally heroic, chaste women like Penelope and Lucrece appear alongside ruling queens and

Amazons like Semiramis and Penthesalia and alongside wicked women like Medea and

Flora” (Benson 9). Their connection is “being renowned for whatever it is they have done” (Benson 9). This book is problematic because of its ambivalence – at one hand he sees women as strong and capable and seems to “suggest social remedies for the perceived weakness of women”, at the other he often describes these women and their behaviour as extraordinary and miraculous. These inconsistencies thus enable two readings of the text: “it may be dangerous and subversive of established social order” or

“it may be safe and supportive of existing gender roles” (Benson10).

3.2 Ludovico Ariosto

Ludovico Ariosto‟s Orlando Furioso is, as it was mentioned above, focusing on the equality of women and men and his work is more successful as a defence of women than Boccaccio‟s because it is not so inconsistent and because it brings several notions about social position of women that were never discussed before. Ariosto‟s defence of women is not constructed as a treatise on female morality or as a collection of stories about famous women, it is a romance epic. This choice of genre is unconventional because “epic would exclude ladies; romance and the custom of society would pair them only with knights and loves” (Benson 91). The important part of the epic story is the quest of Bradamante for Rugiero. She is a female warrior whose future is predicted and she has to save Rugiero – a valiant warrior, but oftentimes imprisoned – become his

wife and found the house of d‟Este. Their marriage “offers a model of male and female relations based on love and knowledge on both sides” (Benson 92). They provide a balancing counter-story to that of Orlando and his madness. Bradamante is allowed to be autonomous in a way that women in Orlando‟s story are not, “yet the representation of her as finally choosing to accept Ruggiero‟s dominion over her resolves the threat that her independence poses to the social and literary structure” (Ibid.). Ariosto included in Orlando Furioso many female characters – good and bad ones – to illustrate the humanist idea that women are equal to men in virtue and in vice. Bradamante then stands above all these other women being “an exemplar of the new woman of humanist thought” that is “autonomously chaste” and “willingly accept[ing] her husband‟s dominion over her” and at the same time being also “active and capable in her own right” (Benson 92).

Orlando‟s part of the epic plot stands as a criticism of misogyny. His madness is

“an exemplum of the tragic consequences of adherence to the old system of relations between the sexes” (Benson 93). Orlando is expecting that Angelica, whom he loves, will be bound to him because he did valiant deeds in her name – but she chooses another man as her husband. His “vision of her as a helpless lamb in his dream, and his ignorance of what she really is like, all make him vulnerable to the complete disintegration of his system of values” (Benson 94). His madness and misogyny are a result of his unfulfilled desire with a woman he thought he owned. Next to the

Orlando‟s story there are stories of Ariodante, Rodomante and Rinaldo – each of these stories “is set in the context of a discussion of woman‟s capacity for fidelity and the right of society to demand it of her” (Benson 94). In Rodomonte‟s story appears another strong female character, Isabella. She meets Rodomonte when she is accompanying the dead body of her beloved. When Rodomonte wants to rape her, she manages to save her

chastity by tricking him into killing her. She is interesting because her most important virtue is not her chastity, but her self-reliance. Women in romantic epic stories are usually – and in Orlando Furioso there are such characters as well – “helpless and passive; they rely on a passing knight to rescue them” (Benson 108). Isabella is heroic and relies on herself and is a “true martyr” because she chooses physical pain instead of spiritual violation.

The epic narrative contains also many stories about unfaithful wives – both guilty of infidelity and accused falsely – to demonstrate “the truth of the Pauline and humanist axiom that when the best woman is a part of a couple, her well-being is as much in her husband‟s keeping as his is in hers” (Benson 116-17). The wife has to be supported by her husband, otherwise her perfection and chastity is nothing against the power of slander – or in some cases against the power of seduction. Ariosto shows women as having “the potential to be very good and admirable, when supported by their society and trusted to be so” (Benson 118).

His support of “interdependence” of sexes rather than independence connects his

Bradamante to modern humanist thoughts and she thus “provides a precedent for the women of Ariosto‟s own day” (Benson 125). That Bradamante and Marfisa are female warriors is not unusual because “the lady knight was a standard figure of chivalric narrative before Ariosto” (Ibid.) But Ariosto‟s lady knights are the first “represented in a manner that led the reader to make generalizations about the role of women” (Benson

125). Their characters brought up difficult and important questions, such as: “Does a woman‟s anatomy determine how she is to be treated by society or do her abilities?

Does a woman‟s capacity to defend herself necessarily invalidate a marital hierarchy that places woman inferior to man?” (Benson 126). In the first edition of the poem from

1516 these issues are not dealt with in any particular effort, but in the second edition from 1532 the second issue is “extremely important” and the first is “handled openly and seriously” (Ibid.).

Ariosto also comments on the difficult position of women in historical records, but he went further than Boccaccio. In the encomium of women added in 1532, the

Narrator does not only defend women and celebrate them, he “attributes to women a desire for fame, and he advises them to break the dependent relationship that exists between themselves and male writers” (Benson 134). He admonishes them to write the stories of their own fame rather than let the male writers to record it how they wish.

This particular part of Orlando Furioso shows what kind of difference these profeminist writers could bring to the self-esteem of the female sex – the situation of women was not much better in Ariosto‟s time than in the Classical Greece, yet Greek women should stay unnamed, unnoticed, not credited even for their virtues, while Ariosto tells women of his age to take responsibility of their fame and record it themselves because men would otherwise still have control over them – “power lies in the written word” (Benson

135).

The last important topic of Orlando Furioso is concerning misogyny versus feminism in state government. The story of Marganorre, the misogynist tyrant, describes how Marganorre, who hates women supposedly because they were the reason of his sons‟ deaths, makes women live in a suburban ghetto where they live without clothes as animals, while their sons and husbands live in the city. The powerless women are saved by Bradamante and Marfisa, who depose the tyrant and put him “in the hands of the exiled women for torture and execution, and establish a matriarchy” (Benson

139). But both these types of government are shown as unnatural. Ariosto is again

claiming equality and interdependency of the sexes rather than superiority of one of them over the other.

At this point it is vital to discuss the relevance of a poet-patron relationship, as it is a power-balanced relationship between a woman and a man. In “Ariosto‟s Threshold

Patron: Isabella d‟Este in the Orlando Furioso” Lisa K. Regan describes the vulnerability of this relationship: the patron holds power over the poet in economical terms, while the poet holds power over the patron‟s image. Poets were, not only in Italy,

“operating in a courtly economy where winning patronage was often directly dedicated to powerful figures” (Regan 51). Women, on the other hand, “largely because their perpetually vulnerable social position, and the rigid expectations held for their behaviour” were put “in constant need of praise” (Regan 51). This situation makes women a searched-for group of patrons. And the road to economic stability oftentimes does not end with the female patron – “Ariosto may well have seen pleasing Isabella d‟Este not as a road to her patronage of him, but to better standing with her brothers

Alfonso and Ippolito” (Regan 65). Women of the North Italian courts were “notable for their literacy and for their appreciation for the writings of courtiers, which meant an expanded market for the attempts to ingratiate oneself” (Regan 65). These female patrons were in a difficult position not only because of this exploitation of their

“constant need of praise” to get to a better position with a male relative, but also because in these times women were particularly vulnerable to slander. Regan mentions that Isabella d‟Este faced rumours of her infidelity only because her unchaste lady-in- waiting was also called Isabella and the literary text did not make it obvious, which lady is being discussed. The poet-patron relationship provided certain anxieties also for the part of the poet and these anxieties had to be reduced by writing: “if the vulnerability of the noble lady, and the insecurity of her hold on her reputation, was directly related to

the insecurity of the courtiers beneath her, these insecurities were negotiated precisely through the act of writing” which served the poet to control his position at the court. If this reality of “the favour of powerful women” being “a competitive commodity, a commodity purchased through their concern with the public acclaim of their virtues” is taken from this region and applied to the English court, it explains the obvious reasons for the creation of Elizabeth‟s cult – so many poets and writers praising her in forms of

Cynthia or Gloriana in anticipation of a reward in form of reaching certain social status by flattering the queen. Taking into consideration that the queen was not a person to slander (otherwise the poet must have been a risk-taker or suicidal) it was inevitable that in this particular period the first proper female dramatic characters in vernacular would appear.

3.3 Tragicomedy and Pastoral

Concerning the drama, Italian Renaissance was influential in introducing two genres – the tragicomedy and the pastoral. While the pastoral drama as such was a new genre originating in Italy, the achievement of the Italian authors in case of the tragicomedy was not inventing this genre, but providing a critical background for it – engaging in a dispute concerning whether this controversial genre should be used, or not. The problem with tragicomedy is that even though it was largely popular because of the “predilection for happy endings”19 of the audiences, the authors felt ambivalent about this genre and it “lacked status” (Dewar-Watson 16). The main reason for this lack of status was the “absence of any recognized classic authority for the genre” (Ibid.)

19 Dewar-Watson, Sarah. “Aristotle and Tragicomedy”. Early Modern Tragicomedy. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007. The author quotes Aristotle‟s Poetics on pg. 16.

and, therefore, no background for theoretic analysis. In the era of Renaissance when there was “no more vital humanist activity than the translation of the classics with the aim of transmitting knowledge, making the wisdom of the past available in the vernacular” (Bate 5)20 tragicomedy was criticised as “distastefully native” (Dewar-

Watson 17). During the Middle Ages Aristotle‟s Poetics was lost and the traditionally supported description of tragedy and comedy was that by Donatus-Evanthius – he characterised the genres as “diametrically opposed to one another” basically in the same terms as Aristotle – tragedy concerns the lives of extraordinary people from history and its plot develops from the happy or at least calm start to the tumultuous and disastrous ending, while comedy is about common people and what starts unhappily turns to a positive ending. In 1508 “the Aldine editio princeps”, the Latin edition of newly rediscovered Poetics, entered the circulation, but it did not help to calm the waters of theoretical criticism: it “instead of establishing a new orthodoxy [...] promoted the diversification of different theoretical strands” (Dewar-Watson 19). While the popular

Senecan drama, which was more corresponding to the model of bad-ending tragedy, existed in print since the 15th century, the Greek tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides became known as late as at the beginning of the 16th century. When the Greek drama got into circulation, it was “something of a revelation to discover that the drama was more nuanced and complex than tradition had come to assume” (Dewar-Watson 20).

Euripides‟ plays, such as Helen, were generically complex, and even some plays by

Aeschylus and Sophocles were examples of tragedy with happy ending. At this point these plays were in contradiction with Aristotle‟s preference for unhappy endings. He discusses his theory of catharsis as the “teleological goal” of tragedy – the pleasure

20 Jonathan Bate quotes Juan Luis Vives, the Spanish scholar, who wrote, among other things, De institutione feminae christinae, a book about education of women, dedicated to Catherine of Aragon and her daughter, future queen Mary I.

arising from tragic events. This focus on pleasure was not consistent with the theory by

Donatus-Ecanthius and it later brought tragedy and tragicomedy closer together. One of the theoreticians, who claimed that tragedy and tragicomedy have something in common, is Cinthio – he claims that the Iliad is a tragedy “ending unhappily” and the

Odyssey is a tragedy “ending happily” – a tragicomedy – he was “at pains to demonstrate that tragicomedy was not a species of popular entertainment but a genre which could lay claim to its own place in high classical tradition” (Dewar-Watson 25).

