Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000: The Destined Livery

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Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance 1984–2000 The Destined Livery

Roberta Barker

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-24

Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984–2000

10.1057/9780230597488 - Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000, Roberta Barker



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The Destined Livery Roberta Barker




© Roberta Barker 2007

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9781403994790 hardback ISBN-10: 140399479X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barker, Roberta. Early modern tragedy, gender and performance, 19842000:the destined livery/Roberta Barker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN140399479X (alk. paper) 1. English drama (Tragedy)“History and criticism. 2. English drama“ Early modern and Elizabethan, 15001600“History and criticism. 3. English drama“17th century“History and criticism. 4. Gender identity in the theater. 5. Sex role in the theater. 6. Feminism and theater“History“20th century. 7. Theater“History“20th century. 8. Sex role in motion pictures. 9. Gender identity in motion pictures. I. Title. PR658.T7B39 2007 822’.9109“dc22 2007025502 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For my mother, Diane Murray Barker and my grandmother, Freda Murray and In loving memory of my grandmother, Zilda Barker


di tante cose quant’i’ho vedute, dal tuo podere e da la tua bontate riconosco la grazia e la virtute. Tu m’hai di servo tratto a libertate per tutte quelle vie, per tutt’ i modi che di ciò fare avei la potestate. (Dante, Paradiso XXXI 79–87)



O donna in cui la mia speranza vige, e che soffristi per la mia salute in Inferno lasciar le tue vestige,

List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgments

x

List of Abbreviations

xii

Introduction: The Destined Livery? Tragedy, Performance, Subject and Spectator

1

Part I Realism and Reinscription 1 What We Are, But Not What We May Be: The Feminist Ophelia and the (Re)production of Gender

29

2 An Actor in the Main of All: Individual and Relational Selves in The Duchess of Malfi

55

3 The Natural Father and the Imaginary Daughter: Patriarchy as Realism and Representation in Titus

83

Part II Performance and Performativity 4 ‘Let Me Forget Myself’: What a Queen is Good For in Edward II

111

5 Death and the Married Maiden: Gender Reproduction as Destruction in The Broken Heart

136

6 Tricked Like a Bride: A New Traffic in A Woman Killed with Kindness

163

Conclusion: Cultural Drag; or, Hamlet and Ophelia Redux

191

Appendix Casts, Production Teams and Opening Dates of Productions Discussed

201

Notes

206

Bibliography

208

Index

230 vii



Contents

1 Ophelia in black. Left to right: Cathy Tyson (Lady-in-Waiting), Frances Barber (Ophelia), Sarah Woodward (Lady-in-Waiting), Brian Blessed (Claudius) and Virginia McKenna (Gertrude) in Hamlet, dir. Ron Daniels, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1984. Photo by Joe Cocks Studio, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 2 Ophelia watches the boy actress. Left to right: Roger Rees (Hamlet), Frances Barber (Ophelia), Dexter Fletcher (Player Queen) and Bernard Horsfall (Player King) in Hamlet, dir. Ron Daniels, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1984. Photo by Joe Cocks Studio, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 3 Married bliss in Malfi. Left to right: Mick Ford (Antonio), Sally Edwards (Cariola), Harriet Walter (the Duchess) in The Duchess of Malfi, dir. Bill Alexander, Swan Theatre, 1989. Photo by Joe Cocks Studio, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 4 The Duchess and her Executioner. George Anton (Bosola) and Anastasia Hille (the Duchess) in The Duchess of Malfi, dir. Declan Donnellan, Cheek by Jowl, 1995. Photo by John Haynes, reproduced by kind permission of the photographer 5 Isabella as Evita. Tilda Swinton (Isabella) in Edward II, dir. Derek Jarman, Working Title, 1991. Reproduced by kind permission of Universal Pictures 6 ‘A stranger here in court, my lord’: Calantha presents Penthea. Left to right: Olivia Williams (Calantha), Emma Fielding (Penthea), William Houston (Prophilus) in The Broken Heart, dir. Michael Boyd, Swan Theatre, 1994. Photo by Malcolm Davies, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 7 Anne Frankford among men: the wedding. Saskia Reeves (Anne) and Michael Maloney (Frankford), centre, with Jonathan Cullen (Sir Charles Mountford), right, in A Woman Killed with Kindness, dir. Katie Mitchell, The

