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

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2007 Blasting Binaries and Humanizing Humans: Thomas Middleton's Feminism Amy L. Stahl

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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

BLASTING BINARIES AND HUMANIZING HUMANS: THOMAS

MIDDLETON’S FEMINISM

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 lifelike 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 as The Ghost of Lucrece (1600) and The Black Book (1604), and running through to his latest works, like The Changeling (1622).7 That is not to say that Middleton’s works are “unoriginal” but rather that he consciously enters into a discourse with

2 other writings of his day. In his epistle to The Roaring Girl, Middleton distinguishes himself from the generation of writers before him: The fashion of play-making I can properly compare to nothing so naturally as the alteration in apparel: for in the time of the great-crop doublet, your huge bombasted plays, quilted with mighty words to lean purpose, was only then in fashion; and as the doublet fell, neater inventions began to set up. Now is the time of spruceness, our plays follow the niceness of our garments: single plots, quaint conceits, lecherous jests dressed up in hanging sleeves…. (1-10) Middleton again critiques his play-writing predecessors in A Game at Chess when the author character, the Fat Bishop of Spalato, delivers his latest book to the White House: “here’s my recantation in the last leaf,/ writ like a Ciceronian in pure Latin,” to which the White Bishop of Canterbury replies, “Pure honesty, the plainer Latin serves then” (2.2.90-92). But Middleton does not simply distinguish his writings in terms of style but also in substance. He points out that other writers’ purposes are often “lean,” their plenty of language compensating for their lack of substance. Like the Fat Bishop of Spalato, whose “[f]at cathedral bod[y]/ ha[s]…but [a] lean little soul,” so these writings’ adorned bulk merely shrouds a shabby intent (2.2.4-5). As Middleton points out in his epistle to The Roaring Girl, too often a writer is but an “obscene fellow,” a hypocrite who “cares not what he writes against others”; he “rip[s] up the most nasty vice that ever hell belched forth,” even while using his profits to entertain his own “private” vices (25, 29-30, 28). In order to build his own honor and reputation, the Fat Bishop of Spalato also employs his flamboyant words to cover his own faults (whoring and gluttony the most readily visible): I know my pen draws blood of the Black House. There’s ne’er a book I write but their cause bleeds. It has lost many an ounce of reputation Since I came of this side. I strike deep in And leave the orifex gushing where I come. But where is my advancement all this while I ha’ gaped for’t? I’d have some round preferment, corpulent dignity That bears some breadth and compass in the gift on’t. (3.1.1-9)

3 It is significant that immediately following the Fat Bishop of Spalato’s delivery of his first writing for the White House, the play’s most vulnerable character, the innocent Virgin White Queen’s Pawn, approaches the assembled White House leaders to plead for justice, relating the Jesuit Black Bishop’s Pawn’s attempt to rape her—and no one believes her. While empty reputations are continually propelled through attractive but false language, truth is denied utterance. Middleton, however, places himself in juxtaposition to this practice, insisting that he writes for the good of the slandered. In The Roaring Girl epistle, he claims to rewrite Moll’s reputation: “Worse things, I must need confess, the world has taxed her for than has been written of her; but ’tis the excellency of a writer to leave things better than he finds ’em,” and in contrast to other “obscene” writers, he “rather wish[es] in such discoveries where reputation lies bleeding, a slackness of truth, than fulness of slander” (21-23, 31-32). While he here admits that his Moll may actually be an improvement upon the real Moll Cutpurse, the following play focuses on the necessity of truthful language, of withholding slander and supporting the reality of character. As Middleton demonstrates that women are more than their unfounded reputations in The Roaring Girl, he reveals in A Game at Chess that men in powerful positions cast these women into such roles—the Black House turns the Virgin White Queen’s Pawn into a lying whore, and Sir Alexander makes Moll a common city prostitute. These men prey upon women in order to create an honorable disguise for their own rotten characters. The Fat Bishop of Spalato seizes his opportunity for worldly advancement among the Black House: It is but penning Another recantation and inventing Two or three bitter books against the White House And then I’m in o’ t’other side again As firm as e’er I was, as fat and flourishing.— Black Knight, expect a wonder ere’t be long. (3.1.52-57) His written words, though presented as the relation of religious and political truths, are nothing but “inventions”; indeed, just as the Fat Bishop is aware that he is a piece playing in a game of chess, so he also realizes that all he does is a performance. As he notes when the Black Knight enters the stage, “I must look to my play then” (3.1.24).

4 Jonathan Dollimore writes that the relatively new idea of subjectivity in the early modern period gave rise to a “growing complexity in characterisation,” leading to “the realisation that identity itself is a fiction or construct. Theatrical disguise and play were not merely a representation of this, but in part the very means of its discovery.”8 If Middleton does one thing with his writings, it is highlight the reality of identity as a construct—a construct shaped by powerful men to better themselves and to place women in roles most conducive to their own social advancement. As we shall see in this study’s three chapters, Middleton has a mind to existing written discourse and consciously represents his culture’s dominant values and practices, not simply mirroring its contradictions but unapologetically exposing them for what they are. Chapter one examines Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy, showing how it retells the popular rape legend of Lucrece, specifically reworking one of Shakespeare’s renditions of it: Titus Andronicus. Instead of victimizing a silent stage symbol, Middleton gives his heroine voice, agency, and her own individual personality. And while Shakespeare typically presents the dichotomy of emblematic virgin and paradigmatic whore, Middleton’s representation of women renders neither of the two main female characters types—neither is Mary or Eve, symbol of purity or embodied monstrosity. This chapter focuses on how Middleton employs the tale of the highly prized woman within a masculine political realm, exposing the system’s ideological and structural indecencies—in both cultural writing and performance. Turning to comedy, chapter two explores the portrayals of three strong female characters in The Roaring Girl and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s. In these tragedies, Middleton again consciously works with set character types for his women, but the types into which they ostensibly fall clearly do not fit them. From the chaste Moll, who roars in the streets with roaming gallants, to Mistress Low-water, who rules both her husband’s and her brother’s fortunes, Middleton presents very plausible human beings, psychologically realistic women who are full of complex desires and wills and exhibit a competent and admirable agency. Chapter three analyzes the disturbing but popular tragedy of The Changeling. While most criticism readily acknowledges the characters’ psychological plausibility, it generally misinterprets the psychological reality of the situation. This chapter explores the alarmingly human nature of Beatrice-Joanna and the horror of her spiral towards death and hell’s flames not as a representation of her unconscious sexual drive but of the unseen yet ever-felt cultural

5 imperative that she play her role as ideal woman, a part that she, as a plausibly faulty human being, cannot possibly fulfill in both substance and performance. Swapan Chakravorty describes Middleton as an individual thinker and voice in his society.9 This study seeks to demonstrate that he promotes that same ability to think and speak in his realistic female characters. It is not his male auctoritas that condescendingly or manipulatively lends his female “puppets” the agency and words that are in actuality his alone, but rather his insight, his observant eye and his critical pen, that portrays what he perceives as reality.10

6 CHAPTER ONE WOMEN, EMBODIMENT, AND DISFIGUREMENT IN SHAKEPSEARE’S TITUS ANDRONICUS AND MIDDLETON’S THE LADY’S TRAGEDY

In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, the statesman Marcus breathes beautiful lines of poetry to his freshly ravished and mutilated niece: Alas, a crimson river of warm blood, Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind, Doth rise and fall between thy rosèd lips, Coming and going with thy honeyed breath…. Oh, had the monster seen those lily hands Tremble like aspen leaves upon a lute And make the silken strings delight to kiss them, He would not then have touched them for his life! Or had he heard the heavenly harmony Which that sweet tongue hath made, He would have dropped his knife and fell asleep, As Cerberus at the Thracian poet’s feet. (2.4.22-25, 44-51)11 In a play littered with severed body parts, gruesome delights, and foul lusts, Marcus is an oddly gentle and seemingly just man. Unfamiliar with the physicality of the battlefield, Marcus is notably detached from the other characters’ brutal actions, and on page, such poetic words seem a perfectly natural response for this philosophical character. Yet, as a number of critics have noticed, when one hears this poetry coupled with the sight of Lavinia’s torn and oozing body, his “heavenly harmony” takes on grotesque overtones.12 There is nothing of Lavinia’s horrific physical pain or emotional agony in his images of dancing fountains, dewy roses, and honeyed sweetness, nothing of her danger of death or sense of loss. He does not see Lavinia or her trauma. Marcus is either oblivious to or unfeeling toward Lavinia’s reception of his words, which do not offer comfort but remind of what she has lost and suffered; he seems more consumed with his personal grief and his brother Titus’ grief to come than with Lavinia’s (if indeed it even occurs to him that she might have great sorrow herself). In transferring her reality

7 to metaphor, Marcus reduces Lavinia to a mere symbol. An honest response to this scene unearths troubling observations about the play’s view of women. Questions about objectification, value, autonomy, and personhood arise. The play’s treatment of Lavinia is horrifying: she is first torn from her betrothed and given to another (as a number of critics have pointed out, her first legal “rape”), then forced to watch her husband stabbed to death, then gang raped (quite possibly, as her rapists suggest, on top her husband’s corpse, which serves as a bloody “pillow” [2.3.130]), mutilated, mocked by her rapists, verbally tormented by her family, commanded to carry her father’s severed hand in her wounded mouth, forced to re-enact her rape on numerous occasions, and finally killed by her own father in a public spectacle. Even so, critics (including ones of the feminist persuasion) feel compelled to praise this play and the questions it raises about the human condition. But in our close reading of the text, we must wonder why Lavinia, gentle and passive as she is, must suffer from the hands of her rapists and also from her family’s supposedly well- meaning treatment and finally from the ever-watching audience. Is there no other way for questions about the condition of women in a patriarchy to be raised? It is argued that Shakespeare, master craftsman that he is, did so in the most effective, most evocative way. As Harold Bloom insists, Shakespeare “invented…the representation of the human”; the psychological realism of his characters is what makes Shakespeare so memorable, what makes his works so profound.13 As with a number of Shakespeare’s other plays, the bulk of criticism on Titus Andronicus follows in this vein of analyzing the characters as plausible human beings, thus exploring the depths of what it means to be human. But in Shakespeare’s own time, his depictions of human nature were brought into question—even in his own acting company. In 1611, the King’s Men purchased and performed a tragic play by a playwright named Thomas Middleton: The Lady’s Tragedy. This play, though written at least seventeen years later than Shakespeare’s, is more than likely an answer to Titus Andronicus, a revision of Shakespeare’s own revision of the ancient legend of chaste Lucrece. Both written and visual art in medieval and early modern times were fascinated with the tale of Lucrece, forming quite a corpus of representations of the tragic Roman character (and her likeminded offspring). As Julia Briggs points out in her introduction to the play in the forthcoming Oxford edition of Middleton’s complete works, a number of plays inspired by the legend were written and performed in the latter part of the sixteenth century and

8 the first decade of the seventeenth century, including Antony Munday’s The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon (1598), Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), John Marston’s Sophonisba, the Wonder of Women (1605), Middleton’s own The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece (1607), and John Fletcher’s Tragedy of Valentinian (1610-11). Briggs suggests that Middleton’s play was perhaps influenced by each of these tales, especially Fletcher’s, but Titus Andronicus is not listed among the possibilities. Indeed, since Titus Andronicus made its London debut over a decade and a half before The Lady’s Tragedy and in the intervening years, all of these plays were also enacted, it may seem implausible that Middleton’s play specifically revises Shakespeare’s. After all, there are no direct correlatives, such as character names, settings, or quotations: Shakespeare’s play is set in ancient Rome, while Middleton’s is an unspecified contemporary kingdom; Shakespeare’s religious framework is pagan, while Middleton’s is clearly Christian (and more specifically, Protestant). Regardless, as I have argued in my introduction, Middleton was a writer conscious of the literary culture into which he was born. He would have been familiar with Titus Andronicus both because of its popularity on stage.14 Additionally, Shakespeare’s play went through several publications in the seventeenth century, including one in 1600 and one in 1611, the year of Middleton’s own work.15 Even if Middleton did not read one of the 1611 editions of his predecessor’s play, it is not improbable that he would have had access to at least some print version of the play. Furthermore, this was not the first time Middleton revised a Shakespearean rendition of Lucrece; eleven years earlier, while still a youth, Middleton “re-told” Shakespeare’s 1594 Rape of Lucrece with his own extended poem of the story, The Ghost of Lucrece.16 While early modern theatre performances were no doubt less “realistic” than modern productions, due in part to technological capabilities and theatrical conventions, it is nonetheless appropriate to examine dramas of the period as possessing, at least, elements of realism. In order to capture human interest, performances must reflect reality in some way; the audience’s ability to see something of themselves (or, at least, other human beings) played out on the stage is what gives humor to comedy and incites empathy and horror in response to tragedy. In other words, it is this essential imitation of our own existence that gives drama its appeal. But more significant than plays’ simple capture of elements from life is the reciprocal mimesis theatre and life engage in. Because theatre is both a reflection of culture and an actual part of society, it thus becomes an active part of that society and a shaping aspect of its culture. The raging early modern debate

9 over the (im)morality of theatre that involved polemicists like Philip Stubbes, John Rainoldes, John Greene, and Stephen Gossen was primarily in response to theatre’s presumed ability to affect the behavior and personalities, even, of individuals and society at large.17 One example of this symbiotic relationship—and one directly pertinent to this paper in particular—is found in recent articles by Jody Enders and Kim Solga; both critics show how proving rape in medieval and early modern Europe was necessarily a performance on the part of the victim, a performance that followed the model of the “reappearance” scenes of ravished women on stage. As Solga observes, “The processes of confession and the processes of fictional representation—the conventions of standardized mimesis—are mutually reinforcing and determining: theatre makes rape knowable, understandable, and… believable to those who were not—could not have been—there to witness.”18 Indeed, despite its limitations in depicting what we consider the real world, theatre does in fact both imitate reality and serve as an exemplar for it. After all, our definitions of reality are often grounded in ideals, and where can ideals better become reality than on the stage? It is precisely for this reason that we critically examine these works.

Figuring the Female on Stage

One of the strongest trends in feminist criticism of Titus Andronicus is to insist that Lavinia should have more centrality in the tragedy than productions have traditionally given her. For instance, Pascale Aebischer explores various stage and screen productions of Titus Andronicus and advocates greater realism in Lavinia’s portrayal—Lavinia is almost always performed as a stylized object without voice, but Aebischer believes she should rather appear as a real woman, visibly suffering. Examining the shockingly realistic 2001-2002 Kaos Theatre stage production directed by Xavier Leret, in which Lavinia is rendered “a present-day woman— lively, assertive, fond of her father” and the gruesome details of her rape are presented (complete with a “skirt ripped open to reveal her naked crotch from which blood was still dripping down along her legs”), Aebischer concludes that Shakespeare does not “necessarily privilege the male over the female hero.”19 Indeed, in this production, writes Aebischer, “father and daughter were

10 united in their fellow-suffering.”20 And while the thought of a Lavinia with personality, emotions, and will is satisfying, I cannot find justification in the original text for such a performance.21 Rather than earning a spotlight for herself, Lavinia’s function is to enhance the brightness of her father’s; her pain and grief is not her own but rather an emblem of her father’s much greater suffering. When the Andronici are presented with Lavinia’s ravished body, trying to make sense of her bleeding, mutilated flesh, it is not to determine what has happened to her or how they might help or comfort her but how they might understand its effects upon themselves. Titus explains, It was my dear, and he that wounded her Hath hurt me more than had he killed me dead…. But that which gives my soul the greatest spurn Is dear Lavinia, dearer than my soul. (3.1.91-92, 101-102, my emphasis) These are Titus’ most compassionate, most loving words for Lavinia, and at this moment, we truly do pity the man. Yet this speech is not for Lavinia at all, even though he declares that Lavinia is “dearer than my soul.” In analyzing rape in Shakespeare, Carolyn D. Williams proposes that rape is, quoting Anna Clark, essentially “a violent act aimed at humiliating women.”22 But I would argue that it is less about hurting and humiliating the woman than it is about hurting and humiliating the man or men in the woman’s life. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gayle Rubin both argue in their studies on the homosocial nature of heterosexual “relations” that every aspect of such relations is actually, to quote from Sedgwick’s title, “between men.” That is, women are simply used to form bonds between men, as Rubin concludes: “If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it.”23 As a result of a later medieval definition of rape as the abduction of a woman from her father, husband, or betrothed, a definition that remained in operation into the early modern period, critics have pointed out that rape is sometimes seen not in terms of Williams’ definition but as a kind of theft. However, it is more than that; it is a social act of violence and defamation directed against the male proprietor of the stolen belonging. Essentially, the two “partners” (to apply Rubin’s term) in rape are both male. In her persuasive article on the early modern standard for rape’s performance, Solga highlights the fact that Lavinia’s family appears to miss the fact that Lavinia has indeed been raped until she literally spells out her fate before their watching eyes. Solga argues that in

11 actuality “the problem is not that the Andronicii do not understand that Lavinia has been raped, but rather that because they do not yet know who is responsible they are unable to conceive of the rape as a homosocial assault—an assault on their own bodies (or their family body) by another man—and hence they are unable to conceive of the rape as rape at all.”24 In this context, it is not surprising that Marcus perceives Lavinia’s condition only in terms of its effect on her father (his first address to the ravished Lavinia concludes with sympathy not for her but for her father—“Come, let us go and make thy father blind,/ For such a sight will blind a father’s eye” (2.4.52-53). Neither is it surprising that Titus understands Lavinia’s miserable condition as chiefly a hurt to himself, the enemy attacking and injuring him. The greatest pain in this scene— indeed, the greatest pain resulting from Lavinia’s rape and mutilation—is not her own but the pain inflicted upon Titus through her, precisely as it was intended to be (3.1.52-53). Titus further identifies Lavinia as an extension of himself when Lucius tries to wipe her tears—significantly, the first action that anyone has made towards recognizing Lavinia’s own grief and seeking to offer her comfort—and Titus thwarts him. Titus declares: Mark, Marcus, mark! I understand her signs. Had she a tongue to speak, now would she say That to her brother which I said to thee. His napkin, with his true tears all bewet, Can do no service on her sorrowful cheeks. (3.1.142-147) Because Titus has already determined that he wants no such comfort in the extremity of his suffering and has said so to Marcus, it is a redundant scenario for Lucius to try to comfort Lavinia; Titus sees comfort as impossible for himself, and if Titus wishes for no comfort, then Lavinia, too, can neither have nor desire comfort. Titus speaks for the voiceless Lavinia as for himself. But if we were to truly evaluate Lavinia’s situation, assuming her character to be a portrayal of a human being, we must realize, as many feminist critics have, what Lavinia has experienced. Lavinia has just witnessed her husband’s murder and undergone an extremely violent rape. After her rape (or even during her rape), these men also cut her hands and tongue from her—thus violating, tearing, and exposing the most sensitive and personal parts of the female body (those seen and unseen). Then, not satisfied with the external tortures they have inflicted upon her, they specifically torment the sensitive interior of her mind by mocking her and laughing at her helpless, violated condition; her rapists brutally penetrate her entire self,

12 leaving nothing to her, save her will. And that will was clearly never Lavinia’s in the first place; her will is subsumed into Titus’s own from the first. A woman in just such a condition is bound to crave kindness, gentleness, and comfort, despite her father’s preference that he himself (and hence her) remain inconsolable.25 But in this scene, we are not made to see Lavinia as a real woman but as a symbol. In his gruesome meditations, Titus asks Lavinia to “make some sign how I may do thee ease” and offers, “shall we cut away our hands, like thine?/ Or shall we bite our tongues, and in dumb shows/ Pass the remainder of our hateful days?” (3.1.121, 130-132). By such offerings, he clearly does not seek to do Lavinia “ease” but to dwell upon his wrongs and his life, which consists of nothing but “hateful days”; Lavinia is the visual representation of the torment that it is for him to live. She is the symbol of Titus’ sufferings, the ever-present reminder that Titus is justified in his horrific deeds of revenge. But even as a symbol, Lavinia cannot figure centrally in the play as we might like her to. Cynthia Marshall explores the dilemma of sympathizing with Lavinia when we do not see or get to encounter (through her speech) her actual rape and subsequent suffering. And while Marshall does not argue that Lavinia is a powerful character with personhood, she does insist that Lavinia is much more of a presence on stage, for “[t]he silent woman [does] become[…] invisible in the text, but not on the stage.”26 Like the Kaos Theatre production’s portrayal of a realistically mutilated Lavinia, bleeding and torn, exposed to the audience, Marshall’s Lavinia also commands a powerfully disturbing stage presence, one that continually draws the audience’s attention whenever she is on stage (nearly all the scenes in which Titus features). But when constructing a stage presence for Lavinia that mimics physical reality, we find that the story takes place over the course of at least nine months (since Tamora gives birth to Aaron’s child without anyone suspecting that the child is anyone but Saturninus’), and in that amount of time, Lavinia’s wounds should have healed. Though she would still have stumps instead of hands, Lavinia should realistically no longer appear bloody and “ravished” as the play instructs for her first appearance after the rape. But we know that Shakespeare liked to telescope events that would have unfolded over the course of actual months or years into a brief period of stage time; this compression of time forces Lavinia to remain simply a bloody symbol rather than an acting person on the stage until the very end. Despite her perpetual gruesome appearance, however, Lavinia is still only a present symbol, not an active person, and as such, not the powerful gruesome spectacle Marshall suggests but a silent victim.27

13 As is characteristic of silent victims, Lavinia submits to—and even endorses—the actions of the males who surround her, thus causing their actions towards her and hers towards them to appear as her own desire, her own will. Lavinia’s death scene is perhaps the most apparent demonstration of her characteristic submission and conformity. Aebischer, however, argues that Lavinia actually has a very powerful voice, and her silencing is not only a result of rapists’ cutting but also—more disturbingly—of our own oppressive interpretations of her, especially in her death scene. Aebischer laments this repeated, active silencing of Lavinia: “In one production, she even ‘handed’ her father the knife with which he then stabbed her in a loving embrace. Obviously, Lavinia’s voice is silenced and ignored not only within the play, but the character is even today subjected to an unwarranted and unwanted critical and theatrical euthanasia.”28 Certainly feminist critics would not wish for a woman’s death by her father’s hand in the name of “honor” to be interpreted as a “loving” act that conforms to her personal will, but such an interpretation of Titus Andronicus is far from “unwarranted.” Aebischer contends that since Lavinia chooses to identify with Philomela’s rape tale (rather than with Lucrece’s), Lavinia expresses a desire to live because Philomela survives her revenge and “acquire[s] a new voice” in the form of a nightingale; thus Titus becomes Lavinia’s unwanted killer rather than her loving assistant.29 But Shakespeare does not paint Lavinia as a full character with her own voice and desires; her death is clearly meant to be an event that she very literally embraces. Lavinia explicitly enters the banquet scene for the purpose of dying; she is neither unaware of Titus’ intentions nor opposed to them. Lavinia appears, according to Shakespeare’s stage directions, “with a veil over her face,” decked in the attire of a virgin bride taking the oath to become the bride of heaven, conjuring up images of the virgin martyrs, figures quite popular in late medieval and early modern literature—the glorified violated woman, who can only achieve this glory for her chastity through her purging death, the willing sacrifice.30 In Julie Taymor’s 1999 film production, Titus, Lavinia also wears a veil during her first entrance in the play. While Shakespeare does not give explicit directions for Lavinia to wear a veil in this first scene as he does in her final scene, as the loving daughter and sister, she would plausibly be dressed in mourning for her twenty-one brothers who return from the war to be buried. Taymor has Lavinia enter through a door to the Andronici tomb, the light surrounding her alone in the dark room as she gently enters, the veil featuring prominently as she stands in the threshold and then when she kneels for Titus’ blessing. The scene is reminiscent of visual representations of