Dewar-Watson claims that even though the Odyssey was not very popular during

English Renaissance because it existed only in Greek and the first English translation appeared in 1614-15, Cinthio, as “one of the most well-known Italian critics and writers outside Italy” (Dewar-Watson 23), was with his literary theory influential on

Shakespeare‟s Othello and Measure for Measure, his “most generically complex works”

(Dewar-Watson 23).

The pastoral drama has its origins in Jacopo Sannazaro‟s Arcadia, “a set of pastoral poems framed within a prose narrative” (Treherne 30) published in 1501.

Sannazaro is the first author who created Arcadia as a pastoral land, even though this invention is oftentimes inscribed to Virgil‟s Eclogues. But the origins of the dramatic pastoral come from Ferrara of the mid-16th century. Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio‟s Egle was performed in 1545 and was a very important part of the development of the dramatic pastoral – the characters are not shepherds but “it establishes the theme of a central female character who wishes to avoid the love of a male suitor in favour of the pleasures of hunting” (Treherne 30). This theme is also present in 1570‟s play by

Torquato Tasso, Aminta. In 1581 Giambattista Guarini wrote his Il pastor fido. This play has a more complex plot – it is “single and whole, coming close to a tragic ending in the fourth act, yet producing a comic ending by way of developments which are

necessary, yet surprising” (Treherne 31). Also the characters are from all social classes

– from noble lovers to an old poor man, but the pastoral setting creates a distance from reality and enables him to “represent comic as well as noble action [...] without worrying about compromising verisimilitude” (Treherne 33). The plot development from almost tragedy to happy ending provides “the idea that true happiness is precisely that which comes after suffering, and which is born out of virtue” and Arcadia becomes

“a place where not only are individual‟s desires reconciled with each other, but those sensual desires are themselves reconciled with moral authority” (Treherne 32). This shift from tragedy proper and the classical idea of pleasure from tragic events to the tragicomic happy ending after a catastrophe shows that the pastoral combined with tragicomedy is a modern drama flowing away from the classical predecessors – the happiness as a reward for suffering and mainly the moderating of one‟s sensuality is more corresponding to Christianity and humanism than to the Ancient believes and philosophies. But although he brought the modern and fashionable genre of pastoral into his mixture of tragic and comic, it was “controversial” and “lead to multiple criticisms by more conservative members of Guarini‟s audience, who rejected what they saw as the unsatisfactory hybridity of this new genre” (Treherne 34). One of the main criticisms was that tragedy and comedy are incompatible and cannot thus be incorporated in one plot – that means that the tragicomedy should have a double plot, one comic with “private individuals” and one tragic with “actions of illustrious persons”

(36) – but this would violate the Aristotelian virtue of unity. Guarini‟s defence of the pastoral tragicomedy, on the other hand, lies in suggesting that tragedy and comedy as such were “second-rate genres”: tragedy “showing the atrocity of chance, blood and death, which are horrible and inhuman things to see” and comedy “making us dissolve into laughter to such an extent that we sin against modesty and the decorum of a well-

mannered man” (Treherne 41). To the incompatibility of comedy and tragedy he says that it concerns only some elements – “terror cannot coexist with laughter” – and the solution and a point for tragicomedy is than that the creator must take from tragedy “the great characters, and not the action; the plot which is verisimilar, but not true; affects moved, but measured; pleasure; danger, not death” and from comedy “measured laughter, the modest pleasantries, the false knot; the happy reversal; and above all, the comic order” (Treherne 40). These moderated borrowings from the two genres have effects on the audience and “the value of the play, therefore, is not intrinsic to the work itself” (Ibid.) but lies in fulfilling the humanist teaching of moderation. Thus the influence of the pastoral on the development of female characters is in creating plots that focus on female protagonists and the use of tragicomedy‟s moderation helps creating more real characters – there are not only the tragic heroines capable of great sufferings or of great wrongdoings or comical laughable stock-characters, in tragicomedy the women are not eccentric and incredible, but believable.

3.4 Transporting Tragicomedy: Commedia dell’Arte

That both pastoral and tragicomedy influenced English dramatists is without doubts – but the ways of “transforming tragicomedy” from Italy to England are a subject to explore, as does Robert Henke in “Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia dell‟Arte”. In this essay Henke wants to prove that commedia dell‟arte was as important for this transportation as were the

Italian dramatists, Guarini and Tasso. He argues that Shakespeare was aware of the commedia dell‟arte and that there are many similarities in “dramaturgy, generic configuration, and theatrical systems” (Henke 43) between plots of the commedia and

of some of Shakespeare‟s plays. There were several ways how an English playwright could get in touch with modern genres from Italy: there were many Italians who lived in

London (e.g. John Florio); Englishmen travelled to Italy; fellow actors got to perform together with Italian actors – e.g. Will Kemp; and there were other playwrights who were aware of the modern genres and could provide information about them – e.g.

Thomas Nashe or Ben Jonson. Some of the English authors combined, according to

Italian practice, tragicomedy and pastoral, but more often they used only the tragicomedy. Influenced by the fame of Tasso and Guarini, many critics thought that they were the main source for English tragicomedies, but after examining the whole theatrical practice in Italy it was revealed that Tasso‟s and Guarini‟s plays were

“unrepresentative” of Italian theatre in general (Henke 45). Most pastoral tragicomedies performed by both professional actors and amateurs differ from Tasso and Guarini mainly by “embodying a fuller range of action than characterises Tasso‟s narratively based play, or lacking the heavy Sophoclean substructure and theoretical apparatus of

Guraini‟s pastoral” (Henke 43). Henke even states that the plays by commedia dell‟arte were closer to Shakespeare than to Tasso or Guarini. But what Shakespeare and commedia dell‟arte have in common with Guarini is that they understood his principle that “genres and their elements were pliant creative materials rather than essential forms” (Henke 47) – which means that combining various elements of different genres

(characters, mood, settings, effect on the audience) is valuable and not at all should be restricted. However, this generic complexity was typical also for classical authors (such as Euripides) and because of the development of Italian drama through translating and imitating the classical drama, it is often difficult to find out whether the origins of a play are classical or Italian – while “most of Shakespeare‟s comedies show the influence of

Italy and many of them are dependent, in part at least, on Italian novella and comedies”

(Kaufman 10), it is also “probable that a great many comedies believed to be dependent on Plautus or Terence are in reality either translations or imitations of Italian plays”

(Kaufman 10).

The Italian influence was not restricted only to larger units such as a whole genre – there is also one particular feature that was transported from Italy to England – intermedii, or, in England, dumb shows. It was a practice of the Italian court drama –

“inserting allegorical representations between the acts” (Cunliffe 5). The intermedii preceded the vernacular drama in Italy. They consisted of, for example, various Morris dances or mythological gods with nymphs or Muses. These dumb shows were added to all comedies and to some tragedies in Italy and they became so popular that many members of the audience – including such supporters of the arts as Isabella Gonzaga

(d‟Este), the patron of Ariosto – were going to see the plays only because of the intermedii. Later in the siteenth century there was even a criticism claiming that instead of the intermedii being written to fit the plays it was the other way around. The intermedii were also popular among foreigners who did not understand the language – because these shows were “dumb” they made impression on them as much as on the

Italian audience. Cunliffe in “The Influence of Italian on Early Elizabethan Drama” praises English playwrights who made the dumb shows even more interesting by

“confining” them “to tragedy, and connecting the allegory closely with the plot” – they gave them thus “greater usefulness and significance” (5).

Even in Italy were the dramatic troupes originally all-male, but in 1560s first actresses appeared and while “all-male theatre appears to have in fact privileged comedy and physical farce” the actresses “broadened the generic repertoire” (Henke

47). Vincenza Armani and “Flaminia” were two rival troupe-leaders from this period and they “brought the high literary registers, musical skills, and familiarity with

fashionable genres such as pastoral into the mix of the commedia dell‟arte” (Henke 47) and thus changed their performance for ever. Henke states that it was the women, as

Armani, who made pastoral “affectively” tragicomic (Henke 48) – they aimed at “a sweet smile rather than the raucous belly laugh of unadulterated comedy, the pathos elicited by false death rather than the terror aroused by the irrevocable death of tragedy, a register of melos and amorous sentiment poised halfway between the two generic extremes” (Henke 48). The fact the English writers were acknowledged with the existence of actresses is known from “Thomas Norton‟s 1574 denunciation of female performers” (Henke 44). It seems that the English playwrights and critics were interested rather in technical parts of the Italian theatre than in women‟s influence on the performance – but at the same time, if they were critical to the fact that women were performing on stage, it does not mean that they were critical to those assets the actresses brought to commedia dell‟arte or that they were aware of them at all – so the actresses influenced the English drama by bringing the female elements (sentiment) to the male theatre of mainly “comedy and physical farce”.

4. The Early Modern England

The Renaissance with all its novelties appeared in England about a hundred years later than in Italy, where it originated, so the Italian influence was as powerful for the emergence of the Early Modern English drama as the revival of the classics. But what was even more important than any foreign influences was the English political scene. England was different from Italy mainly because it was a centralised monarchy and the sovereign played a significant role in the development of the country. So with the Reformation and creation of the Church of England, the humanist emphasis on the individual and the secular world became useful. The literary achievements of the best

English authors were connected to the decisions of the sovereign (Elizabeth I or James

I) – if not directly by trying to gain power, grace or forgiveness by flattering the ruler, then indirectly as a result of their politics – by criticizing it in a form of satire or anticourt plays or by being restricted in the choice of topics (censorship).

