Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender / Edition 1

by Shirley Nelson Garner, Madelon G. Sprengnether

Overview

". . . an important volume for scholar and student alike, and a tribute to the enduring contributions of its authors." —Renaissance Quarterly

"These thought-provoking essays run the gamut of feminist criticism on tragedy." —Shakespeare Quarterly

"Highly recommended . . . " —Choice

These essays mount a powerful critique of the tragic hero as representative of the errors and sufferings of humankind. They come from a variety of perspectives—including feminist new historicism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and autobiographical criticism. While considering Shakespeare's earliest attempts at tragedy in Richard III and Titus Andronicus, this volume also covers the major tragic period, giving special attention to Othello.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253210272
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	02/22/1996
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

SHIRLEY NELSON GARNER is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Minnesota. She is a co-editor, with Claire Kahane and Madelon Sprengnether, of The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation; and a contributor to the Personal Narratives Group's Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives. MADELON SPRENGNETHER is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis and co-editor of Revising the Word and the World: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism and The (M)other Tongue.

Read an Excerpt

Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender

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By Shirley Nelson Garner, Madelon Sprengnether

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 1996 Indiana University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-21027-2

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CHAPTER 1

HISTORY INTO TRAGEDY

The Case of Richard III

PHYLLIS RACKIN

An audience coming to Richard III from the Henry VI plays and King John witnesses a remarkable transformation in the roles and representations of female characters. On the one hand, women are much more sympathetically portrayed. They take on their tragic roles as suffering victims and assume their tragic status as central objects of male concern. On the other hand, they lose the vividly individualized voices and the subversive theatrical power that made the female characters in Shakespeare's earlier history plays formidable antagonists to the masculine project of English history-making (Rackin 151-60).

Robert Weimann's distinction between locus and platea can be used to chart both the elevation of the female characters and their containment. Weimann associates the locus with the upstage site of mimetic illusion, "aloofness from the audience, and representational closure" which privileges the authority of the objects represented, the platea with the forestage where actors addressed their audiences, a liminal space where the authority of the represented narrative could be challenged by calling attention to the immediate theatrical occasion with all its subversive potential. Although not always or necessarily literalized in specific locations on the physical stage, the different acting styles and different relationships between actor and audience that Weimann associates with locus and platea provide a useful basis for understanding the transformation of women's roles in Richard III. Ennobled, the female characters move into the privileged locus of hegemonic representation, but this move also subsumes them in the patriarchal project of that representation and distances them from the present theater audience. Still the dominant figure in the locus, the male protagonist now dominates the platea as well. When Richard speaks to the audience, the platea begins to assume the function it would have in plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth as the site of the soliloquies where the masculine subject of tragedy was to be constructed.

I

Although the First Folio classifies Richard III with Shakespeare's other English histories, the title pages of the Quartos suggest generic difference. In the case of 2 Henry VI, the title page indicates both the episodic chronicle structure of the play and its historical subject: "The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: and the banishment and death of the Duke of Suffolke, and the Tragicall end of the proud Cardinall of Winchester, with the notable Rebellion of Iacke Cade: And the Duke of Yorkes first claime unto the Crowne" The Quarto of Richard III, by contrast, designates at once its self-consciously dramatic form as a tragedy, its origins as a script for theatrical performance, and its strongly centered focus on the male protagonist: "The Tragedy of Richard the third, Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his iunocent nephewes: his tyrannicall usurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserved death. As it hath beene lately Acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants."