14 the Annunciation, thus linking Lavinia with Christ’s mother, the paradigmatic chaste woman and daughter gladly obedient to her Father’s will. Shakespeare’s Lavinia does, no doubt, endorse her killing at her father’s hand because she is, like the Virgin Mary, a symbol. As Titus’ symbol, as a mere extension of Titus himself— or, to use Robin Bott’s term, Titus’ appendage, a part of himself that he is at liberty to dispose of as he likes, just as he does with his hand—Lavinia’s “will” is by definition her father’s will.31 It is also important to note, then, that Lavinia’s death should not be portrayed simply as “loving euthanasia.” Lavinia’s death is a public spectacle; Titus does not kill her in private, as euthanasia must be done. Moreover, if Lavinia were meant to represent a real person, a coherent character, she would have certainly preferred a private execution, for she was so anxious to hide her body and shame from men directly before and after her rape. But Lavinia is a symbol, and symbols do not reflect the psychological complexities of real people. Titus’ killing of her before all of Rome (figured in the emperor and other Roman and Scythian officials) is reminiscent of Lucrece who does likewise after her rape, though he takes the ancient legend a step further by killing Lavinia with the literal hand of the patriarch, whereas Lucrece stabs herself. Because Lavinia is the symbol of Titus’ sufferings, she must be killed publicly, since a symbol only has meaning if it is seen, and indeed, the meaning of Lavinia’s death is that Titus (not Lavinia, except by extension), though bloody and wronged, is triumphant. He reclaims his most-prized honor and purges himself and the empire of unjust suffering forever. This tragedy is clearly not the story of equal sufferings of a father and daughter, as Aebischer asserts, but the story of a father whose afflictions are depicted in the person-less body of his daughter.32 But for the Lady in Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy, death entails no such symbolism; neither is there any question as to whether or not she endorses her death. Because Lavinia is depicted as a dutiful daughter, she is defined by her relationships to others and her emblematic role.33 The Lady, however, is never defined as Daughter or Virgin. Notably, the Lady, like the Tyrant and the Wife, is not named but rather given a label; this label is not, however, of the kind that limits.34 Rather than defined by her relationship to another or her sexual status (as the customary dramatic titles, Wife, Daughter, Maid, Virgin, and Widow all do), the female protagonist is intentionally named “Lady,” connoting nobility and honor and an ambiguous sexuality. In the play’s opening scene, we see her as a much-sought-after woman, the Tyrant announcing as he summons her to the court that his chief aim in usurping the throne was using

15 that power to win the Lady from her beloved, the deposed king, Govianus. In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia is likewise the contested prize between two men who struggle for power, but she is sought after because she is the emblematic virgin—an enhancement and symbol of an essentially masculine notion of honor—while the Lady is desired simply because she is desirable.35 Lavinia serves as the means by which the men of her world situate themselves in relation to other men, while the Lady actually defines the kingdom; her desirability, the Lady herself, is what drives men to sit upon the kingdom’s throne and once there steer it in whichever direction will win her. Unlike Lavinia, who is repeatedly called a maid, the Lady is never actually labeled a virgin, though she is unmarried. The title and stage directions refer to her as “the Lady,” and the only explicit references to virginity are Govianus’ encomiums of the Lady after her death.36 Upon finding her dead, he exclaims, And hast thou, valiant woman, overcome Thy honour’s enemies with thine own white hand, Where virgin-victory sits, all without help? Eternal praise go with thee! (3.1.176-178)37 Govianus calls her victory “virgin,” and while he may refer to the Lady as a virgin in his enthusiastic—almost deifying—praise, the focus seems to be more upon the victory itself as a pure one, a feat the Lady accomplished without help and without ill intention or faltering step; the Lady herself he refers to as a “valiant woman” rather than a “valiant maid.” The other instance in which Govianus possibly references virginity is in a rapturous prayer he makes at her tomb: Eternal maid of honour, whose chaste body Lies here, like virtue’s close and hidden seed, To spring forth glorious to eternity At the everlasting harvest— (4.4.37-40) Govianus is still flowing forth with the Lady’s praise when she cuts him short with her declaration, “I am not here” (4.4.40).38 Assertive even after death, the Lady does what Lavinia, silent in life, cannot do to Marcus’ troublesome and long-winded praise (with which this chapter opened): the Lady regulates—and edits—what is said about her. Indeed, as Govianus sits praying to his dead lover’s tomb as if she were a saint, the Lady points out the absurdity—even

16 foolishness—of what he does: he not only prays to an empty grave but also sits spouting forth clichés about womanhood, remaining inactive while her dead body is being molested by a man whose attentions were so unwelcome that she killed herself. The Lady’s rebuke highlights Govianus’ detachment from reality, indicating his hyperbolic characterization of her as the emblematic virtuous “maid.”39 His speech, significantly, holds no interest for the Lady. While the Lady is never classified as a virgin, there are indications that she has chosen to sexually consummate her relationship with Govianus (as many early modern betrothed couples did): the boy who sings at her grave calls her Govianus’ “wife”; Govianus buries her beside his father in the family tomb; the Lady herself assures Govianus that the only way for her to remain faithful to him is to kill herself, and in death, he will “enjoy” her “still” (3.1.142). Overlooking such textual indicators in favor of early modern dramatic traditions, most critics who have written about the Lady do not even consider the possibility that the Lady could be anything but the iconic virgin; Anne Lancashire, for instance, interprets the play as a saint’s life, the Lady assuming the position of a virgin martyr, or, as Barbara Baines disgustedly asserts, the Lady is “chastity’s martyr.”40 But while it is true that the Lady kills herself in order to prevent the Tyrant from raping her and to remain Govianus’ alone, the fact remains that the Lady, while sexually faithful, is not a sacrifice to virginity, chastity, or male “ownership.” By leaving her sexual status ambiguous and by having the Lady cast Govianus’ characterization of her as a kind of virgin saint as somewhat ridiculous, Middleton seems to suggest that, in contrast to the popular legends of pagan and Christian women proving their worth by protecting their chastity with their lives, the Lady’s sexual status really has no bearing upon the worth of her character. The kiss the Lady gives Govianus in front of her disapproving father and the covetous Tyrant shortly after she arrives on stage immediately paints the Lady’s womanhood as self- determined rather than virginal and passive; unlike Lavinia, the Lady is not (and cannot be) a pure, elevated symbol.41 Moreover, the Lady’s death, while preserving her sexual fidelity to Govianus, is not an action simply to maintain her “purity” for Govianus. The Lady desires to prevent the horrific experience of being subjected to the Tyrant’s violent and continual rape: “Shall I be taken/ And lost the cruell’st way?” she laments (3.1.78-79). Because she chooses death not to prove herself virtuous but to prevent what she does not wish to happen, the Lady, unlike Titus and Lavinia, does not make a show of her death but requests its swift execution in the privacy of her quarters (and since Govianus succumbs to a swoon at the moment she must

17 die, the audience alone witnesses her death). Also significantly, the Lady has already bid Govianus to kill her when she remembers her shriving work. If the Lady were dying as a martyr, especially a martyr to chastity, she would make sure that she had prayed before she declared herself ready for the sword. The Lady does remember to pray (because, after all, she is an admirable woman), but she does not foreground her death in virtue; she chooses death not because she feels a need to prove her virtue but because it is her choice over the Tyrant’s plans of perpetual rape. Indeed, the Lady is characterized both in death and life by her control, her quick and wise decisions, and her solid ability to carry them out effectively. Unlike Lavinia, who silently promotes her father and his doings, the Lady exercises her own will, controlling her actions as well as those of the men who wish to control her. The Lady’s first line in the play, after all, is a commanding assertion: “I am not to be altered” (1.1.104). She proves herself the play’s commander throughout: she rebukes her father’s attempts to pander her to the Tyrant, ultimately turning his heart from greed to repentance; she refuses to let the Tyrant dictate, eventually wresting the kingdom from him; she insists that Govianus exercise courage and aid her in her death. Even as a ghost, the Lady commands the play, appearing to Govianus and demanding that he spring to action and return her body to the grave and exact justice upon the Tyrant. The Lady’s first line has further significance as a pronunciation that she will not fulfill the expected role of the passive sacrificial virgin in the unfolding tragedy, for she will not be “altared.”42 Kevin Crawford has written of how this play is about the failure of masculinity, and while his observations are true—the men do take on certain typical female roles (swooning, raving, and weeping) and are repeatedly shown as impotent—his interpretation of the play is somewhat misfocused. Crawford believes the play is meant to reveal how men should not behave, which is certainly a significant part of the drama, but Crawford argues that the play couches these men’s situations in terms of what they should rather do in order to fulfill a kind of masculine ideal—for instance, Govianus’ method of killing the Tyrant, the “poisoned lips trick,” as Crawford calls it, is “an extreme attack on Govianus’ ability to sexually protect and control the Lady.”43 Similarly, Crawford sees the Tyrant as “unmanned” by his lust.44 For Crawford, the play’s casting of its male characters in a negative light is not a critique of the system that allows them to operate as they do but rather their failure to live up to the ideal that system holds forth. Moreover, the Lady’s command of the play’s action and the audience’s attention becomes

18 simply a default highlighting the fact that the men are not acting as they should; if they were, the play (and kingdom) would not be forced to have a woman at the helm.45 But the play’s focus is not on the men and their failure to be “real men” but rather on the Lady and her abilities as a person. It is for this reason that the Oxford editors have chosen the more appropriate title of The Lady’s Tragedy for this unnamed work. The play’s focus is the Lady; even in death, the Lady is both the center of events and the center of the stage.46 The failures of the men simply cause her example to shine brighter because she is the only one who continually exercises discernment and acts effectually.

Female Embodiment and (Dis)figuring the Binary

Lavinia embodies a popular early modern feminine ideal: a pure and will-less body, readily (and, in effect, willingly) appropriated, always assigned purpose and value. As such, Lavinia is the perfect object for symbolism, and in this play, she does indeed become a symbol on a number of levels.47 Perhaps her most obvious symbolic function is her role itself, since, after all, an ideal woman is only an ideal and not a real person. Yet Lavinia does perfectly promote this role, especially when coupled with Tamora. Chaste, loving, obedient Lavinia is Virtue herself.48 When Titus’ three sons and Marcus plead that Titus should permit Mutius’ burial among his brothers, Marcus praises Mutius as an honorable and courageous man who “died in honor and Lavinia’s cause,” and only a few lines later, when Titus concedes, Titus’ sons and Marcus proclaim that this noble young man “died in virtue’s cause,” thus reaffirming Marcus’ original assertion and conflating honor and Lavinia into the greater figure of “virtue” (1.1.378, 391). Even in the final act, as Titus exacts revenge on her/his rapists, Lavinia is not described as a particular young woman, a unique person with thoughts, ambitions, and desires, but as pure, sweet female virtue; it is not an actual young woman they have violated but a symbol they have dirtied: “Here stands the spring whom you have stained with mud…. Both her sweet hands, her tongue, and that more dear/ Than hands or tongue, her spotless chastity” (5.2.170, 175-176).

19 Likewise, Tamora, though a very different character from Lavinia, serves a symbolic function. Presented as a powerful female ruler (both queen of the Goths and empress of Rome), a woman with a will of her own, commanding her own course and pursuing her own desires, she is the embodiment of female vice: evil incarnate. Tamora is painted as a most dangerous villain, and like Lavinia, her presence is a very physical one; she is both the disobedient, lustful Eve and the deceitful serpent. It is Tamora’s thirst for power, sex, and blood that leads to Bassianus’ murder, Lavinia’s rape and mutilation, Titus’ two sons’ beheadings, Lucius’ banishment, Titus’ severed hand and lost sanity, and even, in effect, Chiron and Demetrius’ horrific fates and the emperor’s and her own subsequent cannibalism. Notably, Tamora vows revenge upon Titus’ entire family on her wedding night, and this vow immediately follows her successful manipulation of her husband and emperor, thus inextricably linking her dangerousness with her sexuality and will.49 Throughout the play, Tamora demonstrates her lust for dominance, for self- rule and even for rule over men, as she openly boasts to Saturninus that Titus will “obey my tongue” (4.4.99). Tamora’s words rule Saturninus’ judgment and actions; thus she in truth rules the entire Roman Empire, as she demonstrates the next moment when she orders Aemilius to carry a message of her own creation that will determine the fate of the empire (4.4.99). While Tamora is ultimately deposed, she is not indicted for her political crimes as an active ruler but for her sexual ones, which become the ultimate womanly evil. When Lucius seeks to prove himself the rightful ruler and Tamora an evil one who deserved her punishment, he presents his most compelling evidence: not Titus’ hand, not his brothers’ heads, not Lavinia’s body, not the murdered emperor or Titus, not the approaching Goths, even, but the child of her adultery. As empress, Tamora’s sexual infidelities are especially transgressive in that her sexual crimes are also racial and political crimes; in accepting another man’s “seed,” she becomes the conduit of one man’s usurpation of another man’s position—not only sexually but, more importantly, socially and politically. As Aaron himself asserts in his eloquent soliloquy, when he “mount[s] aloft with [his] imperial mistress,” he is no longer beneath but above the emperor to whom he has been enslaved (2.1.13). Aaron thus cuckolds Saturninus and interrupts the royal lineage through the all-too complicit Tamora. Ironically, the one innocent product of Tamora’s deeds, her infant son whom she has sentenced to slaughter, is the embodiment of her horrific guilt, her conglomerate evils. And because the child is conveniently a “blackamoor,” he visually unites adultery and the demonic. Sexual infidelity thus becomes the chief of evils, and the play’s

20 two women demonstrate the truth of the female binary—women are either chaste and heavenly like the Virgin Mary or lascivious and of the devil like their mother Eve. Like Titus Andronicus, The Lady’s Tragedy operates within the early modern dramatic convention of two (sets of) women, and with their sexual infidelity and deceit, Middleton’s Wife and her maidservant, Leonela, at first seem to fall into the same category as Shakespeare’s Tamora. Critics that examine the second plot never fail to note the destruction and damnation of its characters and their actions, especially of the Wife. David Bergeron sees this plot as one featuring “the faithful husband” and his “unfaithful” friend and wife who deceive him and turn the entire household to destruction, and Lancashire dubs the Wife “a Lady Lechery.”50 Richard Levin has written an entire article on the relationship of the play’s two plots, finding the connection between the two to be the contrast between the Wife and the Lady—because of the Wife’s “moral failure,” she brings “her husband and her lover down with her to degradation and death,” while the Lady brings “true peace” and “salvation” to those about her (224, 226). Yet it must be noted that, unlike Tamora, the Wife is a sympathetic character, painted as a weak human being who has been tried beyond what she can bear. She begins the play as a faithful wife (“a kind, worthy lady” and “chaste wife”), even though her husband does not act his required part (1.2.22). Indeed, she is distressed at her husband’s unkind behavior, his distraction and absence from her bed, and she several times reproaches the advances of her husband’s friend, Votarius. It must also be observed that the Wife is presented as a very sexual being, her troubles over her husband largely because he has “Forgot the way of wedlock, and become/ A stranger to the joys and rites of love” (1.2.108-109); she even describes her sexual frustration (and appeal) to a man not her husband: I have watched him [her husband] In silver nights, when all the earth was dressed Up like a virgin in white innocent beams, Stood in my window, cold and thinly clad, T’observe him through the bounty of the moon That liberally bestowed her graces on me; And when the morning dew began to fall, Then was my time to weep. (1.2.100-107)

21 While it is inappropriate for the Wife to speak thus to a man not her husband, her speech is about and for (since she desires Votarius to convey the message) her husband. It is only understandable, knowing her longing and how her husband treats her, that the Wife succumbs to Votarius’ advances, for she herself notes that just as her husband has dealt with her unkindly, so has his friend: “’Tis not friendly done, sir,/ To take a lady at advantage thus,/ Set all her wrongs before her, and then tempt her” (1.2.222-224). Our response to the Wife is further complicated in that she is not so much like Tamora but like Juliet. Bergeron and Baines have both concluded that the Lady kills herself in despair when Govianus appears as dead in a swoon, much like the star-crossed lovers of many a romantic tragedy, but the Lady fills no such position, since she is fully aware that Govianus has swooned, and the fact that he swoons has no determining value in her decision to kill herself; it simply ensures that she will be the hand who commands the sword.51 At the same time, Votarius and the Wife do mistakenly die for each other because their fates cannot allow them to live as lovers; Votarius dies by accident at the Wife’s hand in a sabotaged mock-invasion, and the Wife, seeing what she has done to her lover, decides in a fit of passion to join him, running upon the swords of her dueling husband and maidservant’s lover, crying “I come, Votarius” (5.1.121).52 The Wife is not killed in just revenge as Tamora is but rather dies as a result of a fatal mistake and her subsequent grief. By this point in the play, the Wife has morally declined; we see her continually seeking illicit sexual encounters, contriving elaborate schemes to deceive her husband, attempting to manipulate her maidservant, and even—albeit accidentally—murdering. The Wife is ultimately painted as an immoral woman, but she does not become a monstrosity like Tamora. The Wife is painted as fully human; she is not devoid of virtue for the play’s entirety, neither is she unsympathetic, even at her life’s end. The Lady, by contrast, is admirable from the moment she first sets foot on the stage to the moment she exits. All the men of the court are shocked when she does not, like themselves, eagerly ingratiate herself to the Tyrant, embracing honor, rank, and wealth. The Tyrant himself, though he wishes her to succumb to him, praises her remarkable preference for fidelity and devotion over worldly enticements: “There stands the first/ Of all her kind that ever refused greatness,” and Govianus, too, is shocked by her faithfulness to him (1.1.163-164). Even the jealous husband, Anselmus, who cannot trust his own wife, can offer nothing but praise for the Lady, who gives Govianus “Peace and pleasure,” the two things an unfaithful wife (or one who

22 is even suspected of infidelity) deprives her husband of (1.2.18). In addition to being a faithful lover, the Lady is also a respectful daughter, honoring her father as much as possible, admitting him to her quarters the moment his presence is announced, regretting his wait, immediately seeking his blessing, and answering his pandering and unfounded slander (accusations of selfishness and bastardy) with kindness and reverence: But, dearest sir, I owe to you a reverence, A debt which both begins and ends with life… Yet could you be more precious than a father Which, next a husband, is the richest treasure Mortality can show us, you should pardon me (And yet confess, too, that you found me kind) To hear your words, though I withstood your mind. (2.1.55-62) Such a response to a man who disowns her because she will not betray herself and her lover and sell herself to the Tyrant for her father’s advancement at court cannot but earn our admiration; the Lady both responds in an undeserved, gentle manner and stands firm in her own will. But while the Lady is undoubtedly the ideal woman of the play—indeed, who can help but admire her strength, goodness, and wisdom?—she does not conform to a standard cultural ideal of femininity. After all, she is quite possibly no longer a virgin (though unmarried), and she is neither silent nor obedient; in fact, she more effectively commands the play than Tamora does in Titus Andronicus.53 The Lady is a wonderfully complex and realistic woman, depicted as a true person rather than a type or symbol, an actual model to admire and emulate. Lancashire (as most other critics of the play) views The Lady’s Tragedy’s two plots as black and white, an example of wickedness and an example of righteousness, for the play itself “presents above all the clash between worldly greatness and moral goodness, flesh and spirit”; it is essentially a re-styled morality play.54 Lancashire is correct in claiming a kind of morality in the play, but she simplifies it in ways that the play itself complicates, couching the play’s morality in terms of binaries that the play actually deconstructs. Middleton works within the convention of oppositional forces—a woman to emulate and a woman to avoid becoming—but he alters that convention significantly by rendering both women as complex persons that do not fit into polarized types.

The Patriarchal Figure

Both Titus Andronicus and The Lady’s Tragedy are “political” plays. In each, the setting is the royal court of an unjust/incompetent ruler; in each, the ruler tries to steal the betrothed lady of his competitor; in each, the lady’s father tries to ingratiate himself with the ruler by unsuccessfully giving him his daughter; and in each, the ruler is deposed via murder. Considering their hyper-patriarchal contexts (both governmental and familial), it is no accident that these plays raise questions about the position of women in patriarchal societies. In Titus Andronicus, Lavinia and Tamora are the only women (minus the bit part of the murdered nurse and the midwife who is alluded to before her murder) in a fairly large cast. The motherless Lavinia (the only true woman of the play) is surrounded by twenty-five brothers, her father, her betrothed, her uncle, her nephew, the emperor, the Moor, the empresses’ sons, soldiers, and (male) citizens. Taymor’s film version opens with Lucius’ boy violently playing with toy soldiers and ketchup; the film then quickly moves into a literal arena of masculinity, hundreds of grim soldiers marching into the Roman coliseum—then, in a wonderful interpretive move, Lucius’ boy is initiated into that world. Lavinia, however, is always on the perimeter, never welcomed into the male realm of honor, kinship, and understanding, despite the fact that her existence is entirely tied up in that world. Several critics have pointed out the destructiveness and futility of this exclusive and extreme world of male-rule; Brecken Rose Hancock insists that “[t]his violent assertion of masculinity leaves no room for a positive resolution…, particularly because all the women are destroyed and there is no regenerate hope offered by Lucius’ re- established empire,” and Marshall asserts that the play “affirms that this system of gender oppositions produces no winners.”55 But while this is a tragedy, Shakespeare does not conclude with hopeless despair. The play, after all, concludes with perhaps the strongest emotional case for reaffirming the patriarchal system: there is real joy, sorrow, and loss coupled with honor of the dead— stamps of approval and desert. Indeed, when Lucius and Marcus rise above the carnage of the final scene, the entire body of Rome shouts in praise of the establishment of Lucius’ reign—one they have no doubt will fulfill Marcus’ words:

24 Oh, let me teach you how to knit again This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf, These broken limbs again into one body. (5.3.70-72)56 The people are so supportive of Lucius’ instatement as ruler that they are reminded of Titus’ former (and regained) glory and are only too willing to pause the affairs of the entire empire at a crucial point of transition in order to pay honor to the now-martyred Titus, a man who (in their view) did not die as the result of revenge and complicated murderous intrigue but rather who died saving his family and the empire. Lucius’ first speech as emperor focuses on his father’s honor: Thanks, gentle Romans. May I govern so To heal Rome’s harms and wipe away her woe! But, gentle people, give me aim awhile, For nature puts me to a heavy task. Stand all aloof, but, uncle, draw you near To shed obsequious tears upon his trunk— Oh take this warm kiss on thy pale cold lips, These sorrowful drops upon thy bloodstained face, The last true duties of thy noble son! (5.3.148-155) Not only should the entire empire honor Titus but they should do so without presuming to come near to Titus in their mourning for him; only his survivors, apparently, are worthy to “draw near”—as if he were a kind of god. In quite a patriarchal tribute, Titus’ young grandson passionately cries, “Oh, grandsire, grandsire! Ev’n with all my heart/ Would I were dead, so you did live again!” (5.3.172-173); most admirable characters are depicted as willing to sacrifice themselves for their children, but Titus and the values he represents are so great that the reverse is true here. Titus indeed becomes what Bassianus claimed he was back in the first scene, “A father and a friend to thee and Rome” (1.1.424). Regardless of the fact that Titus could hardly be said to have fulfilled these nurturing and protective roles (even to those to whom he most owed it—his own children: Mutius, Lavinia, and Bassianus), Titus is made the empire’s hero once more, and this time he is the worthy father and the mighty warrior, having killed the tyrannical emperor both for his family’s vengeance and the empire’s good. Lucius, by whose actual hand the emperor dies, is driven to this action by his