4.1 Elizabethan Era

After King Henry VIII‟s death, the situation seemed to be resolved – his son,

Edward, was his successor. But Edward died after six years on the throne and so did

Mary, Henry‟s first daughter who reigned in England as Mary I together with her husband, Philip II of Spain.21 When Elizabeth became the queen, there were many things that had to be done and said to make her position secure and gain the love of her people. Instructed by her sister‟s unpopularity, her reign being a “grim example of female rule” (Allman 25), it was inevitable for Elizabeth to find another way of self- representation. She found it in androgyny. While androgyny is a “divinely transcendent

21The information about Elizabeth‟s succession and rule are from Allman, Eileen Jorge. Jacobean Revenge Tragedy and the Politics of Virtue. Delaware: U of Delaware P, 1999. Google Books Search. Web. 20 Mar. 2012.

state of being appropriate for sovereign majesty” (Ibid.), it is also a threat to patriarchy because it denies the essentialism of sex and gender. It is not known whether it was

Elizabeth‟s personal inclination or a philosophical posture, but androgyny was certainly a “political necessity” (Allman 25). She was able to become a partly masculine persona and take on all the rights that belonged to the head of a patriarchal state by “laying claim to the inherently masculine authority of the monarchy” (Allman 26). She even called herself Prince and later King. But, on the other hand, she was “ostentatiously female” – dressed in beautiful dresses, flirting with her courtiers and foreign ambassadors. But she went further in claiming her feminine side – she created the Cult of Elizabeth. It made her feminine side powerful, too. She positioned herself as the

Virgin Queen and “because virginity involved women voluntarily controlling their allegedly voracious sexual appetites, it was an area of female power granted them by and within patriarchal theory and often honoured them with the highest compliment”

(Allman 26). This highest compliment was in accordance with patriarchal thoughts about women since the Ancient Greek – the ability to rely on herself in terms of preserving her chastity or reputation “made a woman male” (Ibid.). The power she thus earned for her feminine side laid in the fact that as a virgin “she owed obedience only and directly to God and not to a man who, representing God, would stand between her and the governing of England” (Allman 26). This enabled her to escape the terrible example of her sister‟s reign. Through the Cult and the literary works connected to it, she put herself on the side of famous women from both biblical and classical stories.

She became the Dame Nature and presented herself “as exhibiting the best of Nature‟s gifts to women – beauty, strength, youth, fertility – maintaining her title to these attributes even after they had become obvious fictions” (Allman 27). She became, in her female form, “the authority of education, wit, cultivation, and political acumen” (Ibid.).

This practice enabled her to become fully androgynous – she did not have to deny her femininity to become only masculine in power, while she was female biologically. The best example of her powerful androgynous persona is her speech at Tilbury before the battle against the Spanish Armada in 1588. She appeared in front of her soldiers dressed

“as armed Pallas” and spoke to them as their queen with “the body but of a weak and feeble woman” and at the same time as a man who has “the heart and stomach of a king, and of a King of England, too” (Allman 27). At first she confirms that she is a weak woman unsuitable for battlefield but then adds that she is a king courageous enough to lead them. If she was really dressed as Pallas Athena, she combined male and female because “what she gave to her male heart and stomach, she dressed as a female god”

(Allman 28). Yet not only her appearance was influential, also her rhetoric had a desired effect – she asked the soldiers “as chivalrous men to come the defence of a helpless woman” and at the same time “challenged them to be as manly as their king” (Allman

28). Her strategy involved demeaning women as helpless, weak and feeble, but she could not afford to demean men – their position was problematic enough because they had to serve a woman. As soon as the day of her coronation she came with a solution for this problematic position of her male subjects – she pronounced herself a wife to the kingdom. Thus all her male subjects as parts of the kingdom became faithful husbands of this “still unravished bride” (Allman 28). This proclamation could mean, as many critics suggest, that the queen was already decided to stay this unravished bride and never marry. Certainly it was a possibility if she wanted to avoid what happened to

Mary I, while it would have been politically problematic for her to marry an

Englishman because he would inevitably be of a lower social rank than she and would become her superior via marriage; it was unthinkable to marry a Christian king or a foreign aristocrat because the religious situation in England was still unstable.

Nevertheless, it was not only this political construct what was important – it was also the “method of dissemination” – she positioned herself in “the centre of a national theatre” and invited others to “play” (Allman 28). The courtiers and aristocrats participated in her “self-creation” – they competed by writing courtly flatteries or by hiring a poet to do so, to get a better position at the court. Elizabeth was not a patron of any poet herself, but taking into consideration the earlier mentioned vulnerable relationship of the female patron and the poet, it was better to let the men of her country take the responsibility for anything similar to slander. And it probably flattered and amused her to see the noblemen striving for her appreciation.

While the literary works engaging in the Cult of Elizabeth were praising her on many levels, the defences of women in general were not as supportive as they were for example in Italy. The original English works “do not challenge the traditional valuation of women on the basis of their sexual purity; nor do they employ the rhetorical method of paradox; nor do they engage in a serious analysis of woman‟s social role as defined by classical authorities” (Benson 205). The reason for this unsupportive environment for women was the problematic political situation in England – because of the “rival claimants to the throne and of the Protestant notion that England was an elect nation, rule by a woman in England resulted in the theoretical restriction of fields for women rather than their expansion as one idealistically minded might have expected” (Benson

234). Pamela Benson‟s theory that “the independent woman was an enemy in practical political thought in England” (235) is supported by defence works by John Aylmer –

Harborowe for faithfull and trewe Subjects – and by Henry Howard – A Dutiful defense of the lawful regiment of women. While Howard‟s text was praising female autonomy and provided “evidence of the strategies used to contain or encourage the independent woman” (Benson 235), it was never printed and survived in only three manuscripts.

Aylmer‟s text, on the other hand, was defensive against female autonomy and its existence in many printed copies provided “physical evidence of the dominance of the extraordinary-woman theory” (Benson 235). Howard was supporting the “exemplary woman” method, while Aylmer was rooting for the “extraordinary woman” – when

Mary I‟s succession was endangered by Jane Grey‟s claim to the throne and Elizabeth was facing the Babington plot planning to replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots, it is understandable that defending Elizabeth‟s reign in terms of the “exemplary” method – every woman is capable of the same if she is given the same opportunities – was not desired. The most popular defence of women, Spencer‟s The Faerie Queene, was a mixture of the two methods – while he “defines the feminine and its role in positive terms” and “establishes chastity as the basis of its power and woman‟s capacity for procreation as its most material manifestation” (Benson 251), he “is not committed to feminine dominance or partnership; he merely brings to the foreground something that is usually held back” (Benson 252) and he “makes no protest against the repression of women, no attempt to rally their forces to a renaissance” (Benson 284). So he praises the feminine virtue, which is a tool of the “exemplary” method, while he praises

Elizabeth as the “glorious exception to the decline caused by masculine government of time and of literary production” (Benson 282), which is according to the

“extraordinary” method. As it was said, it was typical for Elizabeth‟s reign that women were not praised for their abilities and she was the sole exception – Spencer‟s popularity is only a proof of this reality, because what was not working to support Elizabeth was eliminated.

4.1.1 The History of English Drama

Drama in England evolved, as in other countries, from different sources – religious practices, folk celebrations, other literary genres, also from dramatic traditions of other nations, ancient or contemporary, or from current political situation and propagandistic needs. N.P. Miller in his “The Origins of Greek Drama” compares the history of English drama with the history of Greek drama because the former is better documented and has less ambiguous origins than the latter. The history of English drama starts with the elaborate medieval church liturgy, whether it was “an attempt to present that liturgy more vividly to a simple congregation, or a more elaborate form of offering by the officiating clergy” (Miller 132). The Antiphons, a responsorial Christian ritual, were enriched with added melodies and by the ninth century “words fitted to these provided a form of dialogue” (Miller 133). By the second half of the tenth century it “became elaborated into a dramatic scene” – the dialogue of the ninth-century Easter

Day trope “quem quaeritis” now did not take place “between the two halves of the choir, but between one brother acting the angel and three representing the women at the sepulchre” (Miller 133). This scene was acted, not just sung, and it included personal imitation - it was “in fact the first English drama” (Ibid.). It is interesting that back at the beginnings of the genre men – monks, actually – played women without triggering the criticism of inducing immoral thoughts that appeared later in the Early Modern era.

Various episodes were later added to this scene, both from the Bible and from ordinary life, and “by the thirteenth century the quem queritis had become a regular play” (Miller

133). The liturgy for other festivals was treated similarly – “plays about the Christmas story, and episodes from the lives of various saints, became common” (Ibid.) The plays became more elaborate and the church choir was not spacious enough so the performances were moved to the nave and later outside the church – and the clergy

handed the performance over to the guilds. It was a natural course because in those times the towns and especially town guilds were gaining more importance in the medieval society. It was a huge step in the genre development because the guild members added to the performances “the use of the vernacular, realism, the influence of already existing folk ceremonies, and an admixture of comedy” (Miller 133). From this mixture of religious and secular were created such plays as the Secunda Pastorum, The

Second Shepherd’s Play, from the Wakefield Cycle from the fifteenth century. From the fourteenth century alongside these miracle plays developed also the Moralities – they had “much the same connexion with the homily that the miracle play had with the liturgy” (Ibid.) These Moralities dealt, in accordance with the evolution of philosophical thoughts, with human behaviour – nevertheless, this evolution did not go as far as the

Humanist movement in the Renaissance, when the behaviour of men and women was treated in a less religious context, because the Moralities were still connected tightly to the Bible and the teachings of the Church. The characteristics of the morality are

“allegory and spectacle” and “the most famous example of it” is Everyman (Miller 133).

In the fifteenth century the classical drama was rediscovered (first the Latin drama and later also the Greek drama) and the first secular plays, Interludes, were “written for private performance, in great houses, schools, and universities” (Miller 134). The term

Interlude was at first applied to “dramatic composition generally, because these amusements were employed to fill up the intervals of grand entertainments” (Child 7)22 but later was used in a narrower sense to describe “short pieces, having simple plots, free from the abstractions of Moralities, and possessing the attractions of some incidents, lively dialogue, and individuality of character” (Child 7). One of these

22 Francis James Child wrote Introduction to the collection Four old plays: Three interludes: Thersytes, Jack Jugler and Heywood's Pardoner and frere: and Jocasta, a tragedy by Gascoigne and Kinwelmarhs. Michigan: UP, 1848.