In Shakespeare's time, the story of Richard III was repeatedly identified as tragic. Edward Hall had entitled his account of Richard's reign "The Tragical Doynges of Kynge Richard The Thirde" (374). Richard's story (along with those of Clarence, Hastings, Buckingham, and lane Shore) was identified as a tragedy in A Mirror for Magistrates. Thomas Legge's Latin play Richardus Tertius, performed at Cambridge in 1579, is identified in contemporary texts as an exemplary tragedy, singled out by Sir lohn Harington (210) and Thomas Heywood (sig. F4v) to illustrate the beneficial effects of tragic drama and by Francis Meres in his list of "famous tragedies" (319-20). Yet another play about Richard, anonymously published in 1394 and entitled "The True Tragedy of Richard III," begins with a dialogue between Truth and Poetrie that identifies "Tragedia" as a player in the coming action and the subject of the play as a "Tragedie" (sig. A3r).

This essay is an attempt to delineate the ways the movement from history to tragedy transvalued the representations of women and the construction of femininity on Shakespeare's stage. I should begin, however, by acknowledging that the distinction between history and tragedy was by no means clear. The protagonists of tragedy, like those of history, were understood to be characters of high rank. Moreover, in the Renaissance as in antiquity, plays identified as tragedies frequently took their subjects from history (Shakespeare himself is a good case in point: of the eleven plays designated as tragedies in the First Folio, all but Romeo and Juliet and Othello have historical subjects).

Despite the many similarities between the subjects of the two genres, contemporary descriptions of the ways they affected their audiences are strikingly different in regard to issues of gender. Antitheatrical invective typically attacked all theatrical performance as effeminating, but the English history play offered a significant exception. Thomas Nashe, in fact, used the example of the English history play to defend theatrical performance against its detractors: "our forefathers valiant acts ... are revived," he declared, "than which, what can be a sharper reproofe to these degenerate effeminate dayes of ours?" Commemorating the valiant deeds of heroic forefathers and celebrating the masculine virtues of courage, honor, and patriotism, the theatrical representation of English historical subjects could redeem theatrical performance as a means of reclaiming the endangered masculinity of the men in the theater audience.

Tragedy, on the other hand, was likely to inspire womanly emotions in its spectators. According to Stephen Gosson, "The beholding of troubles and miserable slaughters that are in Tragedies, drive us to immoderate sorrow, heavines, womanish weeping and mourning, whereby we become lovers of dumpes, and lamentation, both enemies to fortitude" (215). The claim that tragedy produced womanly softness in its spectators was not confined to antitheatrical discourse. Sir Philip Sidney recounts a story from Plutarch in which the performance of a tragedy "drewe aboundance of teares" from the eyes of a tyrant "who, without all pitty, had murthered infinite nombers, and some of his owne blood" (177-78). Arguing for the salutary effects of tragedy, Sidney does not identify them as effeminating. The terms of his argument, however, suggest just that. He claims, for instance, that tragedy "openeth the greatest wounds, and sheweth forth the Ulcers that are covered with Tissue." As Gail Paster has demonstrated, mens bodies opened and wounded were gendered feminine; and the ulcer image directly parallels the terms in which Hamlet will address his guilty mother: "Lay not that flattering unction to your soul, / That not your trespass but my madness speaks; / It will but skin and film the ulcerous place, / Whiles rank corruption, mining all within, / Infects unseen" (3.4.145-49).

Women, in fact, were especially prominent in descriptions of the effects of tragedies on early modern audiences. In a 1620 recollection of a performance of The Spanish Tragedy; for instance, "Ladyes in the boxes" are said to have "Kept time with sighes and teares to [the player s] sad accents." As Richard Levin points out, the numerous contemporary accounts that describe "women weeping in the theatre" suggest a perception "that women had a special sensitivity to, and perhaps a special preference for, pathetic plots and situations."

