Birthing Conflict: Childbirth and the Battle of the Sexes

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BIRTHING CONFLICT:

CHILDBIRTH AND THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES IN ELIZABETHAN AND

JACOBEAN DRAMA

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

For the degree of Master of Arts

in Theatre

Lana Joy Wahlquist

December, 2011

The thesis of Lana Joy Wahlquist is approved:

______J’aime Morrison, Ph.D. Date

______Susanne Collier, Ph.D. Date

______Ah-jeong Kim, Ph.D. Chair Date

California State University, Northridge

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My heartfelt thanks to Dr. Ah-jeong Kim, who mentored me above and beyond the call of duty, and without whose support, encouragement, and inspiration, this work would not be possible.

iii

Table of Contents

Signature Page ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract v

Introduction 1

Chapter 1:

Childbirth Usurped: Birth Through the Eyes and Fantasies of Men in Macbeth 4

Chapter 2:

Binaries that Breed Conflict: Polarizing the Sexes in The Magnetic Lady and The

Winter’s Tale 25

Chapter 3:

Annabella’s Fertile Will and Body in ‘Tis A Pity She’s a Whore 52

Conclusion 85

Works Cited and Consulted 88

ABSTRACT

BIRTHING CONFLICT:

CHILDBIRTH AND THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES IN ELIZABETHAN AND

JACOBEAN DRAMA

Lana Joy Wahlquist

Master of Arts in Theatre

To men of early modern England, few things mattered more than inheritance, and

necessary to inheritance was, of course, the birth of children. Childbirth, however, was

the business of women, and it was an area where they held complete autonomy, authority, power, and secrecy. This is the material that the playwrights of the Elizabethan and

Jacobean era had at their disposal, playwrights who are often considered some of the

greatest in all of western literature. When they dared to engage matters of reproduction,

they found inherent in the cultural discourse a central conflict that was ripe for drama—

men ruled the world, but women held the key to their heritable sustainability. The playwrights were all men, and the society was patriarchal, but they were nonetheless able

to engage in the cultural discourse in a manner that was poignant, enlightening, and at

times even feminist.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale , Ben Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady , and John Ford’s ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore are a few plays that stand out in the striking way they inscribe femininity. They illuminate attitudes, behaviors, and a spiritual condition that actually reflects men and their world more than it does women. Most importantly, the cultural condition in regards to birthing customs created an inherent social conflict that was ideal for drama. Considering this conflict, and the fact that the stage was a forum for social discourse, I examine the above works for their significance in the discussion about reproductive issues, childbirth, patriarchy, and the feminine experience in early modern drama. Through literary analysis, I engage the theories of

Hélène Cixous, Lesley Ferris, Elizabeth Grosz, and other feminists with these select plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean era. The result is the discovery that although women were subject to patriarchy, their cultural influence stretched far beyond the limits of the birth room and into the main arena of social discourse of the subjects that mattered most to that society. This study demonstrates the feminist facets of these playwrights’ perspectives and places these representations of women among the foremost important figures in the development of a feminist perspective of historical drama.

INTRODUCTION

Hélène Cixous admonished women to write, explaining that if women don’t write

their experiences, femininity will be inscribed by patriarchy. This is exactly what

happened for centuries in regards to childbirth. Birthing was women’s business and it was business that they did behind closed doors, shrouding the event in mystery. Retaining its

secrecy and mystique were paramount. So women did not write, they did not speak, and

they dared not whisper the powerful moments that occurred behind the doors of the birth

room.

Since women did not write, men imagined. As a result, the mystery of childbirth

was recorded in the reflections of men, who waited powerlessly behind closed doors, and

in whose minds inheritance was of primary importance. Some of these men were intuitive

and insightful about the human condition, masters of language, and astute critics of the

social order. Yet simultaneously, they were products of and cogs in the system of patriarchy. But they were able to recognize the inherent conflict between the sexes when

it came to matters of reproduction. They utilized the stage as a forum to add to the

cultural discourse issues pertaining to gender and to reproduction, while simultaneously

critiquing and enforcing the patriarchal system in which they existed.

Other scholars have noticed this theme and examined the culture and the plays for

their significance in this discourse. Scholars such as Caroline Bicks, Kathryn M.

Moncrief, Kathryn R. McPherson, and Adrian Wilson are notable in the field of early

modern literature for examining gender and women’s issues. A few Ph.D. candidates

have completed related studies, such as Rene Breier, whose dissertation is entitled,

`Great-bellied Women': The Pregnant Body and the Plays of Shakespeare , for University

of California, Riverside in 1996. A few other Ph.D. candidates in other fields have

examined the role of midwives in Elizabethan England, or looked at the symbolic and poetic function of childbirth in non-dramatic literature, such as Margaret Helen Dupuis at the University of Oregon in 1998 (Birthing The Text: Authorship And Childbirth In Early

Modern England ) and Carolyn Elizabeth Whitney-Brown at Brown University in 1991

(Tudor And Stuart Birth Stories By Shakespeare And Others ).

Literary analysis being a necessary preliminary to theatrical production, this study

will specifically examine theatrical devices at work in the literature, such as conflict,

satire, ambivalence, and allegory. In addition, inspiration for this topic is found in the

contemporary midwifery and natural childbirth movement, and in the interest of many

contemporary women who are rediscovering the empowerment that comes from

childbirth, which mothers of centuries past seem to have taken as a matter of course.

This analysis will use the theories of Cixous, Lesley Ferris, Elizabeth Grosz, and

other notable feminists to examine reproductive issues in select plays from the

Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Twentieth-century feminist theory works in dialogue with

reproductive themes in several Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Shakespeare’s Macbeth

and The Winter’s Tale , Ben Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady , and John Ford’s ‘Tis a Pity

She’s a Whore are all significant pieces in the discussion of reproductive matters on the

early modern stage. This thesis will contribute to the existing canon by analyzing the

subject of gender in the literature as it pertains to two specific areas—the act of giving birth and the act of telling the story of childbirth on stage, and by analyzing the manner in

which theatre is particularly suited to engage these topics. Through literary analysis and

2 engagement of theories developed by modern feminists, I discover how these playwrights utilized the stage to give birth to new ideas that challenged the ideological status quo.

CHAPTER 1:

Childbirth Usurped: Birth Through the Eyes and Fantasies of Men in Macbeth

“Present fears are less than horrible imaginations” (1.3.137-138)

In the 1970s, French feminist Hélène Cixous (1937-) exposed the phallocentric nature of the written word. She wrote that throughout history, “with a few rare exceptions, there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity” (Cixous 878).

This is an important notion to observe as one examines the literature that involve matters of childbirth. In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, inheritance was the paramount issue of the day. The succession problems that plagued King Henry VIII revisited all of his three surviving (legitimate) children, and trickled their way down throughout the rest of society, as evidenced by the literature produced by the playwrights who undertook the most pertinent matters of their day. They attempted to “inscribe femininity” as they saw it from their perspective, and in support of the cultural establishment of patriarchy. As implied in the quote above, the unknowns of childbirth that men feared were nothing compared to the imagined threat that a culture of empowered women generated in a male- dominated society. These playwrights inscribed femininity by representing a usurpation of childbirth. Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606) is an excellent example of the event of childbirth interpreted through the fantasies of men who feared the mystique of women’s reproductive bodies and in turn, sustaining the authoritarian order. In this chapter I analyze Macbeth as an example of a systematic misogynist enactment of male usurpation of childbirth, rooted in the fearsome fantasies of a phallocentric culture.

Cixous explained that social structure is analogous to men and women’s

sexuality:

Though masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis, engendering that

centralized body (in political anatomy) under the dictatorship of its parts,

woman does not bring about the same regionalization which serves the

couple head/genitals and which is inscribed only within boundaries. Her

libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide. (Cixous 889)

A man’s sexuality is authoritarian by nature, with all the parts being subject to the

desires and impulses of his member. But a woman’s body is cooperative, with each of the parts working together toward a common purpose. The hormones, the uterus, the cervix,

the birth canal, and the breasts all work together to conceive, grow, birth, and nourish her

children. So too works the society of women and the society of men. The public world of

early modern England was male-dominated, hierarchical, and functioned from the top-

down. At the very top were the power struggles between the foremost of its members—

kings, archbishops, popes. But the private world of women was very different. In the birth room, while the midwife was the one “in charge,” this authority was largely pretentious, serving merely to validate her to the world of men. In the birth room, it was

the mother who birthed the child, and while the midwife was the experienced and skilled

authority in childbirth, she could not do the job for the mother, especially in early modern

England. She could only aid her in her travails, and ensure that propriety was maintained.

But, in keeping with his urges, the society of men constantly seeks to penetrate

itself into the privacy of women. This was done by a variety of means, from the culturally

established customs that dictated women’s behavior concerning birth, to ecclesiastical

licensing of midwives, to the images of the birth room and its inhabitants that were

imprinted and recorded in literature. The frequency of childbirth-related depictions in dramatic literature from this period gives evidence to the importance of it to them. The mystique of what happened in the birth room leaked out of its doors and throughout society. As much as privacy and secrecy about childbirth were valued, what happened behind those doors had great significance. It mattered greatly enough for dramatists to satirize, inquire, regulate, fantasize, and usurp the smock-secrets of women.

A tale of unnatural ambition, Shakespeare’s Macbeth can be interpreted as a magnificently misogynistic allegory of the usurpation of childbirth. Macbeth’s usurpation of the Scottish throne parallels the usurpation of childbirth accomplished by the play. As the play moves through the process of Macbeth rising to the throne, securing his reign, and attempting to establish his inheritance, Macbeth usurps the role of woman as mother of life and becomes his own kind of a mother. But he births murder and brings forth death. As the action of the play unfolds, we see a progressive replacement of life and birth symbols with murderous and deathly ones.

Aside from Macbeth, the three witches are the characters most central to the action of the play. The witches function as evil midwives when they orchestrate, witness, and assist the murders in the play via the ‘maternity’ of Macbeth. He becomes a ‘mother of death’ as he is guided by the witches’ prophecies. Many questions abound regarding the witches’ involvement in Macbeth’s actions. Are they controlling him or simply predicting what he is doing out of his own free will? Is he just the vehicle of their magical, evil manipulation of the world? Or is violence and murder gestating in Macbeth and finally carried out in a period of evil ‘labor’ with the witches merely in attendance,

like traditional midwives? Macbeth himself also considers these questions: “If Chance will have me King, why Chance may crown me,/ without my stir” (1.3.143-144) 1.

Macbeth and the witches are finally put to rest by the most unnatural of live births—

Macduff was “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb—a violent, but life-saving act performed not by a female midwife, but by a male surgeon. The evil power of the

Feminine is conquered violently in this play in two ways—first, by the violent birth of

MacDuff (and the understood death of his own mother in childbirth), then by the violence of war and Macbeth’s decapitation by MacDuff. After Macbeth is killed, MacDuff re- enters with his head and proclaims to Malcolm, “Hail King! For so thou art. Behold, where stands/ Th’ usurper’s cursed head. . .” (5.9.20-21). MacDuff, whose birth killed his own mother, then kills Macbeth, the mother of death and usurper of the crown. In this fantasy, the midwife-witches and their role in the murders Macbeth commits are equally as mysterious as a midwife’s actions behind the closed doors of the birth room.

Chris Laoutaris was interested in the connection between a witch’s body and the body of her victims, as supported by archeological discovery unearthing relics that were known to be involved in witchcraft, and examined how these cultural realities manifested in Macbeth . “…The same mechanisms which animate the flow of maleficent corporeal agents between the witch and her victim govern the female reproductive anatomy and, in particular, the generation of fluids and vital spirits necessary to procreation and maternal nurture” (176). He demonstrated the constant theme of fertility and sterility that instances of witchcraft repeat, and showed that there was a very predominant suspicion on the part of men when it came to their fertility. In fact, he suggested that “Macbeth’s usurpation of

1 All quotations from the play are taken from: Shakespeare, William. "Macbeth." The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works . Ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan. Revised Edition. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2001. 773-799. 7 power becomes, therefore, the fulfillment of the impossible fantasy of escape from the pernicious influence of the maternal body” (183). This is related to the assertion that

Cixous made in 1976, when she noted that the greatest fear of men is the threat of castration, either literally or symbolically and that historically men are “consumed. . . by a fear of being a woman” (Cixous 884).

Historian David Cressy explained that in the reality of early modern culture, midwives were no more associated with witchcraft than any other women. In fact, they were well-respected members of their community and bore authority in their own right.

Nonetheless in the dramatic literature of the time they are very seldom represented in a positive light. They are often depicted as old crones, overly controlling, or as witches.

There are many connections between birth matters and witchcraft in literature and often the midwives are depicted as associating with malfeasance in some manner. This common suspicion toward women and the mystery of their reproductive influence is powerfully represented in Macbeth .

In 1.3, the stories of the witches give an indication of common beliefs regarding witchcraft. One witch confesses to killing swine, which would have interfered with the prosperity and nurturing ability of the household. Another witch promised to curse with impotence the husband of a wife who wouldn’t share chestnuts with her because the wife suspected the woman of witchcraft. “I’ll drain him dry as hay. . . / Weary sev’n-nights, nine times nine,/Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine” (1.3.4-23). The fact that the curse has to do with the fertility of the man is significant. Bewitching his fertility echoes the common theme of the connection between witchcraft and reproductive matters, but it goes one step further to affect the man. Not only did this unsuspecting sailor have nothing

to do with the conflict between his wife and the witch, but it illuminates the insecurity of

men in the culture when it came to fears about witchcraft. The fact that a curse could be

laid on a man’s inheritance as a result of a petty female conflict is especially fearsome and suspicious.

In act 4, the incantations of the witches make a connection to the darker aspects of childbirth. They toss into the cauldron a “finger of a birth-strangled babe/ Ditch-delivered by a drab” (4.1.30-1). Adding to the motif of infanticide, this part of the curse also continues the death-birth theme. The witches grotesquely take on this sad and disturbing event as part of their curse, preserving the severed finger of the child that experienced both death and birth at the same time, linking Macbeth to both.

The conjuring process which Macbeth hopes will furnish him with

knowledge of his dynastic future becomes a type of demonic midwifery as

the witches form a magic ‘ring’ [4.1.42] around the cauldron. . . the

cauldron takes on the symbolic function of the womb, producing a blood-

covered infant and a tree-bearing child who ‘wears upon his baby-brow

the round/And top of sovereignty.’ (4.1.88-89 and Laoutaris 183)

If Macbeth is a type of mother in this play, then his offspring are the murders, which he conceives, labors, and births with his body and his determination. The labor begins with the witches’ scene at the beginning of the play, but the murders were conceived in Macbeth’s mind long before by his overwhelming ambition and his even more ambitious wife, both very dangerous bedfellows. By the opening of the play, the metaphoric weight of his swelling ambition is so heavy that it takes very little to trigger

the inevitable. The labor begins in the first witches’ scene in which he is greeted with

ascending titles:

1 WITCH. All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis!

2 WITCH. All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!

3 WITCH. All hail, Macbeth! That shalt be King hereafter. (1.3.48-50)

This encounter with the witches throws him headlong into a labor of ambitious curiosity from which there is no return.

Cixous advocated that women should write in order to inscribe femininity, lest femininity be inscribed by patriarchy. In Macbeth , the femininity that is inscribed is a dark, fearful fantasy that presents women holding a scary and threatening position, a fantasy derived from male authoritarianism and sexual dominance. The witches represent this nervous anxiety well: “with her pernicious arsenal of enchantments, the witch holds the keys to instruments of evil which have the power to emasculate men and drain them of their potency and authority. It is this anxiety which underpins Macbeth’s relation to the witches” (Laoutaris 180).