25 father’s own death in the pursuit of justice; he cries out just before attacking the emperor, “Can the son’s eye behold his father bleed?” (5.3.65). In this final scene, Lavinia is also killed, but it is not her death that spurs Lucius to action or exclamation; indeed, her death is overlooked entirely once the emperor kills Titus. The entire empire supports Titus’ mourning, deeming it worthy to delay the affairs of state, but no one utters a word of Lavinia. But, then, Shakespeare’s Lavinia would have no doubt approved of just such an unfolding of events; Lavinia always prized her father over herself, always knew and eagerly advanced his infinite superiority. Just before her rape, after all other pleas have failed, Lavinia invokes the highest name possible, the idea for which there must certainly be the utmost regard—even from a woman who has just actively sought adultery, murdered, and mocked a potential rape victim—is Titus: “For my father’s sake” (2.3.158). True, Titus has defeated her country, sacrificed her eldest son, and given her as a gift to the emperor, but Tamora must surely know that she owes respect and honor to Titus; Lavinia believes that Tamora certainly could not allow Lavinia’s rape, remembering who her father is (and indeed, Shakespeare implies that if Tamora were not evil incarnate, that would certainly be the case). Because Titus has avenged his family and “restored” the empire, his past transgressions (if indeed they may be called such) are forgotten and almost lauded. Titus’ legacy is so honored that it will live on not only in Lucius but also in Lucius’ son (the likely future emperor of Rome), for Lucius tells him, Thy grandsire loved thee well.… Many a story hath he told to thee, And bid thee bear his pretty tales in mind And talk of them when he was dead and gone. (5.3.161, 164-166) We have, of course, no doubt what these “pretty tales” are about—his exploits in battle, his family’s honors, his fulfillment of duty to the empire; Titus is given a living monument in the person of his now-ruling son, in the hearts of the Roman citizens, and in the very essence of his young grandson who is destined for the throne. Horrific events have transpired in the course of the play and in the last scene in particular, but there is no despair for the patriarchy or subversion of its authority in Titus’ death; rather, Titus is glorified for having restored his own authority, honor, and position as a father of Rome. Titus becomes a biblical savior, deposing the lascivious

26 Jezebel-like Tamora and allowing a righteous male to ascend the throne.57 The evils of the patriarchal system lay only in its temporary overthrow in the rule of a woman. Rather than reaffirmed and honored, the patriarchy in The Lady’s Tragedy is almost farcical. The “ruling” men are exposed as ineffectual, inactive, foolish, irreligious, and vicious. Many critics, however, are blinded by dramatic precedent and do not fairly evaluate what the play actually does with its framework. Lancashire, for instance, insists on the perfections of Govianus, “the true king,… the defender of the public right, [who] may legitimately undertake an act of justice against the Tyrant for the public good,” as if Govianus were the ideal man of this play—courageous and righteous—but Govianus is not even the play’s hero.58 Susan Zimmerman notes that the play’s “supposed resolution seems awkward and formulaic.”59 Indeed, if one were not to realize that Middleton works within the typical dramatic conventions (concluding as Shakespeare does with a re-establishment of male rule) only to critique that genre from within (proving its men incapable even of self-rule and demonstrating the Lady’s continual role in guiding the men and the kingdom where it should go), the ending certainly could prove confusing rather than enlightening. For Middleton does not reaffirm the patriarchy by setting Govianus back on the throne but rather confirms the Lady’s worth in getting him there and the extreme faultiness (evil, even) of a rule of such men. Crawford contends that “The Lady’s, and the play’s, actual tragedy is that there are no real men to prevent it.”60 But what the play transparently shows is not that these men are unable to “prevent” tragedy but that they actually cause it. The real tragedy is that the system in place allows men to behave as they do and force dreadful circumstances upon their women that cause loathsome events to take place—women are driven to infidelity and plotting or forced to choose between things like death and continual rape. In contrast to the near-crushing strength with which Middleton endows a number of his other male characters, especially in his tragedies—men like the Duke of Women Beware Women, Vindice from The Revenger’s Tragedy, and DeFlores and Vermandero in The Changeling— Middleton thoroughly exposes the moral feebleness of the men of The Lady’s Tragedy. The Tyrant’s self-appointed position as creator-god and lover is an utter failure as he drives the Lady to suicide and subsequently cannot even hold himself together.61 Anselmus, suspicious of his faithful Wife, decides that the best way to prove her chastity will be to deprive her of attention and entice her into infidelity, all the while dissembling, railing at virtuous behavior as unkind, and childishly pouting that others care more about the state of the kingdom than about his

27 jealousy and discontent (“look not after him that needs thee not…. who brings me mine?”) (1.2.17, 21). The courtier, Sophonirus, laments that he cannot pander his wife to the Tyrant and wishes for nothing more than to be a contented cuckold; though he “should be wise, by’s years,” Sophonirus is a self-advancing, obsequious and eager fool (3.1.2). Even the soldiers’ fearful ribaldry at the Lady’s tomb serves to highlight that the males in this play are lost in a world of folly.62 Unlike Titus, the Lady’s father is openly painted as selfish, controlling, and cruel towards his daughter, even answering the Tyrant’s designs for his daughter with “I like that cruelty passing well, my lord” (1.1.213). At the age of eighty, he is bent on material pleasures, uncaring for the expense of his daughter: Advancement for thy father, beside joy Able to make a latter spring in me In this my fourscore summer, and renew me With a reversion yet of heat and youth! (2.1.26-29) He foolishly chases after a fountain of youth when he should be wise in his years. He seeks to exchange his daughter for a currency more valuable to him—position at court, which is not only an acquisition of honor but also of intimacy with his male-dominant, the Tyrant. When the Lady insists that he cannot be her father and act in such a manner towards her, she pinpoints the problem with her father and with the patriarchal system: he is “presuming on his power and my obedience” (2.1.95). What kind of a father—indeed, what kind of a man—would so abuse his power, his position, as to take advantage of his own children, abandon and tempt his devoted wife, or tyrannize an entire kingdom for his personal benefit? Through exposing these men’s vices, Middleton reveals that the system allows for and even encourages such abuse and tyranny. And that is this and every lady’s tragedy.63 Just as Titus Andronicus ends with what is supposed to be seen as hope for the future in the establishment of Lucius as emperor, critics have argued that The Lady’s Tragedy also concludes on a hopeful note. Lancashire believes the play is on one level a rendition of the traditional good king versus tyrant tale. Claiming Govianus is the embodiment of a goodly king, “the true king…, the defender of the public right” who “may” and should “undertake an act of justice against the Tyrant for the public good,” she portrays Govianus as a wise “spiritual” man and the Tyrant as a satanic carnal man.64 Basing their argument upon the Classical model of Aristotle’s Politics, A. L. Kistner and M. K. Kistner propose that this play’s tragic theme is the

28 inversion of appropriately hierarchical relationships (ruler-subject, husband-wife, parent-child, master-servant); in this light, the Tyrant’s overthrow by the legitimate king is a return to order.65 Govianus’ reinstatement at the play’s conclusion is thus the triumph of good over evil, virtue over disorder. But neither the play nor its conclusion is quite so simplistic. For much of the play, Govianus is not the ideal virtuous ruler. At the play’s opening, he appears in the Tyrant’s court, apparently deposed but more sulky than outraged and more focused on the faithfulness of his Lady than the state of his kingdom. Before the Lady kills herself, Govianus sighs and swoons and insists that he is incapable of the task given him: “’Tis the hard’st work that ever man was put to…. I shall not have the power to do thee right in’t…. If I do’t, I shall… spoil all that way” (3.1.122, 127, 130-131). One almost wonders why the Lady, being such a strong character, chooses him as her lover. But when compared to the other men in the play, Govianus is at least a good man. He does not enact evil, as his brother does in his treatment of his Wife or the Tyrant in abducting the Lady, and he identifies with goodness, admiring the Lady’s constancy, honoring the elderly, and abhorring the unkindness of the Lady’s father and the pandering of Sophonirus. His only real flaws are inactivity and naivety. Now if the play’s conclusion is a return of an ineffective ruler to the throne of a political system Middleton has revealed as tragically oriented, can we correctly say that The Lady’s Tragedy provides a glimmer of hope after its intense darkness? We might point to the fact that as a result of the Lady’s foul mistreatment just before her death and then posthumously, Govianus overcomes his paralysis, exacting revenge upon the Tyrant, restoring legitimate rule to the kingdom, and honoring the Lady’s wishes for a proper burial. Govianus does seem to undergo a radical conversion or awakening with the spectacular entrance of the Lady’s spirit at her grave and her disturbing revelation that the deprived Tyrant had stolen both her body and her other-worldly “peace” to satiate his raging lust (4.4.60). Incensed, Govianus assumes the position of religious knight, beseeching heaven to “put armour on my spirit,” vowing to see justice done for the Lady “Or in th’ attempt lock death into my breast” (4.4.89-90). The man who succumbed to a swoon at the moment his Lady was most at danger now becomes both a clever revenger and a raging warrior. But this dramatic alteration of Govianus’ character is not enough to justify hope for the kingdom’s future. Middleton does give us hope in this play’s conclusion, but it is not Govianus’ reinstatement at all: it is the Lady’s. While corrupt old lords put Govianus back on the throne—

29 presumably having had enough of the necrophilic Tyrant and his repulsive practices (or simply careful to be on the winning side of the political rivalry)—the real ceremony of reinstatement is the one Govianus orchestrates for the Lady. Govianus is reclaimed as king, but it is the Lady they crown and place upon the throne. While Lavinia is virtually forgotten after her death, even with her bloody and mangled corpse still lying on the stage, the Lady is glorified. More significantly, the Lady is literally placed at the kingdom’s helm as Govianus himself requests in an impressive two-word line that she “Lead on” (5.2.162). Without qualifications, Govianus has pledged to follow the Lady. Of course, the Lady is physically dead and makes it quite clear in her spirit’s exit with her body that she intends to remain on the other side of this life; she will not reign in a physical sense. However, the Lady will be the ruling queen by her foregone example of justice, constancy, and respect for fellow human beings. In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare seeks to give the audience hope through a reinstatement of the patriarchy, of the old order more firmly in place than ever before, but The Lady’s Tragedy offers the hope of a new system, a change in order.

Reflection upon the Early Modern Literary Corpus

Even if we were to side with Bloom in arguing that Titus Andronicus is not, “alas,” one of Shakespeare’s better works, we cannot escape the fact that this play was immensely popular— on public stages and in private homes—for close to a century.66 Given the reciprocally mimetic nature of theatre and reality, this play, regardless of its aesthetic merits, would have the opportunity for significant impact upon early modern English culture. Though Middleton’s play seems to have escaped the popularity Shakespeare’s enjoyed, his revision of his predecessor’s tale was a playwright’s effort both at distinguishing himself from other dramatists (and Shakespeare in particular) and depicting a new kind of rape narrative. Middleton not only effectively captured a unique human being in his Lady—perhaps not so much a new kind of woman as a real kind of woman—but also exposes the flaws of the culture that promoted ideals that marginalized, victimized, and accused women, lauding their only option for admirable “action”: their deaths.

30 CHAPTER TWO ODD COUPLINGS: WOMEN AND MARRIAGE IN MIDDLETON’S NO WIT, NO HELP LIKE A WOMAN’S AND THE ROARING GIRL

T.S. Eliot concluded that Moll in The Roaring Girl is a “real and unique human being,” a view echoed by later critics like Valerie Forman as “unconventional and lifelike.”67 This aspect of the sword-wielding, pipe-smoking, cross-dressing heroine’s character is likely a large part of what has inspired critical interest in the play during the last few decades. Even on page, Moll comes to life as she cants with Tearcat (“‘And there you shall wap with me, and I’ll niggle with you’…. Wapping and niggling is all one”), calls her offenders to task (“You, goodman swine’s face!”), and seeks to set wrongs aright (to Laxton’s amazed “Draw upon a woman? Why, what doest mean, Moll?” she replies, “To teach they base thoughts manners!”) (10.211-212, 216; 1.256; 5.71-72). It may seem odd, then, that this chapter focuses on The Roaring Girl and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s as a couple. With its thin critical history taken up largely with apologies for the work’s “flaws,” the latter play hardly rivals the former’s reputation.68 But our exploration in this chapter will show that these plays do possess more than a common author and date.69

Characterization: Women and Types

Mistress Low-water of No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s has often been compared to a Shakespearean heroine. But as we shall see, unlike The Lady’s Tragedy, Middleton here does not specifically revise Shakespearean works. While it is helpful to understand how Middleton’s writing relates to Shakespeare’s, critics often read Middleton’s works through a Shakespearean lens, which causes a distorted view of Middleton’s characters and of the critical work his own plays perform. Of course, Middleton does employ theatrical vehicles like cross-dressing women that are similar to those of Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists, but as this chapter will demonstrate, he uses them to his own more innovative ends. Middleton’s Lady may serve as

31 a radical revision of Shakespeare’s Lavinia, but Mistress Low-water stands alone as a unique character more of the mold of Moll than of Viola or Portia. Disguising herself as a bold younger son and suitor to the recently widowed Lady Goldenfleece to win back the fortune swindled from her impoverished husband by the now-deceased Goldenfleece, Mistress Kate Low-water is, Kenneth Muir argues, “the virtuous Kate” who is “an almost Shakespearian heroine transported from the world of Arden or Illyria to the corrupt realities of Jacobean London.”70 As a distressed and chaste woman who resorts to cross-dressing to resolve her situation, Mistress Low-water does in some ways resemble several distressed Shakespearean heroines. The moment she first appears on stage, Mistress Low-water seems to despair in her situation, asking aloud a string of questions as though seeking justice from unseen gods: Is there no saving means, no help religious For a distressèd gentlewoman to live by? Has virtue no revènue? … O, how was conscience, the right heir, put by? … Where are our hopes in banks? Was honesty, A younger sister without portion, left No dowry in the Chamber beside wantonness? O miserable orphan! ’Twixt two extremes runs there no blessèd mean, No comfortable strain, that I may kiss it? Must I to whoredom or to beggary lean, My mind being sound? Is there no way to miss it? (2.1-4, 6, 9-15) Indeed, with her household wealth “fleeced” from her husband, Mistress Low-water can find no means to save them from their “distressèd” situation but whoredom, a visible option as Sir Gilbert Lambstone bombards her with offers to be his mistress and thus have open access to “the widow’s notch” even at the height of Mistress Low-water’s vulnerability (2.94). Like the female protagonist of The Lady’s Tragedy, Mistress Low-water is faced with a choice: she can replace her sexual constancy and “all miseries in their loathèd’st forms…, thick like a foul mist” with sexual favors that deliver “the bright enticements of the world/ In clearest colours, flattery, and advancement,/ And all the bastard glories this frame jets in” (2.20-21, 2.22-24). Comparing

32 her two possibilities, Mistress Low-water concludes that nothing—neither “[h]orror nor splendour”—could “force” her to choose whoredom over her life as a chaste wife (2.25, 26). She foregrounds the fact that she thinks especially of her husband’s honor, for the conclusion to her desperate contemplation upon her situation is that such a life would “shame my husband, wound my soul” (2.26). It is likely this declaration that leads David M. Holms to conclude that Mistress Low-water “has the strength of character to make a lone stand against corruption” and that “she sympathizes with her husband’s embarrassment, and feels distress at having no dowry or inheritance to bring to his relief.”71 Her distress and hurt, then, are a direct result of her husband’s drastically altered status. Mistress Low-water’s only apparent concern, her driving motivation for preserving her chastity and disguising herself as a man, are for promoting the honor of the men in her family. Mistress Low-water is thus taken from what Lisa Jardine has called “the vein of the ‘female hero’ of the folk-tale and the saint’s life: the sub- erotic female figure whose chastity is strongly figured in the combination of faithful page and resolute/obedient/loyal/serving daughter or spouse. These are the realms of talismanic female virtue.”72 But before we agree that Mistress Low-water indeed follows the traditional early modern cross-dresser’s pattern, her resolve for holding the “moral high ground” needs revisiting.73 Mistress Low-water declares that neither threatening “shadows” nor “bright enticements” could “force me shame my husband, wound my soul” (2.25, 22, 26). Clearly, she refuses earthly advancement and security to keep from shaming her husband, but is the “wound” to which she refers in reference to her husband as well? Perhaps. But Mistress Low-water reveals another motivation for steering clear of adultery when she reads Sir Gilbert’s letter, a follow-up to his earlier suits. Exasperated and indignant, without reading the letter, Mistress Low-water cries, Thinks he me mad? ’cause I have no monies on earth That I’ll go forfeit my estate in heaven, And live eternal beggar?... That’s my soul’s jointure; I’ll starve ere I sell that. (2.77-80) Continuing with her earlier personification of virtue as earth’s disinherited firstborn, Mistress Low-water refuses to sell her virtue here on earth and live disinherited in heaven, turning her meditations from sustaining the body to sustaining the soul. Indeed, while she truly does not wish to shame her husband, it seems her greater desire is to ensure that she does not inflict a

33 “wound” upon her own soul that proves mortal; her chastity is, she asserts, her “soul’s jointure.” The word “jointure” can here refer to a union (between her soul and potentially starving body, or possibly between her two souls—her own and her husband’s, joined in marriage), a dowry (in her soul’s wedding to heaven’s glory), or her own material estate (the supposed “competent livelihood” that would support her upon her husband’s death, had his incompetence not lost it).74 Like many early modern heroines, Mistress Low-water believes that preserving her chastity is key to entering and acquiring a position of honor in heaven, but she also hints here at her ability to manage her estate both in spiritual and material terms, something neither Sir Gilbert nor Master Low-water have been able to do. In her study of early modern widowhood and analysis of four Middletonian widow comedies, Jennifer Panek also insists that Mistress Low-water “is the familiar cross-dressed heroine.”75 Like other early modern heroines, Mistress Low-water does cross-dress in order to preserve her chastity, and her simultaneous success at and occasional uncertainty in her part seem reminiscent of Viola or Portia. But there are some notable differences. Coppélia Kahn argues in her critical introduction to The Roaring Girl that the avowed eternally single and independent Moll is quite “[u]nlike the Shakespearean comic heroines who disguise themselves as boys so that they can covertly pursue the men they love, but abandon their assumed identities when obstacles to marriage are overcome.” Mistress Low-water is no Moll; she does not challenge the offending Sir Gilbert with a sword, nor does she wear men’s clothing or act the man’s part simply because she enjoys it. But her character and intentions have more in common with Moll than we might initially think. While many early modern cross-dressing women do so largely to protect themselves—to hide the fact that they are vulnerable women—or to follow after the man they wish to marry, Mistress Low-water disguises herself for neither of these reasons.76 The typical female disguise is a page, as in Viola’s case; a sex-less young person who passively receives attention and carries out his master’s will. Mistress Low-water, however, intentionally assumes the role of a young and assertive gentleman, taking on an exceptionally active role. Moreover, her action is not the pursuit of a man who will marry her and protect her from the outside world—she already has a husband (and he hasn’t proven too successful at protecting her). Rather, her pursuit is of money. Mistress Low-water is not the passive page; in order to carry out her scheme, she even transforms her husband into her servingman. Absent

34 when Sir Gilbert accosts his wife, Master Low-water enters the play after Mistress Low-water finds inspiration for her plan to protect her chastity and take back her family’s lost wealth; he asks simply, “Why, how now, Kate?” (2.153). Mistress Low-water replies with urgency and purpose: Wake, wake, and let not patience keep thee poor. Rouse up thy spirit from this falling slumber. Make thy distress seem but a weeping dream, And this the opening morning of thy comforts. (2.154-157) While her husband cannot comprehend her vision of well-being, Mistress Low-water does not wait for his leadership but offers, Will you but second The purpose I intend, I’ll be first forward I crave no more of thee but a following spirit. (2.161-163) Her husband agrees to follow her plan, and she cautions: Sleep not on’t; this is no slumbering business. ’Tis like the sweating sickness: I must keep Your eyes still ’wake; you’re gone if once you sleep. (2.167-169) Master Low-water seems plagued with unawareness and lethargy, but Mistress Low-water sees exactly what their situation is and how they might remedy it; she is both prepared for and unwavering in her course of action. Aware of her own superior capabilities, Mistress Low-water assumes the role of virile and effective leader. Mistress Low-water practically reverses the marriage order by taking the position of command and simultaneously reveals that even without donning male clothing and persona, she is more “masculine” than the men who would order her life’s course. As Gail Kern Paster has argued, early moderns associated “water with male potency”; a man’s high spirit led to his need to spill his water, an act she identifies as a potent expelling in contrast to the woman’s weak, untrustworthy body that incontinently “leaked” its various fluids.77 In The Changeling, De Flores cites the raising of his “spirit” as his drive for raping Beatrice-Joanna, while Beatrice- Joanna herself can only spill blood (3.4.110). But Master Low-water—in accordance with his name—is clearly “poor” in “spirit,” not rising or thrusting forth into the “opening morning” but instead “falling” and “slumbering.” Not only does Master Low-water lack potency but he also

35 spills fluid in the manner of non-Middletonian early modern female characters, his body opening and leaking sweat and effeminizing tears.78 In a similar manner, Sir Gilbert cannot hold his water but seeks multiple channels for it. Master Low-water is impotent, void of the semen (and the cultural corollary of wealth) that would render him truly masculine, while his wife not only holds her liquids but also “stands” upon her own virility. As Moll declares, “My spirit shall be mistress of this house,” so Mistress Low-water prevents the wounding of her soul by replacing her husband’s watered-down—or rather, watered-out—spirit with her own leading “spirit” (5.140).79 Perhaps Mistress Low-water’s greatest distinction from the traditional early modern cross-dressing female protagonist is the extent to which she plays out her part. Intruding upon Weatherwise’s banquet in Lady Goldenfleece’s honor, Mistress Low-water seeks justice against Sir Gilbert (for his wrongs against her and Lady Goldenfleece), boldly accusing him of being “a rank villain” and producing his letter (4.293). But Mistress Low-water does not stop here with simple exposure of injustice, though it might have been a possible resolution to her financial problem. Lady Goldenfleece must certainly be in a grateful mood and not unlikely to reconcile herself with the Low-waters. Having worked herself into the widow’s affections and ridding the playing field of the most prominent competitor for Lady Goldenfleece’s hand, Mistress Low- water then pursues—and with bold sexual assertion—her own marriage to the widow. But it is as Lady Goldenfleece’s “husband” that we find Mistress Low-water’s behavior most un-heroine- like. Once married, Mistress Low-water denies Lady Goldenfleece all affection, calls her lascivious, and creates a situation in which she can publicly accuse her of adultery. Orchestrating it so that her brother, Beveril, is found comforting Lady Goldenfleece in her bedroom the wedding night, Mistress Low-water calls together the entire wedding party to expose the scene as she breaks down the door and storms at the poor woman, “Out of my house!” (9.396). She effectively strips Lady Goldenfleece of her money and, in part, of her dignity. When pleaded with to listen to Lady Goldenfleece’s defense, Mistress Low-water scoffs, “What can she speak but woman’s common language:/ She’s sorry and ashamed for’t? That helps nothing” (9.410-411). Depriving the widow of love, sexual rights, house and fortune, and any hope of consolation, Mistress Low-water does become a Shakespearean figure: she plays

