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Blasting Binaries and Humanizing Humans: Thomas Middleton's Feminism Amy L

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Blasting Binaries and Humanizing Humans: Thomas Middleton's Feminism Amy L Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2007 Blasting Binaries and Humanizing Humans: Thomas Middleton's Feminism Amy L. Stahl Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES BLASTING BINARIES AND HUMANIZING HUMANS: THOMAS MIDDLETON’S FEMINISM By AMY L. STAHL A thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2007 The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Amy L. Stahl defended on March 28, 2007. Celia R. Daileader Professor Directing Thesis Gary Taylor Committee Member Nancy Bradley Warren Committee Member Approved: Nancy Bradley Warren, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…….. ...................................................................................................... iv INTRODUCTION………….. ............................................................................. 1 1. Making Sense of the Early Modern Literary Corpus: Women, Embodiment, and Disfigurement in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy ........................................................................................ 7 Figuring the Female on Stage ..................................................................... 10 Female Embodiment and (Dis)figuring the Binary .................................... 19 The Patriarchal Figure ................................................................................ 24 Reflection upon the Early Modern Literary Corpus ................................... 30 2. Odd Couplings: Women and Marriage in Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s and The Roaring Girl.......................................................................... 31 Characterization: Women and Types.......................................................... 31 Coherence: The Strong Woman and Marriage ........................................... 47 Coupling Women: Expectations and Reality.............................................. 55 3. Female Circumscription: Theatricality and Hell in Middleton’s The Changeling ................................................................................................ 58 Casting Roles .............................................................................................. 59 Impossible Parts.......................................................................................... 68 Hell’s Theatre ............................................................................................. 71 The Womanless Circle................................................................................ 75 CONCLUSION………….................................................................................... 78 ENDNOTES………….. ...................................................................................... 81 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………............................................................................ 96 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .............................................................................. 104 iii ABSTRACT Harold Bloom has insisted that during the English Renaissance, William Shakespeare invented the human. In tortured characters like Hamlet and King Lear, we find the definition of humanity. Now, if being human means that we all must wax noble and operate within a universe of types and extremities, fitting into an age-old ideal and perpetually soliloquizing in angst about actualizing this ideal, then Shakespeare did indeed imbue life into man. But if being human means living in a material world, grappling with its real circumstances, and being true to one’s own personality, preferences, and aspirations, then this line of thought must be reexamined. A contemporary playwright to Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton does not presume to define the human but rather explores humanity in an imitative form. Focusing on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy; The Roaring Girl; No Wit, No Help like a Woman’s; and The Changeling, this paper demonstrates that Middleton breaks away from the school of thought in which Shakespeare operates and provides his audience with a more complex, more inclusive, and—in many ways—more admirable depiction of life. In this paper, I intend to show that the plays of Thomas Middleton are a decidedly more “ideal” source for understanding what it means to be human than those of William Shakespeare. I pay particular attention to how Middleton represents women and how he plays with (and thus overturns) the ideological binaries of his day. iv INTRODUCTION [I]f gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. —Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990).1 …[S]ome perhaps do flout The plot, saying, ’tis too thin, too weak, too mean; Some for the person will revile the scene, And wonder that a creature of her being Should be the subject of a poet, seeing, In the world’s eye, none weighs so light….—Epilogue to The Roaring Girl.2 After the Oxford Collected Works of Thomas Middleton is made available to the public in a matter of months, many readers and theatre-goers will encounter Thomas Middleton’s writings either for the first time or from a fresh perspective, as the collection sets forth the most complete set of his extant work and contextualizes its composition, performance, and critical interpretation. Because initial interpretations on paper and stage create future critical expectations of his writings, it is especially timely to now evaluate the work his writings perform. The verse selection with which this study opens is particularly apt in that it addresses both the reception of newly encountered work (and in particular, the theatrical genre, which is this study’s focus) and a glimpse of one of Middleton’s most intriguing subjects: women in early modern society. The epilogue to The Roaring Girl is important because it is sympathetic towards—even approving of—a woman contemporary society loved to talk about and cast judgment upon. In the epilogue, the play’s roaring girl stands as a representative of innumerable early modern women unfairly critiqued, labeled whores or monsters for simply living as they must or as they choose. Instead of altering these women from beings “[l]imned to the life” to better fit societal demands, as other artists do, Middleton presents his female characters as real and unique persons (2). Indeed, Middleton compares his own dramatic presentations to those that women must make 1 of themselves to a disapproving society. While Middleton recognizes that his own presentations are but representations of reality, like the painter’s portrait of a woman, he also shows, more importantly, that women themselves are but representations—representations that often do not reflect reality at all. Middleton suggests that when audiences unfairly judge his writings, they subject women to comparison with an artificial ideal, a woman that cannot exist in reality, just as the painting loses its vitality and beauty as societal demands render it a life-less monstrosity. As in this epilogue, Middleton’s work characteristically not only sympathizes with women but also insists that their persons are more complex than the categories in which they are too often placed. Middleton’s comparison of his own work to that of unjustly critized women is also characteristic of his writings in that he is both highly observant of social details, especially concerning gender, and that he finds them worth portrayal and commentary. Paul Yachinin’s assertion that Middleton’s tragedies are specifically “sociopolitical” applies very well to Middleton’s analysis of gender.3 Informed by Ben Jonson’s own resentment of the “debasement” of writing for popular entertainment rather than operating as a lofty “poet,” Yachinin argues that Middleton, like Jonson, “emphasized the traditional idea of tragedy as a serious and culturally weighty dramatic form as one way of legitimating the activity of playwriting.”4 But as this study will demonstrate, examining two tragedies and two comedies, Middleton’s comedies are equally as “culturally weighty” as his tragedies; he renders both forms effective modes of cultural representation and critique. Middleton’s comedies and tragedies have often been described as “realistic.” It is this realism that leads T.S. Eliot to his conclusion that Middleton “has no message”; beneath the life- like portrayal of early modern life, critics have found it difficult to find Middleton’s own perspective on the society he represents.5 But as Margot Heineman suggests, Middleton specifically depicts his own culture not simply as “a passive reflection of the world” but as “purposeful and critical.”6 Indeed, Middleton is a self-conscious writer; he carefully positions his works within written discourse and levies his own critique of the culture and ideals these writings represent. Numerous critics have highlighted Middleton’s references to and reworkings of contemporary writers, including Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson, and Marlowe, beginning with some of his earliest works, such
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