Interludes, Jack Jugler, anonymous early dramatic piece written in vernacular in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, is based on a classical source – Amphitryon by

Plautus. But the source story is modified to fit the genre of Interludes: “all dignity is stripped from the characters, every ridiculous feature is much exaggerated and the language and incidents are ingeniously vulgarized to reduce every thing to the grotesque” (Child 11). There are no gods in the story and the characters are changed to fit the period – even “the amiable Alcmena becomes a very cursed shrew” (Child 11). It also does not have any plot; it is only a series of incidents, resembling future picaresque novels. One of the authors of these Interludes was also John Heywood – a witty writer popular during the reign of Henry VIII and even more celebrated later during the reign of Mary I. Among his works belong The Play of the Wether, or The Play of Love and

The Foure Ps. Although female characters appear in some of these Interludes, the total number of characters, both male and female, is usually very small – often only four actors are needed – and the characters resemble stock characters of the earlier

Moralities. Thus, even though these female characters belong among the first ones created in English, they did not enrich the development of female dramatic personae in any significant – or better said positive – way. During the first half of Elizabeth‟s reign the first real tragedies and comedies written in English appeared – not yet original works, but being written in the vernacular, they were still getting a step closer to the later Early Modern English drama. One of these plays was Jocasta by George

Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmarsh. This play was performed at Gray‟s Inn in 1566 and till 1879 it was supposed to be a modified translation of Euripides‟ Phoenissae, but then it turned out to be “except in the choruses, a literal rendering of Dolce” (Cunliffe

4). The actual translator was Ludovico Dolce, an Italian playwright, who modified the original play into his Giocasta. Nevertheless, Jocasta is after Norton‟s and Sackville‟s

first English tragedy called Gorboduc “the second blank-verse play, and, as far as is known, the first Greek play introduced on the English stage” (Child 30). Gascoigne was important also for the evolution of English comedy – he translated Ariosto‟s Gli

Suppositi as Supposes, which was performed and printed together with Jocasta, and as

John Dover Wilson says, “it was more than a transcript; it was englished in the true sense of that word, in sentiment as well as in phrase. Its chief importance lies in the fact that it is written in prose, and is therefore the first prose comedy [in English]” (Wilson

80). It was a comedy created purely for entertainment, which differentiated it from all the University plays that will be discussed later. Wilson claims that the influence of this play on later English comedies is underestimated, and, although this supposition is not certain, at least it is proved that Shakespeare used this play when writing The Taming of the Shrew. Nevertheless, the original play was Italian and written by the author of above mentioned epic defence of women, which makes this English play an important point in the history of female characters of the Early Modern English drama. Another author who contributed to the development of female dramatic characters was Richard

Edwardes. His play, Palamon and Arcite (not extant) was played in front of the Queen when she was visiting Oxford in 1566. The only play by Edwardes that survived the centuries was Damon and Pythias. His contribution to the case of female dramatic characters is not an obvious one – his play does not involve a single female character and the story is about a friendship of two men. Yet this comedy is, according to Wilson, foreshadowing “the romantic comedy – the comedy of sentiment, of love, the comedy which is at once serious and witty, and which contains the elements of tragedy” (Wilson

80). It was a huge step from the farcical Interludes and it was an original play, not a translation. It prepared the grounds for later authors, who added love and passion to the comedy – and with romance came the first fully developed female characters.

Yet before the greatest English playwrights of the Early Modern period appeared on the scene in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, important changes happened in the society – mainly concerning Reformation – which caused several shifts in the development of drama: “the miracle plays had been suppressed as papistical; public theatres had been opened, and their performances killed the Moralities; and the Act of

Censorship of 1589 turned playwrights from religion and the state to a study of human nature” (Miller 134). To summarize the development, the plays of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan authors were created on the background of

the liturgy of the Church, medieval scholarship, sermons, folk-customs, the realism and

humour of the members of the trade-guilds, the influence of classical, Italian, and

French literature, the demand of the public to be entertained, individual genius, and the

social and religious background of six hundred years (Miller 134).

Miller then attributes certain importance to the stages and influences: the Miracles and

Moralities provided a way to keep the drama as a genre alive, even though in a religiously appropriate way that differed from the atmosphere of the pre-Christian Latin plays; the development of drama as a genre was connected tightly to the historical development of its social and religious background (influencing the genre by means of fashion, philosophy, the Reformation or politically induced censorship); and, at last,

“with the Elizabethan Age the moment, the material, and the men combined to produce an apparently sudden growth of great drama” (Miller 134).

4.1.2 University Plays

Even though Oxford as a city and a university seem to be connected nowadays, in the Tudor times they were against each other – or better say the town of Oxford was against the University. Roderick Robertson in his “Oxford Theatre in Tudor Times”

describes the situation – Oxford was not a cathedral town, so it was not a religious centre; it also was not a commercial centre. It was a prosperous market town in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, nevertheless, its prosperity did not last. The reason for decreasing prosperity of the town was the growth of the University. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there were riots in Oxford – clashes between the townspeople and the University – and “the throne consistently supported the University in these conflicts by granting it more and more authority for affairs previously left to the town, so that by the beginning of the sixteenth century the town of Oxford was practically governed by the University” (Robertson 41). Robertson argues that this is the reason for no sufficient evidence of any medieval drama originating in Oxford – as it was said above, the medieval drama was tightly connected to religious festivals and the performances were in the hands of town guilds. If in Oxford the town‟s authority was diminishing, those performances did not happen – there was no one to produce them.

The fact that both Oxford and Cambridge Universities were not attached to monasteries is the reason for the “outburst of production” (Robertson 42) in the sixteenth century. These universities were influenced by the Humanist movement which brought them “to a theatrical fervour that sought to reproduce, under new conditions, the dramatic glories of Greece and of Rome” (Robertson 42). These dramatic performances were not a source of amusement (or not primarily), they were a part of education and proved helpful not only for memorizing classical texts (because such theatrical performance provided a pragmatic reason for memorizing longer texts – forgetting the text on stage in front of the audience was probably more embarrassing than failing to recite it in the class), but also for nurturing speaking skills – as Thomas

Heywood in his Apology for Actors (1612) summarizes23 why are these performances necessary for the students: “to arme them with audacity against they come to bee employed in any publicke exercise, as in the reading of the dialecticke, rhetoricke, ethicke, mathematicke, the physicke, or metaphysicke lectures” – it is also important for a future member of the University because it “teacheth audacity to the bashful grammarian” and makes him “a bold sophister, to argue pro et contra to compose his syllogysmes, cathegoricke, or hypotheticke (simple or compound), to reason and frame a sufficient argument to prove his questions”. Latin plays based on the classical models were written not only by masters to be performed but also by students to better their grammar and composition skills.

The performances ranged from small ones performed out of “student enthusiasm for the amusement of the students themselves” (Robertson 45), to magnanimously staged performances with many mechanic constructions and stage effects – usually prepared to amuse a high-ranked visitor – the Queen, according to the records, visited

Oxford twice, in 1566 and 1592, and both times she attended the University performances. The grand performances were probably held only in the hall of Christ

Church College (because it was the largest), such as the performance in honour of a visiting Prince Palatine from Poland in 1583, which is described in Holinshed‟s

Chronicles24 – there was “a goodlie sight of hunters with full crie of a kennell of hounds, Mercurie and Iris descending and ascending from and to a high place,” while there was a “tempest wherein it hailed small confects, rained rosewater, and snew an artificiall kind of snow, all strange, maruellous, and abundant” (Robertson 43).

23 Heywood is quoted by Robertson in “Oxford Theatre in Tudor Times”, pg. 42 24 Quoted again in Robertson, pg. 43

The University productions were paid by the colleges and there was no admission fee, which was an important aspect of these performances – it distinguished them thus from the professional performances that were not popular among the

University authorities. The reasons for their disapproving attitude were the questions of

“health, finances, and the moral state of the students” (Robertson 47). The authorities were not against dramatic performances as such, they were worried that students would spend their money and time watching these performances instead of studying and there was also the question of moral education of young people. And because controlling which plays were appropriate would be difficult, the Oxford University banned the professional actors from their town in 1584.

Even though the University were strictly against only professional actors, the question of the suitability of dramatic performances for the educational purposes appeared among scholars and University members. The famous dispute between Dr.

John Rainolds of Queen‟s College and William Gager of Christ Church is a vivid example of Protestant attitudes towards theatre (both popular and private) and the defence of dramatic performances from an engaged side – Gager was a dramatist writing neo-Latin plays for the University performances. Their dispute started when

Gager added a scene to Seneca‟s Hippolytus in which he introduced Momus, a character who criticizes theatre. His attack was divided in four points: “1) Actors were condemned by ancient Roman statutes; 2) it is improper for men to dress as women; 3) plays contain lascivious matter; and 4) acting plays is a waste of time and money”

(Robertson 48). In another added scene then Gager mocked these criticisms. Rainolds, who argued against the theatre in the same way as Momus, took these two scenes as a personal attack and started a dispute with Gager, who answered with “a lengthy defence of academic drama in conception and performance” (Robertson 49). Yet Gager based

his defence on a strict division between the professional performances and the amateur performances, which means he argued only for the University drama. Nevertheless, the dramatic performances held at the universities helped the professional drama – “in that bad third quarter of the sixteenth century, when the old courtly interlude had degenerated into unseemly and plebeian drivel and a militant Puritanism was embattled against all the arts” (Brooke 234), the Latin plays written at the English Universities were what “saved the day for the theatre and, so to speak, kept a door open for Marlowe and Shakespeare” (Ibid.).

The Universities and the Inns of Court were “the cradles of modern English drama” (Brooke 234), even though they used Latin instead of English. Among these

Latin plays there were first romantic comedies and tragedies, personal satires or history plays “appearing in full development ten, twenty, and sometimes fifty years before the earliest vernacular effort in the same kind” (Brooke 235). The Latin plays had “form, dignity, and intellectual wit at a time when the vernacular plays very piteously lacked these things” (Brooke 235), yet they were not mere copies of the Greek and Roman plays. And from this environment of higher-rank tragedies and comedies produced at the Universities came the next generation of playwrights – the authors who wrote professionally and for greater audiences than those of the Universities; the authors who for the reason of providing entertainment exchanged the noble Latin for the base vernacular and by their efforts created a new, fashionable, more intricate, beautiful

English – the University Wits.

4.1.3 University Wits

The University Wits was a group of Early Modern English dramatists who were connected by their education – they went to Oxford or Cambridge. These Wits were:

Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, John Lyly, George Peele and

Thomas Lodge. From these six writers, two were particularly important for their innovations and later influence – John Lyly for comedy and Christopher Marlowe for tragedy.

John Lyly, oftentimes more mocked for his invention of euphuism than praised for his improvements of the genre of comedy, was a courtier. This put him in a specific position – he was writing for the aristocracy and for the Queen. His invention of euphuism was on one hand a source of ridicule even for his contemporaries, but on the other it was a successful (at least in the beginning) first attempt to create a more complicated language to replace Latin – the English of the first vernacular plays and

Interludes was criticised for being “crude” – while Lily got carried away in creating an artificial way of speaking overly elaborate, he showed a way of possible improvements for the English drama. Another of his improvements, and particularly important for this thesis, is his targeting women. He acknowledged them as an important part of the audience and tried to please them. One of the ways to gain their favour was introducing romance to comedy. While in earlier comedies the only poetic aspect was the verse and the content was basically farcical, he wrote comedies in prose and added “poetical treatment” (Wilson 82) to the genre. Comedies needed poetic ideas to rise from the low level of farce. While Edwardes, whose work Lyly was familiar with, was getting closer with his Damon and Pythias, he was building the sentimental aspect only on a friendship between two men, and that was an idea not strong enough. Lyly added love

and passion to comedy – he added women. He actually did for English comedy what female actresses, such as Vincenza Armani, had done for Commedia dell‟Arte – moderating the crude comedy by eliciting “a sweet smile rather than the raucous belly laugh of unadulterated comedy” (Henke 48). Not to go completely against the tradition of his times, he banished the farcical elements to his characteristic subplots full of pages and rascals who existed mainly to balance the sentiment of the main plot, to make the audience laugh. To bring passion and romance to comedy he needed to achieve more than a simple moderation of laughter in the main plot – “it was necessary that both sexes should walk the stage on an equal footing” (Wilson 83). Wilson quotes George

Meredith, who said that comedy “lifts women to a station offering them free play for their wit, as they usually show it, when they have it, on the side of sound sense. The higher the comedy, the more prominent the part they enjoy in it” (Wilson 83). As he was the first English playwright to fully acknowledge “that brain forms a part of the feminine organism” when he chose women as the targeted audience for his novels,25 it is not unimaginable that he would be the one who brought proper female characters on the English stage. That his desire for fame and for becoming a trend-setter of his age played an important role in this innovation is without doubts – he wrote his plays mainly to amuse one particular woman in the audience – the Queen.