MACBETH. Upon my head they plac’d a fruitless crown,

And put a barren scepter in my gripe,

Thence to be wrench’d with an unlineal hand,

No son of mine succeeding; if’t be so,

For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind;

For them the gracious Duncan have I murther’d;

Put rancours in the vessel of my peace. . . . (3.1.60-6)

The double-edged sword of the witch’s exaltation of Macbeth to king was that he would be barren and Banquo’s son would succeed him, a thought which fills Macbeth’s mind

with paranoia. To borrow a concept from the nineteenth century novelist George Eliot,

Macbeth is “acting in kind” (qtd. in Robbins 73) when he seeks to murder Banquo and

Fleance. This results in his great bewilderment when Fleance escapes the assassins.

Shakespeare manages to resolve the primary conflict of the play in act 5 without completely resolving the mystery of the witch’s curse. Malcolm, the son of Duncan and rightful heir to the throne is crowned king after the bloody battle that ends with

Macbeth’s head on a stake. His assumption of the throne instead of Fleance implies that the violence in Scotland is not over and that the struggle for the throne will somehow continue on, not with Malcolm’s, but with Banquo’s lineage.

Not only do the witches predict the continued infertility of the Macbeths, but the effect of their curse is mirrored in the fertility of the domestic scene. Banquets were often a dramatic display of a king’s wealth abundance, as dish after dish were served in abundance to large numbers of the king’s courtiers, demonstrating the great measure of the king’s wealth and the fertility of the court’s domestic production. But Macbeth’s banquet is interrupted in 3.4 by the appearance of Banquo’s ghost, bloody and grotesque, sometimes staged as walking on the table, trampling the symbols of the king’s virility, even sitting at his place at the table.

Macbeth’s first murder after his encounter with the witches is the mother of the realm, the king Duncan. Duncan’s language is highly maternal in nature, and even slightly effeminate. Speaking of the traitor whose title Macbeth inherited, Duncan remarks, “no more that Thane of Cawdor shall deceive/ Our bosom interest” (1.2.65-66).

Poetic language and flowery speech is not, however, the only literary device linking

Duncan to the maternal body. He also behaves like a mother of his peers and subjects, “. .

. let me infold thee,/ And hold thee to my heart” (1.4.31-32). Duncan’s display of

affection for Macbeth and Banquo bears a strong maternal quality, sensitive and embracing, very much a foil to the harsh darkness experienced throughout the remainder of the play.

Duncan continues to foil the play’s dark themes with the way Shakespeare crafts the image of his maternal metaphor. Duncan’s maternity seems to be associated largely with the fertility of the earth, standing in contrast with the play’s recurring theme of nature being foul, strange, and “dead” (2.1.50). The language he uses and the language that describes him compares the doomed king to gardens and farms, emphasizing his regenerative and fertile nature. He says to Macbeth, “I have begun to plant thee, and will

labour/ To make thee full of growing. . . .” Banquo later responds to the king, “there if I

grow,/ The harvest is your own” (1.4.28-29 and 32-33). The language accentuates

Duncan’s maternal qualities and emphasizes the reproductive aspect of his maternity, as

well as associating femininity to earthly, natural power and pagan religion. He is later

analogized as a bird: “. . . but this bird/ Hath made his pendent bed, and procreant

cradle:/ Where they most breed and haunt, I have observ’d” (1.6.7-9). In each nature-

oriented comparison, the reproductive aspect is referenced and applied directly to

Duncan.

After he is murdered by Macbeth, the language about his murder echoes the

imagery from Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here” speech from scene 5. Lady Macbeth

wishes to put aside her feminine nature to empower her to commit murder and calls upon

the spirits to “stop up th’ access and passage to remorse” (1.5.44). Likewise, after the

deed is done, Macbeth uses this same feminine language to tell Malcolm and Donalbain

that their father, “the spring, the head, the fountain of your blood/ Is stopp’d; the very

source of it is stopp’d” (2.3.96-97). The stoppage of Lady Macbeth’s feminine blood flow parallels the stoppage of Duncan’s life-blood.

The fact that the language surrounding Duncan depicts him as a maternal figure is significant. If his murder can be interpreted metaphorically as matricide, a connection can then be made to an important classical influence on all Renaissance drama—the work of

Seneca and the Greek classics that inspired him. The matricide of Duncan links the play’s theme back to Electra’s and Orestes’s ambition and their notorious matricide, as recorded in Seneca’s Agamemnon and by other classical authors. In addition, Lady Macbeth’s

incantations in the “unsex me here” speech also allude to the opening speech in Seneca’s

Medea , when the title character likewise calls upon the powers of darkness to help her murder her own children. In Studley’s 1581 translation, “Medea foreshadows both Lady

Macbeth and the witches: she wishes to ‘exile all foolish Female feare and pity’ from her mind as she wreaks ‘hurly burly’” (La Belle 385).

Lady Macbeth is childless, but her character nonetheless recalls the fear of infanticide by her own boast that she would “dash the brains out” of a suckling child at her breast (1.7.57-58). Again, the disturbing image of infanticide is reiterated with

Macduff’s children that are murdered in act 4 and the finger of a “birth-strangled babe”

(4.1.30-31) that is thrown into the witches’ cauldron.

It is no coincidence that Macbeth’s accomplice is none other than his wife. She bears an influence over her husband that is uncommon of a wife of a nobleman. But Lady

Macbeth is no ordinary woman. In fact, she is most unnatural. As mentioned above, she implores the powers of darkness to strip her nurturing and weak feminine nature in exchange for a masculine and murderous one. She is not able to commit these murders

with her body, since hers was made to bring forth life. Together, their murderous

ambition reverses the couple’s natural biology to conceive life, to instead bring forth

death.

The Renaissance understanding of a woman’s bodily functions illuminates Lady

Macbeth’s famous speech, giving evidence to its being more than just an evil incantation of a dangerous woman. She calls on the spirits to allow no “compunctious visitings of nature/ Shake my fell purpose” (1.5.46-47). Some scholars define this phrase as compassion or scruples, but it more likely refers to menstruation—the only “natural and usually unavoidable event in a woman’s life. . . [that] repeatedly reminds her of her sex”

(La Belle 382). According to The Byrth of Mankynde , a popular midwifery and obstetrical handbook of the day, a woman’s vagina is her “passage” through which blood flows from the uterus. They also believed that thickening of the menstrual fluid occurred in between periods of menstruation. The blood from the womb had a special connection to a woman’s heart, which more than symbolically connected to a woman’s emotions. “If the thickened blood blocks the passage of the womb, then, it also stops up the access to the heart from which remorse could flow” (La Belle 382 ). When Lady Macbeth calls on the powers of evil to transform her into the type of person that can murder Duncan, she must first rid herself of all her natural maternal qualities—both physical and psychological. “The biological unsexing will help to bring about the spiritual unsexing. . .

. [Believing that] blood restrained putrifies” (ibid), the process of unsexing and stopping

up all her bodily fluids would cause the womb to become infected, having a profound

effect on Lady Macbeth later in the play.

Chris Laoutaris speaks extensively of the vessels of witches being the agents of their witchcraft. Bottles, pots, and other vessels are filled with the bodily substances of their victims. Archeological digs have unearthed stopped-up vessels containing surprisingly preserved pieces of hair, fingernails, or blood within them. “As we have seen, for enchanted artifacts to work they must become the conduits for the infusion of the blood and vital ‘spirits’ of the witch into her victim, and Lady Macbeth proposes nothing less than the pouring of this diseased substance directly into Macbeth” (186).

Lady Macbeth calls upon the spirits of evil to stop up her natural female functions and fill her with “direst cruelty” (1.5.24). LaBelle argued that biologically, her poisoned womb that results from this stopping up will in turn affect her psychologically. The stopping up of her menstruation will also stop up the channels of remorse and compassion, and the putrefying of her womb will turn her into a poisoned chalice—which Laoutaris concluded was the most common and symbolic tool for witchcraft. Thus, Lady Macbeth’s whole body becomes an evil tool of the witches that enchant her husband. She puts aside her female fertility and, as Macbeth’s wife, becomes the vessel filled with his vital spirits and her own poisonous matter that the witches need to control Scotland’s throne.

Next Lady Macbeth moves on to her bosom, “Come to my woman's breasts,/ And

take my milk for gall. . .” (1.5.48-49). “Like the witches, Lady Macbeth discloses a desire

to determine her destiny through the control of bodily substances; substances associated

with the dangerously permeable female reproductive body. Believing Macbeth to be ‘too

full o’th’ milk of human kindness’ [1.5.16], she seeks to contaminate this nurturing

material” (Laoutaris 185). Once again we see a replacement of a natural, life-giving

source with an unnatural, death-bringing one. Lady Macbeth was once full of milk, now

she is dry. Macbeth is full of the symbolic milk that inhibits him from committing the

deed she wants him to do. Her own maternal kindness expressed by a baby at her breast is

replaced with the image of a baby plucked from her breast and violently murdered.

The common belief of the day was that the fluid of menstruation was the same

substance as breast milk, simply made white in the breasts. An infant was nourished in the womb by this fluid and continues his or her nourishment by the same after birth. After having stopped up and poisoned her womb, her milk will likely do the same. She asks that instead of milk, her breasts would be filled with “gall” or “bile,” furthering the imagery of Lady Macbeth as a vessel of bodily poison for the witches’ foul purpose.

Lady Macbeth’s wicked stoppage of her menstrual cycle has two significant results. First, the blood that no longer flows from her womb now appears elsewhere. The bloody daggers and both of their bloody hands after having killed Duncan parallel Lady

Macbeth’s pseudo-stigmata. More importantly, her other famous speech in the play, the

“out damn spot,” speech (5.1.36-70) features imaginary blood that will not leave her hands. Her behavior throughout the remainder of the play follows the beliefs of the day about women whose cycles had ceased. A woman going through menopause was thought to behave strangely, to resemble madness, to faint and—in the worst cases—to commit suicide. Lady Macbeth takes on all these behaviors, from her frantic fainting to her sleep- walking and finally, to her sad death by her own hand. “Lady Macbeth’s character is, of course, not simply a personification of these medical diagnostics, but the consistency with which her troubled character embodies these symptoms indicates that she has indeed

called down upon herself, with unfortunate success, the stoppage of her menstrual cycle”

(La Belle 384).

Second, the most powerful effect this incantation has on the plot is that it permanently makes Lady Macbeth barren. It only takes one murder for Macbeth to rise to the throne, and thereafter he seeks desperately keep it and to establish his inheritance, necessitating more and more violence and murder. Yet Macbeth has no heir. At every turn, he is reminded of the fruitfulness of his friends and enemies—the regenerative, life- giving qualities of Duncan, Banquo, and Macduff stand in stark contrast to the Macbeths’ deathly barrenness. “And just as Macbeth kills this royal symbol of fruitfulness, Lady

Macbeth destroys her own fruitfulness” (LaBelle 385).

Women taking charge of their own reproductive power was an especially threatening thought to men, and resulted in fantasies that were horrifying and demonic.

“Witches represented a nightmare scenario in which women could control, for their own maleficent purposes, the natural agents of procreation through the mediation of the domestic articles they had most ready access to” (Laoutaris 187). Lady Macbeth represents this masculine nightmare. She is a woman taking control of her own fertility, but in this paranoid fantasy, that can only mean that she is evil, and poisonous and ineffective to her husband. She endeavored to stop up her natural life-bringing capability and be filled with evil. In keeping with the reoccurring images of vessels of witchcraft, she has a tendency to “view herself and others in terms of vessels which can be harnessed through the channeling of fluids, vapours and spirits” (ibid 188). Her strange fertility is referenced yet again by the doctor and gentlewoman who observe her in act 5: “unnatural

deeds do breed unnatural troubles” (5.1.69-70). What could be more unnatural, to a fear- filled mind, than a woman in this society taking charge of her own fertility?

Lady Macbeth’s unnatural, barren, feminine body is foiled against the fertile,

maternal body of Lady Macduff. Shakespeare breaks from his theme of unnatural

femininity and fertility when he depicts Macduff’s wife as feminine, fertile, and strong in

her maternal instincts. Indeed in this brief scene Lady Macduff appears as a refreshing reminder of a femininity that is light and life-giving. After Macduff has escaped to

England in act 4, she points out the natural order when it is not broken, criticizing her husband for not behaving more like a mother bird:

LADY MACDUFF. From whence himself does fly? He loves us not:

He wants the natural touch; for the poor wren,

The most diminitive of birds, will fight,

Her young ones in her nest, against the owl.

All is the fear, and nothing is the love;

As little is the wisdom, where the flight

So runs against all reason. (4.2.8-14)

Shakespeare continues the bird imagery in this scene as Lady Macduff discusses her son’s father with him, finally saying that, like birds, husbands can be bought “twenty at any market” (4.2.40). All this foreshadows their slaughter at the end of scene 2, of which

Macduff later remarks, “What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,/ At one fell swoop?” (4.3.218-219). The natural-ness of Lady Macduff’s body is confirmed by the bird imagery and slaughtered by the unnatural, pseudo-feminine body of Macbeth. He murders true femininity in the very nest of her true maternal being. Choosing to analogize

Lady Macduff to a hen with her brood of chicks calls to mind the rural domestic scene,

fertile with the wealth of the land, managed by women in their traditional role. She is fertile, she is domestic, she is productive—she is everything that the Macbeths are not, she symbolizes the prosperity and virility of his enemy, and she and her brood will die for that.

Macbeth’s further confrontations with the witches reflect the same mysterious quality that real-life midwives did in Shakespeare’s England. Just as a man was unable to determine the extent of a midwife’s power in the birth room and her influence over his potential heir, equally mysterious are the witches in Macbeth . Their involvement in the

murders fills the mind with questions. Are they controlling him or simply predicting what

he is doing on his own? His ambition is certainly present before he meets them, but the

very first scene of the play features the witches devising where to meet with Macbeth

(1.1.8). It is difficult to ascertain how much magical power they really have over the

world and over Macbeth; he could be just the vehicle of their magical, evil manipulation.

Or the witches may merely be witnesses to the violence and murder that has been

gestating in Macbeth all along, inevitably born with or without them. Who exactly is

doing what is a query that Shakespeare leaves unanswered.

The witches’ most devastating act of trickery occurs near the climax of the play,

with their prediction that no man born of woman could harm Macbeth: “Be bloody, bold,

and resolute; laugh to scorn/ The power of man, for none of woman born/ Shall harm

Macbeth” (4.1.8-90). Interpreting this prediction as a sign of invincibility, Macbeth

charges forward in his ambition, despite their warning to also beware of Macduff. It is

important to note that during this time, it was a midwife’s duty to encourage a laboring

mother. “It was her responsibility to aid a woman to birth her baby efficiently and

speedily, and to administer comforting herbs, ointments, and especially comforting words

to encourage the laboring mother” (Cressy 62). The witches, as midwives, turn this duty

onto its head. They perform their duty as midwives to encourage Macbeth’s labor, but

their purpose is dark and wicked. They give Macbeth the inspiration he needs to bring

forth murder after murder, but what he does not realize is that his labor will end in his

own demise.

One of the few mentions of historic cesarean sections in dramatic literature from the period, the revelation of Macduff’s unnatural birth occurs at the climax of the play and serves as the breaking point for the play’s action. This event in the plot is arguably the most famous and significant childbirth-related moment in Renaissance drama. While cesarean section has been performed since antiquity, it was not always as common as it is today, nor was it as safe for mother and child. In fact, until the nineteenth century, it was considered a life-saving surgery for the baby only, usually being performed on a dead or dying mother. It was a desperate attempt to save the life of the child, or “as commonly required by religious edicts, so the infant might be buried separately from the mother.

