"Bastard Daughters and Foundling Heroines: Rewriting Illegitimacy for the Eighteenth-Century Stage" (original) (raw)
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ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 2018
Anxiety over violation of legitimate issue runs through John Webster's canon. Alison Findlay's important 1994 volume Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama discusses Webster's The Devil's Law-Case; however, her listing of plays with bastard characters omits Webster's other works that focus on legitimacy, including Appius and Virginia, A Cure for a Cuckold, and The Fair Maid of the Inn. Further, Duke Ferdinand's concerns in The Duchess of Malfi about his sister's children's paternity form his hysteria. Thus the issue of who should be rightfully considered family is a central issue in many of Webster's plays, as female protagonists threaten familial and social order through perceived immoral behavior. As in Webster's two more well-known plays, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, the central character in The Devil's Law-Case is a widow, Leonora. Her Machiavellian son Romelio, with overtones of Webster's previous manipulative brothers Ferdinand and Flamineo, tries to force his sister Jolenta into marrying a wealthy suitor Ercole, in part by attempted murder of her suitor Contarino. In a plot twist, Leonora also loves Contarino, and the action climaxes in court as Leonora falsely accuses Romelio of being illegitimate and therefore incapable of inheriting his dead father's estate. The female lead presents a threat to the patriarchy that shaped the family structure and political rule of the seventeenth century. The pivotal issue of illegitimacy touches both home and court, and the ability of women to produce bastards represents their ability to upset established order. Leonora's transgression, however, is not entirely condemned, for even though the female protagonist appears to be contained, she receives reward for her subversive initiative. Bastardy had both grown in incidence and penalty during the time of Elizabeth, according to several primary and secondary sources. Martin Ingram's Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 finds an increase in the incidence of births of illegitimate children toward the end of the Elizabethan era (261), Rebecca Probert's more recent study, Cohabitation and Non-Marital Births in England and Wales, 1600-2012, similarly notes a peak in illegitimacy early in the seventeenth century (13), and Fiona McNeill notes, in Poor Women in Shakespeare, "in the period between 1600 and 1624, early modern England saw an explosion of convictions for bastardy in which women were either hanged or imprisoned" (80). The increase of incidents led to the social anxiety voiced in The Devil's Law-Case, though inverting the law-cases in which women were accused of producing illegitimate children for one in which a woman accuses herself. Much of the era's anxiety focused on economics: The Poor Law of 1531 charged the local parish with bearing the cost of illegitimate children, while the Poor Law of 1576 lamented the financial burden of the previous law from increasing numbers of cases (Findlay 12-13). As women's extramarital sex was regarded as a violation of both divine and earthly law, both church and civil courts dealt with bastardy cases. William Clerke's 1594 lengthy treatise, The Triall of Bastardie, whose title could have helped shape the trial scene in The Devil's Law-Case, details the causes and cases of illegitimacy, noting the differing treatment of the offense by sacred and secular authorities: The canons distinguish here, Legitimation ensues (by the canons) a subsequent marriage, in certain cases they dispence: the lawes distinguish not, they respect not marriages that ensue, they dispence not: neuerthelesse they CONTACT Carol Blessing
Virtuous Foundlings and Excessive Bastards
Eighteenth Century-theory and Interpretation, 2008
In Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Ohio State, 2005), Lisa Zunshine works through the issues of illegitimacy, class, and gender in eighteenth-century England with efficiency and insight. For a comparatively brief text (172 pages, plus notes), Zunshine's analysis is wideranging and provocative in its implications for our understanding of family dynamics in the period. This study challenges the conflation of bastards and foundlings in literature and scholarship, by parsing these vexed, often mutually defining relationships. The slippage between the labels of "bastard" and "foundling" is considerable, for people often assumed that foundlings were bastards, as illegitimacy was a primary motive in abandoning a child. Parentlessness left children open to the stigma of bastardy, so that orphans also were often presumed to be illegitimate. That the assumption of illegitimacy was not necessarily true (for there were legitimate orphans and foundlings) allows Zunshine to analyze status as a construct, which leads her to a spectrum of illegitimacy: illegitimate children, legitimate children presumed illegitimate, illegitimate children presumed legitimate, and so on.
