Unruly Women in Early Modern Drama

Concentrating on the drama of early modern England, this course will focus on women who behave badly. Some of these characters cheat, lie, and murder, while others perfect the guise of seeming compliance; some brazenly flout the structures that aim to contain them, while others are subtler in their subversion. We will use these plays to investigate what is by turns exciting, threatening, and frightening about these unruly women, paying attention to the ways that they are punished and sometimes rewarded. We will also attend to the resources of theatrical form, especially the early modern use of boy actors to play women’s parts, to ask how the conditions of staging uphold or undercut the plays’ ideological messages. Finally, we will supplement our reading of this drama with other historical and cultural texts from this period—pamphlets, advice literature, poems, court cases, and ballads—in order to get a better sense of the plays in relation to early modern gender, sexual, and political norms, many of which were crucially different from our own.