Above all it was a measure of last resort, and the operation was not intended to preserve the mother's life” (U.S. National Library of Medicine). In addition, while the event of childbirth was commonly reserved as women’s business, in the very rare occurance that a cesarean section was performed, a male surgeon was called in to do the job. This weighs greatly on my interpretation of the play as a sytematic mysogynist fantasy. The male usurpation of childbirth comes to a climax in direct porportion to the climactic structure

20 of the play, and the ultimate replacement of natural, life-giving birth gives way to the unnatural, tragic mixture of birth and death represented by ancient cesarean section.

An important area to inspect here is Shakespeare’s crafty shaping of the language that he uses to address birth. While Cixous and other literary feminists of the 1970s demonstrated the significance of how language is crafted in favor of patriarchy,

Shakespeare uses language to construct a severe blow to the feminine act of giving birth.

As a master of language, he uses that very weapon to execute a violent takeover of childbirth, delivering the act into the rescuing hands of men. Macbeth grew overly- confident when the witches prophesied that “none of woman born” could harm him. Then during the final battle of the play, Macduff asserts that indeed he was not:

MACBETH. Thou losest labor.

As easy mayst thou the intrenchant air

With thy keen sword impress as make me bleed:

Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crests;

I bear a charmed life, which must not yield

To one of woman born.

MACDUFF. Despair thy charm,

And let the angel whom thou still hast served

Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb

Untimely ripp'd. (5.8.8-16)

An assertion such as this—that since Macduff was born by cesarean section he was therefore not “of woman born”—works well to further the plot, but is extremely offensive to modern women and should be to any woman in any time. With this line,

Shakespeare gives all the credit of motherhood, inheritance, and birthright to the

attending physician who rescued Macduff from his dead mother’s womb. It ignores the

time she carried her son in her womb, nurturing him, her body building him into a child

that could live, even without her milk, and become a man and a warrior. Mostly it ignores

the ultimate sacrifice she made to bring him into the world, birthing him not just with her body, but with her very life. This revelation is no simple plot device or passing

comment—it is a calculated shaping of language that usurps Macduff’s birth from

woman to man. The declaration by the witches that no man born of woman will harm him

gives Macbeth the feeling of invincibility that propels his murderous deeds forward. The

fact that, in the world of the play, there actually is a man not born of woman is a moment of deceptive misogyny that even Macbeth did not predict.

With his death, the final act of misogyny is carried out. Righteous, heroic masculinity conquers evil femininity, and all the plays themes and motifs are drawn in together in the climactic moment of the play. Macbeth was fearless, repeating the witches’ prediction with every assailant he encounters in battle, until lastly, he takes on

Macduff. In keeping with the reoccurring motif of unnatural phenomenon—a theme that

Rosse and the Old Man describe in 2.4—Macbeth is aghast when Macduff reveals that indeed he was not born of woman. Scansion of the iambic pentameter reveals an unavoidable pregnant pause from Macbeth after Macduff’s revelation, which occurs in

5.8. Lines 9-15 hold strictly to the ten-syllable iambic pentameter and do not vary, not even bearing a single feminine ending. But line 16, which completes Macduff’s reveal, contains only the words “Untimely ripp’d,” using only four syllables. Seldom do two words echo so long throughout time. The rhythm that Shakespeare has established in the

22 previous lines resounds silently in the mind of the audience for the span of six more beats as those two words are contemplated. No words are spoken. Macbeth’s stunned silence reveals the witches’ treachery and his inescapable fate. Then finally he lashes out in iambic again, “Accursed be that tongue that tells me so” (5.8.17).

He momentarily wavers, unwilling to fight Macduff. But despite all, he changes his mind, his determination unwavering like that of a woman close to her time:

MACBETH. I will not yield,

To kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet,

And to be baited with the rabble's curse.

Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,

And thou opposed, being of no woman born,

Yet I will try the last. Before my body

I throw my warlike shield: lay on, Macduff (5.8.27-33)

Here, the evil power of the Feminine is conquered violently both in the explanation of Macduff’s birth and in the subsequent beheading of Macbeth. Macduff, the symbol of the usurpation of the birth experience, whose birth killed his own mother, now kills the death-mother, ending Macbeth’s murderous child-bearing. Thus male dominance reigns heroic. The death-mother is dead, the midwife-witches are satisfied, the unsexed and barren queen has killed herself, and even the fertile Lady Macduff has been killed with her children. Only men are left on the stage, and in Scotland, new life begins not from the fertile womb of woman, but from the bloody blade of man.

With this play, Shakespeare brilliantly crafts a dramatic marriage of language and action that inscribes the feminine experience of childbirth in the most misogynistic way.

The takeover of the Scottish throne deftly parallels the takeover of childbirth through language and action. The climax of the play, with its infamous line that Macduff was untimely ripped from his mother’s womb, elucidates an entire system of birth language that unlocks a host of misogyny. In Macbeth we see an inscription of femininity that remarkably illuminates the fearful and threatening fantasies of a phallocentric culture.

Similar sentiments are often drawn from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice . The anti-

Semitism in that play is unavoidable, and one cannot skirt that issue in Merchant

anymore than one can skirt the misogyny issue in this play. But just as Merchant’s villain

has somewhat of a “heart of gold,” likewise is the misogyny of Macbeth duplicitous. The fear that Shakespeare captures in this play is so thoroughly played out that one can easily see the problem with it. Scotland’s end as represented in this play is not desirable and in the end, evil may be vanquished, but the country is no less fearful than it was when the witches were in control.

It is not my wish to directly attack the person of William Shakespeare as a misogynist, but rather to point out how this play brilliantly supports a system of patriarchy in a dark and dangerous way. Indeed, the vicious heroism of masculinity is so caricaturized that Shakespeare’s humanist—even feminist—statement lays thinly beneath the surface. This play depicts a dark world where childbirth is usurped by men, and femininity is violently conquered. Its cynicism implies that without a harmonious balance of power between feminine and masculine, nature and nurture, Scotland will always be a most foul, dangerous, and unnatural place.

CHAPTER 2:

Binaries that Breed Conflict: Polarizing the Sexes in The Magnetic Lady and The

Winter’s Tale

One way that the playwrights of the Stuart era inscribed the feminine experience was through oppositions. From the satire of Ben Jonson to the complex late romantic plays of Shakespeare, we see binary relationships at play in the scenes involving women and childbirth. The playwrights masterfully crafted these binaries, often not with the intention to comment on gender issues, but larger issues at play in early modern English society. But as is common, the most important matters of the world of men were born within the women-only world of the birth room. Through examination of Jonson’s The

Magnetic Lady and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale , I demonstrate how interpreting the maternal experience through binary relationships was a significant way the dramatists expressed not only their intentional themes, but also the phallocentric action of the drama.

Cixous argued that binaries foundational to western thought must be torn down because they are structured under the “underlying opposition of man/woman” and are

“relative positions of mastery and subordination” (Robbins 170). Fundamental to the discourse involving paternity and reproductive issues in early modern drama is the conflict of the apparent oppositions of nature versus culture, which will prove it self to be the binary opposition on which all others are founded. Several years before Cixous explored her concept of binary oppositions, feminist Julia Kristeva (1941- ) noted the nature/culture issue and pointed out its feminist significance in matters pertaining to

childbirth. She was quoted in an interview remarking that the nature/culture binary, “. . . attaches a guilt complex to the maternal function. . . As far as I am concerned, childbearing as such never seemed inconsistent with cultural activity” (qtd. in Robbins

121). Ruth Robbins later expounded on Kristeva’s comments about childbirth:

She will not see the culture/nature debate surrounding childbirth as the

binary opposition that some feminists have claimed it to be. . . In other

words, she attacks the terms of the liberal feminist agenda because she

sees them as re-inscribing precisely the oppositions (between culture and

nature, between subjectivity and materiality) that she believes it is the role

of feminism to attack. (Robbins 121)

Kristeva was critiquing her feminist contemporaries for placing their thinking

within the framework of patriarchy when they viewed childbirth from a perspective of

nature versus culture. But when it comes to reproductive matters in early Stuart drama,

the nature/culture issue is the primary opposition on which many other binary oppositions

are built.

Ben Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady (1632) is a satire full of oppositions such as

these. In it we see powerful binaries such as order/disorder in the character of the

midwife, chaste/fertile in the two young maids, and an ever-present binary of

submissive/assertive in all the females throughout the course of the play. By satirizing

gender stereotypes, Jonson defends the existing social order and establishes his view that

these binaries represent the “correct” order of society. Men and their ability to reason

triumph over women and their conniving attempts to usurp male authority. As critic

Helen Ostovich noted, viewing the world through the lens of binaries such as these

allowed Jonson “to establish the rightness of this system of feminine ‘nature’ in the

service of masculine ‘culture’ by showing what happens when a household of women re-

appropriates maternity and motherhood in the course of their own pursuit of independent pleasure or profit” (425).

The early modern English both onstage and in everyday life fixed their understanding of the world on a grand concept of Order. Sir Thomas Elyot, in the first chapter of The Governor , profoundly explained the importance of this concept in the

Elizabethan and Jacobean mind: “. . . so that in everything is order, and without order

may be nothing stable or permanent. And it may not be called order except it do contain

in it degrees, high and base, according to the merit or estimation of the thing that is

ordered” (qtd. in Tillyard 12). And yet, despite all this orderliness, underneath the

surface, there laid a distinctly feminine way of thinking that relished disorder and

embraced the mysterious and unknown. This was a frame of mind most suitable to

women, who, with their bodies performed the most mysterious act of humanity—birthing

new life into the world. But no figure embodied disorder more than the midwife, and in

the drama, within this disruption of order lays the conflict.

To the male-dominated outside world, the midwife represented orderliness. She was the trusted authority—or at least the representative of the authoritarian system— within the unruly and uncontrolled world of women. And yet, as a caretaker of women in their most vulnerable time of life, she was also the mother-figure in the female circle of trust. She was still a woman, and women trusted her. The aspect of her presence that symbolized social order was in direct conflict with her inclusion and her role in the female community. “Midwives were formidable women possessed of exceptional

authority, and this may have made some men uneasy. Humorous literature. . . sometimes

ridiculed the midwife as ‘mother midnight’ or ‘old mother grope’, but this was an

uncomfortable male representation of skillful women whose specialties were gender-

specific and mysterious” (Cressy 61).

The Magnetic Lady is a cynical and suspicious depiction of early modern

midwives, where “birthing and childcare become powerful weapons in the hands of a

cabal of middle-aged women who reinterpret female sexual pleasure and fecundity for the perpetuation, biological and financial, of the matriarchal line” (Ostovich 426). These

women blatantly ignore the social order and use their birth room empowerment for their

own gain. This work differs from others in the period and others written by Jonson,

where women were sometimes given more developed, complex identities wrought with

depth and insight. In The Magnetic Lady , however, Jonson diverges from these types of

characters and takes a full-fledged satirical and stereotypical approach, resulting in a very

humorous play to the early modern audience, but which leaves today’s audiences bemused, uncertain at its deeper meaning.

In all this stereotyping, two females embody the most threatening aspects of the

early modern woman—Mistress Polish, the gossip, and Mistress Chair, the midwife (the

one character who doesn’t contain some level of buffoonery). Polish is an incessant

talker, and living up to the derogatory connotation of her office, is a gossiping and

conniving schemer. Chair is less talk and much more action. She collaborates with Polish

to carry out her scheme and accomplishes great feats to do so. In constructing a play

wherein gender roles are satirized and the merits of patriarchy are endorsed, Jonson

develops an image of the midwife that is foreboding and hostile. These depictions serve

as a warning to any female—midwife or accomplice—who attempts to dangerously

subvert the social order.

An examination of the characters’ names is the first clue to their flat, one-sided natures. Compass directs the events of the play through manipulation, and throughout the play, his deeds direct the action of the play toward the truth. His namesake as well as others such as Loadstone and Needle directly illicit interpretations of the play based on the newly-formed theories of magnetism, expounded in William Gilbert’s De Magnete

(1600) 2. The name of the midwife, Mistress Chair, has many meanings. La chaire is

“flesh" in French, “but her name also suggests the reproduction of one's flesh in the birthing-chair” (Ostovich 433). A birthing chair or stool is a tool for childbirth (still used

today) to which the play refers a couple of times as a pun. The women’s names also

represent a rather dogmatic interpretation of the gender issues the play incites, as together

the scheming women are the World (Polish) and the Flesh (Chair). In addition, the young

women are characterized as objects of sexual pleasure, aptly named Placentia and

Pleasance.

Ostovich argued that the young girls are symbols of sexual pleasure, and that all

the women in the play work to reassign pleasure—whether sexual, financial, or other—

from the men to women. In act 2 several of the women are seen discussing suitors when

Mistress Keepe, the nurse, tells Polish they were “. . . wishing a husband/ For my young

Mistris here. A man to please her” (2.2.3-4). 3 Pleasance and Placentia together create a binary that spans the breadth of expectations of young women, and the social role forced

2 See McFarland, Robert. “Jonson's Magnetic Lady and the Reception of Gilbert's De Magnete”. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Vol. 11, No. 2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring, 1971), pp. 283- 293. 3 All quotations taken from Jonson, Ben. The Magnetic Lady . Ed. Peter Happe. Series: The Revels Plays. Manchester University Press, November, 2000. 29

upon them. Pleasance represents the chaste female and Placentia, the fertile. While

fertility is the quality men would desire for a wife, the quality that ultimately determined

her worth as a wife and his inheritance, proof of this fertility in a maid was stigmatized.

Jonson spreads the fertile/chaste comparison across socio-economic lines as well.

Considering the girls’ unfortunate swap at birth, Placentia, though raised by wealthy,

upper-class Loadstone is in reality the daughter of the base Polish. Stereotypical of her

working-class bloodline and in keeping with her association to childbirth, she is fertile, but not chaste (fertility undetermined). Pleasance, conversely, while she is of humble

upbringing, is of noble bloodline, and is chaste. In act 5 she also becomes the savior of

the male lineage and social order.

Although the action of the play revolves around them and their bodies, the two young girls are the flattest characters in the play. They have very few lines compared to most other characters and when they do speak, they say little. Placentia, who spends the play pregnant, in labor, and post-partum seems to be ushered along by the tide of all the other characters’ actions. She is not empowered; she does not make any of her own choices or voice any of her own opinions. Even in 2.1 where the women discuss possible suitors, she does not seem to favor a single one. She functions as a mere body, one that exists to pleasure men, to give them heirs, and when she disrupts that part of the process with her premature fertility, she causes a great conflict that sparks the action of the entire play.

Her cousin Pleasance is just that and not much more—she is pleasant. Her few lines exhibit the sweet softness of a typical Stuart-era maiden, slow to speak, unassuming,

not very intelligent, and always agreeable, happily submitting to all that is expected of

her.

The play often refers to “gossips,” which, unlike the definition of the word today, were attendants at a birth—separate from the midwife—usually relatives or friends of the mother, chosen by her or her family to assist in the birth. Attending births as a gossip was a social obligation for many women at that time, especially married ones. The value of

“gossiping” was significant. It was this custom that constructed the intense bonds and loyalty toward each other that women guarded so carefully. It was a regular part of married life for many women to attend the births of their friends and family. In so doing, the women formed a tight bond with each other, the kind that can only be obtained when individuals go through such a trying, yet joyful time together. Experienced, older gossips assisted the work of the midwives, offering a sort of childbirth education to younger women before it was time for them to give birth. Also, if a midwife didn’t arrive in time for the birth, an older, experienced matron could be relied on to do a sufficient job at assisting the mother to deliver the baby.