In An Apology for Actors, Thomas Hey wood recounts three anecdotes to illustrate the beneficial effects of tragedies on their auditors. Two of them center on women who had murdered their husbands. In the first, "a townes-woman (till then of good estimation and report)" watching a play about a woman who had committed a similar crime "suddenly skritched and cryd out Oh my husband, my husband! I see the ghost of my husband fiercely threatning and menacing me" and subsequently confessed her crime to the people about her in the audience. In the second, the particulars of the tragic plot are somewhat different, but they have exactly the same effect on the wicked woman: during the performance of a play in which a laborer, envied by his fellow workers for his diligence, is murdered by having a nail driven into his temples, "a woman of great gravity" becomes "strangely amazed" and "with a distracted & troubled braine oft sighed out these words: Oh my husband, my husband!":

The play, without further interruption, proceeded; the woman was to her owne house conducted, without any apparant suspition, every one coniecturing as their fancies led them. In this agony she some few dayes languished, and on a time, as certaine of her well disposed neighbours came to comfort her, one amongst the rest being Church-warden, to him the Sexton posts, to tell him of a strange thing happening him in the ripping up of a grave: see here (quoth he) what I have found, and shewes them a faire skull, with a great nayle pierst quite through the braine-pan, but we cannot coniecture to whom it should belong, nor how long it hath laine in the earth, the grave being confused, and the flesh consumed. At the report of this accident, the woman, out of the trouble of her afflicted conscience, discovered a former murder. For 12 yeares ago, by driving that nayle into that skull, being the head of her husband, she had trecherously slaine him. This being publickly confest, she was arraigned, condemned, adiudged, and burned. (Sigs. G1v, G2v)

Heywood's lurid examples represent an extreme case. In the first place, the plays he describes belong to the subgenre of domestic tragedy, an innovative dramatic form that moved down the social scale and into the home to find its subjects in a domestic space where female characters could and did play central roles (Dolan). Not all of the female spectators of tragedy were imagined as "guilty creatures sitting at a play," and not all of the spectators of tragedy were imagined as women. Nonetheless, the spectators were repeatedly and consistently described in contemporary accounts as moved to emotions and responses (compassion, remorse, pity, tears) that were understood as feminine. This conception of the effects of tragedy as feminizing, although not always explicitly stated, is remarkably consistent: it appears in arguments for and against the theater, in the prologues and epilogues to plays, in accounts of actual experience as well as in prescriptive directions.

The Induction to A Warning for Fair Women (1599) begins with the stage direction "Enter at one doore, Hystorie with Drum and Ensigne: Tragedie at another, in her one hand a whip, in the other a knife" During the ensuing dispute with Comedie and Hystorie, Tragedie's feminine gender receives repeated emphasis. She is addressed by the others as "mistris buskins" and "my Ladie Tragedie," and she describes the kind of performance she requires as one that will evoke feminine responses from the audience:

I must have passions that must move the soule, Make the heart heave, and throb within the bosome, Extorting teares out of the strictest eyes, ... Untill I rap the sences from their course ...

(Sigs. A2v, A3r)

Over half a century later, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, described the effects of Shakespeare's tragedies in similar terms:

in his Tragick Vein, he Presents Passions so Naturally, and Misfortunes so Probably, as he Peirces the Souls of his Readers with such a True Sense and Feeling thereof, that it Forces Tears through their Eyes....

In direct contrast to Nashe's celebration of the history play, which imagines an audience of men inspired by the representation of a heroic masculine world to emulate the manly virtues of the forefathers, tragedy is repeatedly described as appealing to women as well as men; and its appeal to men is repeatedly described as directed toward their feminine sympathies, softening hard hearts, piercing guilty souls with remorse, ravishing the entire audience with the feminine passions of pity and fear, and forcing them to weep.

A similar gendered difference characterized the subjects of the two genres. On the stage as in the audience, the exemplary subjects of tragedy — "Gods and Goddesses, Kynges and Queenes" — were understood to include women as well as men (Webbe 249). Because history sought to commemorate the past, reconstituted as a nostalgically idealized world of the fathers, women and sexuality occupied only marginal roles. Both tragedy and comedy, however, assigned important roles to women and marriage. In comedy, conflicts between older and newer social dispensations are characteristically resolved in marriage; in tragedy they often constitute the hero's predicament, which is typically defined at least partly in terms of his relationship to women. This is true not only in plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra, which center on romantic relationships, but also in most of Shakespeare's other tragedies as well.