What makes him different from his contemporaries is the fact that he, as a schoolmaster at St. Paul‟s, wrote plays that were performed by choir boys and that enabled him to create more female characters than anyone who wrote before him – while others have usually one more important female character, for example a subject of love of the protagonist, and one or two supporting roles – a nurse, a maid, a sister, Lyly kept this inequality in numbers only in his first dramatic attempt, Campaspe. However,

25 This aspect of Lyly‟s writing is discussed by Wilson on page 67

in Gallathea there are ten female characters and two of them are the main protagonists; in Sapho and Phao there are nine women and eight men; in Endimion eight women and thirteen men; in Midas, which is not even a romantic comedy, there are seven female characters; in The Woman in the Moon are also seven female characters and in Love

Metamorphoses there are again more female characters (eight) than male (seven).26

Although these women were portrayed on their “social and superficial side” (Bond 2;

282), they are “witty, sprightly, and beneath their euphuism so natural” (Ibid.). Bond argues that “to Mileta, Suavia, Livia, Nisa, and Niobe, the mockers and skirmishers of

Lyly‟s ante-chamber and woodland, [we are] chiefly indebted for Katharine, Rosalind

Beatrice” (Ibid.) and other female characters from Shakespeare‟s plays. Even though

Bond is in many aspects exaggerating his praise of the playwright – his women were too superficial not only because the young boys of St. Paul‟s were not able to properly portray passion and love, but also because “Lyly‟s mind was in all probability altogether of too superficial a nature for a sympathetic analysis of the human soul”

(Wilson 101) – it is without doubts that Lyly‟s “English girl[s]” (Bond 2; 282) represent a very important moment in the evolution of female characters.

Christopher Marlowe, Lyly‟s contemporary and a fellow University Wit, focused on the genre of tragedy and, although he died quite young, he created several interesting female characters. One of them is, obviously, Dido, the protagonist of Dido,

Queen of Carthage. He took the story of Dido and Aeneas from Virgil‟s Aeneid and created a tragedy of ill-fated love. His Dido is a powerful woman, even though her personality is rather unstable. This instability lies in her constant moving on the emotional scale from one side to the other – she is a proud queen, but “there are two

26 These numbers are taken from the lists of dramatis personae of Lyly‟s plays as they are reprinted in The Complete Works of John Lyly, edited by R. Warwick Bond, Vol. II and III.

faces to her sovereign will, [...] one smiling and one angry. She smiles when she proclaims her will but is easily angered if its wisdom or goodness are questioned”

(Brodwin 141). She is also a woman in love – at one point she is loving and caring, granting wishes, at another she is angry, wishing Aeneas death on the sea, and yet in another moment she fantasizes how she would fly with the wax wings of Icarus and fall from the sky into Aeneas‟ arms and be reconciled with him. The final session of madly changing attitudes and emotions is culminated with her coldblooded lies to Anna and

Iarbus, telling them she wants to make a fire to burn all the things Aeneas left behind – and one of these things is herself. When Iarbus finds out, he kills himself because he loved her, and her sister Anna loved him, so she killed herself, too. This ending is typical in revenge tragedies when at the end the avenger, after punishing the villain, has to die as well because otherwise there would be a never ending circle of vice, as it appeared in Greek mythology – for example in the story of Orestes. But in this case it was a romantic tragedy that ended with every character on the stage dead. One of the reasons why Dido commits suicide is because she cannot live without Aeneas – but rather then weeping for a lost love she is aware that her relationship was a problematic and a public one and many neighbouring kings did not approve and her being left by

Aeneas will cost her her pride. The other reason is that she wants to punish Aeneas – she wants to ruin his reputation around the whole world by becoming a victim of his cruelty. In Virgil‟s story she meets Aeneas in the Underworld and he thus finds about her suicide, so those who knew the original story also knew that Aeneas will find out someday. These reasons then make the play not a tragedy of a lost love but a tragedy of a lost pride – and while Dido resembles more a tyrant king who sets his eyes on a beautiful woman in need of help and decides to have her, she is still a woman in the

solution she finds to preserve her dignity – she kills herself and not the disobedient subject of her love.

Another important tragedy written by Marlowe is Tamburlaine. As Dido resembles the classical world, Tamburlaine is set in a world of courtly love: to the men

“women are treasures to be won; to the women beauty and virtue are the treasures which purchase honor; and courtship is a barter in which the man bids for the woman as treasure while the woman exacts the highest price possible” (Brooks 3). Courtship is thus a sort of business negotiation – men have to be “worthy to have something to offer, and women have to be beautiful and virtuous to be valuable to worthy men” (Brooks 4).

Women in Tamburlaine are not typical romantic heroines – they are “not passively virtuous” but rather “active, striving to attain individual aims” (Ibid). For them their beauty is something they have to use actively and “virtue is something to be attained rather than protected” (Brooks 4). Zenocrate is a princess who happens to be in need for help; Tamburlaine falls in love with her and has to conquer her heart and when she later accepts him, she becomes his mistress. Their marriage appears at the end of the first part of Tamburlaine and she has to deal with her reputation of his unwedded lover. Yet she is modest and humble and feels that she is not worthy of his love. In Tamburlaine there are “familiar Renaissance attitudes toward women, erotic, courtly, romantic, and moral” expressed, but “they do not illustrate a simple code” (Brooks 11). Erotic love is connected to conquering of a symbolic treasure of woman‟s beauty and this aspiration makes the feelings “seem noble rather than base” (Ibid.). Thus while a knightly character from courtly love literature “aims to serve” Marlowe‟s “heroes aspire to conquer” and also his women “strive vigorously for their own goals, and they are not prizes that are won by lovers who serve faithfully, but prizes that must be seized”

(Brooks 11).

Both these University Wits, whose careers ended abruptly – in Marlowe‟s case with his death, in Lyly‟s case with his falling into disgrace27 – created female characters that were strong and innovative for their time – they became a springboard for the next generation of writers – among them William Shakespeare.

4.1.4 William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is the most well-known dramatic of the Renaissance period. Scholars have been writing about him and his works for centuries, so there is hardly a theme, a notion, an aspect of his plays that was not commented on. His person is a different case – while there are still many unanswered questions about his life before he came to London, the scholars and critics have a large space for disputes concerning whether it was really Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon, who wrote the plays. There are many different opinions28 on this, some people think the author was

Francis Bacon, others believe it was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or that, as Sidney

L. Gulick, Jr. tries to prove in “Was Shakespeare a Woman?” the plays were written by the Queen.

As much as the critics are concerned with the authorship of the plays, they are in recent years interested in analyzing Shakespeare‟s female characters from many points of view – as are feminist readings or psychoanalytic readings. Kathleen McLuskie reads

27 The scholars focusing on Lyly and his works assume that the end of his career was connected to the Martin Marprelate issue, which was the reason for the 1589 Act of Censorship that banned authors from writing disputes or pamphlets (or any kind of literary work) that would include religious topics. Lyly‟s anti-Martinist work includes Pappe with an Hatchet and a lampoon called A Whip for an Ape: Or Martin Displaied and are both included in Bond, vol 3. The 1589 Act of Censorship is included as “A Proclamation Against Certain Seditious And Schismatical Books and Libels” in Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, edited by Edward Cardwell in 1839, pg. 18-22. 28 These theories are the subject of many studies; one of them is James Shapiro‟s Contested Will, printed in New York by Simon & Schuster, 2010.

Shakespeare as a patriarchal author who created characters in and for the world of men.

Richard Levin argues against her hypothesis that “we should not look for a sympathetic treatment” of women in the plays because women were excluded from the entertainment business – there were “no women shareholders, actors, writers, or stage hands” – he says that “if the plays are to be viewed as products of an industry (which they obviously were [...]), then McLuskie has omitted the crucial group of people who would have the greatest influence in determining the nature of those products – the customers” (Levin, Audience 165). He quotes Andrew Gurr who focused on the question of women in the audience and who proved that there were “high proportion of women at the playhouses” and they came “from every section of society” (Levin,

Audience 165). Levin then supports his arguments with evidence from various prologues and epilogues, in which the authors tend to talk to the “fair” part of the audience and adds the changing tradition of addressing the readers of printed plays from

“To the Gentlemen Readers” to the later “To the Readers” or “To the Courteous

Reader” (Levin, Audience 173). If writing for women as an important part of the audience worked for John Lyly, who as one of the first professional playwrights publicly acknowledged them and was able to earn his living by writing for them, it is highly improbable that ten years later and in the world of public theatres, where pleasing the crowds was the main source of financing, a popular author would not care about the female part of the audience. Levin proves this by quoting the Epilogue of

Henry VIII “All the expected good w‟ are like to hear / For this play at this time, is only in / the merciful construction of women, / For such a one we show‟d „em. If they smile /

And say „twill do. I know within a while / All the best men are ours” (Levin, Audience

168) – he claims that Shakespeare thought that it “would be women‟s special interest in the favourable portrayal of female characters in a play” (Levin, Audience 168).

Some critics, for example Henri Peyre, who comments on Shakespeare from the

French point of view, tend to provide questionable arguments. Peyre‟s arguments are almost misleading, which stems from the lack of insight into the cultural background of the era and from comparing Shakespeare with works from different countries and different centuries (e.g. with Hedda Gabler, Madame Bovary, Manon Lescaut or Nana).

He quotes French critics who blame Shakespeare for “the absence of religious concern” in his plays – Paul Claudel “deplored bitterly the frightening absence of God in

Shakespeare‟s theatre” and called him “the genius who never found God” – without commenting on the fact that the era of Reformation was a dangerous period to write about god for the public theatre, not to mention the 1589 Act of Censorship, and the fact that critics and scholars who analyze the plays on the textual basis found religious themes hidden in some of the plays – for example Romeo and Juliet29 appears to be connected to religious matters. And if the general idea that Shakespeare‟s mother was a devoted Catholic (it is mentioned in many works on the dramatist, even in Břetislav

Hodek‟s Příběh mladého Shakespeara, 1999), which means that he was born into a family where religious ideas clashed with the reality of public social life, it is not unimaginable that he was used to hiding his thoughts, only hinting some notions without being caught.