Jonson touches on the double meaning of the word, however, with his depiction of Mistress Polish. He uses her character in many situations to build a motif of men versus women at several points in the play. Indeed, the very title of the play itself suggests that polarizing is a primary theme. The teams are clearly drawn right from the beginning when Polish first enters the scene in act 1:

LADY LOADSTONE. And so my Gossip

Polish assures me. Here she comes! Good Polish

Welcome in troth! How dost thou gentle Polish?

RUT. Who’s this?

PALATE. Dame Polish, her she-Parasite,

Her talking, soothing, sometime governing Gossip. (1.3.37-41)

Language such as this continues throughout the play on the part of the men,

especially toward Polish. It is said that she “cannot speak reason,” and Compass refers to

himself and others of his sex as “masters of our senses” (1.5.26-27). The men appear to be just as united in their opposition to the women as the ladies are in their plotting against

the men. It seems throughout the first act whenever a new character is introduced—with a

few exceptions—the character is praised by the others of their gender. In addition, all the

characters are roundly satirized along gender lines. Captain Ironside the soldier is feisty

and violent, Needle the tailor is effeminate, Silkworm the courtier is vain, Polish the

gossip is loud and loquacious, Chair the midwife is bossy and controlling, and Pleasance

the waiting woman is coy and passive. Stereotypes abound in this work, enhancing the

satire in perfect Jonsonian flavor.

Continuing the polarizing descriptions of gender, the characters in the Intermeans

make some surprising comments about women and childbirth. At the end of act 3 it is

revealed to the men that Placentia is with child and has gone into labor. Damplay and the

Boy interrupt the action (as they do after every act) to discuss the dramaturgical style of

the play’s ‘Author:’

DAMPLAY. This was a pitiful poor shift o’ your Poet, Boy, to make his

prime woman with child, and fall in labour, just to compose a quarrel.

BOY. With whose borrowed ears, have you heard, Sir, all this while, that

you can mistake the current of our scene so? The stream of the

argument, threatened her being with child from the very beginning, for

it presented her in the first of the second Act, with some apparent note

of infirmity or defect. . . (3.chor.1-9).

Feigning sickness was of course a plot device purposed to keep Placentia’s illegitimate pregnancy a secret, but the characters’ comments calling pregnancy an

“infirmity or defect” reflect an attitude that is very derogatory toward women and childbirth, furthering the gender opposition. It is a sour, cheap joke. Extremity in attitude leads to extremity in language, and Placentia is later referred to as “lewd” and

“prostituted” (4.3.27). The conversation continues between the men in this scene, re- appropriating Placentia’s body along the profit/pleasure binary, her premarital fertility lowering her desirability and therefore her “price.” The end of the play further degrades her worth as a bride when she is revealed not to be the heiress of the Loadstone fortune at all, but Polish’s daughter, switched at birth with Pleasance. Her punishment for fertility is disinheritance.

The social order in The Magnetic Lady is completely disrupted by the gaggle of females. They use their power, begotten from the birth room, to carry out a plot that has been in the making for decades. Mistress Polish switched her baby daughter at birth with the Loadstone’s baby in order to secure a rich inheritance when she came of age and an extorting plot could be executed. The time has now come and their attempts to carry out the plot turn their world into a female-centered fantasy. The social order is turned upside down: females rule males, childbirth is re-ordered to serve women instead of men, servants order their masters, even the dramatis personae is reversed—the female characters are listed first instead of the male ones as per usual.

Mistress Chair, the midwife, is the grand organizer of the scheme. In this play, she is presented as a smart (albeit conniving), and motivated leader, as midwives likely were in real life. When the very marriageable heiress of the Loadstone household, Placentia

Steel, is found to be with child, the women keep Placentia’s pregnancy a secret, but it is later revealed as she goes into labor and gives birth offstage. Mistress Chair aptly assists the mother in safe delivery of the child, sends the baby off to a wet nurse (we assume), gets rid of all evidence of the birth, and through an herbal concoction, gets Placentia back on her feet and into society as quickly as possible, hoping to continue the plot by marrying her off so Polish may, by proxy, be connected to the Loadstone fortune. The lie the women use to cover up their scheme is that she had a “fit ‘o the mother/ . . .” which the midwife “cur'd,/ With burning bones and feathers” (5.4.9-11). She reunites the quarreling women and re-establishes the female bond of trust with her often-quoted line describing women’s secrecy, “Come, come, be friends: and keep these women-matters, /

Smock-secrets to our selves" (4.7.40-41). Chair exudes remarkable confidence, and she is praised by Polish, for her ability to work such magic:

CHAIR. You should not fret so, Mistress Polish,

Nor you, Dame Keep: my daughter shall do well

When she has ta’en my caudle. I ha’ known

Twenty such breaches pieced up, and made whole

Without a bum of noise. You two fall out?

And tear up one another?

POLISH. Blessed woman!

‘Blest be the peacemaker.’

And again:

POLISH. Be though yet better by this grave, sage woman

Who is the mother of matrons and great persons,

And knows the world. (4.7.5-10 and 17-19)

Keeping the secrets of women was an important matter, both to men and women alike. Denise Ryan calls midwives the “high priestesses” of women’s secrets. They preserved both the modesty and mystery of womanhood, and women communally keeping these secrets seemed to be pivotal to their kinship and sisterhood. “The midwife who violated the secrets of women. . . breached the fragile barrier holding her divided loyalties—to the city as the upholder of social norms and to the female community as aid and confidante—intact” (Ryan 438). But in keeping with the spirit of secrecy versus transparency, private (bodily, sexual matters) versus public (matters of inheritance),

Jonson touched on the darker side of this secrecy. In the world of The Magnetic Lady , female secrecy implied conspiracy, subversion, and danger.

Such secrecy among women, especially over childbirth, raises threats of

false attribution of paternity, substitution of children, and infanticide—all

skeletal fears Jonson rattles in the last two acts of the play. The fact that

Placentia's baby is a boy increases the seriousness of such threats. She has

produced a bastard who would have an ambiguous, but viable claim to the

family fortune. Women's exclusive control of childbirth implies, as

Adrienne Rich puts it, ‘a potentially dangerous or hostile act, a conspiracy,

a subversion’ of legitimate male rights. (Ostovich 432)

Once again the world of the play is seen to be upside down in terms of birthright and the customs involving childbirth. The midwife’s power is pitted against the world of men in act 4 when Compass is invited by Pleasance to visit the newborn baby boy of

Placentia’s. He wishes to first know the father and Pleasance responds, “Mistris Midwife/

Has promis’d to find out a father for it,/ If there be need” (4.5.5-7). The midwife dares to question the necessity of the inheritance issue, which since the mother is unmarried, negates the need for male involvement altogether.

The serious and suspicious issue of infanticide is also touched upon in the resolution of this play, and the midwife’s testimony that would normally be considered very reliable is thrown into question when Chair is threatened with the accusation.

Placentia returns to the action of the play after giving birth newly restored as a marriageable maiden. There is no evidence of the child, and instead of assuming innocently that the baby is with a wet nurse, Compass demands to see the child.

COMPASS. Bring forth your child, or I appeal you of murder,

You, and this gossip here, and Mother Chair.

CHAIR. The gentleman's fallen mad!

Pleasance steps out.

PLEASANCE. No, Mistress Midwife.

I saw the child, and you did give it me,

And put it i' my arms, by this ill token,

You wished me such another; and it cried.

PRACTICE. The law is plain: if it were heard to cry,

And you produce it not, he may indict

All that conceal't, of felony, and murder. (5.10.67-76)

Pleasance comes into a power of her own after having been in the birth room, but

uses it to betray the women, returning the event of childbirth to its rightful place as a tool

of inheritance and male interests. “Only a woman who was present in the lying-in

chamber can right patrilineal descent, lift the specter of infanticide and reveal sexual

incontinence. In this way, Pleasance ensures that the midwife’s abrogated responsibilities

to the (male) community are met” (Jensted 96). Here Jonson also creates another binary

when he pits the women against each other, contrasting acceptable women’s behavior

with behavior that is outside the social norm. He creates a picture of a “good girl” versus

a “bad girl.” Pleasance does not stand with the conniving plot of the women, but instead

stands for truth, ensuring the ‘correct’ rules of inheritance are followed. She is a “good

girl.” She singlehandedly takes down the social deviance of the older women and the

fertile and promiscuous young woman, restoring the play’s action back to its proper, phallocentric place.

In the end, it is the classical and investigative ability of men that win out against

the cunning subversion of women. The audience is left laughing at the silly women who

dared to conspire against the men and turn their understanding of the world upside down.

It is the foolishness of women that disable Polish’s plotting and Chair’s orchestrating of

the crime. Not even the wise midwife is able to escape the ignorance and sloppiness of

women’s organization. Compass overhears their discussion in 4.4 when the women were being less than discreet in their discussion of the matter, an invocation of gender

stereotypes that effectively puts an end to their foolish female antics. In fact, Jonson uses

the disloyalty of Pleasance to defeat the female cause. She turns her back on the women’s

37 plot and submits herself to the authority and birthright afforded her through her true paternity.

Ostovich argued that there was another binary at play here, one that was far more important to Jonson than gender issues. Since it is unlikely that a figure such as Jonson would have taken an interest in gender roles, it is suggested that Jonson was allegorizing the issue of subversion of the social order in terms of poetic authority, rather than gender.

Ostovich’s insight in this is significant. When The Magnetic Lady appeared on the stage

in 1632, Jonson seemed to be attempting a final masterpiece, after having suffered a

stroke several years prior and having been confined to his chamber for some time. In the

Induction of the play, the Boy of the house speaks of the playwright,

BOY. The author, beginning his studies of this kind, with ‘Every Man in

his Humour’, and after, ‘Every Man out of his Humour’, and since,

continuing in all his plays, especially those of the Comick thred,

whereof ‘The New Inn’ was the last, some recent humours still, or

manners of men that went along with the times, finding himself now

near the close, or shutting up of his circle, hath fancied to himself in

idea, this magnetic mistress. (ind. 91-98)

The theatrical world was moving forward without him, and the fame and respect

he once held was fading. In September of the same year, John Pory was reported to have

remarked about the play that it was by “Ben Jonson, who I thought had been dead” (qtd.

in Happe 1). In literary terms, the pervading style of drama was moving away from the

satires that Jonson had mastered and the Puritan anti-theatre movement was pulling the

middle class away from the theatre altogether. Jonson nonetheless forged ahead with his

style and “while the majority of the dramatists were writing plays of adventure and intrigue with a foreign setting, he continued to satirize the follies of the time” (Peck xv).

In re-establishing the social order in respect to gender, Jonson was crafting an

analogy far more personal—he was proclaiming his own superiority as a dramatist

against the inferior pretenders who dared to compete with him.

Jonson sees these inadequate versifiers-would-be-poets as merely

mimicking and thus undermining the privileged position of true poets, in

the same way that unruly women-would-be men-ape and sabotage male

behavior in their attempts to disrupt patriarchal control. This clownish

repetition by inferiors temporarily displaces the worthy originals by

challenging, even ridiculing the assumption that the established authority

is supreme, genuine, and inimitable. (Ostovich 435)

This competition between poets re-shapes the play from a top-down twist of

gender roles into a phallocentric, masterful depiction of the male mentality and way of

thinking within their exclusive men-only world. The image of an aging playwriting

attempting to elbow his way to the top, along with other men doing the same stands in

stark contrast to the image of the birth room, where hierarchical roles are far more jumbled and where women cooperate with one another toward a common purpose. This play depicts such female camaraderie as subversive and dangerous, defiant of true

authority and social order.

The argument is supported by the character of Needle, an effeminate male tailor of women’s clothing and by the many references in the Chorus explaining the nature of a good play and comparing it to embroidery. This bears significance considering the

competitive nature of the leading dramatists of the time—Jonson would have been deeply

interested in supporting his own position as a poet and one that had been commissioned by the court. This becomes clearer understanding that Jonson’s influence over the

theatrical world was deteriorating, along with his dramaturgical style. But it is important

not to paint Jonson as a resentful, aging has-been. There is much evidence in his body of

work to suggest that Jonson had a great respect for his audiences and sincere concern for

the issues of the day, and the direction in which the dramaturgical style was moving.

Peter Happe noted, “it is perhaps wiser to see this recurring metatheatrical discourse as part of Jonson’s dramatic code: a salient and attractive feature of his way of influencing

and entertaining” (Happe 4).

So to Jonson, the master/apprentice binary was probably far more important than any other represented in the play. Chauvinism was the perfect case-in-point to drive home a more important message—that up-and-comers should remember their place, and the results of other poets disrupting the poetic social order could be as dangerous as when women disrupt it.

But Jonson does more than use a common social stereotype to taut his own authority as a playwright. Jensted explains how Jonson becomes the midwife of the play when he reveals the true father of Pleasance, a social role reserved exclusively for the midwife. Since the Mother Chair, as midwife, failed to meet her obligation to society in disclosing the truth of paternity, Jonson, as playwright will direct (perhaps just as a compass directs) the events of the play to reveal the true father from a birth decades past.

The character of Compass is often thought of as the voice of Jonson, and he wisely directs the events of the play toward the truth, just as a compass directs a lost traveler. In

doing so, Jonson compromises the dependability of a woman’s role in society and

replaces it with male integrity. “The playwright deals handily in smock affairs, aligning him with the more competent Mother Chair and demonstrating his own power” (Jensted

99). Again we see a male authority usurping the authority of women in birth matters.

In The Magnetic Lady , Jonson succeeds in flaunting his reputation within the

establishment as a master poet, and also in ambitiously redirecting birth matters reserved

for women into the world of men. He uses the binaries of order/disorder, chaste/fertile,

and submissive/assertive to craft the most important binary relationship in his world—

that of master/apprentice. It is the essence of phallocentricity, with Jonson as the master

and all others subordinate to him.

The Winter’s Tale (1611) exudes images of Renaissance-era families whiling

away the long, cold, dark hours of a cold winter’s night crowded around a fire pit

listening to a story-teller recount a magical tale of kings and queens, princes and princesses, jealousy, heartbreak, loss, and restoration. All of this is present in

Shakespeare’s romantic play, written late in his career, at the height of his genius. The young prince Mamillius sets the tone for the play in act II when he remarks “a sad tale’s best for winter” (2.1.25). It is not a true story or a history, but a fantastical story ripe with cultural folklore, representing fears and fantasies, nightmares and daydreams about the private and public things that happen within the confines of royal bedrooms.

When it came to matters of birth and reproduction in his plays, Shakespeare often seemed interested in the conflict between the inward world of women and the public world of men—the private/public binary. Since all the works examined in thesis were

written by men, the inherent binary here can be expressed in this tension between the public and private. The only extant historical evidence we have of childbirth from this era

are the public records and the literary reflections, all interpreted through a masculine lens.

Shakespeare’s perspective would often show the secret world of women from the outside while insightfully capturing the inherent cultural conflict. The Winter’s Tale reveals some very significant binary relationships which Shakespeare uses to perpetuate the action of the play, particularly the chaste/fertile woman and tension involving public/private matters, and these binaries infuse the plot with powerful conflict which drives the action of the entire play.

Fraught with jealousy, King Leontes has accused his wife of adultery and refuses to believe her unborn babe is his child. He is torn between the seemingly polar opposites of a wife who is both fertile and chaste (chaste, in this case being faithful in marriage).

He takes her friendliness and courtly flirtation with his guest Polixenes to be sexual attraction and with this, the binary of the chaste/fertile wife is introduced. As discussed earlier with The Magnetic Lady , an unchaste, promiscuous woman threatens the patriarchal order of inheritance with the potential of illegitimate children, but what about

the case where a woman is not in a position to conceive, such as while pregnant?