36 the part of Petruchio, the great shrew tamer. Hardly the familiar heroine, she instead resembles one of Shakespeare’s most assertive and abusive male figures.80 Mistress Low-water is, however, far more complex than Petruchio. Though his dead father’s firstborn, Petruchio is not unlike the prodigal fortune-hunting younger son, the gallant that typifies comedies involving widow marriages. It is in this category that Elizabeth Hanson assumes that Mistress Low-water falls, having simplified her character as a creative version of the gallant type in early modern widow comedies.81 But Mistress Low-water can hardly be considered a Ricardo, the successful but utterly unscrupulous suitor to the widow Valeria in Middleton’s The Widow. Panek also characterizes Mistress Low-water as the exemplar of gallant fortune-hunters, a heightened representation of the type. Mistress Low-water, she points out, pursues the widow with the same sexual vitality as typical young suitors and with the same credentials—no fortune, no land, no title; only sexual promise. Panek proposes that the real reason early modern widows are portrayed as lusty is because this characterization helps to disguise the suitors’ own fundamental lack of what would have defined them as men. She thus concludes that this play “presents a situation in which the widow’s lust cannot compensate for the suitor’s feared masculine inadequacy, but instead points it up hilariously, for Kate [Low- water] is not only without the attributes of manhood that a widow’s young suitor typically lacks…but as a woman disguised as an immature male, she fundamentally lacks any manhood at all.”82 And while it is possible that Mistress Low-water does serve to highlight this aspect of early modern society, that is certainly not all there is to her character. For one thing, Mistress Low-water may portray a prodigal in her disguise, but in the actual world of the play, she is a respected gentlewoman who has effectively been robbed of her livelihood and is now presented with an ultimatum: she must find a way to return her family’s wealth to the proper owners, or she must resign herself to whoredom or die in destitution. Mistress Low-water has not wasted her fortune, defied her family’s wishes (even in pursuing this course of action, she first acquires her husband’s permission), or proven herself anything but perfectly deserving of a gentlewoman’s portion. Furthermore, Mistress Low-water shows herself a loving wife both in wishing to keep shame from her husband and in treating him kindly and with respect, even when he poses as her servingman: “How few women are of thy mind! She thinks it too much to keep me in subjection for one day, whereas some wives would be glad to keep their husbands in awe all days of their lives, and think it the best bargain that e’er they

37 made” (6.217-221). She is also a loving sister to her scholarly brother, overcome with joy when she sees him and running to embrace him. She provides him with sustenance and a wife he adores. At play’s end, her goal accomplished, Mistress Low-water reveals herself, sweetly proclaims, “Heaven give thee eternal joy, my dear sweet brother,” and reconciles herself to Lady Goldenfleece (9.560). In revealing herself in this final scene, Mistress Low-water also reveals that she is a much more complex—indeed, unique—character than she has generally been given credit for.83 Though she doesn’t seek out an active role as Mistress Low-water does, Lady Goldenfleece also figures as a strong character in this play. Appearing on stage for the first time, the widow is flanked by suitors, all dressed in mourning for her recently deceased husband, as she gaily thanks the Twighlights for her enjoyable visit. In such an appearance this widow may appear as fickle, duplicitous even. If she is mourning her husband (and she has all the outward show of a newly-made widow), should she gladly entertain all these suitors and enjoy herself abroad? Shouldn’t we expect more from a woman of her maturity and station in life? Quite the contrary. As a widow, her initial behavior is precisely what we should expect from a woman who is both sexually experienced and “un-mastered.” Panek has noted the blurred fine line between widowhood and whoredom as a result of their “shared sexual openness.”84 Indeed, the lusty widow type reveals the idea that women have an inherent need for headship. A woman who might have once been a modest maiden and a chaste wife, having as Moll says, lost one “head” in exchange for another and now having lost this more powerful one, too, cannot help but crave the filling of what she no longer has (4.46). Thus she insatiably seeks men to fill the “holes” in her life that the death of her husband has left open. Accordingly, Lady Goldenfleece is perpetually surrounded by a swarm of suitors and is not surprised when a new one joins the ranks unannounced at Weatherwise’s banquet. While all of these men try their best to win this widow as their wife, every single one of them assumes her nearly insatiable lust and promiscuity. Indeed, they make sexual jokes in her presence at the banquet, believe she has been more forward with Sir Gilbert than even the kiss they witness is evidence of, all-too-readily accept Mistress Low-water’s suggestions about her relationship with the widow, and have no doubt that everyone in the town will believe the slander they spread about supposed sexual escapades with the widow. Even Mistress Low-water asserts that “nothing kills a widow’s heart so much/ As a faint bashful wooer,” and so she puts on a “bold

38 face and a good spirit” (6.92-93, 88). Mistress Low-water’s sexual presence does in fact play a role in leading to Lady Goldenfleece’s selection of her as her husband (6.184). When Mistress Low-water first joins the party at Weatherwise’s banquet, Lady Goldenfleece, though letting Sir Gilbert kiss her only moments before, admits that The more I look on him, the more I thirst for’t. Methinks his beauty does so far transcend, Turns the signs back, makes that the upper end. (4.217-219) And her longing intensifies as the scene unfolds. As Weatherwise’s “sun-cup” passes around for common drink, Lady Goldenfleece stares, enamored with Mistress Low-water, remarking “It rises/ Full in the face of yon fair sign, and yet/ By course he is the last must feel the heat,” referring to the sun’s heat as well as her own rising desire (4.267-269). Lowell notes in this the “rapidity of her shifting desires,” and Hanson argues that she here plays the allegorical role of Fortuna: “The widows in these plays mean money…. She is changeable not only because, as a woman, her affections are not fixed, but also because, like money, she changes hands and in so doing changes men’s fortunes.”85 While Lady Goldenfleece’s physical attraction to and longing for Mistress Low-water is apparent, her fickleness is not so readily observed. Lady Goldenfleece herself recognizes that her affections here are only very new and possibly passing, for she cautions herself: Fly from my heart all variable thoughts! She that’s enticed by every pleasing object Shall find small pleasure, and as little rest. (4.285-287) She evaluates her thoughts, and she decides that since she has entertained Sir Gilbert’s attentions and he “hath loved me long; he’s best and worthiest,” she concludes, “I cannot but in honour see him requited” (4.288-289). Unlike the young and inexperienced Beatrice-Joanna of The Changeling, who instantly acts upon her new-found sexual attraction to Alsemero by seeking to break her pre-existing marriage contract—and even resorting to murder—Lady Goldenfleece’s response is one of a mature and self-controlled woman. She immediately sets out to agree to marry Sir Gilbert, preferring constant and honorable behavior over letting her mind dwell upon its newest attraction and thus possibly wander in devotion. Her desires may vary, but she carefully regulates her actions. It is only Mistress Low-water’s timely interruption and revelation that saves Lady Goldenfleece from contracting herself to Sir Gilbert.

39 It is not simply Sir Gilbert’s disqualification from winning Lady Goldenfleece’s affections that leads to her consequent preference for Mistress Low-water. Showing Sir Gilbert the door, Lady Goldenfleece declares that she will “marry love hereafter; I’ve enough,/ And wanting that, I have nothing” (4.393-394). She does not mention any specific suitor; she simply insists that she will only look for and accept a man she “loves”—a term not without sexual inference—and who in turn “loves” her, despite his monetary recommendations or claims to titles. Of course, as her savior from a ruinous, loveless marriage, Mistress Low-water already shows Lady Goldenfleece certain positive qualities. Even so, Lady Goldenfleece does not agree to marriage until Mistress Low-water presents her with other strong recommendations of character: devotion, love, and chastity. Panek observes that Lady Goldenfleece chooses Mistress Low-water as a direct result of her promise that “he” has never wooed another woman; it is not so much Mistress Low-water’s sexual promise that confirms Lady Goldenfleece’s preference for her as her “more serious and admirable” quality of “purity.”86 One might counter that Lady Goldenfleece is still a fickle woman because she places her affections on two different suitors in only a matter of hours, but Lady Goldenfleece does not seem to have ever loved Sir Gilbert but to have entertained his attentions because he seemed the most respectable of her suitors and because he had both money and title. The true change is in her priorities, not her affections. She decides to marry for love instead of social and material assets; Mistress Low-water is likely the first suitor she actually loved, and considering who her previous husband was, possibly the only “man” she has ever loved. Clearly feeling a need for companionship, love, and sex, Lady Goldenfleece is indeed a true widow, but she is hardly the lusty widow type, for she holds character as more important than sexual virility, love more important than instant gratification, and she calmly and reasonably rules her actions. The influence and play of feminine types is no less evident in The Roaring Girl. “I know you, well enough,” Moll hears throughout the play, often from men who do not know her at all, “you’re but a whore to hang upon any man” (8.220-221). Sir Alexander believes that reminding his son, Sebastian, simply of Moll’s name should give him reason enough to forsake his supposed courting of the roaring girl; he insists, “Methinks her very name should fright thee from her” (4.157). When Sebastian asks how “the name of Moll” can be “so fatal,” Sir Alexander replies with definitive evidence—statistics: there are “[m]ore whores of that name than of any ten other” (4.159, 162). To ask the Shakespearean question, what’s in a name? In

40 this case, plenty. Moll’s name holds great significance in this play and for the audience, the prologue itself teasing audience expectations and leading up to its final questions and proclamation: “But would you know who ’tis? would you hear her name?/ She is called Mad Moll; her life, our acts proclaim” (29-30). Sebastian also confirms that the “whole city takes/ Note of her name” (1.103-104). The act of naming in this particular play, then, is important for identifying at least its female protagonist. The specific name that the prologue gives here is also significant—not Moll Cutpurse, as she was known, or even Mary Frith, the name of the real woman on whom her character was based—but “Mad Moll.” As Kahn points out in her gloss of the passage, this epithet implies “mad in the sense of not conforming to conventions of behaviour for women,” even “wild” or “eccentric”; this is the woman who is unruly, who refuses to play the typical female part.87 Even beyond the denotations and connotations of the adjectival part of her name, the fact that we are simply given her first name (and that her nickname) implies not only an individuality that does not require an association with family (or in the case of “Cutpurse,” occupation) or distinction beyond a common first name but also a significance in that name, “Moll.” The prologue prepares the audience for the entrance of this provocative character who has made “the audience look/ For wonders” (1-2). But instead there is a substitution, a theatrical slip: another woman appears on stage. This move allows for the delayed entrance of the play’s celebrated character (further heightening audience anticipation) and causes the audience to compare the woman who first figures in the play’s action with the woman they eagerly await to appear. This stage maneuver is coupled with strategic nomenclature—these two women share the same name. Mary Fitzallard, an admired young gentlewoman lawfully betrothed to Sebastian but wrongfully spurned by his avaricious father, disguises herself as a working woman and seeks out Sebastian in hopes of recovering her husband-to-be turned stranger. While Mary Fitzallard and the woman who roars share the same given name, the audience that has been expecting the appearance of a different Mary F. immediately notices that this is not she. This Mary is unassuming, kindly asking permission of Sebastian’s servingman, Neatfoot, to have “nothing else” but a “private word or two” with Sebastian (1.5). As Neatfoot rambles on and on, making foolish sexual suggestions, Mary gives but one-line answers—“I humbly thank you”— and continually addresses her social inferior as “sir,” acting even this “base” part nobly, not unlike the Lady in her first scene (1.29, 5). Neatfoot’s attributions to Mary also reflect a

41 character quite opposite from audience expectations for Moll; he calls her “emblem of fragility,” “sweet damsel,” “your modesty,” and “your chastity” (1.3, 2, 18, 15). Meek and mild, Mary Fitzallard seems an ideal young woman. Indeed, she resembles the ideal woman: the source of her name, the Virgin Mary. Her first and only substantial speech (a full nine lines) is reminiscent of the grieving Mother of God: “my bosom/ Is full of bitter sorrows…. in my breast a poisoned arrow sticks…. love being truly bred i’th’ soul, like mine,/ Bleeds even to death at the least wound it takes” (1.29-30, 32, 35-36). Kahn points out in her gloss of Mary’s name that “Mary connotes chastity, especially in conjunction with Moll” (both because of Moll’s well-known character and because Moll was not simply a nickname for Mary but a name that was used for a “whore, a thief’s female companion, or a female thief”).88 Even without the unavoidable comparison of Mary with Moll as a result of the stage substitution, these connotations would have been evident. But even as Mary is repeatedly labeled “virtuous maiden,” “virtuous gentlewoman,” and “worthy gentlewoman” with “honour” and “modest fame” (2.168, 169; 11.96; 11.183, 191; 11.184, 185) and Moll nothing but “whore,” “cutpurse drab,” and “roaring drab,” their actual characters are not so juxtaposed, as the fact that their names are, in truth, not different at all implies (2.175, 10.306). In addition to the initial switch of Mary for Moll, the play repeatedly treats these two women’s names interchangeably and substitutes their persons and bodies for one another. When Sebastian unfolds his plan to Mary, this exchange is especially evident: “sweet Moll, I must thy company shun./ I court another Moll” (1.72-73). Addressed by nickname here, Mary quite literally turns into Moll. When one Mary/Moll must disappear from the picture, another must take her place, and so Moll stands in Mary’s stead, becoming the object of Sebastian’s courtship. This scene of substitution is highlighted in detail twice more—once when Moll poses as Sebastian’s music teacher and (undercover) as Sebastian’s beloved while Mary stands silent, dressed as a page, and once again in the wedding scene when Moll appears as the “bride,” first in her typical cross-dressed attire and then again in a bridal gown, only to move aside when Mary enters. The two women’s names provide further interchangeability as Moll is also referred to as “Mistress Mary” numerous times, and Laxton even calls her both forms of her name in a single line: “Hold, Moll! Mistress Mary—” (5.68). It is in this same scene that the unstable nature of the name is especially highlighted, for the scene is specifically set in Marybone Park. As Kahn

42 notes in her gloss, the location is “named for St Mary-le-Bourne (on the brook) or St Mary-le- Bonne (the good), also playing on ‘marybone’ for marrow-bone, marrow considered a seat of vitality and an aphrodisiac…. The park was known as a centre of prostitution, thus its name evokes the same juxtaposition of whore and virgin as does Moll’s name.”89 This location is the one Laxton proposes for an amorous encounter with Moll—or so he assumes it to be, though he clearly renders the prospective meeting as prostitution, an exchange of maidenhead for money. Ironically, a place named for a female saint, for the eternal Virgin Mary herself, is a place of whoring, and in the name, both Moll and Mary Fitzallard are evoked on a number of levels, none of them stable, especially when Moll overturns Laxton’s expectations and challenges him to a sword fight in order to denounce the rape of chastity and the injustice of slandering a woman’s name. And “Marybone” may also connote another homophone: “merry-bone,” illicit merry- making, an idea Moll also reverses when she challenges Laxton: “There’s the gold/ with which you hired your hackney, here’s her pace:/ She racks hard and perhaps your bones will feel it” (5.64-66, my emphasis). Moll thus turns the merriness of riding the prostitute into a painful horror-ride at the hands of a Moll who is not a moll. What woman is what she is thought to be? Which “Mary” is connoted in the names of the women and of the town? Can a whorish Moll be proved a Mary and a chaste Mary proved a Moll, or can we ever know which is which? In addition to the endlessly shifting nature of their names, Mary and Moll both engage in activities that bring the definability of their characters into question. But these actions do not construct concrete answers, either. Mary’s first scene, for instance, is not as emblematic of her iconic namesake as it may seem. She claims to only wish to speak with Sebastian, but what she seeks is, in fact, a sexual relationship. Granted, she speaks of marriage, but she epitomizes her agony with an inquiry of lament, “And must another bedfellow fill my room?” (1.80). Neatfoot’s language also highlights the sexual nature of her visit, referencing reproduction, pleasure and satisfaction, kisses, erection, and erotic “feeling” all in their brief exchange about her speaking with his master. As the purpose of Mary’s visit steers her away from saintly virginal categorization, so does her suggestion of her own “shipwreck” if Sebastian does not marry her (1.97). Following on the heals of her lament over her lost position in bed, this comment suggests the possibility that Mary and Sebastian have already shared that bed, that a drastically delayed marriage or an annulment of their betrothal would lead to her utter ruin. In her sixth sonnet, Lady Mary Wroth’s employs the same metaphor of the pain her lover’s

43 desertion inflicts. Notably, her “pain, still smothered in [her] grieved breast,” is like Mary’s, a result of a man’s apparent incontinence (1). Like the leaky vessels Paster sees in the gossips of Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, whose open orifices are most readily identifiable in their greedy mouths, the sonnet describes how her lover’s incontinence “devours” and “swallows,” leaving her “[n]othing of pleasure” or “hope” (8, 10, 9).90 Mary’s phrase could simply imply that losing her beloved will “shipwreck” her life because she cannot be with the man she truly loves, or it could imply that she is also “undone” and cannot put crucial parts of herself back together for another man—as Wroth’s repetition of “lost” and description of being “spoiled” imply (7, 9, 12, 9). Mary’s position is quite ambiguous. Moll’s condition, though, seems more certain: she still owns her maidenhead. Moll more than once boldly declares that she prefers her independence and self-headship over a relationship with a man, famously observing that “marriage is but a chopping and changing, where a maiden loses one head, and has a worse i’th’place” (4.45-47). She seems especially independent and man-like in her fights and almost-fights, of which there are seven: her wished-for encounter with Mistress Openwork, striking of the offending gallant who enters the Openworks’ shop, tripping of Trapdoor, full-blown sword fight with Laxton, drawing on the Curtalax, drawing on Sebastian, and fistfight with Trapdoor during the canting scene. But it must be noted that each of these encounters are Moll’s reaction to an accusation of being sexually promiscuous. Indeed, Moll’s reputation—her good name—is tremendously important to her, though the only way she can counter the limitless slander circulating about her is an action that earns her other forms of slander. Moll explicitly states that her reputation as “Moll Cutpurse” is a result of slander and adamantly points out, How many are whores in small ruffs and still looks? How many chaste whose names fill slander’s books? Were all men cuckolds, whom gallants in their scorns Call so, we should not walk for goring horns. (10.356-359) Moll also continually demonstrates that she prizes the attribute of “honesty” (also a synonym for chastity) the most. When Moll disguises Mary as a page so the two lovers can meet, Sebastian declares, “Thou hast done me a kind office, without touch/ Either of sin or shame: our loves are honest,” and Moll replies with an emphasis on the importance of that honesty, “I’d scorn to make such shift to bring you together else” (8.39-41). Indeed, before she

44 knows that Sebastian courted her only in hopes of marrying another, Moll tries to dissuade him from his wooing, telling him in no uncertain terms exactly what she thinks of marriage and how she would behave if she ever married (though it were an impossibility). It is again honesty that she puts forth as the most important aspect of one’s character: “You see sir,” she explains, “I speak against myself, and if every woman would deal with their suitor so honestly, poor younger brothers would not be so often gulled with old cozening widows that turn o’er all their wealth in trust to some kinsman, and make the poor gentleman work hard for a pension” (4.60-66). Moll is also quite apt at seeing the truth of a situation before anyone else does, a fact most evident in the scene in which she escorts the band of gallants through the streets, warning them about a group of approaching cutpurses and discerning Trapdoor beneath the disguise of a wounded soldier turned beggar. Indeed, she reprimands these men’s dishonest behavior, forcing the thieves to return a stolen purse and exposing and chastising Trapdoor: “Soldier?—Thou deservest to be hanged up by that tongue which dishonours so noble a profession.—Soldier, you skeldering varlet?” (10.114-116).91 In light of Moll’s values and her bold declarations and actions to support them, Viviana Comensoli believes that Moll’s “rejection of marriage derives in part from the Christian ascetic tradition” and that she separates “body and spirit,” holding to bodily chastity so that her spirit can be free in this world.92 And while Moll does assert that the only way for her to be free is to remain unmarried—and unmanned—her sexuality, like everything else about her character, is not so neatly categorized. In his book that generally forces Middleton’s plays into too-narrowly defined categories of Christian thought, Herbert Jack Heller more correctly points out that “Moll has an indeterminate sexual status.”93 Moll does not wholly exclude herself from the play’s sexual talk—she notably jokes in the viol-playing scene in Sir Alexander’s quarters, “I’ll play my part as well as I can: it shall ne’er be said I came into a gentleman’s chamber and let his instrument hang by the walls!” (8.85-87). She is also painted as having sexual appeal; the epistle calls her “Venus,” Mistress Openwork assumes that her husband flirts with Moll simply because Moll is in their shop, and Laxton (who is not aroused by Mistress Gallipot or any of the other women) is immediately drawn to devising plans to get Moll to sleep with him: “Heart, I would give but too much money to be nibbling with that wench. Life, sh’as the spirit of four great parishes” (15, 3.193-195).

45 Jean Howard has pointed out the specifically sexual nature of the viol-playing scene in particular, noting that the change of Moll’s instrument from her real-life lute to a viol as especially significant because the lute could be “tucked decorously beneath the breast, but the viol, played with legs akimbo.”94 This incident, she argues, insists upon… female erotic desire, while making clear the cultural imperatives that operate to shape, channel, and control that eroticism….heterosexual marriage is the only “legitimate” avenue open to Moll for acting on any of her sexual desires, whatever they might be. And marriage she rejects on political grounds as entailing an insupportable subordination and loss of independence…. Yet Moll never denies her sexuality….95 Howard believes that Moll’s sexuality is visualized in the viol, which “suggests her own sexual instrument and her masturbatory playing of it a final defiance of patriarchal, phallus-oriented, sexuality.”96 We might reconcile Moll’s adamant refusal to marry and militant protection of her chastity with her simultaneous sexual embodiment by this categorization of her sexuality, but this reading, too, is problematic. This scene is sexual and sexually described, but Moll herself couches this episode in terms of disproving those who slander her by calling her a whore. Firstly, Moll does not choose the viol as her instrument; Sebastian offers it to her, and Moll insists that she would not have played it if he had not given it to her, for “though the world judge impudently of me, I ne’er came into that chamber yet where I took down the instrument myself” (8.92-94). Her “dreams” are also of the truth being seen for what it is. She describes two women who are sexually loose and could be called whores, and concludes, “Yet she began, like all my foes,/ To call whore first; for so do those—/ A pox of all false tails!” (8.122-124). She proceeds to show her prized honesty once the song is over by not only “keep[ing her] legs together” but also pointing out Sir Alexander’s jewels meant to entice her and making sure no one takes them (8.129). So it seems that Moll’s sexuality is yet another aspect of her character that defies all boundaries; we cannot determine what we should think of her sexually, except that she upholds her chastity for reasons other than the cultish value given hymenal intactness (as we will see Beatrice-Joanna does in The Changeling). The point is that she is not sexually involved with men, but neither is she sexually unaware or put-off. We may leave open the possibility that Moll is autosexual, but in trying to show that she is, we yet again try to categorize a person whose very nature is intentionally indefinable.

46 As Anthony B. Dawson has said of the actual Mary Frith, so too Moll “pose[s] a problem of categorization.”97 But it is not as though she simply makes it problematic for us to categorize her, as though it were a task that must be done; rather, Moll’s very nature, her very existence, not only begs that we not try to fit her into pre-existing roles but also defies any kind of label she is given. Indeed, she visibly slips from the categories into which she is placed. Kahn notes that Moll is depicted as freely moving between genders and classes. Kahn observes that Moll is “equally at home with nobles, middle-class artisans, or criminals” and that she “never conceals her socially ascribed identity as a woman, doesn’t stop dressing like a man, and refuses to marry. By wearing breeches and carrying a sword, she assumes the social position and prerogatives of a man—without either renouncing her social identity as a woman or conforming to its dictates.” Moll is more than a free-mover. She easily moves among different classes of people, but she is not simply a non-conformist, as Adrienne L. Eastwood supposes in her article on single women in early modern society. For her, Moll becomes the female type who cross-dresses out of a kind of necessity to impersonate a man, thereby achieving what she needs and desires as a woman who does not fit into a socially acceptable male-dominated position.98 Moll does not renounce her expected feminine role and turn instead to the masculine roles forbidden her. Rather, she actively carves out her own character, choosing what she likes from all genders and classes and fluidly constructing her own indefinable identity. Laxton points out Moll’s “slipperiness” in the play’s beginning when he observes in the market that “She slips from one company to another like a fat eel between a Dutchman’s fingers” (3.213-214), and Moll bookends the play with pointing out as much again at its conclusion: Condemn me? troth an you should, sir, I’d make you seek out one to hang in my room: I’d give you the slip at gallows and cozen the people. (11.209-211) Just as the actor who plays Moll slips in and out of an ever-changing wardrobe—from frieze jerkin and safeguard to all-male traveling garb to a wedding dress—so Moll’s character slips from definitive identification.

