The Fall of the Female Protagonist in Early Modern English Domestic Drama
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Fall of the Female Protagonist in Early Modern English Domestic Drama by Stacey Pratt A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English & Film Studies University of Alberta © Stacey Pratt Fall 2014 ii Abstract My dissertation offers an innovative reading of three early modern domestic tragedies, Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and Othello, exploring parallels with the archetypal domestic tragedy of Adam and Eve through early modern commentaries on Genesis. Puritans, for whom marriage was godly, nevertheless expressed lingering discomfort about sexuality as fallen. While critics have asserted domestic drama does not follow a homiletic formula, I maintain the domestic tragedies use an early modern understanding of the marriage of Adam and Eve to inform and to convey the import of a new genre. My main concern is the fall of the adulterous wife in a dramatic and a moral sense. I argue the wife is made the primary transgressor in the plays and punished with death. In choosing these plays, I also attempt to account for the paradoxically sympathetic portrayal of the adulterous wife. In my first chapter on Arden of Faversham, I attempt to reconstruct the scene of the crime, Alice’s adultery and murder of her husband, Arden, and the Fall in the context of Faversham as a local producer of apples, with Alice as a scapegoat for Eve. In my second chapter on A Woman Killed with Kindness, I turn my attention to the metaphors of the rib and one flesh, and their implications for marital separation. Anne’s adultery leads simultaneously to a breakdown in marriage and in the metaphor of one flesh. Through the smashing of Anne’s lute and her subsequent starvation, the play suggests the one flesh view of marriage is insufficient in the face of the social problems caused by adultery. In my third chapter, I propose Othello as a variation on the treatment of the adulterous wife. Desdemona is killed despite being completely innocent. I examine references to Adam and blackness to argue the primary concern in Othello is not race, as critics have sometimes assumed, but Othello’s lineal connection to Adam as a progenitor of sin. I hope to contribute to both feminist and genre criticism of the drama, changing the way we read the wives in the plays by showing how they rival the male protagonist in dramatically charged moments for the attention and sympathy of the audience. iii For Brendon and Samantha iv Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank my parents, whose love for books started me down this path, and who supported my perpetual studies with unflagging interest and good humour. My supervisor, Sylvia Brown, has supported me through this entire process, and her careful reading of my work and insightful questions have made this dissertation what it is. I couldn’t have asked for a more wonderful mentor. Rick Bowers, with his enthusiasm for drama, his confidence in my ability, and his interest in what I think has kept me going. Patricia Demers was always ready with a smile and an encouraging word. A special mention is due to Viviana Comensoli for her thought-provoking graduate seminar on early modern domestic drama, when I first fell in love with these plays. MEMI awarded me a travel grant to take a summer research trip to the Newberry Library in Chicago in the early stages of my research, where I pored over editions of Hugh Plat’s Delightes for Ladies, the illustrations in John Gerard’s New Herbal, and Fruits and Flowers. The Department of English and Film Studies gave me a dissertation writing grant near the end of my program, allowing me the freedom to think about my project and the time to write the majority of my dissertation. I would like to extend my thanks to the librarians at the British Library and the staff at the National Gallery for helping me complete research on Arden of Faversham and on musical instruments. I owe special thanks to the staff at the St. Albert Public Library, who allowed me the use of their private study rooms and always greeted me cheerfully. It was a wonderful place to work. Thank you to Brendon for taking care of the cooking, laundry, and childcare at home so I could write about marriage. I could not have done this without you. This dissertation is for my daughter Samantha for her patience while I wrote evenings and weekends to finish yet another chapter, and to show her that anything is possible. v Table of Contents Introduction................................