Shakespeare touches on a common fear of men that when his wife’s lust goes unchecked,

she will have no motive to keep herself faithful to her husband. As Michelle Ephraim

noted, “ The Winter’s Tale presents the pregnant woman as a sexual threat because she

can escape detection. . . . Shakespeare legitimates Leontes’ anxieties about the pregnant

woman’s sexual ‘agitation’ and her ability to conceal her indiscretions” (48). Leontes

observes his pregnant wife’s flirtations with Polixenes and burns with jealousy. Her

42 pregnant state makes her behavior more discomforting without the threat of illegitimate issue, as it would deviously conceal her behavior, cuckolding Leontes without consequence.

When the time comes for Hermione’s child to be born, waiting-woman Paulina is confidant to Queen Hermione, defends her against accusations of infidelity, and presents her newborn daughter, Perdita, to King Leontes as his child. As much as she is a caretaker and friend to Hermione throughout the play, she is most like a midwife in 2.3, performing the traditional ritual of the midwife when she leaves the mother with the baby and presents the child, a daughter, to her father. A more important scene than one would think, this is a depiction of a traditional cultural rite that clearly implicated the true paternity of the child, as best as could be ascertained at the time. As midwife, she was the one who was considered to be closest to the truth of the child’s paternity and the most trusted authoritative figure in reproductive and sexual matters. So when Paulina takes the baby out of her mother’s arms to present her to Leontes, she makes a bold statement that the king is in error.

In this scene, the complex nature of the authority/subject binary is powerfully expressed. The king should have ultimate authority over every subject in his kingdom, but the women hold a truth that is outside of his knowledge. Leontes insists the baby is not his, but there is a higher truth that exists in the birth room, exceeding the authority of a king. When Paulina comes to the king with the child, Leontes refuses her, but she is insistent, using birth room language and inciting the powerful authority of a midwife who was believed to have a greater proximity to the truth of paternity than any other in that society. Her words should bring comfort, knowing that his lawful wife has begotten a

legitimate heir, “… I/do come with words as medicinal as true,/ Honest, as either, to purge him of that humour/ That presses him from sleep. . .” (2.3.36-39).

Her stubborn insistence that she see the King is rooted far deeper than the

character’s strong personality, but in the powerful position of the midwife. The birth

space was an area of “indisputable female jurisdiction” (Ryan 443), and was what critic

Gail Kern Paster argued was the “inversion of customary gender hierarchies” (165). This

is where Paulina comes into her power. In the birth room, the midwife was the Queen

Mother of them all. With the absence of men’s authority, the midwife was expected to

uphold the customs of the day and to monitor propriety. For a royal figure such as

Hermione, “Tudor household ordinances for a queen’s deliverance required ‘all the ladies

and gentlewomen to go in with her and after that no man to come into the chamber.’ The

royal gossips were lodged nearby, with women of noble rank in close attendance”

(Cressy 57). Paulina was certainly this type of midwife-figure. In her attempts to see the

king, she uses birth room jargon: “No noise, my lord; but needful conference/ About

some gossips for your highness” (2.3.40-41). Paulina comes to the king, even after she

has been warned not to, and he unleashes a gamut of insults, ending with the provocative

statement admonishing her husband’s inability to control his wife, “Lady Margery, your

midwife there” (2.3.159), elucidating the multifarious reputation of midwives at the time.

Paulina has certainly attended Hermione’s birth of Perdita as a midwife and this event

sparks intense emotions in Leontes. First, his jealousy rages with his inability to know the

unknowable—the true paternity of the child, and the faithfulness of his royal wife.

Although he is a great king, Paulina has usurped some of his authority and defiantly

claims his mistake when she presents the child to him with authority of her own. She

knows something he does not, she is closer to the truth than he, and that grates deep into the heart of a king’s pride.

Leontes rails against her for this, but he is only attacking the messenger, as often occurs in Shakespearean scenes involving royalty. In this case it is certainly less cruel to attack the midwife than to take his anger out on Hermione, fresh out of childbirth, so the exclusive circle of women in this case protects the queen from the jealous wrath of her husband. “Leontes, construing ‘midwife’ as a hostile epithet, participates in a developing early modern discourse that sought to reclaim the private counsels and public proclamations over which the midwife had particular control” (Bicks, Gossip’s Bowl 26).

Leontes’ derogatory use of the word “midwife” implies the hostile attitude toward midwives, and especially when the midwife’s words challenged the authority or testimony of men. “The midwife as conduit between the private female birth chamber and public, primarily male-dominated institutions was figured as collapsing the foundational division upon which patriarchal power was defining itself” (ibid).

Shakespeare capitalizes on this gender binary and changing nature of women’s oppression with Leontes’ admonition to Antigonus, “What! Canst not rule her?” (2.3.47-

51). With this statement, he extends the authority/subject binary into the more personal realm of husband and wife. The more private family model was expected to mirror the king/subject relationship in the culture at large. Leontes passes the blame to Antigonus when his own absolute authority seems weak. In reality, family life was not private at all.

“The family defined the ideals of the gender system, as relations between husband and wife provided a model for all relations between women and men” (Amussen 196). A husband was thought of as a smaller-scale king of his own household and Leontes clearly

saw the connection between his own ability to rule and the breakdown in the traditional marital roles represented here between Paulina/Antigonus and Leontes/Hermione. If he cannot control even his own family, then how can he rule?

Paulina answers for her husband (a bold maneuver) with all the complexity that a powerful, authoritative woman in a male-dominated society can: “From all dishonesty he

can: in this—/ commit me for committing honour—trust it,/ He shall not rule me”

(2.3.47-51). She incites her own integrity and independence with this line. Her position as

midwife empowers her and creates her autonomous identity. From out of the birth room

she emerges a self-determined woman, able to answer to a moral authority higher than

her husband or even her king.

But Paulina’s motivation may be more than civic duty. In fact, much of the

mystery of the play rests in the question of Paulina’s reliability. What is Paulina? Is she a bold and honest advocate, or a stubborn, man-hating liar, covering up a grand scheme?

Certainly she is a bold and authoritative woman, and as a midwife has a certain amount

of credit endowed to her office by society. But all this does not make her personally

trustable. Powerful figures are sometimes known to use their powers for ill, and Paulina

could just as much be covering for Hermione’s promiscuity as she is advocating for a blameless queen. The mystery of Paulina’s credibility is united to the mystery of a

woman’s body that was infamous in Shakespeare’s day, at a time when inheritance and

women’s chastity were critical issues to individuals in positions such as Leontes.

Women’s bodies, while shrouded in mystery, were also the source of suspicion

and folklore, often associated with sin and deformity. Some early medical texts refer to

them as leaky vessels or malformed versions of the male anatomy, or in the case of the

author of A Discourse of the Married and Single Life (1621), as a potentially dangerous threat: “[s]ometimes at marriages walnuts are scattered up and downe, which sheweth that a woman is likened unto a walnut, that hath a great shell, but a little kernell; faire without, but rotten within” (qtd. in Ephraim 45). This analogy to a woman’s body reveals the suspicion, skepticism, and disdain that sometimes surrounded women’s and reproductive issues.

Critic Michelle Ephraim explained the biological phenomenon of superfetation that occasionally occurred to be a possible consequence of a pregnant woman’s promiscuity. Early modern medical texts regarding reproduction would sometimes explain that a woman could, if she were excited enough during the act of copulation, conceive a second child while she was pregnant with the first, making it possible for a loose woman to carry twins of two different fathers in her womb. With this belief they explained the occurrence of fraternal twins that bear little resemblance to one other, or twins born on separate days, or who are born with vastly different birth weights, or a variety of other phenomenon involving multiples. Ephraim proposed the interpretation that Hermione was indeed unfaithful with Polixenes and the resulting superfetation was hidden from the king by Paulina at the time of the birth. “If Leontes is traumatized by the ambiguity of Hermione’s behavior towards Polixenes, superfetation would at least make visible the ‘spider’ to which he eludes, ensuring that Hermione and Polixenes would generate evidence of their adultery” (Ephraim 52). She gives as evidence of this interpretation the many allusions Shakespeare makes throughout the play to twins and doubling.

Ephraim’s thesis that Hermione is an adulterous queen who uses her legitimate pregnancy as a license to act upon her lust for Polixenes falls short in act II, in the scene of Paulina’s important declaration. It was the belief of the day that a woman in childbirth would confess infidelity to a midwife, thus determining the midwife’s authority in matters of paternity. Certainly this would be a belief perpetuated by Shakespeare, as he would have known no different and the drama it incites would be captivating. But instead, Shakespeare uses the paternity ritual to defend Hermione and her actions. When reading the play at face value, all signs point to Hermione’s fidelity and Leontes’ unmerited suspicion. In addition, Hermione’s innocence is later proclaimed by Apollo’s oracle to which she appeals at her trial: “Hermione is chaste; Polixenes blameless;

Camillo a true subject; Leontes a jealous tyrant; his innocent babe truly begotten; and the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found” (3.2.131-133). Within the world of the play, Apollo’s oracle is the highest truth.

Paulina places herself in a perilous position for her queen in act 2, and it is

Leontes that leaves the paternity scene appearing ignorant and stubborn. If the suffering of childbirth would prompt a woman to reveal the true paternity of a child, then surely the suffering would also urge the woman to confess other related sexual deviance. And since an affair with Polixenes is the very thing for which she was currently imprisoned, if she was guilty, a confession would happen at the moment in question. The paternity scene provides for a clear interpretation of all three characters in question, justified by the text, and solidly positions each of them in the dramatic action that propels the remainder of the play.

While Ephraim argues her proposition for this interpretation astutely, she ultimately confesses there is no evidence of superfetation in the play (55), but that,

“Hermione’s disappearance and Paulina’s role as her guard and confidante do provocatively underscore the ‘unseen’ possibilities generated by the pregnant body”

(ibid). Although the interpretation is ultimately unsupported in the text, the implications of Ephraim’s argument are significant—that the mysteries of a woman’s body defined along the binary of chaste/fertile puts the male counterpart into a constantly fearful and suspicious position. He depends upon the natural consequence of fertility to keep his woman’s chastity in check. But when that consequence is removed, the binary is broken.

To the male mind, without the threat of illegitimate heirs a woman has no more motivation to remain chaste than a man. This threat produces fearful fantasies of all sorts of oddities—such as superfetation, or the monstrous births of which Autolycus told—a usurer’s wife who birthed “twenty moneybags at a burden, and how she longed to eat adder’s heads and toads carbonadoed” (4.4.264-266). “Recalling Leontes’ condemnation of Paulina as a ‘gross hag’ and a ‘midwife’ who falsely assures him of Hermione’s fidelity, Autolycus through his overtly absurd tale, also reminds the audiences of the artful narrative authority held by pregnant women’s female companions” (Ephraim 54).

Viewing women with this chaste/ fertile opposition, as Leontes does, places men and women in antagonistic positions that result in fear, suspicion, and brokenness. No one can be trusted in this scenario—not kings, midwives, spouses, or even oracles from the gods.

But it is this brokenness that propels the action forward in the play, and indeed becomes a primary theme. When Leontes refuses the authority of Paulina, he establishes

the conflict that powers the rest of the play. He disowns his daughter as a bastard and

49 brings his wife to trial as an adulteress. Leontes continues to seek what is lost, as the oracle commanded, and his family is ultimately restored to him. The conflict created by the birth drives all the other events in the play and do not resolve until the end, when

Hermione resurrects (although the interpretation of the play’s ending is often debated) and the family unit is restored.

This play demonstrates clearly the importance of paternity and reproductive matters, especially in royal cases. It is a reaction to the many issues of inheritance and matters of paternity that the country faced during the Tudor years that led to the coronation of a powerful female ruler, Queen Elizabeth I. Her reign continued the discourse involving the conflicting gender roles, and Shakespeare brilliantly captures a dynamic paradox that defined the most important matters to the people of his day—that their world was highly patriarchal, ruled by men and for men, where women and their bodies were essentially property, and yet the whole nation was ruled by their adored monarch, The Virgin Queen.

Paster prudently argues that while females were empowered by the event of childbirth, that empowerment was “constrained by a whole host of stratagems” (165).

There were consequences for female assertiveness. The empowerment that women experienced from childbirth put them in direct conflict with the powerful and often dangerous authority of men. These constraints, in the hands of an intuitive playwright, create a compelling drama that transcends patriarchy. The implications of the chaste/fertile woman and the arenas of public/private matters are found in The Winter’s

Tale with all its possibilities available to the curious mind.

Ruth Robbins’ observation that “the woman who gives birth inhabits both poles of the opposition of culture and nature in her very being” (Robbins 121) could not be better exemplified in these two cases of Stuart drama. Both The Winter’s Tale and The

Magnetic Lady feature subcultures within each gender which operate from a binary

system of oppositions. The plays clearly represent a male view of the world and of the

feminine experience. They give us an important example of how the feminine experience

was inscribed by men, and how profoundly culture affects nature.

CHAPTER 3:

Annabella’s Fertile Will and Body in Tis A Pity She’s a Whore

“A Wretched, Woeful Woman’s Tragedy” (5.1.8)

In 1989, Lesley Ferris examined four archetypal female characters from the western stage: Clytaemnestra, the Duchess of Malfi, Miss Julie, and Medea, observing that these women disrupted the social order with their “wilful” (sic) actions 4. Such a

woman fits well within the tradition of western tragedy because she must be punished for

her strong will by the patriarchal system attempting to dominate her. In addition, “their

transgressions are primarily sexual: they have ‘wilfully’ chosen their sexual partners”

(112). Annabella, the heroine in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633) fits well into this

description, having a will and a body that both prove tragically fertile. Like the rich soil

of a garden, the ideas that men plant in her mind grow out of control, paralleling the

growth of the baby planted in her belly. In this chapter, I will examine the opposing

forces at work between the male characters attempting to control their destiny through

their own force of will (which inevitably leads toward death) and Annabella’s destiny as

it is brought upon her by others, through the luscious fertility of her mind and body.

Annabella goes through the play continually submitting herself to the will of the

men in her life. Her will is fertile because it is influenced by every man who seeks

influence over her. By contrast, the men in the play have a compulsion to manipulate the

world and their destiny through the force of will, and by their willful actions the tragedy

4 Ferris, Lesley. Acting Women: Images of Women in Theatre . New York: New York University Press, 1989. 52

is moved forward. In addition, the male and female roles in ‘Tis Pity express the gender

dichotomies of which feminist Elizabeth Grosz expounded in her treatise, Volatile

Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. She notes that “Dichotomous thinking

necessarily hierarchizes and ranks the two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart" (3). The

theme of reason versus passion is a reoccurring one throughout the play, and the men

constantly strive to use their reason to overcome their passion. They also use their reason

to inscribe their will onto Annabella’s body. As these men use Annabella as a vessel for

their own lusts and self-interest, it is ultimately Annabella’s bodily fertility that brings

about her demise, and everyone else’s. While the men desperately scramble to will

themselves into positions of security, power, wealth, and pleasure, Annabella’s fruitful

womb is the one thing completely out of everyone’s control.

Their role in the play may be small, but each of the male minor characters does

his part to willfully propel the tragedy toward its inevitable end. First, Annabella’s father

Florio does so by exemplifying the traditional role of a young woman’s first protector and provider. In regards to Annabella’s marriage, he says to Donado, “I will not force my

daughter ‘gainst her will./ . . .My care is, how to match her to her liking:/ I would not

have her marry wealth, but love” (1.3.3 and 10-11)5.

But despite his gracious and open-minded depiction, he still supports the patriarchal hierarchy as he seeks to establish his legacy through Annabella’s body. He finds suitors for her and recommends Soranzo as his favorite. She knows she must marry, but her position as a willful woman is still in its early stages of development. Early in the

5 All quotations taken from Ford, John. "'Tis Pity She's a Whore." 'Tis Pity She's a Whore and Other Plays . Ed. Marion Lomax. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. 165-239. 53 play, when her relationship with her father is being established, she has only achieved the first stage of Ferris’ described willfulness—she has chosen her sexual partner, but in all other aspects she remains a traditional young woman caught up in the system of patriarchy.

