(Dis)Obedient Wives: Manifestations of Collective Female Agency in Early Modern City Comedies
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BERBERYAN, LILIT, PhD. (Dis)Obedient Wives: Manifestations of Collective Female Agency in Early Modern City Comedies. (2017) Directed by Dr. Michelle Dowd. 225 pp. In the three decades between 1596 and 1626, roughly sixty city comedies were composed by early modern playwrights: these plays—some of which are largely out of print while others are frequently printed, anthologized, and taught—create a composite image of how drama imagines the lives of ordinary London citizenry. Partly due to the growth of London’s marketplace economy, citizen wives and working women gain financial stability and visibility within early modern society during this period. City plays depict the female characters’ negotiation of issues of power and agency; theater imagines the possibilities that might give these characters the capacity to manipulate societal expectations to gain power and agency. In this study, I use exemplary city plays—including works by Dekker, Jonson, Middleton, and Shakespeare—from the aforementioned catalogue of city comedies to delineate and discuss three models of agency: defiant, subversive, and acquiescent. These models of agency are contingent on the subject’s continual negotiation and reassertion of her positionality. Defiant agency is made possible through the rejection or visible challenge of patriarchal forms of control. Subversive agency requires the female characters’ thorough understanding of modes of conduct to which they are supposed to conform; however, their obedient behavior ultimately ends with a subversion of societal expectations. The final model of agency I discuss is acquiescent agency. In this model, the female characters’ behavior is in keeping with the societal regulations, but this behavior enables the female characters to occupy the role of validating patriarchal forms of control. Additionally, female agency in early modern city plays often results from a communal negotiation of societal expectations of female behavior rather than an individual’s relationship with the ideological apparatus. This study highlights manifestations of female power that are largely under-examined, as well as reading and interpretive practices that make it possible for scholars of female agency to locate it in instances of obedience rather than only in defiance of societal expectations of conduct. (DIS)OBEDIENT WIVES: MANIFESTATIONS OF COLLECTIVE FEMALE AGENCY IN EARLY MODERN CITY COMEDIES by Lilit Berberyan A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2017 Approved by Michelle M. Dowd Committee Chair © 2017 Lilit Berberyan DEDICATION To my mother. ii APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by Lilit Berberyan has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair. Michelle M. Dowd l Committee Members. Jennifer Feather l . Jennifer Keith l May 8, 2017 l Date of Acceptance by Committee May 8, 2017 l Date of Final Oral Examination iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my committee—Michelle Dowd, Jennifer Feather, and Jennifer Keith—whose guidance, generous feedback, and mentorship has made this project possible. I would like to thank my friends and colleagues, particularly Brenta Blevins and Meghan McGuire for their continued support. My family’s love and encouragement throughout my graduate career has been immensely valuable. Finally— for the countless hours she spent listening to me fine-tune my claims and arguments in this dissertation—I would like to thank my mother, to whom this dissertation is dedicated. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: RETHINKING FEMALE AGENCY AND POWER IN EARLY MODERN CITY COMEDIES ......................................................1 Why City Comedy? ......................................................................................8 Ideology and Female Power .......................................................................16 What is Female Power? .............................................................................24 Female Agency through Defiance, Subversion, and Acquiescence ..........27 II. INSTRUCTIONS IN THE MYSTERIES OF WRITING LETTERS, CORRUPTING SERVANTS, AND TAMING SPIES: AGENCY AND DEFIANCE IN EPICENE ....................................................................36 Conspicuous Consumption and the Marketplace .......................................40 The Collegiates: An Order Between Courtiers and Country Madams ..................................................................................................51 III. “HERE COMES OUR GOSSIPS NOW”: AGENCY, RITUAL, AND SUBVERSION IN A CHASTE MAID IN CHEAPSIDE .................................68 Leaking and Metatheatricality ...................................................................73 Churching and Female Communities .........................................................79 Agency and Community ............................................................................89 Agency and Continuity ..............................................................................95 IV. “A NEEDLE ‘TWIXT TWO ADAMANTS”: IDEOLOGICAL STRIFE AND COLLECTIVE AGENCY IN THE ROARING GIRL AND WESTWARD HO ...........................................................................................105 Societal Expectations and Ideological Strife ...........................................106 Acquiescence and Collective Female Agency in The Roaring Girl ........................................................................................110 Acquiescent Agency and Geographical Mobility in Westward Ho .......................................................................................138 V. DOMESTIC MANAGEMENT, COMMUNAL INTERVENTION, AND FEMALE ACQUIESCENT AGENCY IN NORTHWARD HO AND THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR ..................................................152 v Agency through Acquiescence ................................................................157 Stolen Rings and Sleepwalking: Domestic Labor, Spectacle, and Agency in Northward Ho.....................................................................162 “Buck, Buck, Buck”: Domestic Management and Acquiescent Agency in The Merry Wives of Windsor ..............................................183 VI. CODA: FEMALE POWER FOR ITS OWN SAKE .........................................203 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................215 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: RETHINKING FEMALE AGENCY AND POWER IN EARLY MODERN CITY COMEDIES In his comprehensive study of early modern city drama The City Staged, Theodore Leinwand compiles a list of female characters who are able to affect or critique the behavior of their male counterparts: Thus Doll Common must manage Subtle and Face; Moll Firth (in The Roaring Girl) trips up the gallant and protects the gentleman; Maria (in The Woman’s Prize; or, The Tamer Tamed) demands the respect of Petruchio; Mistress Allwit (in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside) tacitly (though not with our approval) signals the depravity of Sir Walter and Master Allwit; Sindefy (in Eastward Ho) reminds Quicksilver of his precarious position; Thomasine (in Michaelmas Term) chastens Quomodo and aids Easy; the wives in Westward Ho trick their husbands and their gallants; the silent “woman” turns the tables on Morose; the whore Frank Gullman (though she too is deceived) tricks Follywit and disparages Sir Bounteaous (in A Mad World); the Courtesan (in A Trick) finds a husband as she hoodwinks Hoard; and Field’s ladies receive their amends. Few of these feminine victories are unequivocal. Yet throughout the decade of city comedy we are examining, playwrights were presenting independent, capable stage women. (139) That Leinwand’s study of Jacobean city comedy is exemplary in its scope and thoroughness hardly needs repeating. However, the aforementioned catalogue of remarkable moments of female power against male rule is just that: a catalogue of moments and instances. When examining many of the plays that Leinwand discusses throughout The City Staged, I resist the conclusion that he arrives at: that early modern dramatists frequently created powerful female characters who were capable of resisting 1 male-dictated expectations and could go as far as showcasing the shortcomings of the male characters with whom they shared the stage. My approach in this study is different from Leinwand’s (and that of many early modern scholars) in that my analysis of the power of female characters is not concerned with how this power affects the male characters in the play.1 In analyzing the relative power female characters might be able to wield in the course of a play, I am interested in how the female characters are able to use this power in a way that may have nothing to do with a male character. Thus, my interest in Westward Ho is not limited to the female characters’ ability to fool their husbands and the gallants; rather, I am interested in how the trick they play on the male characters of the play benefits the female characters. Within the genre of city comedy, female power is frequently the result of careful—and subtle—negotiations of the circumstances and limitations surrounding the female characters; as such, it has been frequently glossed over in early modern scholarship. The following study is an examination of what the drama of