Coherence: The Strong Woman and Marriage

Because both these plays do focus on these extraordinary female characters, how they conclude with the convention of marriages is problematic. Whereas the marriages in many early modern comedies’ conclusions tend to imply only a “happy ending,” a felicitous return to social order, as in Much Ado about Nothing—the chaos of deceit, betrayal, and sexuality overcome in multiple marriages—the traditional comedic conclusion in No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s and The Roaring Girl is not so easily acceptable as truly resolving the plays’ issues. George E. Rowe, Jr. notes that in No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, “The promise of multiple marriages is reminiscent of Shakespearean comedy, where the seemingly endless procession of young lovers to the altar at the end of a given play signifies the formation of a new, harmonious society.” Rowe highlights Beveril’s traditional wedding masque and Sir Oliver’s intentions for blessing a double marriage upon the very day of Lady Goldenfleece’s wedding but points out that while elements for the traditional early modern comedic ending are present, disorder and “perversion” lie beneath.99 Indeed, the audience knows that the two proposed marriages cannot take place because two of the supposed lovers are already married (and in an incestuous marriage at that), and the “marriage” that is celebrated on stage is also false, Mistress Low-water both married and a woman (and another boy actor), thus triply an impossible husband for Lady Goldenfleece. As Jowett points out, “Marriages have taken place that, more or less to the audience’s best knowledge, break the very laws on which marriage is founded. Incest doubles the family upon itself, and same-sex marriage denies the possibility of progeny.” But we might also observe that this conclusion is not the play’s real one. The four young lovers are granted their true loves, Jane with Sandfield and Grace with Philip (the latter pre- existing marriage rendered non-incestuous and thus licit), and Lady Goldenfleece is wedded to a legitimate suitor. Thus, though the partners differ, there are still two weddings and a recent wedding celebrated at play’s end. Still, we know enough about at least two of the marriages to wonder how they might turn out. Philip, for instance, though literally given visible, tangible Grace throughout, is not the likeliest candidate to serve as an exemplar of a caring husband and head of household. Muir highlights the emotionally instability and self-absorption of this young man, noting that Philip—even when confronted with his living mother whom he carelessly failed to rescue from captivity, instead spending the ransom on whoring—is “appalled much more by the loss of his wife than by the revelation of treachery to his mother.”100 It seems also that

48 Philip’s real concern is his own happiness; when he despairs of his situation, he never once mentions Grace or seeks to comfort or protect her. His true sentiments are revealed in his second sentence in the play’s opening scene: “My wife will be forced from me, my pleasure!” (1.4). The loss of his wife means the loss of his pleasure, and for this he laments. One could argue that he simply refers to his wife as his true delight, but in light of his unrepentant treatment of his mother and sister, it seems quite unlikely. Heller believes there is ultimately hope for Philip, including him in his list of “[c]onverts and penitents,” but Philip’s remorse never goes beyond self-pity, and—unlike many Middletonian characters—he never displays repentance.101 In light of all this, should we rejoice in his affirmed marriage, celebrate that his misbehavior is rewarded and a young woman placed in his selfish and unruly embrace? We might also wonder, if Lady Goldenfleece at last marries for love when she “marries” Mistress Low-water, only to have her marriage partner exchanged for another, what kind of marriage will she have? Indeed, Lady Goldenfleece claims that her choice of Beveril when released from her marriage to Mistress Low-water is not primarily based upon love: Then in revenge to thee, To vex thine eyes, ’cause thou hast mocked my heart And with such treachery repaid my love, This is the gentleman I embrace and choose. (9.525-528) But her motivation for revenge over abused trust and affections does not mean Lady Goldenfleece cannot possibly love Beveril. Indeed, she does not marry to spite Mistress Low- water; she marries Beveril—“[t]his… gentleman”—in specific (the man who supposedly cuckolded Mistress Low-water) as a just desert for Mistress Low-water’s treatment of her. True to her vow when she denounces Sir Gilbert, Lady Goldenfleece does choose to marry a man regardless of property or title simply for love. Beveril has demonstrated that he does truly love Lady Goldenfleece in the masque he created for her, in his discovering of the abusive suitors, and his readiness to answer her call. Hanson argues of this play and other widow wooing comedies that “the prodigals win their rich and attractive widows to bring about the comic conclusions of the plays.”102 But she makes a mistake in lumping all of these widow tales together as though they all have the same elements and message. In this instance, the prodigal is clearly Philip, and rather than a rich widow, he marries a penniless tavern girl. Lady Goldenfleece does marry a poor man, but he is clearly a kind-hearted man who loves her and

49 does not care for her money (he gladly watches Mistress Low-water take charge of the widow’s wealth). The most unusual coupling that occurs in this final scene, however, is the reconciled Mistress Low-water and Lady Goldenfleece. Rowe argues that the most “grotesquely unnatural” part of this comedic conclusion is the “union of extremes” that occurs with the sudden reconciliation of these two “mortal enemies.” Like Lady Twighlight’s earlier forgiveness of her unrepentant son, Rowe finds this resolution difficult to believe. He believes that “this unity [is] as perverted as the proposed marriage of Grace and Weatherwise” and concludes that Middleton tries to expose the fact that “the reconciliation which occurs at the end of traditional comedy [is]…fundamentally unnatural.”103 Rowe’s argument that Middleton critiques marriage-as- comic-conclusion as less than perfect certainly has merit, but the newly formed relationship between Mistress Low-water and Lady Goldenfleece as “sisters” seems one of the most likely of the relationships to succeed.104 These women are the play’s two fullest personalities who have demonstrated, despite their minor imperfections, solidly admirable character. They also share a common experience of abuse at the hands of men and have both seen a woman set aright the situation men like Goldenfleece, Master Low-water, Sir Gilbert, Philip, and Sir Oliver mangled. Secrets having been brought to light, Mistress Low-water and Lady Goldenfleece vow to love each other as sisters, and Lady Goldenfleece turns proprietorship of her wealth over to Mistress Low-water, both their husbands well-pleased with the arrangement. Now that the most capable characters are given command of their community’s future, it is not implausible that the two are truly reconciled. Lady Goldenfleece has given up claims to her wealth, Mistress Low-water has reclaimed disinherited virtue’s “portion,” and both are better off than they originally were (Lady Goldenfleece with a loving husband and Mistress Low-water with command of her family’s means of living, rather than her incompetent husband); there is no longer reason to remain enemies. A large question mark still looms over Philip and Grace’s marriage—not so much in terms of Philip’s happiness as of Grace’s. But Grace does (for some unknown reason) love Philip, and she now has hope in the “wit” and “help” of two leading women in the community, women who offer another form of help in their strong examples. Thus, Beveril’s conclusion that this night is one of “general joy” is not far from the mark (9.690).

50 The Roaring Girl similarly ends with a marriage, one that gives no indication of unhappiness. Yet because Moll has been so outspoken about her rejection of marriage, many critics find her participation in Sebastian and Mary’s wedding a problem that must be reconciled with their reading of Moll. Viewing Moll as a walking contradiction, Dawson points out that Moll not only persuasively argues against marriage but also offers “rather conventional views concerning wifely obedience…. She herself wants none of the marriage game, but at the same time she is happy to promote it for others; she certainly does not seek to topple the system.”105 Indeed, what are we to make of the fact that Moll both asserts that “a wife, you know, ought to be obedient”—something that she will not be—but at the same time insists that the citizen wives serve their husbands faithfully and gladly helps Mary into a marriage (4.39)? Critics have often noted the importance of marriage in this play, even without regard for Moll’s views on the subject. Heller argues that the play serves as a “reassertion of the pre- eminence of Christian marriage,” for instance.106 And Holms supposes that the plot with the citizen couples “emphasize[s] the dignity of marriage” over the “shabbiness of lechery.”107 Comensoli also asserts that “the concern at the heart of the play [is] with the degeneration of marriage and the family.”108 Noting Moll’s role in the play’s marriages, Jane Baston argues that the play offers but a “mere gesture towards subversion,” Middleton creating a Moll who “does appear to challenge and subvert gender and class norms” in the early part of the play, but that “a close examination of the final acts reveals that she is gradually contained and incorporated into the prevailing social apparatus of the play…. Moll has become rehabilitated into a society which is neither new nor tolerant.” Thus, “rather than a spokeswoman for a new world order,” Moll becomes “a matchmaker, mediator, and conciliator, all in the service of venery, not radical feminism.”109 Similarly, Deborah Jacobs proposes that Moll “triumphs in various ways over anyone perceived as disruptive of the social order” and is actually a highly conservative force, an “instrument of the state.”110 Howard highlights Moll’s “utopian aspirations” and Comensoli her “misogamy,” pointing out that Moll thus clearly cannot fall into the category of social conformer, and Jardine celebrates Moll as the proto-feminist who subverts the early modern patriarchal system, serving as “the outspoken spokesperson for disorder.”111 But Moll simultaneously seems to promote order, especially in Sebastian and Mary’s wedding. Thus Dawson and Comensoli conclude that

51 Moll is not a coherent woman or character but rather a mode of portraying the idea of social image.112 Forman likewise insists that though Moll appears… “real,” she actually functions within the play as a site of projection that embodies and intensifies cultural fantasies and contradictions. These contradictions have provided much fuel for a critical debate over whether she supports or subverts the play’s social order—a debate the play itself seems to invite…. [Thus] the question of whether or not Moll is subversive is not a particularly useful one, precisely because Moll is not a coherent character who is the source of action, but is instead a locus of cultural fantasies, an embodiment of the culture’s contradictions.113 Howard also agrees that Moll is not “a self-consistent representation of a unified psyche” but rather a “representation… enmeshed in contradictions.” She concludes, in perhaps the most thoughtful critical evaluation of this very important part of the play, that The ending of the play, which leaves Moll defiantly outside the marriage fold and Mary submissively within, is a fine example of the significant contradictions of this text’s handling of the “comic” matter of venery. This drama doesn’t tell a single or simple story about sexuality and its relationship to institutions such as marriage. In its inability to do so it reveals the pressure points in the culture’s ways of making sense of its multivalent and changing practices.114 The trouble with the body of existing criticism is that it focuses on certain elements of Moll’s character and ignores others, thus forcing her into the binary system as either conforming or subversive, or it takes her entire character into account but cannot believe she is, as such, a unified person but reflects a contradictory, changing culture. But Moll, though she can neither be categorized as a conforming nor a subversive character, is a perfectly coherent person, a “unified psyche” even. Moll as an individual has several unifying values, honesty and personal integrity perhaps the two most prominent. Indeed, Moll’s choice to be utterly independent and her choice of which social values she will uphold and which roles she will practice lead directly to her militant defense of her name as an honest woman. As long as other characters do the same, she accepts them and generally promotes their well-being. One might wonder, for instance, why Moll protects Jack Dapper from the thugs his father sends after him; after all, the young gallant truly is

52 in debt and has been engaging in activities like dancing, smoking, drinking, gambling, and perhaps whoring, as his father laments. Yet Jack Dapper certainly does not deny his behavior; he both chooses it and owns it. But if Jack does engage in whoring, how can Moll support him? Isn’t this the same Moll who wounds Laxton as she insists, “I scorn to prostitute myself to man,/ I that can prostitute a man to me” (5.111-112)? This is the same Moll who rages against “all men” who employ their golden witchcrafts …[to] entangle the poor spirits of fools— Distressed needlewomen and trade-fallen wives, Fish that needs bite or themselves be bitten— Such hungry things as these may soon be took With a worm fastened on a golden hook. Those are the lecher’s food, his prey. (5.92-99) Does she not here protect the poor fallen whores? Moll does accuse men who sexually prey upon vulnerable women, but she also believes there are means of escape for such women, for she also proclaims that …she that has wit and spirit May scorn to live beholding to her body for meat, Or for apparel, like your common dame That makes shame get her clothes to cover shame. Base is that mind that kneels unto her body….(5.134-138) Moreover, it seems most likely that Jack Dapper has not been whoring in the sense of illicit intercourse with a woman because Moll herself believes that Jack is too enamored with himself to “put…[his] courtship home enough to a wench” (3.330-331). Thus Moll’s friendship with and protection of Jack is not inconsistent with her values. Similarly, Moll’s support of Sebastian’s marriage plan is entirely in keeping with her character. As Sebastian affirms, his relationship with Mary is “honest”; they intend to marry for love, fulfilling their vows to each other. And Mary clearly wants this marriage; this is what she has chosen, actively seeking it from the very first line of the play. Moll is not wholly opposed to the practice of marriage, nor does she seek to dismantle marriage as an institution; her speeches against marriage are all in opposition to her own marriage: “I have no humour to marry. I love to

53 lie o’ both sides o’th’bed myself; and again o’th’other side, a wife, you know, ought to be obedient, but I fear me I am too headstrong to obey, therefore I’ll ne’er go about it” (4.37-41). She does not assert that marriage is a moral evil or a social injustice but that she simply doesn’t have the “humour to marry.” Granted, Moll’s second affirmation of her choice not to marry levels a bit more of a social judgment. When asked when she will marry after Sebastian and Mary’s wedding, Moll replies in no uncertain terms: …I’ll tell you when i’faith: When you shall hear Gallants void from sergeants’ fear, Honesty and truth unslandered, Woman manned but never pandered, Cheaters booted but not coached, Vessels older ere they’re broached; If my mind be then not varied, Next day following, I’ll be married. (11.216-223) Moll’s basic statement is equivalent to “I’ll be married when hell freezes over,” but she also suggests that she does desire to see an alteration in social practices and values. But even here, what she seeks is an alteration of society, not its complete dismantling. In regards to marriage in specific, she says she would like to see “Woman manned but never pandered”; she does not condemn the role of wife but rather women’s unjust treatment by men. If a woman like Mary chooses to be a wife, then Moll supports her choice, though she herself would not choose such a life. Moll’s “utopian aspirations,” as Howard calls them, are actually quite pragmatic; she understands her society’s limitations better than anyone. Her desire is not for a society in which all women are like herself—indeed, she recognizes that not all women want to or have the personal capacity to be like her—but for a society that welcomes individual interpretation in whatever honest form it manifests itself, a society not so bound to its categories that it must continually slander those who do not fully fit into their conceived types of admirable character. Indeed, though Moll continually shows herself to be the play’s most admirable character, truly above reproach (especially sexually), she is repeatedly slandered as a whore.115 Jardine argues

54 that “As long as woman uses her natural intelligence to set off the man’s abilities…, she is his supreme ornament…. But the minute she shows signs of independence (inevitably represented on stage as adultery and sexual rapaciousness) those gifts become responsible for her downfall.”116 Intelligent and competent, Moll is never represented as dishonest or given to “sexual rapaciousness,” as Jardine insists independent women on the early modern stage were inevitably depicted, but she nonetheless earns the same reputation. Moll’s independence, coupled with her intelligence, abilities, and honesty, reveals the incompetence and dishonesty of the men around her. She demonstrates that an independent woman is not necessarily helpless or whorish and that an independent man is not necessarily competent or honorable. Moll’s nature and her very existence shake her society’s notions of class, gender, and virtue. Howard notes that Moll’s character and actions reveal that “women are not inherently weak, silent, and dependent, nor men the only ones gifted with the sword.”117 Kahn takes this observation further, insisting that “[i]f women costumed as men may become virtual men and perform as men, they not only threaten male governance; they also call masculinity as a fixed essence into question.” Indeed, the men must see Moll as a whore; otherwise, she is material evidence that their social practices of gender and class are not stable, that practices do not equate to essential differences. Forman’s interpretation of Moll as an emblem of the shifting nature of early modern economy, of the uncertainty of the material world and a re-conceptualization of value, is helpful to highlight the fact that Moll does indeed demonstrate that socially constructed codes cannot possibly embody a material, unchanging basis for social differences.118

Coupling Women: Expectations and Reality

In both The Roaring Girl and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, the leading female characters demonstrate that convention does not necessarily equal nature, expectation does not necessarily reflect virtue. Both plays are couched in terms of spectator expectations. The prologue for No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, addresses the audience frankly: How is’t possible to suffice So many ears, so many eyes?

55 … How it’s possible to please Opinion tossed in such wild seas? Yet I doubt not, if attention Seize you above, and apprehension You below, to take things quickly, We shall both make you sad and tickle ye. (1-2, 9-14) The prologue lists, with honesty, the various reasons the audience may attend this performance, each expecting something specific from the event. They know what they come for, and in such terms will they cast judgment upon what they see. The Roaring Girl’s prologue highlights this element of audience participation even more: A play (expected long) makes the audience look For wonders—that each scene should be a book, Composed to all perfection; each one comes And brings a play in’s head with him: up he sums, What he would of a roaring girl have writ— If that he finds not here, he mews at it. (1-6) The prologue then continues with a description of what the audience may anticipate in this roaring girl but concludes that all are actually wrong: “None of these roaring girls is ours: she flies/ With wings more lofty” (25-26). It is in this context of heightened awareness about expectation and reality that the audience is presented with both plays. No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s concludes with a seemingly conventional epilogue, Weatherwise asking for applause as he proclaims, “The planet’s Jupiter: you should be jovial….The sign’s in Gemini too: both hands should meet” (13, 17). The audience expects such an epilogue, but the character speaking the epilogue here is highly unreliable. Consulting his much-mocked almanac, Weatherwise once again seeks to control action and cast judgment. The audience is left to wonder whether they should simply “be jovial” or reconsider these two female characters they just saw break free from their expected types. What is their judgment of this performance?

56 Following Sir Alexander’s assertion that “common voice” is “the whore,” The Roaring Girl’s epilogue once again visits the relationship between social expectation, judgment, and reality (11.248). Addressing the audience, it proposes a scenario of A painter, having drawn with curious art The picture of a woman—every part Limned to the life—hung his piece out to sell. (1-3) And as this life-like woman appears in public, everyone scrutinizes her and casts a “verdict,” finding innumerable imperfections. In consequently matching social expectations, the painter ruins his beautiful work: “it was so vile,/ So monstrous and so ugly” (13-14). While the epilogue immediately operates as a metaphor for the playwrights and their play, it simultaneously illustrates what has happened to Moll on stage as well as by the spectators and reflects what likely occurred in the streets just prior to the performance and possibly directly after its conclusion. Social conventions do not always reflect reality and can easily destroy beauty and life. These two plays offer several women to admire onstage, but more importantly, they look forward to women off-stage who might remain unmarred by expectation and fill the streets with beautiful, lively countenances—not painted creations but realities.

57 CHAPTER THREE FEMALE CIRCUMSCRIPTION: THEATRICALITY AND HELL IN MIDDLETON’S THE CHANGELING

De Flores: For I place wealth after the heels of pleasure; And were I not resolved in my belief That thy virginity were perfect in thee, I should but take my recompense with grudging, As if I had but half my hopes I agreed for. Beatrice: Why, ’tis impossible thou canst be so wicked, Or shelter such a cunning cruelty; To make his death the murderer of my honour! Thy language is so bold and vicious I cannot see which way I can forgive it With any modesty. De Flores: Push! You forget yourself. A woman dipped in blood, and talk of modesty? (3.4.118-129)119 What should we make of Beatrice-Joanna? As De Flores characterizes her, Beatrice- Joanna is indeed bathed in crimson. She is steeped in intrigue, and by the end of the play, her bloodied body becomes a literalization of the trope De Flores introduced. While this study has thus far praised several Middletonian women for active pursuit of their will, Beatrice-Joanna’s plotting to achieve her desires hardly seems laudable; this female protagonist looks decidedly different from Moll, Mistress Low-water, or the Lady. Yet even in her blood-bathed skin and clothes and her christening as “whore,” Beatrice-Joanna is not of the same mold as Shakespeare’s Tamora either.120 As De Flores also points out, Beatrice-Joanna begins the play and figures in her world until the final scene as the prized virgin. But more importantly, Beatrice-Joanna is not without audience sympathy; as Annabel Patterson points out in her critical introduction to the Oxford edition, the audience identifies most with Beatrice-Joanna. Indeed, we do “both love and loathe” this female protagonist (1.1.125). Our complicated response to Beatrice-Joanna seems to reflect an oft-observed “doubleness” in her character.

58 Madeline Bassnett applies Barbara M. Benedict’s description of “monstrosity” to her own characterization of Beatrice-Joanna: she is “both human and inhuman, divine and carnal.”121 Judith Haber argues that Beatrice-Joanna should be “seen as the origin of all doubling.”122 The majority of criticism on the play also sees Beatrice-Joanna’s truest self as a woman with two “sides”: Before her sexual encounter with De Flores, that doubleness depends on a mixture of… sensualism…[and] innocence…: combined, these qualities allow her to lust after De Flores while remaining unaware of the true nature of her feelings. After their relationship is consummated, the corrupted Beatrice Joanna becomes aware of the contradiction between her outward persona and her secret life of sin. …[She is] a Beatrice who progresses from repression to expression.”123 While this chapter will challenge the conclusions psychoanalytically informed criticism has made about Beatrice-Joanna, the pervasive sense of Beatrice-Joanna as a representation of doubleness is not as unfounded as Roberta Barker and David Nicol argue in their thoughtful reading of the play. As N.K. Sugimura points out, Beatrice-Joanna’s very name seems to signal a double-nature.124 But the source of Beatrice-Joanna’s “doubleness” is not the struggle between her conscious and unconscious desires but rather her awareness of and desperate attempts to enact the social role she is expected to play. Middleton highlights the performativity of this idealized feminine role the play’s men have created, a role necessary to form the most desired relationships of the play: homosocial bonds between the men.125 Beatrice-Joanna’s purity as this ideal allows the purity of the men’s ties to each other, even though it ultimately leads this woman who cannot embody the ideal to a hideous life of intrigue and deception.

Casting Roles

Beatrice-Joanna, perhaps better than any other character in the play, understands that the world of The Changeling is a cultural theatre in which each character has their given roles to perform. As the wealthy aristocratic daughter, Beatrice-Joanna intentionally constructs herself as the play’s emblematic virgin and Petrarchan lady, the parts into which she is cast from birth.