The next minor character, Bergetto, Annabella’s first suitor is directed by his uncle, Donado. Bergetto and Donado have interfering wills that comically contradict each other as they seek to advance themselves in attaining Annabella. As these men attempt to control their destinies, it necessitates that they also attempt to control the fate of a woman. In addition, Donado, as the authoritarian father-figure to Bergetto, needs to also control the will of his nephew. Their efforts to scramble for control humorously work against each other, and in the end fail, but Ford will later use the romantic rearrangement to begin the tragic descent toward death.

Third, Richardetto uses his reason to manipulate his world through half-truths. He willfully carries out his own vengeance against Soranzo, and like many of the other men in the play, his actions only serve to complicate the plot and further the tragic events.

Unlike Annabella, he is influenced by no one. Richardetto disguises himself as a doctor and finds a young soldier, Grimaldi, who has his own desire for Soranzo’s blood.

With Bergetto’s mistaken murder, both Grimaldi and Richardetto add themselves to the company of men who attempt to manipulate their world through the force of their will, but fail tragically at the hand of fate. While there would be no guarantee that

Grimaldi would attain Annabella should he have succeeded, his mistake complicates the plot further and brings to light the tragedy that reoccurs with each willful act by the male characters. Not only has Grimaldi failed to assassinate the right man, but the plan

54 backfires on Richardetto, who has lost a husband for his niece, bringing tragedy into his very household.

He may be a minor character, but Grimaldi’s confession of Bergetto’s murder before the Cardinal, Florio, and others illuminates an important gender difference along religious lines. While Annabella’s confession necessitates her being emotionally tortured,

Grimaldi freely enters the scene with the Cardinal and by his own free will makes a confession which is thorough, but littered with excuses and blame:

GRIMALDI. In presence of your grace,

In thought I never meant Bergetto harm:

But, Florio, you can tell with how much scorn

Soranzo, backed with his confederates,

Hath often wronged me; I to be revenged,

(For that I could not win him else to fight)

Had thought by way of ambush to have killed him,

But was unluckily therein mistook;

Else he had felt what late Bergetto did.

And though my fault to him were merely chance,

Yet humbly I submit me to your grace,

To do with me as you please. (3.9.39-49)

To make matters worse, the Cardinal next announces the pope’s protection of Grimaldi from punishment of this murder, based on Grimaldi’s noble birth. He scolds Florio for thinking him an unfit choice for his daughter and then sends them away.

The Cardinal establishes himself here as the symbol of religious patriarchy and authoritarianism. It is clear that in the world of the play, the church does not dispense grace and mercy equally along gender lines, and that papal forgiveness and grace falls easier on the higher nobility and the male.

The last of the minor characters, Richardetto’s wife Hippolita imitates the actions of the men as she attempts to manipulate her own destiny and dies for it. In her few scenes, as she plots with Vasques to kill Soranzo for betraying her, Hippolita fits the definition of a willful woman succinctly, and on her body is also inscribed the will of men. Like the men in the play, when things don’t go her way she seeks to manipulate others by the force of will and her attempts also lead to a tragic end. But although her actions may resemble those of the men, the contrast she bears with Annabella is enlightening. Whereas Annabella is desired, Hippolita is scorned. Whereas Annabella repents her sexual sin, Hippolita seeks revenge. But they both die murdered by men around them. Hippolita, the willful, angry, scorned lover, dies poisoned by the betrayal of

Vasques and Soranzo, yet Annabella, the virtuous, “penitent whore” dies gruesomely in the arms of and by the hand of her lover.

Hippolita’s fate proves once again that in Ford’s Parma, women are severely punished for their wrongs. Vasques plays the part of her co-conspirator, only to betray her later with a poisoned cup, permanently imprinting her body with the taint of adulterer,

scorned lover, and whore. Champion astutely points out that, of all the morally inept

characters in this play, Vasques is the “most flagrant criminal” who “escapes with his life

and the relatively mild decree of banishment from what is not even his native land while

eight characters reflecting various lesser degrees of involvement and guilt lie dead” (78).

He makes the conniving choice of feigned friendship and romantic interest in her,

allowing her to believe that after Soranzo’s death they would be married. She thought she

would pay for his service by surrendering her body to him in marriage, but ultimately she

surrendered her body to him in an entirely different manner.

Her final speech before she dies poisoned by Vasques at the wedding feast indeed

expresses her villainy. But Ford manages to squeeze in some dramatic irony and

foreshadowing when she curses Annabella’s fertility:

HIPPOLITA. . . . may thy bed

Of marriage be a rack unto thy heart;

. . . mayst thou live

To father bastards; may her womb bring forth

Monsters,—and die together in your sins

Hated, scorned, and unpitied! . . . (4.1.92-93 and 95-98)

Her chilling words about malformed babies touch at the heart of the incest that spurs the primary action of the play, Annabella’s being pregnant with her brother’s child upon her marriage to Soranzo cuckolds him from the very start, and by the end of the play they will indeed all die together for their sins, “hated, scorned, and unpitied,” especially given the final line and title of the play.

The principal male characters also seek to manipulate the world through their own will, but their motivations are deeply spiritual and psychological. For Friar Bonaventura, it has a particularly religious flavor, and his efforts work better on Annabella’s fertile mind than Giovanni’s willful one.

In the opening scene, Giovanni is found confessing his lust for his sister to him and the Friar implores him to repent and not follow through with his passions. Later, in

2.5, they meet again and Bonaventura tells Giovanni “I day and night have waked my aged eyes/ Above my strength, to weep on thy behalf” (2.5.7-8). The text has turned from prose to verse, implicating Bonaventura’s divine connection, the depth of Giovanni’s passion, and the seriousness of his sin. Unable to reason with Giovanni and dissuade him from consummating his passion for his sister, the Friar has turned to heaven to intervene in the events on earth. Bonaventura seeks any avenue he can to try to prevent the great moral catastrophe he foresees between Giovanni and Annabella. He cannot prevent the damnation of their souls through his own power, so he seeks the Divine.

Unable to move Giovanni, he instead tries his hand at persuading Annabella to confess and repent her sin. The disparity between these two attempts is remarkable. In both scenes with Giovanni, Bonaventura appeals to his reason, his morality, and attempts to induce a meeting of the minds. This is not so with Annabella. The scene begins with the stage direction, “Enter the Friar in his study, sitting in a chair, Annabella kneeling and whispering to him, a table before them and wax-lights; she weeps, and wrings her hands”

(3.6). In his first lines he tells her, “…weep, weep on,/ These tears may do you good; weep faster yet . . .” and proceeds to read her a sermon about hell:

FRIAR. . . . In this place

Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts

Of never-dying deaths: there damnèd souls

Roar without pity; there are gluttons fed

With toads and adders; there is burning oil

Poured down the drunkard’s throat; the usurer

Is forced to sup whole draughts of molten gold;

There is the murderer for ever stabbed,

Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton

On racks of burning steel, whiles in his soul

He feels the torment of his raging lust. (3.6.4 and 13-23)

The reading of these tortures is sensory and repulsive, the damned being tortured

with the very desires that they indulged on earth. The entire scene plays like a scene set in

hell. The mood is scary and ominous. Bonaventura stands above her, implying his moral

and religious superiority, subjugating her, using all his patriarchal power to emotionally push her down into the earth.

Bonaventura does not specifically represent the authority of the church as the

Cardinal does, but the spiritual domination of it, and its inseparable ties to patriarchy. He

exerts his superiority over the woman in order to humble her to the dust and punish her

for her sins, to force her heart into repentance through fear and guilt. Annabella, like a

tortured prisoner, cries for mercy and begs, “Is there no way left to redeem my miseries?”

(3.6.33). Her repentance is not begotten from her own will but from the mental and

emotional agony inflicted on her by the Friar. And the life-change that she must make to

save herself from the hell he describes is simply to go on with the men’s plan: marry

Soranzo, and put the affair with Giovanni behind her.

The difference in the tactics used to obtain a confession is surprisingly stark, and the misogyny present in the Friar’s attempts is significant. He treats Giovanni with a certain amount of mutual respect, attempting to appeal to his reason and inner morality,

even though he clearly disapproves of his actions and still desires to control him. Perhaps

his failure with Giovanni contributes to the harshness with which he treats Annabella, but

when he eventually does shift his approach to her instead of him, his tactic is inhumanely

cruel.

The disparity between these two approaches can be explained by Grosz’s delineation of the binary reason/passion and mind/body along the lines of male/female.

Feminists and philosophers seem to share a common view of the human

subject as a being made up of two dichotomously opposed characteristics:

mind and body, thought and extension, reason and passion, psychology

and biology. . . . Dichotomous thinking necessarily hierarchizes and ranks

the two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the

other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart." (Grosz 3)

This is where and how the Friar fails Giovanni. He senses that Giovanni's problem is just as much in his mind when he replies "O ignorance in knowledge!"

(2.5.27), but he is unable to advise Giovanni any further than to simply suppress his

desire. If, in this case, the mind is Grosz’s primary term and the body the subordinate,

then the "fall from grace" is most perfectly characterized in both Giovanni's mind and body. For he first falls from grace in his mind, with his strange, chauvinist obsession with

his sister, then he falls from grace with his body when he seduces her and consummates

his desire.

Like many victims of torture, Annabella goes along with it, submits her

confession and is immediately joined in engagement with Soranzo in the next scene.

Placing the torture scene directly prior to the engagement scene enhances the compulsory

nature of her marriage. Her father Florio is called in by the Friar only after he has heard

confession sufficient enough to satisfy him. This portion of her marriage vow (the vows

of intent, often spoken on the occasion of the engagement, long before the wedding)

therefore also becomes as compulsory as the false confession. It is made through tears,

immediately follows torture, contains a religious element, and is made publicly before

those who would punish and ostracize her for her incest.

The struggle Bonaventura has in this play is beyond normal. The issue he faces

with Giovanni seems to get at the very core of his faith, and he does everything in his power to affect change in the situation. As the play progresses, it becomes clear that the

conflict is much more than a battle of the wills between Bonaventura and Giovanni, but

that the Friar is struggling with something fundamental in Ford’s Parma, which causes

Amtower to describe the work as “a play about an entire society that collapses under the

social and moral inadequacy of the discursive system that supports it” (180).

It is not simply the lust and incest between the siblings that the Friar confronts. He

grapples with a societal and religious system where one of its most noble sons, a model

citizen, student, and parishioner falls so far from grace that he takes down an entire

community with his fall. The way Giovanni struggles against his shifting spiritual paradigm is much like a conversion to a new religion. But Bonaventura sees it all as a

logical fallacy: “. . . For though he cannot offer a new spiritual vision for this

demoralized world, he can at least show the danger of those who deceive themselves into believing that the logic of words has any teleological value” (Amtower 193).

Likewise, Larry S. Champion condemned the Parmesan society crafted by Ford as

a “pervasive moral ambivalence” and generously explained the incest at the heart of the

61 plot as a relationship “set in the context of a decadent society in which each individual is a law unto himself, pursuing his own interests at whatever cost to those around him” (78).

Bonaventura’s interest in Giovanni’s situation, therefore, is not an isolated one. It is symbolic of the degenerate society around him, to which as a friar he is called to minister and to live amongst. It is also important to note, that as a friar, he has purposely separated himself from ecclesiastical support and authority, represented by the Cardinal. His interest in the spiritual condition of Parma is likely not such that it is his personal responsibility, but more likely his personal passion.

Bonaventura’s appeal to Annabella’s soul through the torture of her emotions and body reinforces Grosz’s assertion that the dichotomous view of the sexes falls along the binary of mind and body, with females being closely associated with the body. He is still concerned with her soul, but the approach he uses to force Annabella into confession is through torment of her body and emotions. This is explained by Grosz’s assessment of the mind/body relationship, and as it pertains to sin and Christianity:

Within the Christian tradition, the separation of mind and body was

correlated with the distinction between what is immortal and what is

mortal. . . This is why moral characteristics were given to various

physiological disorders and why punishments and rewards for one's soul

are administered through corporeal pleasures and punishments. (5)

So Bonaventura’s torture of Annabella can be explained as a more complex, distorted benevolence than simple misogynistic torture. His patriarchal perspective forces him to

appeal to Giovanni through his reason and to Annabella through her body and emotions.

In both instances, he is attempting to “save” them from the eternal consequence when

their current, temporary bodily pleasures will become everlasting bodily tortures in the

fires of hell.

Soranzo is the second principal male character who willfully manipulates his destiny, but—unlike Bonaventura—Ford uses him to depict a stereotypically masculine aggression that determinedly and stubbornly advances toward murder and death.

During the course of Hippolita’s out lash against Soranzo for his abandonment of her for Annabella, Ford re-introduces the issue of the value of an ill-made promise.

Vasques and Hippolita both criticize Soranzo for going back on his word to marry her, but Soranzo insists “The vows I made, if you remember well,/ Were wicked and unlawful; ‘twere more sin/ To keep them than to break them.” He turns the situation back on her, imploring her to reflect on her own lack of integrity, “. . . Think thou/ How much thou hast digressed from honest shame/ In bringing of a gentleman to death/ Who was thy husband. . .” (2.2.84-86 and 87-90). Soranzo, Vasques, and Hippolita put into words the larger moral issue that Giovanni and Annabella overlook, and that Ford begs the audience to consider—the validity of promises made in the heat of passion, without or against moral guidance. But any honor Soranzo achieves in his choosing what he perceives to be the lesser of two evils, elevating moral virtue above interpersonal integrity, will be short- lived and his late-adopted morality will not be able to save him in the end.

Despite Soranzo’s moral inconsistency, he continues to take action to advance his interests, and now means to attain the beautiful, virtuous, and (whom he believes to be) chaste Annabella. But as Soranzo’s actions work to bolster him self, the obstacles that

Ford puts in his way work to bolster the tragic action of the drama. Soranzo’s past does not disappear and breaking promises—even ill-made ones—prove to have dire

consequences. Fate and circumstance work against his masculine urge to manipulate his

world and control his destiny. As Soranzo tries to forget the mistakes of his past and upwardly propel himself in marriage to Annabella, two pairs of conspirators work to undo him: the scorned Hippolita with Vasques the unfaithful servant and the cuckolded

Richardetto through the jealous Grimaldi.

Annabella may appear duplicitous in her relationship to Soranzo, but overall Ford depicts her as a smart, strong, and courageous woman. So despite how much Annabella’s will is tossed around by others, there is one moment when it proves quite strong.

Strikingly, it is the very moment wherein her body is inscribed—or rather literally imprinted—by the hand of Soranzo. In 4.3, the wedding is over and Soranzo is furious to discover her pregnant. Ironically irate considering his own past infidelities, he beats her, calling her such names as “strumpet,” “whore,” and “harlot,” but Annabella refuses to reveal the name of her lover, protecting her brother in the direst of circumstances. Unlike the men’s actions, Annabella’s secrecy is perhaps the only willful act that does not complicate the tragic action of the play. Her secrecy sustains the action of the play in the direction it was headed. Soranzo opens the scene “dragging in Annabella,” and threatening the most gruesome of murders:

SORANZO. Not know it, strumpet! I’ll rip up thy heart,

And find it there

ANNABELLA. Do, do!

SORANZO. And with my teeth

Tear the prodigious lecher joint by joint.

ANNABELLA. Ha, ha, ha! The man’s merry!

SORANZO. Dost thou laugh?

