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'Often Dyings': Wedding Night Tragedy on the Renaissance Stage

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'Often Dyings': Wedding Night Tragedy on the Renaissance Stage UNIVERSITY OF READING ‘Shrill cryings’ and ‘often dyings’: Wedding Night Tragedy on the Renaissance Stage PhD Department of English Literature Adrian Blamires September 2016 Declaration I confirm that this is my own work and the use of all material from other sources has been properly and fully acknowledged. ……………………………………………… Adrian Blamires Contents Declaration of authorship Abstract Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Introduction: The Tragic Wedding ................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2 Tragic Wedding Plots and Motifs in Elizabethan Drama ............................................ 46 Chapter 3 Shakespeare’s Wedding Night Tragedy ...................................................................... 75 Chapter 4 Broken Nuptials and Maimed Rites in Marston’s Tragedies ………….……….…. 115 Chapter 5 Libertines and Liebestods: The Jacobean Fatal Marriage .......................................... 158 Chapter 6 Wedding Night Martyrs in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon ................................. 194 A Caroline Coda ........................................................................................................ 225 Appendix I ................................................................................................................. 229 Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 233 Abstract I argue in this dissertation that tragic and tragicomic plots centred on the wedding night were a major convention on the English Renaissance stage. Previous scholarship has identified ‘broken nuptials’ in Shakespeare and ‘subverted wedding nights’ in Beaumont and Fletcher, but these scenarios have not been addressed as part of a wider convention. I contend that almost every dramatist of the era, working individually or in collaboration, utilised ‘tragic wedding’ designs. Whilst they drew upon various precedents, particularly from the classical period, their dramaturgical focus on the wedding night was highly distinctive. My thesis highlights the employment of ‘delayed consummation’ structures – familiar from romance and comedy – to a tragic end; I also consider ‘displaced consummations’ in which the bridal chamber is subject to the incursion of revengers or rivals, often leading to rape, murder or martyrdom. ‘Wedding night tragedy’ takes shape in the Elizabethan era and becomes a recognizable sub-genre by the Caroline period. The subverted transition rites lead, I suggest, to fluctuations in sexual identity, as a range of competing discourses on marriage and eros are sounded. The prevailing matrimonial idealism of the age is challenged by residual patristic doctrine or emergent libertine ideology. The dominant discourse tends to win out, I maintain, even in tragic defeat, but moral absolutism is frequently shaken. The wedding night focus was accompanied by major mimetic breakthroughs, as dramatists developed symbolic means by which to suggest the consummation, and depicted the marital bedchamber for the first time. Scenes of unprecedented intimacy were staged, often to unnerving or sensational dramatic effect. I exemplify my arguments with detailed discussions of a range of texts, from famous plays such as Othello and The Changeling, to less familiar (but often vital) works such as Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany and Sophonisba. Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my doctorate, and the Reading University English Department for supporting me throughout my studies. I give particular thanks to my supervisors, Michelle O’Callaghan and Mark Hutchings, for guiding me with insight, patience and good humour despite my preference for byways rather than highways; if some semblance of direction emerges out of my endless indirections it is largely thanks to them. I would also like to thank my examiners, Lucy Munro and Chloë Houston, who provided valuable observations on my thesis as a whole, and the members of the Reading English department who gave helpful feedback on particular sections: Cindy Becker, Phillipa Hardman, John Holmes, Carolyn Lyle, Andrew Mangham, Stephen Matthews, and Peter Stoneley. My heartfelt gratitude goes to the many friends who have given me encouragement. I owe a major debt to Derek Beaven for reading some of the following chapters, for asking many important questions, and for pointing out some handholds when I was stuck on the ‘north face’. Special thanks as well to Robert Fitzmaurice who has provided innumerable perceptions and suggestions along the way, and to Candy Fitzmaurice for bringing the Chinese story of ‘The Butterfly Lovers’ to my attention. A huge thankyou