Shakespeare's history plays opposed the troubling realities of cultural change by projecting a better world in the past; his tragedies played out those cultural contradictions in the struggles of an individual heroic figure destroyed by the irreconcilable conflicts they produced. Deeply implicated in those contradictions, the ambivalent place of women in Shakespeare's world and the instability of the gender ideology that attempted to contain them were central issues in tragic drama (Rose; Callaghan). With the possible exceptions of Juliet and Cleopatra, Shakespeare reserves the role of tragic hero for a man; but, as Mary Beth Rose has argued, the increasing importance assigned to marriage "as the basis of an ordered society" allowed female characters to play central roles in non-Shakespearean Jacobean tragedies such as The Duchess of Malfi which "bear witness to a particular historical moment when private life was beginning ... to be related analogously, rather than hierarchically, to public affairs" (96-98).

II

The reconstruction of history as tragedy and the transformation of women's roles in Richard III can be associated with an earlier stage of this process. Paradoxically, however, even as the female characters in Richard III are ennobled, they are also disempowered. Because the traditional subjects of English history were the heroic deeds and dynastic struggles of kings and noblemen, most of the female characters in Shakespeare's other English history plays are defined in gendered antithesis by low social status and foreign nationality. Some are literally alien — such as the French women in 1 Henry VI and Henry V and the Welsh women in 1 Henry IV. Others, such as the women in the Boar's Head Tavern, are excluded from the scene of historical representation by their confinement to the anachronistically modern settings of the fictional, plebeian, comic subplots. The foreign tongues spoken by the Welsh woman in 1 Henry IV and the French women in Henry V and the malapropisms that disfigure the speech of Mistress Quickly signal their inability to enter the official discourse of English history. In direct antithesis, all of the female characters in Richard III are highborn English women who speak in the undifferentiated, formal blank verse that constitutes the standard language of the playscript. Recruited in the service of the hegemonic project of the plot, the accession of Henry VII to the English throne, the women are also subsumed in its hegemonic discourse. As Nicholas Brooke has observed, "the flexibility of private speech" in this play is almost entirely "confined to Richard" (108). Even Margaret, the most powerful of Richard's female antagonists, speaks in the generalized rhetorical terms that constitute the normative language of the play.

Assuming their tragic roles as pitiable victims, female characters are no longer represented as dangerous, demonic Others. The subversive theatrical energy of the peasant Joan is replaced by the pathos of suffering English queens. Margaret, the adulterous wife and bloodthirsty warrior of the Henry VI plays, is transformed into a bereaved and suffering prophet of divine vengeance for the crimes of the past. In the Henry VI plays, the female characters are defined as opponents to the masculine project of English history-making. In Richard III', all of the women support the desired conclusion of the historical plot, the foundation of the Tudor dynasty.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Introduction: The Gendered Subject of Shakespearean Tragedy, Madelon Sprengnether

1. Tragic Subjects
History into Tragedy: The Case of Richard III, Phyllis Rackin
A Woman of Letters: Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, Sara Eaton
"Documents in Madness": REading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture, Carol Thomas Neely
"Born of Woman": Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth, Janet Adelman
"Magic of Bounty": Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power, Coppélia Kahn

2. Implicating Othello
Desdemona's Disposition, Lena Cowen Orlin
"The Moor of Venice," or the Indian on the Renaissance English Stage, Margo Hendricks
The Heroics of Marriage in Othello and The Duchess of Malfi, Mary Beth Rose

3. Shakespeare Our Contemporary?
The Fatal Cleopatra, Carol Cook
What's Love Got to Do with It? Reading the Liberal Humanist Romance in Antony and Cleopatra, Linda Charnes
Shakespeare in My Time and Place, Shirley Nelson Garner
Leaving Shakespeare, Gayle Greene

Notes on Contributors
Index