Come, whore, tell me your lover, or by truth,

I’ll hew thy flesh to shreds; who is’t? (4.3.53-58)

Through the crucible of this beating, Annabella transforms into the willful woman she is destined to become. While Soranzo’s “inscription” is being beaten into her body,

Annabella defiantly holds to her own values and protects her brother’s identity at all costs. Annabella spends the scene defiantly taunting him, toying with him, even singing in Latin a phrase which translated states “what death sweeter than to die for love?” (Ellis

142). No matter how much Soranzo abuses her, Annabella stands firm with unwavering determination. Her stubborn protection of her brother’s identity makes for a surprising ending when it is not Soranzo who follows through on his cruel and gruesome threats to her life, but Giovanni.

The patriarchy at play in both scenes displaying Soranzo’s violent and treacherous behavior toward women (this scene and Hippolita’s scene) is clear long before the violence begins. Both Hippolita and Anabella, while depicted as foils, have their destinies held in the hand of a man and in the presence of great violence. In both relationships,

Soranzo determines for himself the course of his own life, and that of the woman, and appropriately adjusts his belief system to suit his current desires and circumstances. The women are expected to go along with his will. They both resist, exhibiting their strength as women and human beings, but the cost of such resistance and attempts at self- determination is violent.

Kate Millett (1970) noted in her classic work, Sexual Politics :

We are not accustomed to associate patriarchy with force. So perfect is its

system of socialization. . . so long and so universally has it prevailed in

human society. . . . And yet. . . control in patriarchal societies would be

imperfect, even inoperable, unless it had the rule of force to rely upon,

both in emergencies and as an ever-present instrument of intimidation.

(qtd. in Caputi 438)

The violent man that Soranzo becomes is not proof of his patriarchal frame of mind, but rather the ultimate end to it. He operates within the system of patriarchy and in the moment when a woman becomes willful, he then becomes violent. Violence is the tool by which patriarchy is enforced.

In her relationship with Soranzo, Annabella’s fertility makes her threatening and thereby endangers her. Her detached behavior during the scene of her beating indicates her anticipation of such a reaction from her husband. The rule of force, as Millett explains, was so engrained in the fabric of Jacobean society that Annabella surely prepared herself for a beating upon the discovery of her pregnancy. Despite Soranzo’s own sordid past, he condemns Annabella for cuckolding him scowling, “… Deceitful creature,/ How hast thou mocked my hopes, and in the shame/ Of thy lewd womb even buried me alive!” (4.3.110-112).

It is not simply the infidelity that shames him, but the result thereof. Her character is blamed for the workings of nature. "Far from being an inert, passive, noncultural and ahistorical term, the body may be seen as the crucial term, the site of contestation, in a series of economic, political, sexual, and intellectual struggles" (Grosz 19). The insult of calling her womb “lewd” establishes the site of contestation between them. She has

exercised her free will in choosing her sexual partner, to the shame of her husband. As a

nobleman, Soranzo is not betrayed by love—Annabella established multiple times that

she did not marry for love—but the betrayal marked on Annabella’s body publicly

announces the social shame now ascribed to Soranzo.

The reason motif appears again here when at the end of the argument, Annabella

shows a moment of softness and remorse for Soranzo’s position and he feigns a likewise

remorse, expressing intent to forgive her of her feminine faults. Even in pretended

forgiveness, his chauvinist attitude reveals itself, “My reason tells me now that ‘tis as

common/ To err in frailty as to be a woman’” (4.3). But reason is once again debunked by passion and violence several lines later when he reveals his true state of mind to

Vasques: “I carry hell about me; all my blood/ Is fired in swift revenge.”

Thirdly, Giovanni is the most complex and psychologically fascinating male

character and he creatively uses the force of his will to manipulate his world in

remarkable ways, starting from his very first scene. He tries to justify his incestuous feelings to the Friar, hoping the priest will give him permission to act on his desire. He does not. Relentless, Giovanni goes to Annabella to win her despite the Friar’s warnings.

Giovanni’s struggle is between the moral and the biological, the natural and the

Divine. Reason is the only negotiating tool he possesses to navigate the distance between these two extremes. His unlawful desire wins over his moral compass and he uses reason to excuse himself from the boundaries imposed on him by his failed morality:

GIOVANNI. What I have done I’ll prove both fit and good.

It is a principle (which you have taught,

When I was yet your scholar) that the frame

And composition of the mind doth follow

The frame and composition of the body.

So, where the body’s furniture is beauty,

The mind’s must needs be virtue, which allowed,

Virtue itself is reason but refined,

And love the quintessence of that. This proves,

My sister’s beauty being rarely fair,

Is rarely virtuous; chiefly in her love,

And chiefly in that love, her love to me.

If hers to me, then so is mine to her;

Since in like causes are effects alike. (2.5.13-26)

Bonaventura responds with the lament “O ignorance in knowledge!” (27), pointing out Giovanni’s ability to sway his logic toward the interests of his lust. As

Giovanni’s former tutor, Bonaventura sees the larger tragedy as it is being conceived in

Giovanni’s mind. He knows this kind of logical fallacy and spiritual disintegration cannot end well, that Giovanni is now making his way through the “moral wilderness” that

Boehrer describes (357). Amtower explains the religious significance of Giovanni’s twisted logic:

In a further act of willful misunderstanding, Giovanni allows his love to

become a form of idolatry. . . by appropriating the language of Christian

spirituality and applying it to a context utterly apart from the Christian

context, [he] confounds the spirit of Christian doctrine. He worships

Annabella, . . but without faith—and without the anchor of organized

religion to prioritize and contextualize his love. Thus he . . . [conflates] the

spiritual realm with the carnal realm, debasing both in the process. (188)

In this scene, Giovanni and Bonaventura represent similar, but opposing attempts to control not just the circumstances of their world, but also the ideological and cosmic world as well. The difference is that Bonaventura seeks divine intervention in an earthly situation that he perceives to have eternal consequences and Giovanni seeks, through reason, to bring moral law under his own jurisdiction. Since Bonaventura will not acquit him, he will be the arbiter of his own actions, following a morality of his own making.

Bonaventura’s lament of Giovanni’s logic falls in line with Amtower’s observations that,

. . . he seeks another, better moral order, one which will appropriately

venerate and sustain the love that seems to him a transcendent power. . .

Thus in re-envisioning ‘the good’ through platonic concepts that attempt

to bypass the Christian insistence on God as the appropriate end of all

contemplation, Giovanni finds not another, better world, but rather a

circular and gratuitous reenactment of the logic and rituals of the very

Catholic paradigm he rejects. (179-180)

Giovanni’s logical discrepancy and its eventual lack of resolution are intentional.

Ford purposely sets up the philosophical debate and then gives it dignity by refusing to take a side. No logical framework proves itself superior by the play’s end, either pragmatically or theoretically; in fact, just the opposite occurs. “The value structure of

Ford’s stage world is. . . ambivalent from beginning to end as a result of two clearly defined theories of human conduct, both of which impose logical coherence upon existence in such a society” (Champion 80). Ford persuades his audience to achieve a

higher level of thought—to ponder the human consequence of moral and philosophical

exploration within the context of a corrupt society. Indeed, by the end of the play, no

good deed will be left unpunished and only the thoroughly corrupt—those individuals

who never reflect on such things—remain.

Annabella is the one principal character whose dramatic function is entirely different from the rest. While the men move stubbornly forward, catapulting themselves toward tragedy by the fuel of their own willful passion and twisted logic, their character arcs remains surprisingly still. Annabella, however, as her circumstances are directed by the men around her, develops and matures spiritually, concurrent with the gestating baby in her womb.

In regards to the sexual relationship with her brother, Annabella does freely engage in it, but she does not seek him out or initiate the affair. If she felt as passionate as

Giovanni before his confession, she certainly did not show it. When he first woos her, it is with flowery words and at every turn she playfully dismisses him, as if she were unsuspecting of his darker, more passionate purpose. When she finally does understand, she is quickly convinced, despite her acknowledgement of the dire consequences of their love: “If this be true, ‘twere fitter I were dead” (1.3.210).

Their love affair is consistently problematic throughout the play. Were these two simply not brother and sister, surely their love would be considered more innocent, tarnished only by the unfortunate circumstances surrounding them, to which Champion agrees, “their affection, if unrighteous, is also intensely sincere, and the spectators are constantly required to weigh that sincere immorality against the lust, avarice, treachery, vindictiveness, and hypocrisy of the society whose morality the lovers have rejected”

(78). As repulsive as their affair may be, we come to pity them—especially Annabella—

and their moral and social predicament, especially as the depravity of the other characters

in the play are exposed.

By the nature of the relationship, Annabella’s brother is her authority and caretaker, second only to her father. The fact that he comes to her to woo her and attain her sexually is not a fair game of love. Whether or not Annabella sincerely and truly requites Giovanni’s love is up for interpretation, but a more complex truth lies deep within the character’s psyche. Because of the fertility of her mind at this point in the play, she is not capable of exercising her own judgment, for her judgment is skewed by the authority Giovanni holds over her. John Stuart Mill, in his groundbreaking Victorian classic, The Subjection of Women (1869), wrote on this issue:

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women

should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a

position different from all other subject classes that their masters require

something far more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely

the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the

most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with

them, not a forced slave but a willing one; not a slave merely, but a

favorite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their

minds. (Mill 26-27)

Giovanni does just this with Annabella. His desire for her will not be satisfied with platonic or brotherly love, or wish for her ultimate well-being. Instead, he desires her romantically, sexually, yet has no desire to marry her or be a father to the child he

conceives with her. It is one-sided desire, not true love. In addition, his sensual desire for

her extends beyond her body to her mind and emotions. He seeks mastery over her whole

self—mind, body, and soul. The fertility of her body later betrays his shallow sexual pleasure and the fertility of her mind betrays her devotion to him when she gives up the

affair, repents of her sin, and marries Soranzo.

When Florio asks Annabella for the wedding ring her mother left her, “and charged you on her blessing not to give’t/ To any but your husband…” (2.6.37-38), she says that her brother had taken it, saying he was going to wear it. Ford builds an analogy here that depicts maidenhood and Annabella’s body for the commodity that it was in

Jacobean culture. The wooing that occurs during the courtship period is virtually a sales pitch wherein the suitor hopes to “close the deal” on Annabella’s body.

In this scene it must be noted that Giovanni was not given this ring as a token of

Annabella’s love. He took it. He took it for himself much in the same way that he took

Annabella’s body and took Annabella’s affection for himself. If maidenhood is a commodity, then stealing that ring symbolizes all he steals from Annabella and from her future husband. He steals her mind and will, her body and her virginity, and he steals her potential firstborn child.

A moment in which Annabella shows remarkable strength of character occurs at the beginning of the fifth act. She is in a mournful state, she has been beaten by her husband, mentally abused by the Friar, tossed around relentlessly by various men in the play, and now “imprisoned in her chamber” without council or companionship,

anticipates her own death. Now pregnant and broken she appears at her window, begging

anthropomorphized Time not to forget her:

ANNABELLA. Pleasures, farewell, and all ye thriftless minutes

Wherein false joys have spun a weary life;

To these my fortunes now I take my leave.

Thou precious Time, that swiftly rid’st in post

Over the world, to finish up the race

Of my last fate; here stay thy restless course,

And bear to ages that are yet unborn

A wretched, woeful woman’s tragedy.

My conscience now stands up against my lust

With depositions charactered in guilt. (5.1.1-10)

Annabella’s behavior here brings to mind Hrotsvit’s Paphnutius, as examined by

Lesley Ferris, drawing connections between patriarchy, whoredom, and violence. She

notes that once the reformed harlot “repents and asks forgiveness, she willingly accepts,

indeed embraces, physical suffering and deprivation” (80). Annabella takes more

responsibility for her sin than Giovanni ever does and willingly accepts and embraces the

consequences thereof. She does not attempt to provide escape for herself, make excuses,

or blame, but courageously endures the wrath of her husband as he mercilessly beats her

and imprisons her.

The contrition Annabella experiences is an important part of her transformation

into the willful woman. It connects her both to her past actions which designate her as

“whore” and to her imminent spiritual transformation, culminating in her murder. Like

Miss Julie, Medea, and others, Annabella embarks on a spiritual journey throughout the play which results in her transcendence, and her death. But unlike some of the female

characters that Ferris examined, Annabella retains a feminine softness unlike any other.

Her willfulness is not expressed in her ability to defy the patriarchal system, but in her

ability to spiritually rise above it. Her strength of character defies any of their efforts to

reduce her into moral deprivation, and where all others who work within the patriarchal

system die shamed, Annabella dies triumphant.

Annabella’s attitude toward Giovanni has an arc far different from his. In the beginning, her love for him is juvenile and reckless. Then with the Friar’s provocation, guilt and conviction overcome her and she leaves the affair behind. Yet she never scorns her love for Giovanni. Although she must marry, she remains constant in her deep affection for her brother. Whether this love comes from his role as brother or lover is unknown and inseparable. She seeks to protect him at all costs while Soranzo abuses her.

In addition, after all the torment Annabella endures between Bonaventura’s and

Soranzo’s torture of her, it is not Annabella who breaks, but her nurse, Putana—the only one who ever knew her secret.

In keeping with the sentiment of the title, Annabella is indeed a pitiful character.

The victim of circumstance, of her own misguided passion, poor judgment, and the manipulation of others, she wears on her body the signifier of adultery and moral deviance. She is fixed dialectically, as Laurie Finke notes, “caught between male fantasies of idealization and exploitation,” and describes her as “literally killed into art”

(230). She takes all the blame for the affair, protecting Giovanni and remaining true to him throughout the play, if only in her heart. Her death (and that of her infant) is fearsome and brutal, but her death by the hand of the one who loved her most changes her

from a living, breathing, reproducing female to an ideal, goddess-like, attaining immortality.

As the play progresses, Annabella grows clairvoyantly aware of the danger around her. Although he is feigning forgiveness, she is suspicious of Soranzo’s intentions and fears for her life. In 5.5, Giovanni surprises her in her chamber and she warns him in the impending danger: “. . . Be not deceived, my brother,/ This banquet is an harbinger of death/ To you and me; resolve yourself it is,/ And be prepared to welcome it” (5.5.26-29).

Annabella’s lust and passion for Giovanni seems to have burned off as she has been gestating fear, torment, and a child. What is left is genuine sisterly concern for him.

Giovanni’s head is still unrealistically in the clouds. In an ironic twist of logic, Giovanni ignores all reason and instead dwells on the pleasures he has lost. He speaks like a madman as he prepares to violently murder his sister and the object of all his affection, lust, and warped idealism. Annabella, conversely, remains level-headed with her mind tightly fixed to the present circumstances. She has come to terms with her inevitable end, and only hopes to do something to rescue her brother from the same fate.

ANNABELLA . . . But, brother, for the present, what d’ye mean

To free yourself from danger? Some way think

How to escape: I’m sure the guests are come

GIOVANNI. Look up, look here; what see you in my face?

ANNABELLA. Distraction and a troubled conscience.

GIOVANNI. Death, and a swift repining wrath… (5.6.42-47)

Giovanni’s remarks during her murder are both revealing and puzzling. They give

deep insights into his psyche and his spiritual journey. First he utters, “Thus die, and die

75 by me, and by my hand” (85). In Giovanni’s mind, the most unjust murder of Annabella would be by Soranzo. Annabella being murdered by her brother and the father of her child is somehow complete. To him it ensures the gravity and tragic effect of the situation is respected. To Giovanni, it may be that he properly ended a catastrophe of his own making, that no one had more right to her body than he, or had more right to the fruit of her womb.