59 Her father depends upon her unquestionable virginity in order to marry her to a wealthy and honorable young man who will become his heir, and Alsemero worships her supposed pristine state, comparing her to a prelapsarian Eve—and perhaps the Virgin Mary, who in a more permanent sense than Eve births Life itself— and giving her highest praise when she passes his virginity test: “Chaste as the breath of heaven, or morning’s womb,/ That brings the day forth” (4.2.150-151). Alsemero’s idealization of Beatrice-Joanna is also reminiscent of the pining Petrarchan lover writing of his beautiful but unapproachable “lady,” as he (and De Flores) expressly calls her in their first two encounters (1.1.64, 77, 82, 93, 98; 2.2.13, 46, 48, 52).126 Beatrice-Joanna’s performance of this role is most apparent in her commission of Alonzo de Piracquo’s murder. As De Flores approaches Beatrice-Joanna, she coaches herself in acting contrary to her feelings: Why, put case I loathed him As much as youth and beauty hates a sepulchre, Must I needs show it? Cannot I keep that secret And serve my turn upon him? (2.2.66-69) She then enacts a great show of kindness and interest, calling him by name, complimenting his looks, touching his face, and offering to make a lotion for his skin condition. In addition to her complete reversal in her interactions with De Flores and the numerous asides both speak in this relatively brief exchange, the artificiality of the scene is highlighted by Beatrice-Joanna’s apparent dramatization of the lady in distress. After sufficiently flattering De Flores to earn his pledge of “service,” Beatrice-Joanna accelerates to presenting him with her dilemma (2.2.97). “We shall try you,” she says, as if perhaps at some point she may have a need of his “employment” of “manhood,” but she quickly breaks into a dramatic, “O my De Flores!” (2.2.99, 94, 93, 100). She apparently pauses for effect here because De Flores has time for a confused yet excited aside and an actual prompt to continue in her thought: “You were about to sigh out somewhat, madam” (2.2.101). Beatrice-Joanna seems to falter here, remarking, “No, was I? I forgot—O!” (2.2.102). She again offers no more, causing the anxious De Flores to plead with her to let the “sigh…have utterance,” at which cue she finally breaks forth: “Would creation—” (an exclamation so emphatic that De Flores believes it a thirst for sexual satisfaction) “Had formed me man!” (2.2.105, 107). She continues:

60 O, ’tis the soul of freedom! I should not then be forced to marry one I hate beyond all depths; I should have power Then to oppose my loathings, nay, remove ’em Forever from my sight. (2.2.110-114) It is here that De Flores believes his hopes will come to fruition—“Oh, blest occasion!”—in both ridding himself of his rival and ingratiating himself to his lady; he joyously declares, “Without change to your sex, you have your wishes” (2.2.114, 115). Bassnett argues that this moment conveys Beatrice-Joanna’s true longing to be a man and thus control her destiny and that De Flores suppresses her newly vocalized desires with his own “story” for her life when he becomes the man she wishes to be.127 And while these are important and revelatory lines few critics have commented on, De Flores does not overshadow Beatrice-Joanna or her true desires here but rather plays into the forthcoming scene she is creating. She has no real desire to be a man; Beatrice-Joanna clearly likes being a woman, especially at this moment, dreaming as she is of marriage to the sexually attractive Alsemero. Rather, these exclamations about manhood and action are simply intended to enlist a man to do the bloody deed she as a woman “cannot” do. Another famous Beatrice—Shakespeare’s from Much Ado about Nothing—enacts a very similar scene when she commissions Benedick to kill Claudio in a duel. As she weeps over Hero’s unjust defamation and Benedick declares his love for her, Beatrice seizes the moment, declaring, “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest” (4.1.285-286).128 Benedick responds—as she knows he will—with his pledge of service to her as evidence of his love: “Come, bid me do anything for thee” (4.1.287). Thus binding him to her will, Beatrice delivers the task: “Kill Claudio” (4.1.288). When Benedick tries to back out of his pledge, Beatrice insists that he has proven that he in fact does not love her at all, and when Benedick still hesitates to commit to her purpose, she employs her infamous tongue: “Oh, that I were a man!,” “Oh God, that I were a man!,” and again, “Oh, that I were a man for his sake!” (4.1.302, 304- 305, 316). With these fierce laments and a critique of weakened manhood, Beatrice wins Benedick’s pledge to challenge Claudio. As opposed to Beatrice’s indictment of effeminized men, Beatrice-Joanna’s enlisting of De Flores actually praises his fulfillment of masculine ideals, yet both women employ this strategic elevation of all things masculine in order to achieve their

61 will. Indeed, in claiming a wish for masculinity, these women concede their inferior status, their limitations, while implying that these men fall into this coveted superior, active position. The two Beatrices thus play with gender ideals in order to commission killings that they themselves will not have to commit.129 Because of their dramatic performances, the men play into their desires. Beatrice-Joanna is significantly more theatrical than Shakespeare’s Beatrice, though, for once she has De Flores’ eager pledge, she pretends that she had never thought of having him play the killer for her. When he declares that she should “Claim so much man in me,” she appears surprised by the idea: “In thee, De Flores?/ There’s small cause for that” (2.2.116-117). To confirm his commitment, he kneels before her like a valorous knight, and she yet again pretends that she does not wish such a thing upon him, admonishing, “There’s horror in my service, blood and danger./ Can those be things to sue for?” (2.2.120-121). The solemn truth of this remark would certainly be felt in full if she were not so coy in its employment, never thinking that blood and danger were not “things to sue for” when a beautiful lady in distress is involved. Once she has contracted De Flores, Beatrice-Joanna incites his desire for her betrothed’s blood with theatrical exclamations that paint the commissioning and deed as glorious: Beatrice: Then take him to thy fury! De Flores: I thirst for him. Beatrice: Alonzo de Piracquo! (2.2.134-135) Sugimura argues that this exchange is intended to reveal Beatrice-Joanna’s “deep thirst for sex” and “thirst for blood,” placing evidence of her “sexual excitement in her gasps of fear” and their “exchange of half-lines,” which create “a sense of breathlessness.” While De Flores’ “excitement is overt,” Sugimura insists that Beatrice-Joanna’s is “under the surface” but equally as present, “charged with double delight.”130 Beatrice-Joanna certainly is excited, but her excitement is not an unconscious sexual drive. She may experience a measure of sexual excitement in the thought of achieving her desired marriage to Alsemero, but her excitement at this moment is primarily in her belief that she has successfully enacted this scene. As she gleefully remarks while walking off the stage, leaving De Flores to fulfill his promise, “I shall rid myself/ Of two inveterate loathings at one time:/ Piracquo and his dog-face” (2.2.146-148). Beatrice-Joanna is perfectly confident that De Flores will carry out the deed—and that without any negative repercussions for her—because his role is that of the play’s villain.

62 Convinced from the beginning that De Flores’ ugly face is a reflection of the hideous role he will play, Beatrice-Joanna labels him not only her personal “poison” and “basilisk” but also “[t]he villain” (1.1.112, 115; 2.1.57). It is only fitting, then, that when Alsemero proposes that they “Remove the cause” of Beatrice-Joanna’s distress by killing Alonzo, Beatrice-Joanna immediately realizes why De Flores upsets her so: “Blood-guiltiness becomes a fouler visage” (2.2.23, 40). She reproaches her blindness in an exclamation, “The ugliest creature/ Creation framed for some use, yet to see/ I could not mark so much where it should be!” (2.2.43-45). Just as she was born to play the emblematic virgin and desired Petrarchan lady, so De Flores was created to play the villain; their very appearances declare it to be so. Because he is the villain, Beatrice-Joanna expects that De Flores will enjoy killing merely for the joy of spilling blood and amassing wealth, not considering that villains also enjoy other kinds of crime. As the Petrarchan lady, she is supposed to be untouchable; indeed, all men are supposed do anything for her, without a thought of favor. After all, Alonzo and Alsemero both are willing to fight even with brothers and friends to protect her and her honor. Moreover, Beatrice-Joanna has requested service of another man only a scene before she commissions De Flores. The first scene of Act 2 opens with Beatrice-Joanna standing above Jasperino as she declares, “O sir, I’m ready now for that fair service/ Which makes the name of friend sit glorious on you,” giving him a secret letter for Alsemero and earning Jasperino’s appropriate reply of “The joy I shall return rewards my service” as he hurries off to complete the mission (2.1.1-2, 5). On the heels of Jasperino’s service and Alsemero’s offer to duel with Alonzo, Beatrice- Joanna enters her commissioning scene expecting that any man would be only too delighted to serve her in any way she might request. The dominant critical argument is that this scene and the one in which De Flores returns to claim his reward reveal the deceptive Beatrice-Joanna’s true self, her repressed feelings for De Flores finding voice. Joost Daalder and Antony Telford Moore, for instance, see Beatrice-Joanna as both afraid of and unconsciously sexually attracted to De Flores, asserting that “Beatrice and Alsemero think, wrongly, of love and loathing as two quite distinct feelings. The dramatists, however, draw attention to the connection between the two, and delineate that connection as something that we moderns would describe in Freudian terms: while the one feeling is in the conscious mind, its connected opposite is in the unconscious.”131 Peter Morrison likewise notes that while Beatrice-Joanna appears “surprised to discover that lust, not greed, has motivated De Flores,” the commissioning scene depicts a

63 woman who “seems to know…exactly why De Flores will be eager to do her bidding.”132 Such criticism leads to interpreting Beatrice-Joanna’s defloration as sex that she has unconsciously craved and pursued and that she subsequently, as De Flores insists, comes to “love anon” (3.4.173). In this context, her protests only function as preservation of her conscious desires to remain an emblematic virgin until she becomes an honorable wife to Alsemero, allowing her unconscious desires to seek satisfaction even while she believes she does not desire illicit, violent sex with De Flores.133 In an alternative to the typical Freudian reading, Christopher Ricks offers a framework for the commissioning scene as an honest “misunderstanding.” He notes that De Flores does not know what Beatrice-Joanna proposes when he eagerly offers his “manhood” for her service and the two employ language that is both straightforward and laden with sexual connotations, and thus the two suffer “tragic incomprehension.”134 De Flores cannot know the precise service Beatrice-Joanna seeks from him, at least not right away, but he is certain that the cause and ultimate direction is sexual, for he has just witnessed her secret meeting with Alsemero. Consequently, he is set upon any service that will allow him to “put in for one” (2.2.60). Beatrice-Joanna, at the same time, flirts against her natural loathing of De Flores in order to excite his desire for her so that he forgets her former abuse of him and wishes to serve her even in murder. But while Beatrice-Joanna blindly believes that she will remain an unattainable lady to admire from afar even while being served to the fullest, De Flores will carry out the deed only to its completion in what he perceives as its ultimate end: the consummation of his desires upon Beatrice-Joanna—though he knows that she does not actually offer such a payment. Beatrice- Joanna thinks of reward only in terms of money and provision for escape, believing that the “angels’ food” De Flores hungers for is gold rather than sexual elation (3.1.127). Her explicit offer of reward has not a hint of sexual gratification: “When the deed’s done,/ I’ll furnish thee with all things for thy flight;/ Thou mayst live bravely in another country” (2.2.143-145). De Flores’ agreement is more equivocal, “Ay, ay: we’ll talk of that hereafter”; he intends to negotiate the payment after the deed is done, his requested payment then undeniable (2.2.146). One may argue that De Flores in fact believes that Beatrice-Joanna intends to favor him with much greater payment than provisions of wealth. After all, as soon as he brushes aside her

64 negotiations for later, he envisions her role in their sexual encounter as much more active than his own as she “feeds” upon him in her “[h]unger and pleasure” (2.2.152): O my blood! Methinks I feel her in mine arms already, Her wanton fingers combing out this beard, And being pleased, praising this bad face. (2.2.148-151) But De Flores’ view of women is that they do not conform to reason or act as they pretend to be. Indeed, he affirms that Beatrice-Joanna undoubtedly still believes him a hideous creature and notes that she does not actually offer sexual payment, but he also sees women as “odd feeders,” preferring to “feed heartily” on indisputably “[s]lovenly dishes,” even over attractive men— which is, as he says, “strange”; it doesn’t make logical sense (2.2.155, 154, 155). What he is certain of, however, is that which leads Othello to murder the innocent Desdemona: if a woman is sexual at all, then she is willingly sexual with all men, quite indiscriminately, aside from her own pleasure: For if a woman Fly from one point, from him she makes a husband, She spreads and mounts then like arithmetic: One, ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand— Proves in time sutler to an army royal. (2.2.60-64). Thus, if Beatrice-Joanna is sexually interested in Alsemero (even though she has not consummated the relationship), then she will gladly accept De Flores’ bid for sexual relations as well. As Othello believes of Desdemona and her supposed infidelity with Cassio, because she has slept with Othello, she will sleep with any man—even “the general camp,/ Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body” (3.3.361-362). Iago speaks similarly of Bianca, describing her as a woman who is able to provide for her physical needs “by selling her desires” (4.1.96, my emphasis).135 Women cannot deny sex because they have an intrinsic craving for such pleasure, especially if it is illicit. And because women’s desires are fickle, a woman like Beatrice-Joanna will doubtless eventually change her preferences, even desiring a man she once clearly despised. Thus, De Flores believes Beatrice-Joanna will not—and cannot—deny him the pleasure he seeks. Beatrice-Joanna does prove incapable of denying De Flores’ bid for her body, but she does not exhibit the desires he believes she must have. De Flores returns after the murder as

65 Beatrice-Joanna soliloquizes on her planned marriage to Alsemero and the “refulgent virtue of my love” (3.4.17). Upon confirming the deed, Beatrice-Joanna again offers money as his sole reward, and when he scoffs at her offer, she is perplexed: “What will content him? I would fain be rid of him” (3.4.74). He then refuses even twice the original amount, and Beatrice-Joanna worries, “I am now in worse plight than I was;/ I know not what will please him!” (3.4.77-78). As De Flores approaches her physically, Beatrice-Joanna grows increasingly fearful, and upon understanding that he will only settle for her virginity, she explicitly refuses consent: “I dare not,” “O, I never shall!,” “I would not hear so much offence again,” and “With thee, foul villain?” (3.4.104, 106, 142). Beatrice-Joanna even wishes she had instead simply married Alonzo rather “than to hear these words”—not to mention having to undergo the deed (3.4.132). The lofty Petrarchan lady falls from her pedestal and even kneels before the man who should kneel before her, begging to preserve her virginity. Though De Flores uses the language of love as he leads her off stage, it is clearly not Beatrice-Joanna’s repressed will they enact. As Barker and Nicol point out, “De Flores is able to read Beatrice’s audible fear as sexual arousal and to offer the kind of encouragement typically given to shy early modern newlyweds; but Beatrice herself is silent on the point, and an actor playing her part could just as easily enact her terror in a manner that contradicted De Flores’ complacent conclusion.”136 So caught up in the creation of her own play as she acts out her role, Beatrice-Joanna finds too late that De Flores’ “performance” of his part requires something she does not wish to give (3.4.58). Indeed, De Flores forces his will upon her, demanding—with increasing violence—the payment a woman who seeks murder must pay: Come, kiss me with a zeal now. (3.4.95) …I will not stand so long to beg ’em shortly. (3.4.96) …Take you heed first. (3.4.98) …Think on’t: I’m in pain, And must be eased of you. (3.4.101-102) …Quickly! (3.4.104) …Do you urge me? (3.4.144) …She that in life and love refuses me, In death and shame my partner she shall be. (3.4.157-158)

66 After these threats and Beatrice-Joanna’s own lament that this is “[v]engeance” upon her for Alonzo’s murder, De Flores delivers his potentially romantic “bedding” lines (3.4.166): Come, rise, and shroud your blushes in my bosom; Silence is one of pleasure’s best receipts: Thy peace is wrought for ever in this yielding. (3.4.170-172) Indeed, the first line is the same string of words that the Duchess of Malfi puts forth as she and her chosen husband, Antonio, proceed to their wedding chamber: “Oh, let me shroud my blushes in your bosom” (1.3.201).137 The difference, of course, is that the Duchess utters these words on her own behalf while De Flores commands Beatrice-Joanna to make him her “shroud,” her grave, while she “pants” in fear (3.4.173).138 The confirmation of Beatrice-Joanna’s “true” desires for De Flores that critics have seen in her later professions of love for De Flores is neither proof of always-present unconscious desires nor evidence of a “change in feelings” resulting from their sexual “union.”139 Morrison not only claims that Beatrice-Joanna is “wholly aroused” right before De Flores ushers her off stage but also that “only De Flores… genuinely loves her, and so it must be De Flores who destroys her—the alternative of their free, mutual, carnal, ecstatic human love.”140 Haber claims that Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores are a “perfect pairing”: “The ideal union that Alsemero had envisioned is both undermined and fulfilled by the orgasmic union of Beatrice Joanna and De Flores.”141 Kay Stockholder compares the two to Romeo and Juliet, noting that the real difference is that Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores find that “personal, rather than family, animosity functions as the source of libidinous and romantic attraction.” She also believes that “[t]hough moral condemnation is implicit” in their “relationship…, their fidelity to each other and their isolation from everyone else gives it a romantically asocial and amoral purity”; even the “moral force of the play” is “undermined by the compelling force of romance.”142 Professional stage productions by Michael Attenborough and Richard Eyre actually portrayed Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores as a kind of Romeo and Juliet pairing.143 On a less romantic but perhaps more appalling note, Michael Neill interprets their relation to each other as one of equality and simultaneous desire and ownership; he argues that in “chang[ing] skins,” Beatrice- Joanna and De Flores undergo a “process of mutual penetration and possession.”144 And so the violent sex De Flores continually forces upon Beatrice-Joanna’s body is lauded as the epitome of an egalitarian love relationship, though most concede it is somewhat perverse.

67 Two critical arguments oppose this widely-accepted view. Douglas Duncan asserts that there is no textual evidence for Beatrice-Joanna actually loving De Flores, despite her brief remarks that critics are fond of citing.145 Barker and Nicol point out that Beatrice-Joanna’s praises are “marked [by a] lack of steamy passion” and only praise De Flores as “necessary” rather than “‘desirable’ or ‘admirable.’” They assert, “The old adage ‘fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity’ describes exactly the situation in which she finds herself; her transformation originates more from her desperation to maintain a semblance of obedience to the patriarchal code than from the fulfillment of any hidden desire.”146 Indeed, Beatrice-Joanna is utterly dependent upon De Flores. For one thing, he blackmails her; if she doesn’t cooperate with him and cater to his desires, then he will expose her crimes. But she also finds that if she in some measure pleases the man, then he will aid her in continuing the performance of her scripted roles, which is her chief aim in life. Indeed, Beatrice-Joanna’s most cited sentence speaks to just such a reliance: “I’m forced to love thee now,/ ’Cause thou provid’st so carefully for my honour” (5.1.47-48). Not only is this “love” something that is “forced”—and love, by definition, cannot be compelled, since it is the free gift of the heart—but it is entirely based upon the maintenance of her reputation, her “honour.” Variations of the words “sight” and “honour” are repeated innumerable times throughout the play, indicating Beatrice-Joanna’s obsession with being seen as fulfillment of the roles she is expected to play. After all, she is acting out of necessity to preserve not merely her position but also her life. De Flores functions as a supporting actor and stage manager, aiding her difficult performance.

Impossible Parts

In the world of The Changeling, everyone acts a role, but it is the woman who can never perform her part as she ought. In acting, Beatrice-Joanna is trying both to exert control over her own life, enacting her own desires, and to force herself into the ideals she must embody. As Duncan points out, Beatrice-Joanna was likely raised on the ideals of Vives, cultivated as she would have been to perform her utmost calling as first the intact virgin bride and then as the chaste wife. Vives, Duncan observes, “subordinates every aspect of a girl’s education to his

68 theme” of virginity above all else; Beatrice-Joanna’s acceptance of his teaching as her ideal is evident in her desperate plea to De Flores, “Let me go poor unto my bed with honour,/ And I am rich in all things,” a direct reference to Vives’ advice: “Give her chastitie, and thou hast given her all things” (3.4.161-162).147 Because Beatrice-Joanna’s virginity is such a valued treasure, a quality that defines her existence, Beatrice-Joanna believes it should be given to the man who deserves to have her, the admirable man she both honors and loves. Thus her desperation that results from the double-bind she finds herself in committing murder in order to fulfill her supposed purpose as virgin bride and then discovering that she has also destroyed the one part of her person that matters to all the men involved: her virginity. As De Flores characterizes Beatrice-Joanna’s “yielding” of her maidenhead as her burial, so is the case. With the death of her virginity outside of the wedding chamber, her character— her desires and beliefs—has essentially been put to death. As Lisa Hopkins observes of Beatrice-Joanna’s defloration, “the act must be so completely erased from the visible fabric of her life that, from now on, everything she does must be an act in another sense: she must live a lie, acting out one role to conceal the act of darkness which has changed her true life into something quite different.”148 Beatrice-Joanna knows from the beginning that she but plays a part, but when she loses her virginity, her only hope is in becoming an even more successful actress, “performing” on a higher level. Duncan notes that Beatrice-Joanna is, as a result of her enforced defloration, “struggling to maintain the shadow of her honour when the substance is gone.”149 But just as Beatrice-Joanna knows that she simply plays roles into which her male world has cast her, her dramatic capabilities more heavily relied upon with each stroke against her physical status, so both she and the audience are aware that substance need not exist behind the act. Middleton makes this especially clear with Alsemero’s virginity test. Fully aware she is no longer physically a virgin, Beatrice-Joanna learns the signs a “true” virgin will exhibit and thus plays the part of virgin so well that she passes with flying colors. It is all a matter of performance; Beatrice-Joanna is herself played by a boy, a figure whose substance was never that of the iconic virgin or even a biological female. Yet his performance, following a specific script, is a more real embodiment of these feminine ideals than the character he portrays, operating in the troubling realm of unscripted expectations, is herself capable of. Even when the meaninglessness of the ideals is thus anatomized, Beatrice-Joanna must still construct her identity as the visual representation and physical realization of her feminine

69 roles. As Sara Eaton proposes, Beatrice-Joanna’s ultimate tragedy has nothing to do with the “depravity inherent in beautiful women” but is rather found in her inability to successfully live up to the male-defined imperative to both “be” and “seem.”150 She may act her part, but she will at last be exposed as what she cannot embody: “a series of negatives: not-virgin, not-wife, finally not-alive.”151 Having successfully performed even through her wedding night with Diaphanta’s help—an act which provides fully tangible “substance” to the show—Beatrice-Joanna as now confirmed non-virgin finds that the “truth” behind her appearance is continually doubted. The disillusioned Alsemero asks her pointedly, “Are you honest?” (5.3.20). Beatrice-Joanna answers with a laugh that she believes will demonstrate her innocence, but Alsemero finds the act unsatisfactory. Beatrice-Joanna insists, ’Tis innocence that smiles, and no rough brow Can take away the dimple in her cheek. Say I should strain a tear to fill the vault, Which would you give the better faith to? (5.3.24-27). She highlights the fact that regardless of the manner of her answer, it is but an act, an act which will never satisfy the observer. As Alsemero himself confirms, his question is but a set-up; the nature and substance of her response do not matter—she can convince him of nothing but that she is whore: ’Twere but hypocrisy of a sadder colour, But the same stuff. Neither your smiles nor tears Shall move or flatter me from my belief: You are a whore. (5.3.31) A woman is only as she is perceived, and since all men know that Beatrice-Joanna is no longer a virgin, she will always remain suspect; she will always represent a possible (but physically improvable) whore. Haber notes that Middleton here “insist[s]…on the coincidence of…virgin and whore.”152 Indeed, neither is “provable,” except perhaps in the sex act itself, but the performing of which—the act of actually knowing her—irretrievably renders the woman a whore. She cannot ever truly fill her part as virgin or chaste wife or even idealized Petrarchan lady, for in the very fact that these are all unknowable presentations with no material certification of their veracity, she is necessarily always deceptive, always already the whore.153