29 Dr. Gerard Kilroy, head of English Department at King Edward's School in Bath, author of works on Edmund Campion, analyzes the play as a symbolic story that criticizes the outcomes of the Reformation – some people hiding their true beliefs, some acting rashly and getting executed – Romeo is representing a Roman Catholic (based on Dante‟s division of pilgrims – romei are pilgrims to Rome), Juliet is at the beginning in the symbolic world of Protestant England but after meeting Romeo, she is no longer a Capulet, but becomes an English Catholic – her plan to feign death is then symbolic for the English Catholics who pretended to “be dead” but were still alive, and Romeo‟s reckless behaviour leads to real death – it is a warning that reckless actions (such as Catholic plots, e.g. the Babington Plot), will lead only to death and tragedy, but waiting in piece and pretending to be eliminated, dead, might be the better plan. He supports this hypothesis for example by the textual evidence in the famous sonnet of Romeo and Juliet‟s first meeting – there is a repetition of words pilgrim and palmer (according to Dante a pilgrim to Jerusalem). The lecture called “Changing Eyes: Fate and Fluctuation in Romeo and Juliet” is available both as a text and a recorded video in the archive of Portsmouth Institute – year 2011, theme The Catholic Shakespeare? (http://www.portsmouthinstitute.org).

What is more important for this thesis is that Peyre criticizes Shakespeare also for his women – they are shallow and “with utter naiveté [they] throw themselves at the necks of the men they have decided to love – with utter abandon and not much understatement” (110). He quotes Taine, who portrayed Shakespeare‟s women in his

History of English Literature as “charming children, ho feel to an excess and love to the point of madness” (Ibid.) and adds that any man “wearies of having married an inconsequential prattling little girl with the head of a bird and the immutable fidelity of a dog” (Peyre 110). Sidney L. Gulick, Jr., on the other hand describes Shakespeare‟s women in a different light. His hypothesis that Shakespeare was actually a woman who had to pretend to be a man to work in the patriarchal society seems to be exaggerated, yet his opinions about the female characters are quite just. He quotes Coleridge and summarizes his words saying that “the author of these plays presents women as idealized characters” (Gulick 445). Gulick divides the idealization as moral and intellectual. The women are “admirable characters, noble, loyal, and innocent” (Gulick

445). Marina from Pericles is able to protect her chastity; Desdemona is too innocent to believe there can be such evil in a man as is in Iago; Lady Macbeth “besides being more quick-witted than her husband and understanding him as he did not understand himself, had the compunction which he lacked – she could not kill [...] the king, whereas he could; he then sank into an orgy of murder” (Gulick 446) while she became mad;

Goneril and Regan are “wickedness incarnate” (Ibid.), but on the other hand they are two to “balance Edgar, a man and the archfiend of the play” which means that even though the sisters are evil, they are not as wicked as a male character. Then there are female characters who are smarter than their male counterparts: Beatrice who wins over

Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing; Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, who at first manages to get a husband she desires while not breaking a promise to her father, then

saves Antonio by pretending to be a lawyer and “finally tricks her husband with the ring, thus making sure that for the rest of their lives she will have him safely tethered”

(Gulick 446); Viola from Twelfth Night has a twin brother, Sebastian, nevertheless, it is her who is loved by both Orsino and Olivia (who then marries Sebastian); Helena from

All’s Well that Ends Well goes through with a surprisingly bold plan to manage getting pregnant with her husband without him being aware of it; Juliet, one of the youngest characters, yet one of the most active, she “deeply in love as she is, still [...] keeps her feet on the ground, makes sure [Romeo‟s] purpose is honourable, has her nurse arrange details, gets herself married, and manages her actions with intelligence as well as with courage” (Gulick 446), while Romeo falls quickly out of love with Rosalind, then in love with Juliet, behaves recklessly and without thinking, gets banished from Verona, breaks down emotionally, when he learns about her death he again acts before he thinks and then he kills himself – in this case the woman, while being much younger, operates with sobriety and were it not for him and his recklessness, her plan would work and there would be no tragedy. Cleopatra, older than Juliet, but similarly intelligent and courageous, “enmeshes one of the great men of the time” (Gulick 446) and even though she kills herself in the end, she does it in a great style. And there is also Rosalind from

As You Like It, who is not afraid to leave the court of her uncle and travel, disguised as a young man, to the Arden forest accompanied by a female cousin and a clown; she is also capable of winning the man of her heart, Orlando, or better say she is able to fashion her lover according to her wishes – in a play of double cross-dressing, she, dressed as Ganymede, offers to play fair Rosalind for Orlando, so that he would be able to woo her properly.

Shakespeare‟s female characters may lack depth or may seem to never experience carnal love or a sort of true love, as Peyer claims; however, they are the

greatest female characters created in the Early Modern England. Dion Boucicault argues in “Shakespeare‟s Influence on the Drama” that his plays became classics over the centuries mainly because they provide a challenge for the actors – that the roles of

Hamlet, Othello, Romeo, Lear or Macbeth attracted actors of every period because their tragedy and great monologues were touching the audience and presented a great opportunity to start or enhance one‟s acting career. But, even though that during the

Elizabethan and Jacobean era there were no actresses, during the Restoration, still in the seventeenth century, first actresses appeared and it is as believable that actresses wished to prove their qualities by playing Juliet, Desdemona, Rosalind, Viola, or Lady

Macbeth, as the fact that male actors preserved Shakespeare for later centuries.

In the middle of Shakespeare‟s career there was a huge change – Queen

Elizabeth I died and was succeeded by James I. That this change would create a difference in the society was by then probably anticipated. But the change brought more than was expected – while during the era of Elizabeth the lives of her female subjects were not really changed because she wanted to be the “extraordinary” woman, above others in virtue, intelligence and capability, the fictional lives of female dramatic characters evolved to a great extent – their stories became more elaborate, their characters more developed, their voices better heard. But during the reign of King

James I all of this was about to change.

4.2 Jacobean Era

During the last decade of Elizabeth I‟s reign she became less popular. Her

“combination of dominance and coquetry” (Allman 29) became problematic because she was already old and the courtiers found it more and more troublesome to flatter her according to her Cult. So the “coquetry” of her feminine part being unwanted, her

“androgynous structure began to dissolve, her mystical male body alone commanding respect” (Allman 29). During these years the queen‟s subjects were looking with expectations across the borders to Scotland, were James lived and ruled, already having sons to succeed him.

James‟ accession, even though it was long wished for, was almost as troublesome as Elizabeth‟s. Neither of them accessed to the throne in a patrilineal way –

James derived his claim to the throne from his great-great-grandfather, Henry VII.

England thus had “seventy-three years without the royal passing reassuringly from father to eldest son” (Allman 25). The fact that his claim was preserved through daughters is also the reason for another problem – he was born in another country. His problematized roots, or his personal preference, caused that he created his royal persona as androgynous as well. But his androgyny was different and more disturbing. It did not honour women, as Elizabeth‟s androgyny honoured men – because it did not need to, in fact adding the feminine side to the image of a male king was only compromising “the presumed superiority of male” (Allman 30). He was not fond of women as sex and he isolated himself from them whenever it was possible – this attitude “rendered his rhetorical assumption of women‟s biological capacities a hostile appropriation” (Allman

29). He was androgynous and yet fully masculine – he “absorbed, in order to eliminate, women” (Allman 30).

This emphasized masculinity brought another problem connected to his reign – the position of his male subjects. Just as Elizabeth, James I during his coronation pronounced himself married to the kingdom of England – but this time was the nation his bride – he “metaphorically transformed the men of England, accustomed to playing

Elizabeth‟s male consorts, into submissive and obedient wives, bodies to his head”

(Ibid.). He was also a pacifist and seemed to his male subjects as cowardly and womanish because during Elizabeth‟s reign people tend to define manhood in terms of military prowess. But the most problematic were James‟ public displays of love towards his male favourites. Allman quotes Francis Osborne who speaks about the king‟s “love, or what else posterity will please to call it” for his favourites and comments on his

“kissing them after so lascivious a mode in publick, and upon the theatre, as it were, of the world” (Allman 30). English court gossip in general suggested that the king was homosexual, yet they never used the word sodomy. This behaviour put heterosexual men again in the positions of subjection. During Elizabeth‟s reign their maleness remained normative – it was normal to flatter a woman, who even claimed to be their metaphorical wife. But being forced into homosexual behaviour was different – Sir

Henry Rich is known for losing “an opportunity for advancement” by “turning aside and spitting after the king had slabbered his mouth” – he rejected the king on the basis of his sex and gender having a “divine sanction” which he did not want to compromise – he chose God over the king. This marginalization of heterosexual men brought them to the same position as women. There were two possible outcomes for women from this situation – it could create “a male backlash of sympathy and respect” because of “the seemingly tyrannical rule of another man” (Allman 32); or it could be the other way around. Because the equality in position was based on a diminution of men‟s authority, it could create a defensive exaggeration of men‟s difference from women – misogyny.

While Queen Anna was not allowed to the court, she created her own – “an important centre of patronage in the arts” (Allman 32). The women of the court were reduced as well – Arbella Stuart and Mary Wroth were “forcibly restrained from asserting the political and artistic rights of their birth” (Ibid.). Women were put in pressure to behave as “unthreateningly foolish creatures that they are assumed to be” – woman‟s place at the court was quite simple – she had to be apart from men, procreating at her husband‟s will, “spending her time in gossiping benignly in the space allowed her life” (Allman 32).

Elizabeth during her reign widened the cultural split in the category of women – if women were not like her, they were “inherently wicked and licentious” (Ibid.) and even the queen was often a victim of rumours of promiscuity. But her female presence on the throne made public expression of misogyny unacceptable. Yet it lived in its underground exile and was getting only stronger in the last decade of Elizabeth‟s reign, when her Cult was getting more and more ridiculous and her control over sexual ideology was too long.

4.2.1 Jacobean Revenge Tragedy

To find the origins of the Jacobean revenge tragedy it is important to look back to the Elizabethan era, to the second half of her reign. While the English drama was developing from the medieval forms, influenced by classical plays and foreign writers, there appeared a special kind of play – the Tragedy of Blood. While the drama was still immature, these plays were characterized by bombast and pathos – “the action of these tragedies was a prolonged tempest. Blows fell like hail-stones; swords flashed like lightning; threats roared like thunder; poison was poured out like rain” (Symonds 388).

To provide a sort of relief, the authors “strove to play on finer sympathies by means of pathetic interludes and lyrical interbreathings – by the exhibition of a mother‟s agony or a child‟s trust in his murderer, by dialogues in which friend pleads with friend for priority in death or danger” (Ibid.) and many other similar images. The first real

Tragedy of Blood is The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd. This play includes all the stock characteristics of the genre: “a ghost [...]; a noble and courageous lover, young

Horatio, traitorously murdered; [...] a generous open-hearted gentleman, Hieronymo,

[...] a villain, Lorenzo; [...] a beautiful and injured lady, Bellimperia, [...] a play within a play, used to facilitate the bloody climax” (Symonds 389). As this tragedy is of blood, there are “at least, five murders, two suicides, two judicial executions, and one death in duel” (Symonds 390). Only few characters survive to bury the dead.

