Subversion or Incorporation? (original) (raw)
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Moll Cutpurse as Hermaphrodite in Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl
Renaissance and Reformation
In his 1927 essay on Middleton, T.S. Eliot praised The Roaring Girl as Middleton's "best" comedy. What Eliot valued was the Roaring Giri herself, Moll Cutpurse, whom he finds always real. She may rant, she may behave preposterously, but she remains a type of the sort of woman who has renounced all happiness for herself and who lives only for a principle.. .. Middleton's comedy deserves to be remembered chiefly by its realperpetually realand human figure of Moll.. .. [The Roaring Girl is the] one comedy which more than any Elizabethan comedy realizes a free and noble womanhood. * Eliot is thus able to forgive the play's weaknesses for its powerful portrayal of a central figure who is, paradoxically, both "perpetually real" and the embodiment of an ideal (a "type of. .. free and noble womanhood"). Despite Eliot's enthusiasm for The Roaring Girl, subsequent criticism has not been so forgiving; it certainly has not been so enthusiastic. Between 1927 and 1970, the criticism confined itself largely to very limited or technical problems, such as the relationship between Moll and the historical Mary Frith, the manuscript of the quarto edition, or the "double" names of two of the characters, Moll and Mary Fitzallard. In the 1970's, however, Middleton (and Dekker) scholarship flourished, resulting in several book-length studies. At one extreme is Anthony Covatta, who mentions merely in passing that The Roaring Girl is "much overrated" and that it is "sentimental and topical." At the other extreme is David M. Holmes, who devotes a chapter to the play, focusing on identifying Middleton's contribution and on a plot summary. In between are critics like Norman Brittin, who offers a brief commentary: the play is "largely a vindication of Moll" (who, as the historical Mary Frith, needed a good deal of vindication), and its patterns are "mainly romantic and satirical," the romantic parts being written by Dekker and the satirical by Middleton. Perhaps, however, the most significant work done during the
The Fashion of Playmaking": The Worn World of The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker
2016
When they collaborated on writing The Roaring Girl for Prince Henry’s Men at London’s Fortune Theatre in 1611, Thomas Middleton and fellow playwright and pamphleteer Thomas Dekker were undoubtedly aware of the “crowd trouble” that so often accompanied productions at public theaters. With an admission price as low as a mere penny to stand in front of the stage, as many as 3,000 playgoers—courtiers, merchants and tradesmen and their wives, apprentices, prostitutes, and pickpockets—would have been packed into the open air amphitheater (Gurr, Shakespearean Stage 34). Middleton and Dekker 1 appealed to this diverse audience by placing Mary Frith (known in the play, as she was on the street, as Moll Cutpurse) 2 —a real-life cross-dressing woman living in the Fortune’s immediate vicinity—at the center of the play. Frith was a well-known and colorful local figure and probably a Fortune Theatre regular (Gurr 276). As the first woman to set foot on an English stage, Frith even performed a pos...
The Attitudes Towards Women in the Mary Play and the Roaring Girl
Atatürk Üniversitesi Kadın Araştırmaları Dergisi
Women's marital status has always been a controversial issue for the public opinion over the centuries because a woman's gender almost always brings her certain limitations and expectations. The gender norms imposed on people and the stereotyped gender roles usually determine the attitude towards women in many countries. This study aims to examine two dramatic works "The Mary Play" and "The Roaring Girl" which show the attitude towards women both in the Medieval and in the Early Modern England. The attitude towards women in terms of gender norms and the concept of marriage are analysed in both plays, and it is seen that the accepted gender roles in these two plays are so similar to each other that the femininity and the marital status of both female characters are at the center of public concern. Yet, there is a certain attitude in both plays contradictory to the patriarchal mindset of femininity, marriage and motherhood, which can be regarded as a pioneer of feminism that will emerge a few centuries later.
This paper covers a span of fifty years in the reception of Wycherley’s masterpiece, his Country Wife. This play has been chosen for study because its linguistic and thematic features made it scarcely elligible as a stage piece for the increasingly prudish and good-hearted audiences that attended the playhouse during the second half of the eighteenth century. The challenge that its rewriting posed on playwrights was not small, taking into account that the piece’s most outstanding features are its employment of witty language and its cynic approach to the relationship be tween the sexes. This paper focusses on the different processes of theatrical appropriation undergone by The Country Wife in response to the changing demands of audiences. A number of editions attributed to John Lee (1765, 1786) and David Garrick (1766, 1777, 1808, 1819) have been closely read bearing in mind their theatrical nature. Finally, the analysis of metatextual items has proved a valuable tool to check the mutual relationship between text and performance that was characteristic of the period.
Gender and Cross-dressing in the Seventeenth Century: Margaret Cavendish Reads Shakespeare
2013
Is there a woman in Shakespeare? This might sound facetious, but it is not so outlandish in the context of boy actors. Elizabethan drama was after all designed and stagemanaged by men mostly for men. In this context, is there an “essential” woman on the stage? In this essay, I examine issues of gender and sexual identity in Shakespeare’s drama by looking at how one particular woman reader of the seventeenth century, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, perceived femininity in his plays. In particular, I look at what can be read as a commentary on the ambivalent ending of Measure for Measure in her own Convent of Pleasure (1668) to try and offer a contextualized reflection on notions of gender expectations, and issues of reception. Is there a female character in Shakespeare? This might sound tongue-in-cheek, but not so outlandish when confronting once again the bare fact that female roles were held by young actors, and that we are dealing after all with a theatre designed and st...
Charting the Course of Temptation in early modern drama
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.
A Critical Analysis of Transgression and Subversion in Shakespearean Drama
Never shackled by generic conventions, Shakespeare offers valuable insights into cultural norms and behavioural expectations of the Elizabethan period. With a woman on the throne, Elizabeth I's blurring of identity provoked issues regarding the role of woman in society and man's crisis of masculinity. His plays provide a fertile base for transgressing conservative gender codes and subsequently interrogates humanity's sexual appetite. A feminist reading of Shakespearean drama reaffirms his subversive challenge to hegemonic notions of womanhood. This essay will also employ 'Queer Theory', a post-structuralist approach, in order to examine how Shakespeare undermines rigid gender identities and confronts a societal framework that restricts alternative desires.