Hell’s Theatre

Supporting Beatrice-Joanna’s understanding that she must act her part, the play itself frames the world of The Changeling as a cultural theatre, both in content and structure. Hopkins points out that at the dramatic center of the play is the rather out-dated dumb-show, which depicts the defining point of Beatrice-Joanna’s life as nothing but a theatrical show—it not only represents her marriage, but as Hopkins points out, also the unstageable act of her defloration.154 This substantive center of the play’s structure is also held in place by the play’s bookends of rehearsing and playing parts. In the opening scene, Jasperino watches Alsemero kiss Beatrice- Joanna and remarks that “he ne’er rehearsed it before” (1.1.61). A few lines later, Alsemero reminds Beatrice-Joanna of her role, asking for her love, whispering, “that’s your part, lady” (1.1.82). And but a few lines following that, Beatrice-Joanna hisses at De Flores, “And how welcome for your part you are,/ I’m sure you know” (1.1.98-99). The play’s final scene has a similar focus, as Alsemero forces Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores into his closet, commanding them to “rehearse again,” and De Flores declares that “I coupled with your mate/ At barley- break,” a game in which each couple plays a specific role (5.3.114, 162-163). More specifically, by the play’s end, the characters find themselves in the theatre of hell. The closet into which Alsemero has thrust Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores is most likely the discovery space, a portion of the theatre typically associated with darkness, secrecy, and death and particularly in this play with murder (of Alonzo in the small dark “vault”) and condemnation (of Beatrice-Joanna in the virginity test and her subsequent means to cover up the truth) (3.2.21).155 Alsemero highlights this idea: …rehearse again Your scene of lust, that you may be perfect When you shall come to act it to the black audience Where howls and gnashings shall be music to you. Clip your adultress freely; ’tis the pilot Will guide you to the Mare Mortuum, Where you shall sink to fathoms bottomless. (5.3.114-120)

71 As Beatrice-Joanna enacts her newly assigned role of whore, just as she performed her virginity, the discovery space thus becomes the mouth of hell from which we hear the screams of its tortured souls. And because it is a “bottomless” pit, the gaping mouth draws in the audience, now turned “black” as their own sins paint them, in horror. Swapan Chakravorty observes that this depiction has a “chilling immediacy,” as the “[c]astle and theatre turn to hell, the spectators to its ‘black audience.’”156 De Flores asserts that he and Beatrice-Joanna are “left in hell,” the couple that loses at barley-break and the couple darkened with deeds of blood, while Vermandero replies aghast, “We are all there. It circumscribes us here” (5.3.163, 164). These men, like the voyeuristic audience, do not merely observe De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna’s performance but are also inside the theatre of hell, which is not only the circle of the theatre but also that of the deceptive woman’s devilish conjuring and of her own whorish ring of “hell.” Because De Flores cuts off Alonzo’s ringed finger, the sexual imagery of fingers wearing rings has often been noticed. Before disposing of Alonzo, De Flores pauses in discovery: Ha! what’s that Threw sparkles in my eye? O, ’tis a diamond He wears upon his finger. It was well found: This will approve the work. What, so fast on? Not part in death? I’ll take a speedy course then: Finger and all shall off. (3.1.21-25) Several scenes before in the madhouse plot, Alibius is explicit in his metaphor as he enlists Lollio as the guard of his wife’s chastity when he is away, affirming that he is fearful of becoming a cuckold because of his wife’s youth and beauty (and if she married him, why wouldn’t she run after younger, more handsome and wealthy men?). He asserts: I would wear my ring on my own finger: Whilst it is borrowed it is none of mine, But his that useth it. (1.2.26-29). Lollio supports his suspicions, noting: “You must keep it on still, then; if it but lie by, one or other will be thrusting into’t” (1.2.30-31). While critics have noted the phallic nature of the finger and De Flores’ severing of Alonzo’s as a form of castration, the emphasis is not so much upon the man’s ability to wear the ring but upon the feminine nature of the ring as loose and easily accepting one man after another.157 De Flores views his inevitable penetration of

72 Beatrice-Joanna as more easily done once he has removed the vigilant occupant from her ring, thus “clear[ing]/ The passages” (3.1.26-27). Of course, with so many wearers, the ring becomes the fiery locus of hell, the woman’s bodily entrance that sets men aflame and from which she issues corruption. But the circular flames of the woman are not limited to her “ring” alone. Her nether “eye,” as Lollio calls it, is one of three, and her two other eyes similarly issue fire from their spheres as they penetrate men (3.3.83).158 De Flores describes Beatrice-Joanna’s ocular penetration as a painful burning of his soul: “I live in pain now: that shooting eye/ Will burn my heart to cinders” (3.4.155-156). Alsemero confirms the idea when he comes to suspect Beatrice- Joanna of infidelity; he insists: O, were she the sole glory of the earth, Had eyes that could shoot fire into kings’ breasts, And touched, she sleeps not here! (4.2.106-108) Whether or not a man penetrates into the woman’s hell as she slips onto his “finger,” he still lives in danger of entering the circle of her fiery hell because she can penetrate him and thus draw him into the flames with her. According to this logic, Vermandero is quite right when he observes that each and every one of them was circumscribed, or “drawn” into this woman’s hell. But then again, has the woman actually circumscribed these men, or have they put themselves there? Deborah Burkes observes, “In the nightmare world of the play, no man is safe from… Beatrice-Joanna’s corruption.”159 But the fact is that Beatrice-Joanna has hardly drawn any of the men into her flaming corruption; the play is quite explicit that they have “thrust” themselves into this ring that they have turned into hell. Though it does not make the cut for Patterson’s list of “keywords that stand for, and lock together,” the play’s “major issues,” the salient verb “thrust” appears at least five times throughout the play, the first incidence setting the dramatic connotations for subsequent utterances: De Flores fingers Beatrice-Joanna discarded glove that she cannot bear to touch her skin again now that De Flores has touched them, and he violently forces the tiny glove open: “I should thrust/ My fingers into her sockets here” (1.1.237).160 While early modern audiences may have initially seen Beatrice-Joanna’s dropped glove as another kind of loose ring, something she cannot keep to herself, making a comparison to Frances Howard’s dropped glove that Prince Charles reportedly refused to retrieve because it

73 was already “stretched by another,” Beatrice-Joanna’s glove and ring are actually too small for the men who thrust into them.161 De Flores himself compares Alonzo’s wearing of Beatrice- Joanna’s ring as a forceful thrusting when he delivers the finger and ring to her: De Flores: I could not get the ring without the finger. Beatrice: Bless me! What hast thou done? De Flores: Why, is that more than killing the whole man? …A greedy hand thrust in a dish at court In a mistake hath had as much as this. Beatrice: ’Tis the first token my father made me send him. De Flores: And I made him send it back again…. He was as loath to part with’t, for it stuck As if the flesh and it were both one substance. (3.4.29-31, 33-36, 39-40, my emphasis) Alonzo greedily wears a ring so small it cannot be removed from his finger, a ring that the woman did not willfully give him or leave loosely lying around; Beatrice-Joanna’s father “made” her give him the ring.162 As her proprietor, Beatrice-Joanna’s father effectively gives her ring away, just as he determines who will pick up her dropped glove (more than likely meant for the man of her choice, the present Alsemero), and thus in both cases, he determines the man— “legitimate partner” or not—who will “thrust… into her sockets,” who will violently force himself into Vermandero’s daughter. With or without a husband, Beatrice-Joanna must undergo a rape-like consummation of male desires. Not only have the men forced themselves into the flaming circle of hell, but they have in fact created it. The feminine circle that joins them all is of their own making, the circular ties of males bonded to males. Vermandero knows that the unpolluted ring of his daughter is what will link him to an honorable son, what will purchase that tie that he has longed for. After Vermandero boasts to Alsemero that he is acquiring the “proudest” gentleman in Spain as his son, Alsemero observes, “He’s much/ Bound to you, sir,” and Vermandero completes the circle of his thought: “He shall be bound to me,/ As fast as this tie can hold him,” adding that this is his true “will” (terms with decided sexual connotations) (1.1.214, 216-224). In this arrangement, male is thus tied in a “fast” marriage to another male, mutually fortifying their wealth and honor. Their very diction speaks it:

74 Vermandero: You’re both welcome, But an especial one belongs to you, sir, To whose most noble name our love presents The addition of a son, our son Alonzo. Alonzo: The treasury of honour cannot bring forth A title I should more rejoice in, sir. (2.1.97-102, my emphasis) Evidently more than between a man and his wife, marriage is solidified by the love of the man and his wife’s father. Vermandero sorrows like a lover at Alonzo’s disappearance: His breach of faith Has too much marred both my abusèd love— The honourable love I reserved for him— And mocked my daughter’s joy. (4.2.25-28, my emphasis) Marrying Alonzo ought to give Beatrice-Joanna “joy” as she performs her daughterly role of virgin bride, but the real love in the relationship is a very special kind of love that Vermandero has been saving up to especially give the son of his choice, and thus it is he who is scorned and deserted by the beloved. Homosocial relations are thus elevated above heterosexual ones.

The Womanless Circle

Duncan notes that Middleton’s favorite dramatic theme is “the exploitation of woman’s sexuality, and especially virginity, for the commercial and social advantage of herself or her family,” but he argues that there is an “almost total absence of this theme” in The Changeling.163 On the contrary, this theme is especially present in this play, revealing what may happen when the woman’s virginity is too heavily relied upon as the means of family honor, connection, and inheritance, highlighting the impossibility of owning such a “treasure.” Despite the fact that De Flores has stolen Beatrice-Joanna’s virginity, Beatrice-Joanna is seen as the thief, taking away what belongs to her father and thereby dishonoring and “defil[ing]” him (5.3.149). At the same time that she is accused of pulling all the men into her circle of hell, she is also blamed for breaking that most important circle of male ties. Luckily for Vermandero, Alsemero is anxious

75 enough to be “bound” to such a great man that he overlooks the fact that he has no true tie to Vermandero (since he never did consummate his marriage with Beatrice-Joanna) and declares himself the son Vermandero has always wanted, encouraging him to thus “joy again” (5.3.187). Hopkins argues that in this final scene, Middleton “offer[s] a reformation of homosocial bonding after disruption by threatening women,” for “the father-son and brother-brother relationship [is] sealed between Alsemero and Vermandero and Alsemero and Tomazo over the dead body of Beatrice-Joanna.” She also believes that because Beatrice-Joanna is the woman who tries to “beguile” men, she is essentially taught a lesson in her brutal death and humiliation and that this corrective act is also an attempt by Middleton and Rowley to “bind…themselves with Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson in a controlled demonstration of mastery over the mysteries of performance.”164 Similarly, Burkes believes that the “formation of a more perfect family, an all male family” that is clearly “barren” serves to “expose…the falseness of a woman for all to see,” thus encouraging anxiety about women and their lack of trustworthiness.165 And while Beatrice-Joanna is certainly not depicted positively, her end is quite pathetic rather than utterly condemning. Groveling and bloody, Beatrice-Joanna musters her last breath to beg forgiveness from her father and Alsemero, the two men she has sought to please in all of her desperate actions, and she hopes even her death will ultimately please them: “Forgive me, Alsemero, all forgive:/ ’Tis time to die when ’tis a shame to live” (5.3.178-179). This “false” presentation of a happy, “more perfect family” is not intended to fortify cultural anxieties or unite the playwrights with misogynistic forebears but to reveal false logic, unjust reasoning, and emptiness in the ideals espoused. Even as Beatrice-Joanna lies in a pool of her own blood at his feet, Alsemero again attempts to control and perfect the world in which he lives by delivering a moral lesson about the story’s changelings and praising the male bonds that have been formed as a result of Beatrice- Joanna’s pathetic end. Alonzo’s brother Tomazo he clasps in affection: “Your change is come too: from an ignorant wrath/ To knowing friendship,” and Vermandero he cheers with the knowledge that he now has “yet a son’s duty living”—which is naturally considered better than that any daughter could ever give (5.3.202-203). But even if Beatrice-Joanna were truly the monstrosity these men make her out to be, the incongruity of this “happy” formation of male ties with the still-bleeding female body in the foreground would be most apparent for the watching audience. The smiling faces of brother-in-law, husband, and father are hardly believable signs of

76 an improved world in the presence of the mutilated flesh and agonized expression of Beatrice- Joanna’s body. By employing culturally familiar stories, techniques, and situations, Middleton does not here reaffirm the ideals that under-gird them but rather reveals their emptiness and destructiveness. As Alsemero condemns the woman he supposedly loved to hell’s wrath, he ignorantly stands in the circle that was not Beatrice-Joanna’s creation but the construction of the community of men with which he now proudly identifies himself. It is they who have created the flames of hell they fear. And at play’s end, that fearful flaming circle is where they yet stand, their hellish theatre still very much alive and well.

77 CONCLUSION

As the hellish arena of theatricality in The Changeling makes visible, a woman’s sense of identity and agency is at risk in a society that demands that women fulfill an impossibly rigid feminine ideal. Like the theatre of masculinity that opens Julie Taymor’s film version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, both Beatrice-Joanna and the Lady of The Lady’s Tragedy are circumscribed by decidedly masculine worlds that demand perfect performances of their women. As the fathers of these women both make explicit, Beatrice-Joanna’s and the Lady’s performances of ideal femininity are required to form bonds between men. In each case, refusal to perform this role calls for not merely a withdrawal of “protection” but rather a death-sentence. While the Lady perceives and stands up against this male-dominated ideological system, dying in defiance, Beatrice-Joanna is blind to its injustices; she truly believes she can and must fulfill her assigned roles. The Lady sets herself outside of that system even as Beatrice-Joanna continually performs on its center stage. When her father tries to turn her over to the Tyrant, the Lady stands firm against his professed will—“[a]dvancement for thy father”—declaring her preference to be a “shepherd’s” daughter rather than a lady, because she would thus be freer, “happier and more peaceful” (1.1.26, 41). The Lady’s ability to “withstand” her father’s purposes both preserves her own will and independence and redeems her father, as he is forced to see the folly and inhumanity of his ways (1.1.62). Far from saving her father, Beatrice-Joanna instead fears him, as though he were an unapproachable god. Beatrice-Joanna does disagree with her father’s express will— What’s Piracquo My father spends his breath for? And his blessing Is only mine, as I regard his name, Else it goes from me, and turns head against me, Transformed into a curse. (1.2.19-23) Of course, the man’s name, blessing, and cursing are intentionally ambiguous: they can be either Vermandero’s or Alonzo’s, her two male masters, father and husband. Beatrice-Joanna’s will is not in accord with those of her father and the man he has chosen as her husband (men are effectively the same, fused as they are through their female conduit). But where the Lady enacts

78 her own will, Beatrice-Joanna dares not even approach—let alone contradict or defy— Vermandero or Alonzo, her father having proved his unwillingness to listen to his daughter’s desires, calling her fear of the “violent” loss of her virginity to Alonzo but “a toy” (1.1.195, 201). Beatrice-Joanna continues to operate within the male-scripted bounds of power, choosing murder rather than the appearance of disobedience, firmly believing in the unmatchable value of her virginal intactness—it outweighs a man’s life. And whereas the Lady’s father repents on his knees, seeking her forgiveness, Beatrice-Joanna grovels before her father, begging for his pardon: “all forgive” (5.3.178). The pardon Beatrice-Joanna seeks is not for murder but for transgressing her father’s will and, more importantly, inadequately playing her part: she has acted so poorly that her performance only earns her “shame” in others’ eyes—and now, as she is exposed as an actress with no substance, she dies in her own shame of her failure to truly embody the feminine ideal, for “’Tis time to die when ’tis a shame to live” (5.3.179).

Often called a Puritan primarily because of his depictions of the dark recesses of human nature, Middleton does not so much seek to display innate human depravity as represent plausible human beings, characters who form a broad spectrum of admirable traits and personal flaws. The murderous Beatrice-Joanna and the irreproachable Lady stand as vastly different characters, but neither one embodies a certain type of woman, nor are their portrayals and audience responses mutually exclusive. Middleton makes clear that Beatrice-Joanna is not the embodiment of an unleashed woman—the insatiable whore, lusting for and devouring all men’s blood. Beatrice-Joanna herself seeks not to consume men’s blood but to purge her own, preventing their contamination: O come not near me, sir. I shall defile you. I am that of your blood was taken from you For your better health. Look no more upon’t, But cast it to the ground regardlessly; Let the common sewer take it from distinction. (5.3.149-153) Even in her violent death, Beatrice-Joanna fully upholds the identity the play’s men place upon her and lauds their own worthiness; she is always what they make her. And while Beatrice- Joanna is not the typological whore, neither is the Lady a pure example of feminine virtue. The

79 Lady rather explicitly denies such an embodiment, disallowing herself to be seen as the cold white marble representation of worshipful femininity that adorns her tomb. Govianus pays homage to her monument, viewing her tomb and effigy as a “[t]emple of honour” where he kneels and devoutly worships (complete with prayer book and cantor), praying to her and praising feminine ideals (4.4.4). The Lady, however, is displeased. In a forceful entrance complete with whirlwind, lightning flashes, and thunderous clatter, her tombstone “flies open,” and the Lady displays herself as awesomely active, in contrast to the lifeless, passive figure adorning her tomb. To varying extents, each of the women this study has examined—the Lady, the Wife, Mary Fitzallard, Moll, Lady Goldenfleece, Mistress Low-water, and Beatrice-Joanna— is a victim of cultural ideology, forced into a position that does not suit her. But none of these women is strictly a victim. To each woman, as a human representation, Middleton gives the ability to act; her society may deny her agency, but Middleton does not deny her character agency—her society may cripple her ability to enact her will, but she possesses an intrinsic ability to think, desire, and act. In recent criticism of Middleton’s writings, he has been called a “master,” and his reputation as one of the great writers of the English language will no doubt solidify with the Oxford publication of his complete works. And while this study certainly would not argue against such claims, what deserves most attention and praise is not his mastery of the written word but his characters’ very human presentation. Middleton writes as a self-conscious voice among written discourse and an observant social critic, focusing particularly upon his culture’s most crippling social and political views and practices: those which lead to women’s exploitation. He displays this exploitation as both verbal and psychological, extending even further than its potent physical expressions of rape and murder. By carefully representing women who are not simply lifeless victims, types, or symbols but plausible complex human beings, Middleton reveals not only the cultural flaws that lead to female tragedy but also the potential for social improvement—primarily provided by society’s competent and admirable women, persons just off-stage, ready for a chance to perform far beyond their society’s expectations.

80 ENDNOTES

Notes: Introduction

1 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001) 2501.

2 Text citations are from Oxford Press’ forthcoming Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, general editor Gary Taylor. Coppélia Kahn, ed., The Roaring Girl.

3 Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) 95.

4 Yachinin 100.

5 Elizabethan Essays (New York: Haskell House, 1964) 89.

6 Margot Heineman, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 67.

7 Critics have noted Middleton’s interaction with various other authors, including Nashe’s Pierce Penniless in The Black Book, Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece in The Ghost of Lucrece, Jonson’s Hymenaei in The Changeling, and Marlowe’s Faustus in The Changeling. See, for instance: Swapan Chakravorty, Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 39, 42, 162; Roma Gill, “The World of Thomas Middleton,” “Accompaninge the players”: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580-1980, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (New York: AMS Press, 1983) 16; Heineman 52-57; David M. Holms, The Art of Thomas Middleton: A Critical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) 7; Celia R. Daileader, “Re- writing Rape, Re-raping Rites: Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s Lucrece Poems” (unpublished, 2006); Judith Haber, “‘I(t) Could Not Choose but Follow’: Erotic Logic in The Changeling,” Representations 81 (2003) 80.

8 Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 3rd ed., (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) 176.

9 Chakravorty 195.

10 Lisa Hopkins, “Beguiling the Master of the Mystery: Form and Power in The Changeling,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997) 158.

Notes: Chapter One

11 All Titus Andronicus citations are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th ed., edited by David Bevington (New York: Pearson-Longman, 2004).

12 See, for instance, Bernice Harris, “Sexuality as a Signifier for Power Relations: Using Lavinia, of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 38.3 (1996): 383-406; Cynthia Marshall, “‘I can interpret all her martyr’d signs’: Titus Andronicus, Feminism, and the Limits of Interpretation,” Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama. Eds. Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (Lewiston: Mellen, 1991): 193-213; and Emily Detmer- Goebel, “The Need for Lavinia’s Voice: Titus Andronicus and the Telling of Rape,” Shakespeare Studies 29 (2001): 75-92.

13 Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998) 77. Significantly, though, Bloom himself avoids serious criticism of this play and whatever questions it may raise—intentionally or inadvertently—about the human condition by writing it off as Shakespeare’s least artistic work, an over-the-top parody of Marlowe in a cathartic exorcism of “the ghost of Christopher Marlowe,” 77-79. However, his argument is somewhat inconsistent when he simultaneously marvels at Shakespeare’s genius for representing unique personalities of psychological plausibility in plays he had already written, as well as ones that followed upon Titus Andronicus’ heals.

14 Maurice Charney and Hannah Charney note that there are five recorded performances of the play throughout the year of 1594, and it remained so popular that it was performed for Christmas festivities by London players in the home of Sir John Harington two years later, and Edward Ravenscroft revised it for Restoration performances, publishing the new text in 1687 (xiii). Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (New York: Harvester, 1990).

15 The 1600 edition was published under the title The most lamentable Romaine tragedie of Titus Andronicus As it hath sundry times beene playde by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembrooke, the Earle of Darbie, the Earle of Sussex, and the Lorde Chamberlaine theyr Seruants, STC 22329, and the 1611 edition was published with the title The most lamentable tragedie of Titus Andronicus As it hath sundry times been plaide by the Kings Maiesties Seruants, STC 22330.

16 Celia R. Daileader persuasively argues for Middleton’s poem as a direct revision of Shakespeare’s in her unpublished essay, “Re-writing Rape, Re-raping Rites: Shakespeare’s and Middleton’s Lucrece Poems” (2006).

17 Some of the unequivocal titles include ones like the following: Gosson’s Playes confuted in fiue actions prouing that they are not to be suffred in a Christian common weale…(1582), STC 12095; and William Prynne’s The players scourge, or, actors tragaedie, divided into two parts. Wherein it is largely evidenced…That popular stage-playes…are sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions; condemned in all ages, as intolerable mischiefes to churches, to republickes, to the manners, mindes, and soules of men…. (1633),

STC 20464a. For more on the nature of the debate and of the theatre’s “transversal” force in society, see Bryan Reynolds, “The Devil’s House, ‘or worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England,” Theatre Journal 49.2 (1997): 143-167.

18 Jody Enders,“The Spectacle of the Scaffolding: Rape and the Violent Foundations of Medieval Theatre Studies,” Theatre Journal 56 (2004): 163-181; and Kim Solga, “Rape’s Metatheatrical Return: Rehearsing Sexual Violence among the Early Moderns,” Theatre Journal 58 (2006) 56.

19 Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 50, 51, 49.

20 Aebischer 52.

21 Aebischer examines how modern actresses have interpreted Lavinia as an actual woman, noting that these “actresses in their preparation of the role have resisted the allegorization of Lavinina and attempted to re-emphasise the physicality of her suffering.” “‘Yet I’ll Speak’: Silencing the Female Voice in Titus Andronicus and Othello,” Societe Francaise Shakespeare (1999) 34. Aebischer also notes that such Lavinias have come into conflict with their Tituses and directors, which she believes is a result of the male desire to dominate but is in actuality because the play simply cannot allow Lavinia to be such a figure, Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies.

22 “‘Silence, like a Lucrece knife’: Shakespeare and the Meanings of Rape,” The Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993) 103.

23 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), and Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975) 174.

24 Solga 65.

25 One can psychologically understand Titus’ need to remain without comfort because he has brought these sorrows upon himself through his arrogance and pride, killing his youngest son, bestowing the empire upon a wicked young man, and seeking that man’s good graces above his family’s own good. But Lavinia’s suffering is heaped upon her simply because she is Titus’ daughter.