Grosz’s insights into the mystery of the female body may partly explain

Giovanni’s obsession: "Woman... remains philosophy's eternal enigma, its mysterious and inscrutable object—this may be a product of the rather mysterious and highly restrained and contained status of the body in general, and of women's bodies in particular, in the construction of philosophy as a mode of knowledge" (4). Giovanni, the consummate scholar, has shifted his fascination from philosophy to his sister. The intrigue of her person (mind and body) becomes his next “inscrutable object” as he pursues knowledge of her with his mind and body.

Ferris, in examination of the portrayal of woman as a “penitent whore” in nineteenth century French drama, noted that the Bohemian ideal resembled Ovid’s classic

Pygmalion , where Aphrodite brings to life the sculpture with which the artist has fallen in love. Like Pygmalion and Bohemian novelist Henri Murger, Giovanni has crafted an ideal woman that he desires to use to his specific purpose. He crafts the morality of his new religion after Annabella’s beauty and his obsession with her resembles that of the

Bohemians: “The Bohemian mythology enveloping these women was that they piously scorned conventional morality; their beauty inspired the artist and was indeed essential to his creativity; they were sexually generous, and were almost certainly the artist’s current

sexual ‘oeuvre’” (89). This explains Giovanni’s unwillingness to elope with his sister— his love is, in many respects, not real. It follows a romantic, Bohemian-like fantasy created in Giovanni’s mind. It does not include any aspect of real life, of longevity, family, or commitment, but exists in secrets, in private chambers, in whispers, and stolen moments.

Finke describes Giovanni’s actions with Annabella as simultaneously reducing

and idealizing Annabella to a poetic idea, or a sort of platonic ideal. They are “masculine perceptions of woman that transform her into extreme projections of man’s own fears of mortality” (223). The idea of “Annabella” in Giovanni’s mind is not the same as the real- life Annabella, whom he exploits and violates. When her fertility—evidence of the earthly, less-than-ideal, “real” Annabella—betrays their passion, there is nothing left for

Giovanni to do but to destroy the corrupted work of art he has created. Her pregnancy is the dose of reality that boosts Giovanni into madness, as his obsession with an ideal unravels.

. . . to be literally painted into a lifeless immortality, or to be made into a

mirror that reflects the painter’s virtues (as well as his fears), necessarily

produces disastrous results. Forced by Giovanni’s love to juggle several

ideals, to fulfill the conflicting demands of a faithful sister and lover and a

dutiful wife and daughter, the living Annabella can finally be none of

these. Therefore, Giovanni logically concludes, she must die so she cannot

betray him, so that she might remain faithful to the ideal. . . (Finke 233)

As a mortal being, Annabella can never be goddess-like as Giovanni idealizes her to be. He praises her “immortal beauty,” comparing her forehead to Juno, her eyes to

“Promethean fire,” her “dimpled cheeks” to the lily and the rose (1.2.182-191), and as the play progresses, seems to live in a fantasy world where his actions have no consequences,

where women can be kept for pleasure only, and where moral law is guided by individual

desire.

Giovanni has crafted a fantasy where Annabella is his private possession, his muse and lover. The universe and Annabella are all under Giovanni’s creative control and he dominates them. “Thus Pygmalion gains possession of female perfection, the ideal erotic object shaped to the pattern of his own desires and wishes. . . the male artist moves from being inspired by his female model to the ultimate act of creating her” (Ferris 89).

This fantasy is simply another form of patriarchal domination. When Giovanni murders his sister, he attempts to preserve this idyllic, fantastical image of her. Since she is an object of his creation, he can do what he will with her.

Annabella, on the other hand, moves beyond the romantic idealism by which she and her brother were enchanted at the beginning of the play, and somehow, through (or despite) the motivation and actions of other men in her life, comes to a position of staunch realism. She breaks free from the emotional bonds of Giovanni, she preserves her integrity with her abusive husband Soranzo, and manages to never publicly dishonor her father in the process. Just as her womb is rapidly and independently gestating the fruit of her sexual relationship with her brother, the influence that Florio, Soranzo, Bonaventura, and Giovanni have over Annabella all contribute to a new feminine being that ultimately can be credited to Annabella alone.

Exhibiting her newly evolved perspective, Annabella behaves with dignity and moral superiority even in the moment of her death. She prays for God to forgive

Giovanni and her own sins and then, with her dying breath, simply states the most truthful words about the situation that exist in the entire play: “Brother unkind, unkind—

Mercy, great Heaven!” (5.5.93).

While Annabella’s words are simple, Giovanni’s are complex, revealing a deep and dark inward life:

GIOVANNI. She’s dead, alas, good soul; The hapless fruit

That in her womb received its life from me,

Hath had from me a cradle and a grave.

I must not dally. This sad marriage-bed,

In all her best, bore her alive and dead.

Soranzo, thou hast missed thy aim in this;

I have prevented now thy reaching plots,

And killed a love, for whose each drop of blood

I would have pawned my heart. Fair Annabella,

How over-glorious art thou in thy wounds,

Triumphing over infamy and hate! (5.5.94-104)

The way he takes control over the situation and takes vengeance into his own

hands reflects what contemporary scholars have discovered about real-life killers of

women. Mary Daly coined the term gynocide and it carries with it a psychology that is

different from other kinds of murders. As Jane Caputi wrote, “sexual murder is the

ultimate expression of sexuality as a form of power” (438). Giovanni sees Annabella’s body as rightfully and exclusively his and the loss of control he has over her body makes

him very unstable. As Annabella’s body and mind are controlled by Friar Bonaventura,

Soranzo, her father Florio, and her natural reproductive powers beyond their control, the

exclusivity Giovanni has over her wanes. Her murder therefore, becomes one last

desperate attempt to regain the privilege he has lost. He may not be able to prevent a

child from being conceived, but he can terminate the life of that child. He may not be

able to control Annabella’s mind or have access to her body, but he can cease anyone else

from doing so.

Her fruitful body, therefore, becomes subject to the will of the gardener Giovanni.

By his will the seed was planted, but the conception and the growing of the life that sprouted from her womb was under the control of nature. But Annabella’s body is not a wild field left free to reproduce on its own. She is under the control of society, religion, and Giovanni. When he parades her heart on his dagger at the banquet scene, he tells the banqueters, “’Tis Annabella’s heart. . ./ I vow ‘tis hers: this dagger’s point ploughed up/

Her fruitful womb, and left to me the fame/ Of a most glorious executioner” (5.6.30-33).

The presentation of her heart in such a manner is more than a gruesome and shocking way to bring an end to the play. “[His] dagger can only be read as the phallic marker which both makes productive the woman’s body as the field of its seed, but which renders as well that ground fallow” (Amtower 189). Like a gardener with ultimate control over his field and the fruit of it, Giovanni cuts down Annabella, “ploughing up her fruitful womb” just before her “fruit” is fully ripen.

The revenge of which Giovanni speaks during the banquet scene is a strange one.

He revels in the blood on his hands, “Why, this was done with courage; now survives/

None of our house but I, gilt in the blood/ Of a fair sister and a hapless father” (5.6.66-

68). The revenge he seeks could be against others, or conversely, a twisted form of self-

hatred. Giovanni has spent the majority of the play pondering morality, reason, religion,

sin, and love. Both the Friar and his own lust tug at his reason in two different directions.

Bonaventura insists that hell awaits him if he does not repent, but his overwhelming

desire for Annabella will not allow him to do so. Murdering her brutally, taking his final

violation against her body, thoroughly seals his eternal fate. He damns himself once and for all by betraying his love, his reason, and his morality. After his battle with Soranzo as he lay dying, the Cardinal admonishes him,

CARDINAL. Think on thy life and end, and call for mercy.

GIOVANNI. Mercy! Why, I have found it in this justice. (5.6.100-101)

But dying with her also frees them both from the earthly bodies that confine their immortal love. In his madness, Giovanni avenges himself upon the whole universe— morality, religion, reason, society, and nature—and releases Annabella to an immortality that he imagines will free them both.

The ending is positively troubling. The paradox of his sincere love and her brutal

murder is at the center of the ambivalent world Ford constructs, leaving the audience with

nothing but oppositions and confusion:

. . . [Ford] refuses to provide a culminating experience through which to

lend a single moral and emotional perspective to the tragic events. . . . The

spectator is left to choose for himself between the wisdom of passive

endurance and the attraction of egocentric defiance of external values. The

metaphysics of the stage world neither exclusively repudiates the one nor

supports the other. (Champion 79)

If Giovanni constructs a new religion, as Amtower argues, then the ritual at the banquet scene is significant. He parades her heart on stake, invoking rituals that involve the saints of the Middle Ages, blood sacrifice, and other ancient Catholic tradition spanning centuries. “Thus when Giovanni ceremonially impales Annabella’s heart onto the end of his sword, he is committing a deliberately ritualistic act, staking out the space in which his moral world takes shape. It is no mistake that Giovanni invokes the parameters of Christian symbolism in service of his own ‘new religion’” (Amtower 190).

The construction of Giovanni’s new religion is complete and the self-induction into it is made complete by his murder of Annabella, and his public expression thereof.

His inability to accept the natural consequence of their affair parallels the character arcs that the siblings respectively experience. Giovanni changes little. His will and his desire stay as constant as his unchanging body. He does grow increasingly mad, as a result of the increasing nature of his twisted logic, culminating in and fueling the violent murder at the end of the play. Annabella’s character arc resembles her changing body, as it grows and develops throughout the course of the play. Her lack of self-will somehow also allows her to yield to the changes that her circumstances bring upon her.

As her body moves from maidenhood to motherhood, so also does her mind develop and mature. All the physical and mental abuses she experiences throughout the play are somehow part of her maturity, and are inextricably linked to the courage she shows. Her mental fertility is dually her undoing and her salvation.

But what of their child? All this character development is embodied in the life of the tiny unborn babe in Annabella’s belly. Giovanni claims, “Nine moons have had their changes/ Since I first thoroughly viewed and truly loved/ Your daughter and my sister”

(5.6.39-41), implying that Annabella’s unborn baby was full term, ready to be born at any

moment, and even likely to survive his or her mother’s murder. To Giovanni, this child

was nothing more than an unwanted consequence of their forbidden love, but it grew to

attain a life of its own, and become its own person. The text implies the death of the

child, but never describes or explicitly states it. The reader and audience are left with the

mystery of that unborn child. If it died, who buried it and with what rituals, if any, was

the body honored? If the child lives, what are the implications of such a survival? Does

the child surviving imply a beautiful hope that is desperately lacking in the play’s ending

as written, or does it defy the moral bleakness that Ford so powerfully constructs? All

these are questions that go unanswered in the text, which add to the feelings of

ambivalence that he masterfully assembles.

The outlook for Parma is utterly hopeless, and the only glimmer of hope is the potential for change that this child could represent, if he or she lives. Through Giovanni’s exchanges with the Friar and the scenes featuring the Cardinal, it is established that

Parma is a society that is thoroughly corrupt—its religion, its values, its governance are all depraved to the effect that they produce an ending such as this. Most of the nobility lie dead at the end of the play, having been brought down either by Parma’s morality or by

Giovanni’s. And to provide the final, hopeless remark, we are left with a stereotypically corrupt character, the Cardinal, speaking the most insulting and shallow remark that could be said of the drama, reducing the grand implications of the tragedy to the fertile

Annabella: “Who could not say, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore?” (5.6.156).

With this, Annabella has completed her transformation into Ferris’ “wilful woman.” And to establish her position as such, the Cardinal ironically calls her a whore,

83 blaming the entirety of the bloodbath on her sexual deviance, yet establishing her in dramatic history within the company of Clytaemnestra, Medea, the Duchess of Malfi,

Miss Julie—women who have exerted their will, chosen their lovers, paid the ultimate price, and were immortalized for it. With her death, Annabella demonstrates that the fertility of her mind and body has more power than the men of Parma ever feigned to have. It exposes the corruption of the individuals and the society around her, and brings her to spiritual triumph.

The fertile soil of Parma’s corruption bears the fruit of moral degradation that feeds the tragedy of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore . Annabella stands as the constant symbol of

fertility and spiritual purity in a corrupt environment. Her fertile mind gestates the seed of

the men around her just as her fertile body gestates the seed of her brother. But as the

men attempt to control her with the force of their will, they catapult themselves toward

spiritual disintegration and tragic death. Annabella, on the other hand, ripens both

maternally and morally, elevating herself above the depravity of Ford’s Parma. She enters

into the classical canon of willful female characters, but does so on her own terms. She

retains her feminine softness while spiritually rising above the corrupt patriarchal system

that would put her down. She is disdained by society, yet rises above it. Within this

“wretched, woeful, woman’s tragedy” (5.1.8), we discover moral transcendence and

female triumph.

CONCLUSION

The cultural conditions that existed in early modern England within the separate

worlds of men and women created an inherent conflict that was ripe for drama. It is no

wonder therefore, that some of the era’s most prolific playwrights capitalized on this in

their work. The formidable power held by midwives, the mystique of the birth room, the

threat of the autonomous woman, and the uncontrollable nature of a woman’s fertility all

served to bond women together communally in a society that was controlled by patriarchy. All this points to one conclusion—that women were powerful, far more powerful than the men of the day would have liked to believe. The significance of the plays that undertake reproductive issues and the dramatists who produced them is that

they seem to have understood this fact.

To reiterate the words of feminist and scholar Elizabeth Grosz, “Woman... remains philosophy's eternal enigma, its mysterious and inscrutable object” (4). All the plays examined in this thesis reflect this important observation. Since they were written by men, they cannot “inscribe femininity” accurately, as Hélène Cixous admonished women to do. But they do inscribe femininity as seen through the lens of patriarchy.

Looking through this lens can give us insight to the social dynamic that existed between the sexes. Theatre is useful in this regard because it not only informs us about the external social conditions, but also helps us examine these conditions from within the collective psyche of men. In addition, the drama from the early modern era allows us to see the social condition from a unique, third-person perspective that is strikingly ahead of

its time, and surprisingly aligned with feminist theory that was not thoroughly developed

until centuries later.

The power women had, however, was only partially conceived in the birth room.

It was also handed over to them unknowingly by men. Because men held inheritance so dear, the bearers of their inheritance naturally held great power over their minds and actions. Therefore, because women delivered to men the “object” that held the entire worth of their masculinity, they therefore had a powerful hold over society that is indefinable in patriarchal terms. In the top-down, linear power structure that existed in early modern England, we see several oddities occurring on stage. Feminine power is allegorically and violently conquered in Macbeth , a middle-class midwife stands up to a king in The Winter’s Tale , a united group of domestic women attempt to take control of a family fortune in The Magnetic Lady , and a pregnant woman spiritually transcends her

abusers and murderer in Tis a Pity She’s a Whore .

These plays both critique and enforce the patriarchal social order of Elizabethan

and Jacobean England. The actions and events that occur in these plays weaken the linear

and strict social roles that the society defined. For every strong stance they take against

femininity, there is an equal or greater movement that transcends the gender of the playwright and demonstrates the often subtle, yet powerful sway women had over the

actions of men.

While patriarchy unknowingly gave power to childbearing women in early

modern England, in contemporary culture patriarchy has taken it back through the

developing medicalization of childbirth. But the continued development of these feminist

ideas is leading many twenty-first century women to rediscover the power of the birth

room that made early modern women so powerful. It is valuable, therefore, for

contemporary women to look back on these characters, as they are a necessary part of the

feminine story.

The female characters represented in these works prove themselves to be important figures in the inscription of the feminine experience and in the development of the female persona inscribed through drama. They may have been given to us through the hands and pens of men, but they give us important insights into the attitudes, psychology, and behaviors of men and women in a patriarchal culture. Their fertility and the dramatic tales of their births give us a window into the significance of childbirth in the social discourse of early modern England, as it pertains to patriarchy, inheritance, and the conflict inherent between the sexes.

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