as well to Adam Stout and Matthew Henry for sharing their wit and wisdom on a host of pertinent matters. I am enormously grateful to my mother, Mary Jill Blamires, who has offered unfailing aid and encouragement. Above all, I would like to thank my wife, Lindsay, and my son, Rufus, for supporting me throughout, and in particular for helping me to get over the line – I couldn’t have done it without you (not even close). CHAPTER 1 _____________ Introduction: The Tragic Wedding My thesis is that the subverted wedding night became a major tragic (and tragicomic) convention on the English Renaissance stage, one that has gone largely unaddressed beyond its occurrence in a handful of famous works. Weddings in early modern drama tend to be associated with the happy end of romantic comedy, the collective festivities before a move offstage to the bridal chamber – to what Stephen Greenblatt calls the ‘unrepresented consummations of unrepresented marriages’.1 The second part of Greenblatt’s phrase refers, I take it, to the church service, which seems never to have been fully represented, perhaps due to sensitivities over abuse of the Prayer Book.2 Yet Thomas Heywood, writing in 1624, lists marriage amongst a number of musty ploys used ‘to bombast out a play’,3 and in fact almost every element of the wedding day is to be found in the drama of the era. We see the waking of the bride, the bridal procession, the entrance to and emergence from the chapel, wedding banquets, and nuptial entertainments such as masques and plays. There are also dumbshow solemnities led by priests, examples of handfasting or self-knotted unions, and numerous instances of betrothal by ring or gift exchange, which for some at the time meant that a marriage had been formed. But what of the wedding night? The consummation itself could not, of course, be dramatized, for obvious reasons of decorum. Yet various dramaturgical strategies are employed, as I demonstrate in this dissertation, to foreground the sexual rites of marriage on the English Renaissance stage, particularly where those rites are tragically disrupted. Some conventions that concern the wedding night, such as the bed-trick, have attracted critical attention,4 but others remain less familiar – scenes, for example, that depict the readying of the bride for bed, or the reveille matin (post-nuptial waking of 1 Greenblatt 1988: 89. 2 Bevington 1984: 142 suggests that this accounts for a general absence of Christian ceremony on stage. 3 Prologue to The English Traveller. 4 See Desens 1994 and Doniger 2000. The majority of Renaissance bed-tricks have a nuptial setting. 1 the couple). Whilst I consider such scenes in the course of this study, my main focus is on the structural and semiotic means by which the nuptial night comes to the fore, in plots that involve a ‘delayed consummation’, or in staged action that denotes a ‘displaced consummation’. In many of the plays the sexual union of bride and groom is postponed or usurped, usually having come under threat from revengers or rivals who would pervert its course. Well-known examples of such dramatic narratives include Othello, The Changeling and The Maid’s Tragedy. A securer understanding of these plays is to be obtained, I suggest, from locating them within a wider generic field. Hence I give equal space to some largely unexplored plays in which delayed or displaced consummations serve as the structural hub. Some of these less familiar works – Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany and Sophonisba, for example – are of great consequence in the development of a ‘tragic wedding’ convention in which marriages are contested at the point of erotic union. My aim is to provide an intertheatrical case study, tracing the development of a ‘tragic wedding’ convention. The works I discuss have been categorised in a variety of ways: revenge tragedy, romantic or love tragedy, sex tragedy, domestic tragedy, pathetic tragedy (melodrama), and Italianate intrigue tragedy. A number of plays would sit comfortably within several or even all of these categories. I adopt ‘wedding night tragedy’ as a generic handle, sharing the view of Alistair Fowler that ‘variety of description and evaluation’ is welcome with regard to literary family resemblances.5 Louise Clubb, writing on Italian Renaissance drama, points to a range of ‘accumulated stage-structures, or theatergrams’ at the heart of professional dramaturgy, a ‘common fund of theatrical coin’, or ‘a pool of exchangeable parts and practices, the unpublished common property of playwrights and actors’.6 The ‘tragic wedding’ (or ‘fatal marriage’) convention can be viewed as one such theatregram. It occurs, as I discuss below, in neoclassical Italian drama, but became more of a mainstay in England, where tragedy loomed larger in the populist repertory. Almost without exception,
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