Charting the Course of Temptation in early modern drama (original) (raw)

At the turn of the sixteenth century a handful of dramatists engaged with debate over Puritan doctrine on women and temptation. These included George Chapman’s An Humerous Dayes Myrth (1599), a satire of Puritan female piety as a young bride with an old husband negotiates her way around the dangers of temptation, and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1603) or Measure for Measure (1604), through the characters of Isabella, the young virgin seeking salvation through cloistered asceticism, and the purportedly ascetic Angelo who equivocates on temptation, shifting his own frailty onto Isabella: “Is this her fault or mine? The tempter or the tempted, who sins most, ha?” (2.2.169). It was a commonplace of Puritan doctrine that women were more vulnerable than men to temptation, and Puritan women’s writings display a disturbing level of acquiescence to this creed, justified by their greater burden of Original Sin and their frailer bodies. Spirited opposition came from the women’s controversy pamphlets of 1617: “The Serpent at first tempted woman, he dare assault her no more in that shape; now he employeth men to supply his part,” wrote Esther Sowernam, shifting blame for women’s vulnerability onto the deception of men. This paper will look briefly at the experience of temptation in women’s devotional writings, as context to several seventeenth-century plays for their take on the debate, including some written by women or for female performance.