Kyd‟s tragedy inspired Marlowe to write his The Jew of Malta which then influenced other dramas, among them Titus Andronicus. As the time went on, the genre of tragedy was developing, female characters were given more space and the plays became, at least partially, less bombastic and pathetic. When the social changes connected to the accession of James I shifted the position of women into an even more subordinate position and there was no official Cult to make a woman extraordinary, the way was largely open for the advent of misogyny. This new aspect changed the genre and from the Tragedy of Blood there evolved the Jacobean Revenge tragedy, which brought its own characteristics – among them the even more visible division of female characters to angels and to whores. But this division was not simple and both opposites played their role in diminishing women.

The female characters of Jacobean Revenge tragedy can be divided into two groups – the victims and the idealized women. According to Eileen Jorge Allman “the

plays idealization of virtuous women, a cultural stance now widely accepted as the mirror image of misogyny, cannot [...] be dismissed as inseparable from contempt and equally disempowering and dehumanizing” (17). She claims that the idealization of women is not the opposite of misogyny – it rather is a “benign” option of patriarchy in opposition to the “violent” option of open misogyny.

These idealized virtuous female characters (such as Castiza in The Revenger’s

Tragedy) are not silent and obedient – they have moral authority over other characters and dramatic authority over the audience – these characters are those that people follow and wait for their decisions. Constance Jordan (quoted by Allman) claims that even misogynist literature can have a feminist dimension – allowing its female characters to act and to think – so, setting aside the fact that they are a patriarchal construct, the female characters of the Jacobean Revenge tragedy are important.

Allman also claims that it is important to focus not only on the men-women relationships but also on those of men and other men. In any culture where the “signs of dominance are gendered [...] men use the verbal and physical signs that indicate dominance over women to assert themselves against other men” (Allman 19). When the government is tyrannical, it means that one man dominates over other men – they find themselves sharing the subordinate position with women – “their voices are silenced, their social and familial authority is usurped, and their sexuality is controlled” (Allman

19). This is present in the language of the revenge tragedy – when a man is defeated by another man, he is “unmanned and feminized” (Allman 20). This use of language is a

“sign of loss” – while the man is still male, he is “forced to submission and is coded female” (Allman 20) – it does not mean that his sex is changed, it means that his

masculinity is denied to him – this “sign of loss” can then be displaced on women in terms of misogyny.

Other than misogynist reaction to the submission of men is the above mentioned rejecting the tyrant‟s dominance and turning to the spiritual world – turning from the king to the God. In the spiritual world there exists equal authority because virtue is

“degendered and depoliticised” (Allman 20). By asserting their obedience to a higher authority, men are enabled to obey women (as Antonio in The Duchess of Malfi). This refusing to obey the king and turning to God instead was possible because

“Protestantism‟s emphasis on individual conscience, reinforced by the revolt against and continued opposition to Catholicism” was creating in post-Reformation England a

“potential conflict with the state” (Allman 20).

Another theoretical collision caused by submission of men in tyranny is the destabilization of binary opposites. If a man is called effeminate, it supports the theory of binary oppositions. But the problem lies with the fact that it shows that “the signifiers of subjection have a life of their own and can separate from one group and attach to others” (Allman 21). If gender is separated from the sex it means that the assumed theory of difference between sexes composed in form of binary opposites is not working. When men are “effeminate” it means that women have to be diminished even more to stabilise to dynamic of men superior to women.

Together with the submission of men during the Early Modern era in England other aspects of social change were at work – “the rise of capitalism, destruction of rural life, the swelling of urban centres, the discovery of human societies functioning outside the boundaries of Europe” (Allman 23). But these changes were not foreshadowing a future development – “the greater the turmoil, the more violations of the theoretical

social order; the more violations, the stronger the reactionary impulse to strengthen that order” (Allman 23) – that means that instead of moving forward, these changes only reinforced the old social order. This social order worked according to a scheme that

“men actively impress themselves on women and, through women, on the world; women passively accept and bear the impress” (Allman 24). It means that “no less than the world‟s balance hangs on women‟s fulfilling their part of the binary bargain” (Ibid.).

And, obviously, women were charged for all those unwonted changes in the social order

– because they did not want to fulfil their part, the world was falling apart. They were punished for this disobedience by being “banished from the public to the private, used as commodities in economy‟s burgeoning capitalism, denied subjectivity and voice”

(Allman 24). Yet the solution was easy: “if women would only hold their tongues and keep their places, all would again be well” (Allman 24). This scapegoating of women was a practice inseparably connected to the misogynist world of Jacobean era.

One of the literary tools of diminishing women, both to idealize and victimize them, is turning them into scattered objects. Laurie A. Finke in “Painting Women:

Images of Femininity in Jacobean Tragedy” comments on the tradition of Renaissance poets of “killing a woman into art” – the author of Renaissance sonnets “attempts to deny mortality and neutralize the threat posed by woman‟s carnality by transforming her, through his lyric, through art, into an ideal, eternally changeless because essentially lifeless” (Finke 361). The fragmentation of a woman is “implicit in her transformation from body to text” (Finke 362) but the effect is not caused by the fact that her image is turned into words, it is created by the choice of those words – “she becomes a collection of exquisitely beautiful, dissociated objects, which fail to add up to any coherent or human whole” – her features are described in terms of jewels or metals, her face fragmented into “lilies, roses, cherries, pearls, angles, and bows” (Finke 362). Nancy J.

Vickers, quoted by Finke, claims that the result of such fragmentation and idealization of women is a “code of beauty” that presents the idealized body as a norm and it creates pressure on women to become this ideal “beautiful monsters composed of every individual perfection” (Finke 363). This tendency to look like the ideal proved fatal for the Renaissance women for the effects it had on their bodies and their reputation.

Because cosmetics used in the Early Modern times contained mercury, women were poisoning themselves while trying to become the ideal. Finke quotes Thomas Tuke‟s “A

Treatise Against Painting” to show the horrifying results of using cosmetics: even young women “turn old with withered and wrinkled faces like an ape, and before age comes upon them, they tremble (poor wretches) as if they were sick of the staggers, reeling, and full of quicksilver for so they are” (Finke 364). The facial cosmetics, a sort of modern make-up, cleared the face of various spots and colour differences, but it also slowly consumed the skin and flesh and practically destroyed the face that wanted to look beautiful and forever young. The evolution of the “painted woman” situation can be summarized thus into a short line of interdependent events – the authors of sonnets and other lyrical poetry create an idealized woman and praise her for her immortal beauty; these sonnets are highly fashionable and popular, which means they are read and admired; women want to be admired for their beauty and want to go with the current fashion, so they start using mercury-based make-up to look like the idealized woman; they actually ruin their natural beauty by striving for the artificial; they become subjects of criticism and ridicule and it only feeds the already existing fear of women deceiving men (considering adultery), and their artificial beauty covering ruined skin is just an available argument for the critics.

In Jacobean tragedy the female characters are often victims of this objectification and fragmentation. One of the obvious examples is Gloriana from

Middleton‟s The Revenger’s Tragedy. Her lover, Vindice, uses her skull in his revenge plot to punish the Duke for her untimely death. He not only decapitates the dead body of his beloved, he also paints the skull and poisons it and disguise it as a country lady

(however unimaginable it is). Gloriana‟s body is abused even though she is already dead. In later tragedies the women are usually alive at the beginning of the play and they are subjects of various violent misuses “including rape, prostitution, and murder”

(Finke 359). In the plays women are reduced “to mere objects whose femininity is exclusively defined by their sexuality” and they are “also potentially sexual threats because they are all potentially false lovers” (Finke 359) – this aspect of seeing women as deceivers is in the plays, as well as in the criticisms as it was mentioned above, often connected to the artificial beauty, as for example when Vindice says “See ladies, with false forms / You deceive men, but cannot deceive worms” (Finke 358). By this fear of men, women are reduced to “whores or potential whores” (Finke 359). Female characters facing this accusation of being whores, and being punished for their sin, are for example the Duchess in Webster‟s The Duchess of Malfi, Annabella in Ford‟s ‘Tis

Pity She’s a Whore or Vittoria in Webster‟s The White Devil, Bianca in Middleton‟s

Women Beware Women or Beatrice in The Changeling. In all these cases the real sin lies in the fact that these women choose their lovers or husbands on their own, without getting approval of the representatives of the patriarchal society.

On the character of the Duchess Finke describes yet another aspect of diminishing women – she is silent: “she can talk, but she cannot speak; she can make noise, but can have nothing to say” (Finke 366). While she speaks openly when with her husband Antonio or with her maid, her eloquence is reduced to a small number of lines when she is in the presence of her brothers who present the patriarchal oppression.

When she is alive, she “remains outside language and powerless precisely because she

is silent” (Finke 367) and when she is strangled, she is silenced forever. Finke comments that “sexual hostility most frequently results in the silencing ʻdecapitationʻ of the tragic heroine: Lavinia raped, her tongue cut out (and her hands cut off so she cannot write) in Titus Andronicus, Desdemona strangled in Othello” and already dead

Gloriana in The Revenger’s Tragedy is “reduced to a grinning skull” (Finke 367).

Another mutilated woman is Annabella from ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore – she is praised only for her beauty, not for her actions. Her sin lies in her choosing her own brother as a lover, while she is married to another man. The relationship with her brother is based on his trying to “eliminate” her difference from him – she “becomes a passive and silent mirror of her brother and, like a mirror, she can only be a physical, and hence unthreatening, reflection” (Finke 368). Both her husband and her brother try to make her constant by fragmenting her, at first only verbally, into pieces. When she changes – becomes visibly pregnant – “their language of verbal dismemberment becomes more and more violent and the insistent repetition of these conventional images becomes more disturbing” (Finke 369). At the end of the play her brother kills her by stabbing her into the stomach, killing their unborn child, and then appears on stage with her heart impaled on his sword.

While Ford‟s treatment of Annabella is misogynistic in the violence used against her, Middleton‟s tragedies are not based simply on violent punishment of sinful women and he also does not criticize only women but also men. Albert H. Tricomi in

“Middleton‟s Women Beware Women as Anticourt Drama” describes how Middleton criticizes the corrupt court of James I and deconstructs the power symbolism – “the [...] systematic juxtaposition of the beneficent public images of authority with the sordid, private reality [...], its exposure of the court as an over-sophisticated, morally effete institution” and showing the similarity with the Court of James I by introducing

“topical, Jacobean grievances of enforced marriage and ward-ship” (Tricomi 65).

