Shakespeare’s Sisters Shakespeare’s of The Girlhood Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture Series Editor: Lorna Hutson hese original interpretations of Renaissance culture focus on literary texts in English and in The Girlhood T a range of vernacular languages. They also deal with the reception and transformation of the Greco-Roman literary, political and intellectual heritage. of Shakespeare’s ‘In this instructive and interesting book, Higginbotham shows the changing and multiple meanings of girlhood on the early modern stage and its potential to disrupt understandings of women’s lives based on marital status. Full of new information and skilful readings of a wide range of plays, The Girlhood of Sisters Shakespeare’s Sisters is invigorating reading.’ Jean Howard, George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University ‘Perhaps the most radical and significant aspect of Higginbotham’s book is her insistence that attending to girlhood as a category of analysis does not merely extend our knowledge of early modern culture and GENDER, its sex-gender system, but requires us to rethink the dominant model through which we have made sense of that culture.’ Kate Chedgzoy, Newcastle University TRANSGRESSION, The first full-length study of how the concept of the ‘girl’ was constructed in Jennifer Higginbotham ADOLESCENCE sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and drama he Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters argues for a paradigm shift in our current conceptions of the early modern sex-gender system, challenging the widespread assumption that the category of the ‘girl’ played little or no role in the construction of gender in early modern English culture. TGirl characters appeared in a variety of texts, from female infants in Shakespeare’s late romances to little children in Tudor interludes to adult ‘roaring girls’ in city comedies. Drawing from a variety of print and manuscript sources, including early modern drama, dictionaries, midwifery manuals, and women’s autobiographies, this book argues that girlhood in Shakespeare’s England was both a time of life and a form of gender transgression. Jennifer Higginbotham is Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University. She specialises in Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, feminist theory, and early modern women’s writing, and her articles on gender and early modern literature have appeared in the journals Reformation and Modern Philology. Jacket design by Cathy Sprent Jacket images: from Megale chymia, vel magna alchymia, by Leonard Thurneisser, 1583 Edinburgh ISBN 978-0-7486-5590-8 Jennifer Higginbotham 9780748 655908 The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters HHIGGINBOTHAMIGGINBOTHAM 99780748655908780748655908 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd i 006/12/20126/12/2012 116:186:18 Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture Series Editor: Lorna Hutson Titles available in the series: Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability James Kuzner 978 0 7486 4253 3 Hbk The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth- Century French Literature John D. Lyons 978 0 7486 4515 2 Hbk Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain Dale Shuger 978 0 7486 4463 6 Hbk Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion William P. Weaver 978 0 7486 4465 0 Hbk Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640–1705 Penelope Anderson 978 0 7486 5582 3 Hbk The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence Jennifer Higginbotham 978 0 7486 5590 8 Hbk Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama Andrea Stevens 978 0 7486 7049 9 Hbk Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture website at www.euppublishing.com/series/ecsrc HHIGGINBOTHAMIGGINBOTHAM 99780748655908780748655908 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd iiii 006/12/20126/12/2012 116:186:18 The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters Gender, Transgression, Adolescence Jennifer Higginbotham HHIGGINBOTHAMIGGINBOTHAM 99780748655908780748655908 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd iiiiii 006/12/20126/12/2012 116:186:18 © Jennifer Higginbotham, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 5590 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 5591 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5593 9 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 5592 2 (Amazon ebook) The right of Jennifer Higginbotham to be identifi ed as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. HHIGGINBOTHAMIGGINBOTHAM 99780748655908780748655908 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd iivv 006/12/20126/12/2012 116:186:18 Contents Acknowledgments vi Series Editor’s Preface viii Introduction 1 1 ‘A wentche, a gyrle, a Damsell’: Defi ning Early Modern Girlhood 20 2 Roaring Girls and Unruly Women: Producing Femininities 62 3 Female Infants and the Engendering of Humanity 104 4 Where Are the Girls in English Renaissance Drama? 