Bastardy in Butleigh: Illegitimacy, Genealogies and the Old Poor Law in Somerset, 1762-1834
Genealogy, 2020
Early academic histories of non-marital motherhood often focused on the minority of mothers who had several illegitimate children. Peter Laslett coined the phrase 'the bastardy prone sub-society' to describe them. More recent qualitative research has questioned the gendered perspectives underlying this label, and emphasized the complex, highly personal processes behind illegitimacy. By locating the social experience of illegitimacy, particularly multiple illegitimacy, within a broader genealogical and parochial context, this study tries to set the behaviour of particular individuals within a ‘community’ context in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It places illegitimacy alongside pre-nuptial pregnancy within the sample parish, but also focuses on the majority of illegitimate births that fell under the administration of the parish and became ‘bastardy’ cases. It examines the parish’s administrative responses, particularly its vigour in identifying and recovering money from putative fathers, and discusses the social circumstances of these fathers and mothers. It then goes on to reconstruct the inter-generational genealogy of a dense family network that linked several mothers and fathers of multiple illegitimate children. It highlights some significant and recurrent disparities of age and status within these family concentrations which lay beyond the limits of the courtship-centred model of illegitimacy.
In Everything Illegitimate': Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama
The Yearbook of English Studies, 1993
In Conan Doyle's story 'The Adventure of the Priory School' Holdernesse Hall, the country seat of that stately patriarch the Duke of Holdernesse, is threatened by a peculiar revenant. Mr James Wilder is to all appearances a modern young man who occupies the mundane post of ...
Chaucer and His Bastard Child: Social Disjunction and Metaliterariness in The Two Noble Kinsmen
The long-standing and belaboured problem of the authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen has often prompted readings of the play that have emphasized the uneven quality of various scenes or rifts indicative of the supposedly patchwork quality of the final product of Shakespeare’s and Fletcher’s cooperation. This article breaks with this critical tradition and instead stresses the play’s unity. The key issue analyzed is the relationship of The Two Noble Kinsmen to its source, understood, however, not so much as “The Knight’s Tale” itself, but as the figures of Chaucer and his characters. Suggesting that the play’s prologue is more than just a conventional opening, the argument outlines the contrast between Chaucer’s original characters and those added in the Jailer’s Daughter subplot. In its course, it posits the existence of a fundamental ontological gulf between the two groups and focuses on the only moment when it is bridged, offering a Bakhtinian reading of the carnivalesque masque and morris dance in the woods. In effect, the article provides a consistent reading of a both socio-historical and meta-literary nature which does justice to the play’s overall unity.
The Unprodigal Prince? Defining Prodigality in the Henry IVs
Shakespeare, 2017
Since John Dover Wilson's declaration that Prince Hal is a "prodigal prince", critics have read the Henry IV plays as adaptations of the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15.11-32). Although the parable informs the plays, Hal is not "prodigal" in the predominant early modern understanding of prodigality. Prodigality is defined by wasteful excess, often financial in nature, and prodigal sons were defined as much by this excess as by association with the Lukan paradigm. The Henry IVs present one of the most complex and enduring formulations of the relationship between prodigality and the parable in early modern literature, which cannot be understood without an appropriate understanding of prodigality in context. This article explicates early modern prodigality, accounting for its classical context, secular and religious usage, gendered dimension, and role in dramatic adaptations of the parable. It then situates the Henry IVs within this context and delineates how Hal enacts a prodigal son plot with Falstaff's prodigality functioning in place of his own prodigal dissolution. By providing a historicist understanding of prodigal sons, this article facilitates more accurate readings of prodigality and the parable in early modern culture.