Middleton shows the corruption of the Court by presenting “the Duke‟s potent power to exploit his exalted, public presence to achieve lowly, private ends” (Tricomi 66). This exploitation of power is also connected to the story of Isabella who is forced into marriage with Ward – it shows the unjust “misuse of positions of trust to exploit those who should be protected” (Tricomi 71). When James I succeeded Elizabeth I on the

English throne, the Parliament wanted to abolish the institution of wardship – while

James agreed to a sort of compromise, it was never enacted and the wardship became more unjust than before – “the king sold warships in reward for service to gentlemen and nobles for a handsome fee. The appointed guardian loved this political plum because he could bilk the ward‟s estate during the ward‟s minority and could also marry his charge off to the highest bidder” (Tricomi 71). The wardship element is not present only in the Isabella plot, as Tricomi suggests, but also in the story of Bianca. Her young husband leaves her at home with his mother to guard her. Even though Tricomi describes the Mother in terms of “trusting simplicity” (68), but Richard A. Levin has in his “If Women Should Beware Women, Bianca Should Beware Mother” clearly a different opinion on this character. He claims that the Mother is not naive at all, but rather experienced – he supposes that she once experienced a similar situation to

Bianca‟s. The Mother belongs to the fallen gentry and in several situations she seems to understand that there are certain merits to the infidelity of her daughter-in-law. She is not happy that her son has a wife, because they were poor even before they had another person to support. Levin claims that from the beginning the Mother is thinking about how to better her situation through this unwanted daughter-in-law. Thus, even though she is not a proper ward of Bianca, she is betraying the trust of her son and his bride,

and instead of protecting Bianca, she quickly and cunningly introduces her to the higher society of Florence, to the life of debauchery.

4.2.2 City Comedy and Domestic Tragedy

The Jacobean era is not connected only with the Revenge tragedy. Two new genres developed – city comedy and domestic tragedy – stories of domestic life set in the familiar world of London. These stories “provided the possibility of pleasing a wider audience and extending the market for a new form of entertainment” (McLuskie

1) – these plays focused on the relationships between men and women and while the city comedies turned from romance as represented in comedies by Lyly and

Shakespeare, the domestic tragedies rejected “the high bombast of Elizabethan tragedy in favour of a more direct appeal to their audience‟s experience and sensibilities”

(McLuskie 1). Among the playwrights who wrote domestic tragedies were Thomas

Dekker, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Heywood, however, as the first play in this tradition is considered Arden of Feversham written by an anonymous author. The three authors, accompanied by Ben Jonson, wrote also the city comedies. Thomas Heywood was important for the female characters because he wrote many plays focusing on women and “created one of the most sentimental female icons in Jane Shore, the heroine of his two-part historical play, Edward IV” and he was “equally alert to the potential of comedic fashion in his representation of women” (McLuskie 2). He wrote a popular domestic tragedy called A Woman Killed with Kindness. Thomas Middleton, who focused on women even in his plays written in the genre of Jacobean revenge tragedy (Women Beware Women, The Changeling), wrote for both adult companies and for the Paul‟s Boys – he adapted the “iconoclastic and sexually and politically daring

plays” created for the boys‟ troupe for the adult companies – he collaborated “with

Dekker on the first part of The Honest Whore and on The Roaring Girl” (McLuskie 5).

When the boys‟ troupes were disbanded in 1606, Middleton wrote A Chaste Maid in

Cheapside for an adult company – the Lady Elizabeth‟s Men – that was joined by the boys from the former Children of the Queens Revels. Thomas Dekker was later not as successful as the other playwrights, but at the turn of the century he was very popular – he wrote The Shoemaker’s Holiday and “no less than fourteen plays” (McLuskie 5).

Dekker was “equally influential when writing satire” (McLuskie 6) and together with

Ben Jonson they were “concerned with the bargain between entertainment and instruction which the commercial theatre had struck with its patrons and supporters”

(McLuskie 6). While Jonson wrote for the Court, Dekker wrote for the citizen audiences. In collaboration with other dramatists Dekker wrote The Witch of Edmonton

(with Rowley and Ford), The Honest Whore (with Middleton) and Westward Ho! (with

Webster), which “was imitated in Jonson, Chapman and Marston‟s Eastward Ho! for a rival company” (McLuskie 6).

Many of the plays deal with the changes in the society connected to viewing marriage as business deal – “in city comedy, the place of women is effectively subordinated to the competition between men for status and power. The love plots are moved to the margins of the action, and the women‟s concerns are circumscribed within the arena of marriage” (McLuskie 28). Love and passion are “suppressed in comedy with bawdy mockery and witty devices” while in tragedy “similar competitive forces explode in violence and death. They are brought to the forefront of the action, offering a tragic mirror image of the comic interaction between women, men and the changing social world” (McLuskie 28). Most of the tragedies and comedies are focused on unhappy marriages and adultery, and while tragedy takes these themes and explore “the

social damage and personal pain consequent upon it” (McLuskie 38), the comedies play with cuckoldry and fidelity in terms of market place deals – parents sell their children into loveless marriages, husbands are consent with their wives‟ infidelity if it provides for their families, mothers pushing their daughters into sexual relationships to cure their

“greensickness” as does mother to Moll in The Chaste Maid in Cheapside. These plays, as the mirrors of the changing society, were facing the future Restoration Comedy of

Manners more than they resembled the great drama of the Elizabethan period.

5. Conclusion

The aim of this thesis was to follow the beginnings of the English female characters back to the Early Modern England and find the special conditions in which these female dramatis personae evolved. The Elizabethan period was extremely important for their development because it was the time in which the whole English drama as a genre originated – before this period there were no real English dramatic characters. The favourable conditions for this evolution were created by the Humanist thinking that the best way to find and transfer knowledge is to look back to the Classical

Greece and Rome, read the literary works written in those times and translate them into the vernacular languages. But the changes that came with the Renaissance and the rebirth of the Classics were not the only foundation-stones for the English female characters – to use a quotation of Federico Chabod from Gundersheimer‟s The Italian

Renaissance, “we must look for change and development in the midst of continuity”

(12). So while the import of a two thousand years old culture made a difference, it is vital to look at the continuity of development of the Early Modern Europe – Italy, the cradle of the Renaissance, was a century ahead from England and going through the same process of reinventing the Classics, during the Elizabethan era it already provided a mixture of the classical and the home-made. Also the English continuity played essential role in the evolution of female dramatic personae – the development of dramatic genres started in the ninth century with the Church liturgy and it continued through the Miracles and Moralities until it reached the tumultuous era of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The particular circumstances for the development of the Early

Modern English drama were created by the changing society, the upcoming modernity, the focus on human, which inherently brought the focus on women and their virtues,

their social position and their abilities. While the women gained attention in the real world, the female characters started to appear on the stages of private and public theatres. But the evolution of female dramatic characters was not easy and straightforward. Women had to face criticism based on binary oppositions – their inclination to sin was supposed to be inherent in their sex and they had to be submitted to the male control – they were not trusted by the society and were easy victims of slander, they continually had to prove that they are capable of virtuous conduct. While the real women were dealing with the criticisms, many authors wrote literary or theoretical texts to support them. But when the political situation changed and under the problematic rule of James I men became diminished on women‟s level, their treatment of women in literature changed. The dark period for the female dramatic characters is the Jacobean revenge tragedy – they were raped, mutilated and murdered on stage, or they were idealized, objectified, fragmented into pieces. But with the new genres, city comedy and domestic tragedy, the dramatic setting became familiar and friendly for the female characters – even though the topics were still the same – women deceiving men, infidelity, cuckoldry, punishment or satirical treatment of immorality – the environment was more private than in the previous plays with their classical settings. While the plays moved from the public sphere to the domestic, female characters were brought home and it provided a huge step in their evolution. Nevertheless, the female characters of the later Jacobean period and of the Restoration drama would never exist were it not for the two thousand years old Classical heroines.

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Résumé (Czech)

Tato diplomová práce zkoumá vývoj ženských hrdinek anglického dramatu.

Období raného novověku bylo v Evropě silně ovlivněno znovuobjevením kultury klasického Řecka a Říma, a proto je celá první kapitola věnována klasickému období.

Poskytuje popis společenské pozice žen v Aténách pátého století před naším letopočtem, protože to je období, ve kterém vznikly první opravdové dramatické žánry, a je důležité pochopit společenské prostředí prvních ženských dramatických postav.

Kapitola se dále zabývá čtyřmi představiteli klasické literatury, Euripidem, Vergiliem,

Ovidiem a Senekou, a jejich díly, která později přivedla mnoho zajímavých hrdinek do literárního světa raného novověku. Druhá kapitola se zaměřuje na vlivy, které přišly z renesanční Itálie – literární obhajoby žen, inovace žánrů a cesty, jimiž se tyto inovace dostaly do alžbětinské Anglie. Mezi nejvlivnější inovace patří pastorály, tragikomedie a komplexnost žánrů komedie dell‟arte. Poslední kapitola se zaměřuje na specifickou situaci v alžbětinské a jakobínské Anglii. Popisuje způsoby, jakými Alžběta vyvažovala svůj problematický nástup na trůn, a jak tím ovlivnila hrdinky soudobého anglického dramatu. Kapitola také popisuje vývoj anglického divadla a poskytuje tak kontinualitu s vývojem v předchozích obdobích. Podkapitoly se potom zaměřují na důležité dramatiky, jako jsou Lyly, Marlowe a Shakespeare. Jakobínská část kapitoly začíná komentářem problém spojených s Jakubem I. a jeho vládou a dále se zaměřuje na jakobínskou revenge tragedy (tragedii pomsty) – nejtemnější období pro hrdinky anglického dramatu - a na nové žánry městské komedie a domácí tragedie, které přinesly nové zpracování hrdinek, a posunulo anglické drama od předchozího renesančního typu ke komedii období restaurace.

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Résumé (English)

This thesis examines the evolution of English female dramatic characters. The

Early Modern period in Europe was greatly influenced by the rediscovery of the

Classical Greece and Rome – that is why the whole first chapter is dedicated to the

Classical era. It provides description of the social position of women in Athens of the fifth century BCE because that is when the first genuine dramatic genres appeared and it is important to understand the social background of the first female dramatic personae that were ever written. It also deals with four representatives of the Classical literature,

Euripides, Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, and their works that later introduced many important female characters to Early Modern literary world. The second chapter is focused on the influences that came from the Renaissance Italy – the literary defences of women, generic innovations and the ways how these innovations got to the

Elizabethan England. Among the most influential innovations important for the development of English dramatic female characters belong the pastoral, the tragicomedy and the following generic complexity of commedia dell‟arte. The last chapter focuses on the particular situation in the Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It describes the ways in which Elizabeth dealt with her problematic accession and how it influenced the dramatic female characters. It also describes the evolution of the English drama to provide continuality in the development with the previous eras. The subchapters focus on important dramatics such as Lyly, Marlowe and Shakespeare. The Jacobean part begins with commenting on the problems connected with James I and his reign, and then focuses on the Jacobean Revenge tragedy – the darkest era for the English female dramatic characters – and on the new genres of city comedy and domestic tragedy that brought new treatment of the female characters and moved the English drama from the previous Renaissance type to the Restoration comedy.

103