26 Marshall 200.

27 The very nature of silent victims, such as victims of domestic abuse, is that they and the crimes against them are unnoticed. The disturbing part is not their ability to capture our attention and sympathy but rather that we shudder at the crimes committed against them when they are brought to our attention, but we never actually take note of the victims themselves. In the fall of 2001, the Mortar Board chapter at Converse College, a women’s college in South Carolina,

remembered Domestic Violence Awareness Month by placing life-size red silhouettes like those from the scenes of murders of women in South Carolina as a result of domestic abuse, along with a brief verbal profile (“average” neighbors), in various high-traffic areas about the campus. Encountering these figures was a disturbing experience not simply because they were faceless reminders of death but because they did just what the victims never did—made themselves public.

28 Aebischer, “Yet” 33.

29 Aebischer, “Yet” 33.

30 For instance, Baines’ book includes a number of dramas and paintings of virgins/chaste women who must kill themselves after (attempted) rape in order to preserve their virtue and honor. Barbara J. Baines, Representing Rape in the English Early Modern Period (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 2003). Bott also goes into a detailed account of the popularity and permutations of the tale of Virginia and Virginius. “‘O Keep Me from Their Worse than Killing Lust’: Ideologies of Rape and Mutilation in Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Eds. Elizabeth Robertson, Christine M. Rose, and Christopher Cannon (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 189-211. On a more religious note, as Brigg’s points out in her introduction to The Lady’s Tragedy, John Foxes’ The Acts and Monuments, or “Book of Martyrs,” first printed only a couple decades before Shakespeare’s penning of Titus Andronicus (and subsequently reprinted and read all over England for decades thereafter), “recorded the lives of a number of early Christian martyrs, including that of Sophronia who, like…her Roman prototype, Virginia…, escaped rape by committing suicide.”

31 Bott 195.

32 It is worth noting that if Shakespeare did view this play about both Titus and Lavinia, he would have included her name in the title (as he did with Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida), but he names the play instead after the given name of her father and the family name of which he is head. A mid-seventeenth-century printing of the play gives a much longer title: The lamentable and tragicall history of Titus Andronicus with the fall of his five and twenty sons in the wars of [t]he Goaths, with the ravishment of his daughter Lavinia by the empresse [t]wo sons, through the means of a bloody Moor, taken by the swor[d] of Titus in the war, with his revenge upon them for their cruell an in humane act…. The heading for this publication not only confirms that the early modern audience did indeed view this as a most “lamentable” tragedy, but they also saw it specifically as Titus’ tragedy and the tragedy of his sons. Lavinia is mentioned only in the context of what happens to her, against whom it is committed (Titus and his family), and the men by whom it is committed. Edward Ravenscroft’s Restoration adaptation of the play includes Lavinia’s name more prominently: Titus Andronicus, or, The rape of Lavinia…. But even in this version, Lavinia is not the subject of the title but the specific person against whom a rape is committed, whereas Titus’ name not only comes first but also stands alone. 1658-1664 (Wing L252A); Ravenscroft, 1687 (Wing S2949).

33 As Marshall points out, Lavinia is depicted as a virgin throughout the play, despite her marriage to Bassianus (195). I might also note that there is always the possibility that she still is, considering she has only been married a matter of hours and under distressing circumstances.

34 Middleton frequently leaves his characters “unnamed” within the stage directions and play text, as do other playwrights of the period (Shakespeare included). Naming characters was not a dramatic convention, nor did it indicate individuality of personalities; rather, what makes the character is the material given for his or her performance on stage. Plays were not, after all, meant to be read but watched.

35 As Daileader notes, she seems to have a “sexual aura” about her. Celia R. Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 94.

36 Some of the stage directions actually call her “the Lady of Govianus,” which implies that she in some way belongs to him, a possible indication of sexual attachment.

37 Citations from The Lady’s Tragedy are from Oxford Press’ forthcoming Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, general editor Gary Taylor. The Lady’s Tragedy, edited and annotated by Julia Briggs.

38 Gary Taylor has pointed out that the Lady’s statement, a permutation of the angel’s “He is not here” at Christ’s tomb after the Resurrection, as a annunciation about herself does actually deify the Lady. However, this deification is not in the traditional terms Govianus invokes—the deity of the Virgin Mary—but of Christ himself. “Divine [ ] Sences,” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 13-30.

39 Another possibility is that Govianus is simply calling the Lady an attendant or servant to “honour.”

40 Anne Lancashire, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Anne Lancashire, “The Second Maiden’s Tragedy: A Jacobean Saint’s Life,” The Review of English Studies, 25.99 (1974): 267-279; Baines 177.

41 Daileader also notes that the physicality of the Lady actually kissing Govianus is a clear indicator of her sexuality, 94; Crawford likewise asserts that the kiss is a sexual metaphor and a symbol of sexual activity, 106.

42 My thanks to Nancy Bradley Warren for this astute observation.

43 Crawford 114, my emphasis.

44 Crawford 102.

45 This interpretation, while not intentionally belittling the Lady or condemning her actions, is oddly reminiscent of John Knox’s sixteenth-century proclamations against female rule.

46 Both the Tyrant and Govianus are obsessed with the Lady’s dead body, the Tyrant worshipping and fondling the body at the center of his court, his entire thoughts and actions consumed therein, while Govianus worships at her tomb, living only in his meditations upon her and her fate. In both scenes, the center of the stage is the Lady—either in body or mock-body effigy.

47 For instance, Huffman argues that Lavinia is a visual “emblem” of “Rome without justice.” Clifford Chalmer Huffman, “‘Titus Andronicus’: Metamorphosis and Renewal,” MLR 67 (1972) 733; and Ray asserts that Lavinia is a stand in for the people of Rome, who do not give consent to Saturninus’ rule, just as she does not consent to her rape. Sid Ray, “‘Rape, I Fear, Was Root of Thy Annoy’: The Politics of Consent in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49.1 (1998) 22, 35.

48 Lavinia does embody the early modern triad of femininity; she is chaste, silent, and obedient. Critics such as Aebischer have noted that Lavinia’s silence is forced upon her and that she does open her mouth in the woods against Tamora,“Yet” 29. I do think this is an important observation, but Lavinia’s words here do not make her forward or outspoken; on the contrary, her husband gives her leave to do so and even encourages her to speak out against Tamora. Shakespearean women commonly speak out (and are praised for it) in order to castigate an unruly woman (as Kate does in The Taming of the Shrew), a blackamoor (as Emilia does in Othello), or a Jew (as Portia does in The Merchant of Venice). Lavinia is living up to the principle of female silence in giving her husband what he wants to hear when he wants to hear it, simultaneously assuring him that she is quite unlike Tamora, since she condemns her un-lady- like behavior.

49 Indeed, Tamora, in her manipulative eloquence, urges Saturninus, “My lord, be ruled by me” (1.1.443).

50 David M. Bergeron, “Art within The Second Maiden’s Tragedy,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1 (1984) 174; Lancashire “Introduction” 46.

51 Bergeron 181; Baines 176.

52 Baines voices the more conventional interpretation of the Wife’s suicide as the result of having “destroyed” her honor “with her lust,” while the Lady’s suicide is in order to preserve her honor, 177. Yet the Lady continually demonstrates that she is unconcerned with how people perceive her, dying not for honor but will, and the Wife’s suicide is similarly more sympathetic than one would expect in a play of opposites. This is notably not a play couched in binaries.

53 While the Lady is not submissive, we have no doubt that she is not disobedient for defiance’s sake; she would be respectfully compliant, were the requests made of her good and respectful of her person and desires.

54 Lancashire, “Introduction” 39.

55 Hancock 8; Marshall 209.

56 Interestingly enough, this is an explicit reference to the trimmed “branches” of Lavinia, yet Lavinia is completely absent from their final speeches.

57 The play’s final lines, Lucius’ sentence for Tamora’s body, is reminiscent of that given Jezebel, the Old Testament female figure of evil power and sexual impurity, who ruled her husband Ahab and the kingdom but whose body was eaten by wild animals.

58 Lancashire “Introduction” 38.

59 Susan Zimmerman, “Animating Matter: The Corpse as Idol in The Second Maiden’s Tragedy,” Renaissance Drama 31 (2002) 227.

60 Crawford 120.

61 As a necrophile and a Herod-figure, the Tyrant desires to be a creator-god, Daileader 97.

62 Crawford believes that the soldiers are simply inappropriate for such a serious scene as the Tyrant’s theft of the Lady’s body, but their foolishness and ineffectiveness intentionally highlights that of one of their own—the Tyrant himself, 108.

63 Indeed, as an unnamed woman who is simply called “Lady,” this admirable female is not the only one of her kind, as Baines insists, 173; there are many “ladies.”

64 Lancashire, “Introduction” 38.

65 Middleton’s Tragic Themes (New York: Peter Lang, 1984).

66 The sigh is Bloom’s own, 86.

67 Elizabethan Essays (New York: Haskell House, 1964), 89; “Marked Angels: Counterfeits, Commodities, and The Roaring Girl,” Renaissance Quarterly 54.4 (2001) 1540.

68 For instance, Regents Renaissance Drama editor E. Johnson Lowell’s introduction, though asserting that this is “one of Middleton’s best comedies,” lacks enthusiasm and interest. He argues that “one has the sense that Middleton was unsure of his purpose” with this play and that Middleton “seems to be satisfied, too often in the play, to exploit a type, to present a conventional intrigue, to rely on stage tricks, and to accept a new dramatic genre without adapting it to his own comic vision. For instance, his treatment of incest in the play lacks clarity of intention. He is not interested in the consequences of this sexual transgression (a theme he would not pass up in his tragedies), but in the manifestations of the sin. Yet the manifestations

are washed aside by the device of a death-bed secret” (xx). No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, Thomas Middleton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976). Kenneth Muir’s assessment is more laudatory but not without qualification: while he calls this play “masterly,” he also highlights in only the second paragraph of his essay that it is “not without flaws, for the ‘impure art’ of Middleton…causes occasional embarrassment, as all recent productions [of his various plays] have shown.” “Two Plays Reconsidered: More Dissemblers Besides Women and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s,” “Accompaninge the players”: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580-1980, ed. and intro Kenneth Friedenreich (New York: AMS Press, 1983) 147.

69 Like The Lady’s Tragedy, these plays were both written in 1611. Both text citations are from Oxford Press’ forthcoming Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, general editor Gary Taylor. Coppélia Kahn, ed., The Roaring Girl; John Jowett, ed., No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s. While Middleton and Thomas Dekker collaborated on The Roaring Girl, Middleton wrote all but one of the significant scenes depicting Moll. Scholars agree that the two playwrights worked very closely to produce a unified piece, so even in the tenth scene, which is attributed to Dekker, it is the same Moll as the one Middleton fashioned throughout the rest of the play. Because this study focuses on trends in Middleton’s writing and because this play clearly has the influence of his hand throughout, I will here refer to the play as simply written by Middleton. See Kahn “Canon and Chronology.”

70 Muir 156.

71 The Art of Thomas Middleton: A Critical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) 84.

72 Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 26.

73 In his critical introduction, Jowett observes, “Though she claims the moral high ground…, her charm has more to do with wit than virtue.”

74 Oxford English Dictionary online.

75 Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 172.

76 Stephen Orgel notes that the typical cross-dressing woman’s motivation is to provide “protection” and “safety,” thus indexing her “virtue” (18). “The subtexts of The Roaring Girl,” Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed, Susan Zimmerman (New York: Rutledge, 1992): 12-26.

77 “Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy,” Renaissance Drama 83 (1987) 60.

78 Equally as present is the anatomical sex-role reversal as Master Low-water “opens” while Mistress Low-water is the “first forward.”

79 My thanks to Celia R. Daileader for her direction to the richness of these passages and for her foundational argument in her forthcoming article.

80 Like Petruchio, Master Low-water calls his wife “Kate.” Middleton may here consciously critique The Taming of The Shrew, intentionally naming Mistress Low-water after the abused wife of the man she mocks and whose behavior she shows to be that of a man who is no real man at all.

81 “There’s Meat and Money Too: Rich Widows and Allegories of Wealth in Jacobean City Comedy,” ELH, 72 (2005): 209-238.

82 Panek 175.

83 The exception here is Jowett’s critical introduction, but since the focus of his essay is necessarily broad, he leaves many questions unasked and aspects of her character unexamined.

84 Panek 166.

85 Lowell xx; Hanson 225.

86 Panek 179.

87 Kahn 1.102; 30.

88 Kahn 1.0.1, 1.73.

89 Kahn 5.4.

90 Paster 57-58.

91 To “skelder” is specifically to pose as a “wounded or disbanded soldier” in order to live by begging but can also more generally mean to “swindle, cheat, or defraud,” and with its aural resonance with a “gelder,” it is possible that Moll implies that Trapdoor is in effect stealing manhood in the defrauding of gentleman’s purses, Oxford English Dictionary online.

92 “Play-Making, Domestic Conduct, and the Multiple Plot in the Roaring Girl,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 27.2 (1987) 258.

93Penitent Brothellers: Grace, Sexuality, and Genre in Thomas Middleton’s City Comedies (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000) 163.

94 “Sex and Social Conflict: The Erotics of The Roaring Girl.” Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Rutledge, 1992) 184.

95 Howard, “Sex and Social Conflict” 184-185.

96 Howard, “Sex and Social Conflict” 185.

97 “Mistres Hic & Haec: Representations of Moll Frith,” Studies in English Literature, 1500- 1900. 33.2 (1993) 396.

98 “Controversy and the Single Woman in The Maid’s Tragedy and The Roaring Girl,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 58.2 (2004) 7-27.

99 Thomas Middleton and the New Comedy Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979) 124.

100 Muir 155.

101 Heller 36.

102 Hanson 227.

103 Rowe 120-121.

104 Jowett argues that this relationship is the most powerful in the play’s conclusion, the real comic conclusion’s marriage that leads to order: “Mistress Low-water doesn’t get a wife, but she does get a dowry….Mistress Low-water’s ‘I am her servant for’t’ sets aside Beveril’s theoretical power as husband-to-be and insists on acknowledging deference to the Widow. The Widow not only gives Mistress Low-water access to her wealth but puts her fully in control of it. She thus establishes an alliance between the women that strips her future husband of his potential rights….The play cannot propose woman-to-woman marriage as the basis for a socially inclusive comic ending, but it can and evidently does propose a woman-to-woman financial exchange as the basis for that comic ending.”

105 Dawson 394.

106 Heller 158.

107 Holms 107.

108 Comensoli 251.

109 Baston 320, 323.

110 “Critical Imperialism and Renaissance Drama: The Case of The Roaring Girl,” Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, eds. Dale M. Bauer and Susan Jaret McKinstry (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) 78.

111 Howard, “Crossdressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39.4 (1988) 438; Comensoli 251; and Jardine 161.

112 Dawson, esp. 402; Comensoli, esp. 251.

113 Forman 1541-1542.

114 Howard, “Sex and Social Conflict” 185.

115 Orgel even describes Moll as “with the exception of Mary Fitzallard, the only unquestionably virtuous woman in the play,” and we might note more exactly that she is the most admirable person in the play, 24.

116 Jardine 38-39.

117 Howard, “Sex and Social Conflict” 180.

118 Forman 1540.

Notes: Chapter Three

119 Citations from The Changeling are from Oxford Press’ forthcoming Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, general editor Gary Taylor. The Changeling, edited and annotated by Douglas Bruster. Rowley also had a hand in this play, but as with The Roaring Girl, this text will refer only to Middleton as author since he was clearly involved in the entire work and since this study focuses on his plays specifically.

120 Twentieth-century theatre critics have seen Beatrice-Joanna as a character meant to be played as a “dangerous tigress,” which is also how Shakespeare’s Tamora is portrayed (and how Julie Taymor’s film renders her almost literally), revealing how closely our modern expectations of women on stage have not changed much since the early modern period. Roberta Barker and David Nicol, “Does Beatrice Joanna Have a Subtext?: The Changeling on the London Stage,” Early Modern Literary Studies 10.1 (2004) 23.

121 “‘A Frightful Pleasure, That Is All’: Wonder, Monstrosity, and The Changeling,” The Dalhousie Review 84.3 (2004) 394.

122 “‘I(t) Could Not Choose but Follow’: Erotic Logic in The Changeling,” Representations 81 (2003) 92.

123 Barker and Nicol 15.

124 “Changelings and The Changeling,” Essays in Criticism 56.3 (2006) 258.

125 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001) 2501; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

126 Thomas L. Berger was perhaps the first to write about the Petrarchan qualities of the play, especially in its treatment of fortified buildings and its poetic correlative, the lady. “The Petrarchan Fortress of The Changeling.” Renaissance Papers (1969): 37-46. Sara Eaton examines the play’s pervasive rhetoric of courtly love. “Beatrice-Joanna and the Rhetoric of Love in ‘The Changeling,’” Theatre Journal 36.3 (1984): 371-382. Andrew Stott has more specifically compared Alsemero’s love for Beatrice-Joanna to that of Dante for Laura, noting the impossibility for Beatrice-Joanna to live up to Alsemero’s expectations since the woman of poetry can never be approached and thus remains permanently ideal. “Tiresias and the Basilisk: Vision and Madness in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling,” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 12 (1999) 168.

127 Bassnett 398.

128 All citations from Shakespeare’s plays are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th ed., edited by David Bevington (New York: Pearson-Longman, 2004).

129 While Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Beatrice-Joanna do resemble each other in some ways, I do not intend to imply that Beatrice-Joanna is a reincarnation of Shakespeare’s Beatrice or that the women’s desires are the same. Shakespeare’s Beatrice notably wishes to kill a man who has effectively killed her kinswoman, while Beatrice-Joanna wishes to kill a man that simply wishes to marry her. Additionally, one might argue that Shakespeare’s Beatrice does actually wish to be a man, while Beatrice-Joanna clearly uses her precursor’s mode for a desired result without true conviction of the words she speaks.

130 Sugimura 254.

131 “‘There’s Scarce a Thing but Is Both Loved and Loathed’: The Changeling,” English Studies 80.6 (1999) 508.

132 “A Congoun in Zombieland: Middleton’s Teratological Changeling,” “Accompaninge the Players”: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580-1980, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (New York: AMS Press, 1983) 222.

133 Sugimura, for instance, argues that Beatrice-Joanna “believes herself” when she claims not to be aware of De Flores’ meaning in his claims to her virginity, though it is apparent that she does indeed fully understand his desires since they are in fact her own, 247.

134 “The Moral and Poetic Structure of The Changeling,” Essays in Criticism 10 (1960) 298.

135 Iago’s line of thinking has great cultural precedent, the gallant-like Satan of N Town’s The Passion Play, a part of the Corpus Christi pageants, which were preformed even into the Elizabethan era, characterizes the woman who must prostitute herself in order to acquire a dowry as a woman who simply cannot deny herself sex, for she will “selle lechory to hem that wil bey./ And they that wil not b[u]y it, yet inow shal they han,/ And telle hem it is for love—she may it not deny” (106-108, my emphasis). Ed. David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975); Ruth Nisse, Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005) 3.

136 Barker and Nicol 34.

137 All citations of The Duchess of Malfi are taken from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed, vol. 1. M. H. Abrams, General Editor and Stephen Greenblatt, Associate General Editor. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

138 Such a depiction of Beatrice-Joanna is quite contrary to the popular image of Beatrice-Joanna as “a nubile and beautiful young girl, not yet in touch with her own rampant sensuality, who is initiated into the mysteries of sex and evil by a Svengalian lover and who finds her ultimate consummation on the point of his knife,” as Barker and Nicol have summarized it, 26.

139 Lisa Hopkins, “Acting the Act in The Changeling,” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 8 (1995): 109. Daalder also argues that Beatrice-Joanna “against her conscious intention comes to enjoy De Flores himself.” “The Role of Isabella in The Changeling,” English Studies 73.2 (1992) 27.

140 Morrison 232, 230.

141 Haber 92.

142 “The Aristocratic Woman as Scapegoat: Romantic Love and Class Antagonism in The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling,” International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre 14 (1996) 146, 149-150

143 For more details about the productions, see Barker and Nicol.

144 “‘Hidden Malady’: Death, Discovery, and Indistinction in The Changeling,” Renaissance Drama 22 (1993) 98.

145 “Virginity in The Changeling,” English Studies in Canada 9.1 (1983) 33.

146 Barker and Nicol 35.

147 Duncan 29. The citation is from Vives’ seventh chapter.

148 Hopkins, “Acting the Act” 111.

149 Duncan 33.

150 Eaton 381.

151 Hopkins, “Acting the Act” 109.

152 Haber 80.

153 For another argument on the significance of Beatrice-Joanna’s deception, see Deborah Burkes, “‘I’ll Want My Will Else’: The Changeling and Women’s Complicity with Their Rapists,” English Literary History 62.4 (1995), esp. 772-783.

154 Hopkins, “Acting the Act.”

155 For a discussion of the discovery space and death on the stage, see Mariko Ichikawa, “What to Do with a Corpse?: Physical Reality and the Fictional World in the Shakespearean Theatre,” Theatre Research International 29 (2004): 201-215. Barker and Nicol also point out that Alonzo is likely murdered in the discovery space, his cries like those of Beatrice-Joanna’s in the play’s final scene, 36.

156 Society and Politics in the Plays of Thomas Middleton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 162.

157 See, for instance, Chakravorty 147; Hopkins, “Acting the Act” 110; Malcolmson 329.

158 It is for this reason that De Flores must occupy Alonzo’s “eye” in order to kill him and take his ring.

159 Burkes 763.

160 The word “thrust” appears also in 1.2.31, 2.1.48-49, 2.2.167, and 3.4.33.

161 Hopkins, “Beguiling the Master of the Mystery: Form and Power in The Changeling,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997) 154.

162 Once again, we find a contrast in The Duchess of Malfi’s wooing scene, in which the Duchess herself gives away her ring, and she is concerned that it is properly “fit” (1.3.119). She also refutes the idea that it is the woman’s ring in which from which the devil springs, mocking Antonio’s suggestion that a devil tempts him from her ring, which he views as off-limits. To his “There is a saucy and ambitious devil/ Dancing in this circle,” the Duchess replies simply that he must “Remove him” and wear the ring instead, since there is no need for “small conjuration” of the kind he implies (1.3.116-117, 118).

163 Duncan 25.

164 Hopkins, “Beguiling” 158.

165 Burkes 782.

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103 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Beginning her semi-formal education as a toddler, Amy L. Stahl was educated at home until the age of 17. She graduated summa cum laude from Converse College in 2005 with a B.A., majoring in English, focusing on Creative Writing, and minoring in Politics. Ms. Stahl is expected to receive her M.A. in English Literature in April of 2007 from Florida State University. Ms. Stahl’s academic writings include her undergraduate honors thesis, “‘They shall shine with incomparable Brightness’: Printed Seventeenth-Century English Funeral Sermons as Portrayals of Masculine and Feminine Models,” and conference papers: “Shakespearean (Re)Valuation: Women, Embodiment, and Disfigurement,” Literature and Film Conference, 2007; “Rendering the Extraordinary Common: Virgins, Whores, and Martyrdom,” Southeastern Medieval Association, 2006; “Gender Distinctions of Clergymen and Clergy Wives in Printed Seventeenth-Century Funeral Sermons,” South Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities symposium, 2005; “The Dead Clergy Wife: The Written Female Standard in Early Modern England,” National Undergraduate Literature Conference, 2004. Having thoroughly enjoyed her two-year experience as a teacher in the First Year Composition program at FSU (and in particular, her class Writing about Classical Music of the Romantic Era), Ms. Stahl is pursuing a career in teaching young people. In addition to her academic interests of late medieval and early modern drama and devotional writings, women’s studies, and political philosophy, Ms. Stahl’s passions are various: writing lyric poetry and fiction, listening to and performing Classical music, studying German and Arabic, and experiencing and learning about foreign cultures.

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