144 5 Voicing Girlhood: Women’s Life Writing and Narratives of Childhood 179 Epilogue: Mass-Produced Languages and the End of Touristic Choices 202 Bibliography 204 Index 220 HHIGGINBOTHAMIGGINBOTHAM 99780748655908780748655908 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd v 006/12/20126/12/2012 116:186:18 Acknowledgements This book owes a tremendous debt to the friends and colleagues who have supported me over the past ten years. My work on girlhood began with a question in Phyllis Rackin’s Shakespeare seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, and if it weren’t for her unfailing support as a mentor and advisor, this project never would have come to fruition. It is also better and stronger for the feedback I received from Peter Stallybrass and Rebecca Bushnell, who have always been incredibly generous with their comments and time. As the project has developed, I have been fortunate to have the advice of my fellow scholars at The Ohio State University, especially Alan Farmer, Chris Highley, Richard Dutton, Luke Wilson, Hannibal Hamlin and John King, and I am grateful to Lorna Hutson as the series editor for seeing the project to its completion. Over the years the ‘noble girls’ from my writing groups have pro- vided a wonderful support system, and I want to thank Elizabeth Williamson, Jane Dagenhardt, Jessica Rosenfeld, Jamie Taylor and Marissa Greenberg for reading through so many of my early drafts. I am also deeply indebted to the work of Will Fisher, whose work on boyhood served as a lightning rod for my project, and to Kate Chedgzoy, whose suggestions for research helped open new avenues of exploration and enabled me to write the book I wanted to write. A number of other scholars have also offered wonderful recommendations over the years, including Erika Lin, Melissa Sanchez, Claire Busse, Gina Bloom, Laura Gowing, Gordon McMullan, Lucy Munroe, Ann Thompson, Diane Purkiss, Caroline Bicks, Deanne Williams, Margreta de Grazia, David Wallace, Rita Copeland, Vicki Mahaffey and Emily Steiner. Stephanie Gibbs Kamath deserves a medal for listening to me wax enthusiastic about dictionary entries over endless cups of tea in the British Library, and Justine Murison, Alex Fleck and Veronica Schanoes will always have my undying gratitude for all the hours they spent listening to me talk about girlhood. My thanks also go to Jared Ellman for his many HHIGGINBOTHAMIGGINBOTHAM 99780748655908780748655908 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd vvii 006/12/20126/12/2012 116:186:18 Acknowledgements vii kindnesses, and to Karen Robertson and Leslie Dunn, for introducing me to feminist Renaissance studies. Last but not least, Robert Sherwood has my love and my promise that the next book won’t involve nearly so many ‘Girl Power’ jokes. Parts of the Introduction and a version of Chapter 1 were previously published as ‘Fair Maids and Golden Girls: The Vocabulary of Female Youth in Early Modern English’, Modern Philology 110 (2011), pp. 171–96, © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. HHIGGINBOTHAMIGGINBOTHAM 99780748655908780748655908 PPRINT.inddRINT.indd vviiii 006/12/20126/12/2012 116:186:18 Series Editor’s Preface Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture may, as a series title, provoke some surprise. On the one hand, the choice of the word ‘culture’ (rather than, say, ‘literature’) suggests that writers in this series subscribe to the now widespread assumption that the ‘literary’ is not isolable, as a mode of signifying, from other signifying practices that make up what we call ‘culture’. On the other hand, most of the critical work in English literary studies of the period 1500–1700 which endorses this idea has rejected the older identifi cation of the period as ‘the Renaissance’, with its implicit homage to the myth of essential and universal Man coming to stand (in all his sovereign individuality) at the centre of a new world picture. In other words, the term ‘culture’ in the place of ‘literature’ leads us to expect the words ‘early modern’ in the place of ‘Renaissance’. Why, then, ‘Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture’? The answer to that question lies at the heart of what distinguishes this critical series and defi nes its parameters. As Terence Cave has argued, the term ‘early modern’, though admirably egalitarian in conception, has had the unfortunate effect of essentialising the modern, that is, of positing