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….29 Chapter Two..............................................................................................................................................89 Chapter Three……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..163 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..229 Figures…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………234 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………239 1 Introduction A Model for Marriage Adam and Eve as the model for marriage and the agents of the Fall served as the prototypical couple of domestic tragedy. Domestic drama can be defined as a genre that enjoyed popularity in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, was characterized by being set at home instead of abroad, and was preoccupied with the everyday and those of middling status. Its concern was with the ordinary rather than the exceptional, the homely rather than the exotic. The plays under discussion were performed and published during the period between 1590 and 1610, a span of time known for a group of domestic tragedies referred to as murder plays.1 I focus on three notable examples of domestic tragedy concerned with the adulterous wife with implications for the Fall in Genesis: the anonymous Arden of Faversham (1592), A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) by Thomas Heywood, and Shakespeare’s Othello (1604).2 The aim of this dissertation is to examine the connection between Eve’s Fall as discussed in commentaries on Genesis and early modern marriage manuals, and the parallel representation of the fall of the female protagonist accused of adultery in early modern English domestic tragedy. It is my contention there is a connection between Eve eating the apple and the pattern of the wife falling into adultery in the plays that, although tangible enough to an early modern audience through staging and symbolism, must be recovered for the modern reader. Wives in these tragedies are punished for their personal sin of adultery, whether actual or imagined, but also in a larger sense for Eve’s transgression, and the plays suggest the Fall is to blame for the reality of marriage as 1 A good point of reference for a discussion of the murder plays is Leanore Lieblein’s “The Context of Murder in English Domestic Plays, 1590-1610.” She defines them as a subset of plays “linking marriage and murder… more often than not through the provocation of adultery,” a move which “enables the dramatist to juxtapose the emotional imperatives of passion and the communal judgements embodied in religion and the law,” and she indicates such plays often drew on “actual murders” (181). 2 Lena Cowen Orlin takes the canon of surviving domestic tragedies to include “Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, Two Lamentable Tragedies, 1 and 2 Edward IV, A Yorkshire Tragedy, A Woman Killed with Kindness, The Witch of Edmonton, and The English Traveller,” and she also allows Othello as a variation on the genre (“Domestic Tragedy” 371). 2 fallen. I also maintain opposing views about Eve’s role in the Fall as primary transgressor or passive victim help to account for the fact playwrights portray the wives to some degree as sympathetic. Without exception it is the wife and not the husband, though variously implicated through his failure in his domestic responsibilities or harsh treatment of his wife’s adultery, who is made to the bear the consequences of marriage as fallen, supporting the position of sermons and early modern marriage manuals that subjection within marriage was Eve’s punishment for falling to temptation. At the same time, the wife is invariably represented sympathetically. Whether or not the wife is guilty of the adultery or murder, all are punished with death, in fulfillment of God’s decree that tasting the apple would result in death. Critics have generally been intent on demonstrating the differences between early modern domestic drama and the biblical dramas of the earlier period. Though a few critics have seen fit to discuss Eve in relation to early modern tragedy, or to female characters more specifically, none have sufficiently explained the relationship between Eve’s fall and the fall of the female protagonist in the domestic drama, or explored the symbolism of the apple as it concerns fallen sexuality in the genre. By recovering an early modern reading of the domestic tragedies informed by Genesis, I hope to continue to shift the focus to the wife as complementing man but also competing with him as the central figure in the drama of the Fall. In the Beginning: Commentaries on Genesis Commentaries on the book of Genesis proliferated in the early modern period. Gervase Babington, the Bishop of Worcester, compiled the first commentary on Genesis in English, entitled Certaine plaine, briefe, and comfortable notes vpon euerie chapter of Genesis, which appeared in 1592, the same year as the publication of Arden of Faversham. A second edition was issued in 1596, and it was reprinted numerous times into the seventeenth century. Babington uses Genesis to hold up Adam and Eve as a model for marriage and comment on the Protestant idea of marriage as godly. Babington takes the account of the first marriage in Genesis as offering “great testimonies, proofes, and arguments, of the 3 holynesse and goodnes of this diuine institution,” making “mariage most commendable and honorable” (C2v).