42

53

64

77

112

145

viii



List of Figures

List of Figures

171

175



Other Place, 1991. Photo by Joe Cocks Studio, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust 8 Anne Frankford among men: the triangle. Left to right: Michael Maloney (Frankford), Saskia Reeves (Anne), Barry Lynch (Wendoll) in A Woman Killed with Kindness, dir. Katie Mitchell, The Other Place, 1991. Photo by Joe Cocks Studio, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

ix

This book began life at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon. My very sincere thanks go to all the past and present fellows of the Institute, especially to my very encouraging and supportive supervisor, Pamela Mason, and to the unfailingly kind John Jowett, who read and commented upon many early chapter drafts far beyond the call of duty. In and out of my thesis defence, Martin Wiggins has shown me extraordinary scholarly and personal generosity; I should like to thank him particularly for sharing so many insights into the productions discussed here with me. Kate McLuskie was a warm and inspiring external examiner whose questions and suggestions have helped to shape this book’s final form. Countless fellow students offered invaluable friendship and support, but I would especially like to thank David Brown, Mary Stewart Burgher, the late Doreen Brockbank, Paul Edmondson, Joy Leslie Gibson, Paul Prescott, Kathryn Prince, Leo Sharrock and Shirley Wright. Many others have helped to guide this project to fruition. The staffs of all the libraries and archives at which I worked—the Shakespeare Institute Library; the Shakespeare Centre Library; the Theatre Museum, London; the National Theatre Archive, London; the Folger Shakespeare Library; and the Dalhousie University Library—have been extraordinarily helpful. Jim Shaw and Kate Welch at the Institute; Sylvia Morris and Karin Brown at the Centre; and Ian Colford at Dalhousie are beyond praise. At Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy and her assistant, Christabel Scaife, have been endlessly patient and thoughtful; and I am most grateful for the wise and rigorous suggestions of the book’s anonymous reader. All remaining idiocies are emphatically my own. Many colleagues and friends at Mount Allison University, Dalhousie University, the University of King’s College and other institutions have been most generous in sharing ideas and suggestions. The examples and mentorship of Christy Luckyj and Ron Huebert have permanently shaped my ideas about early modern drama and about scholarship in general. Jennifer Bain, Karen Bamford, Steve Baur, Jure Gantar, M.J. Kidnie, Kim Solga, Jacqueline Warwick and the members of the Dalhousie Gender and Women’s Studies reading group have also been sources of inspiration. Alan Andrews has been a tremendous help in many ways—not least in pains takingly preparing my index! In the six x



Acknowledgments

xi

years between my thesis defence and the completion of this book, many students have made an indelible impact on my thinking about drama and performance. I would like to particularly thank Tyler Foley and Dawn Tracey; all the members of the ‘Impersonations’ seminars at the University of King’s College (2004, 2005 and 2006); and the casts of Henry IV, Part One (Mount Allison University, 2000), Troilus and Cressida (Dalhousie Theatre Department, 2002) and Fuente Ovejuna (Dalhousie Theatre Department, 2006). Finally, I would like to record a few of my many personal debts of gratitude. My sincere thanks and affection go to the Sisters of the Carmelite Monastery, St. Charles’ Square, London; Father Iain Matthew; Margaret Atkins; Kevin Flynn; Sylvia Hunter; Alison Betty; Tawnie Olson; and Elizabeth Peirce. All of the members of my family offered support, especially Ann, Tim and Julie Nicol; Stephen and Susan Barker; Fraser and Freda Murray; and Lynn Murray. I wish that I had had the chance to add this volume to the library of my dearly missed grandmother, Zilda Barker. Three people can never be thanked adequately: Shannon Brownlee, Diane Murray Barker, and David Nicol; without them, there would be nothing. An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Death and the Married Maiden: Performing Gender in Ford’s The Broken Heart’ in English Studies in Canada 30.2 (June 2004): 67–89. Some sections of the Conclusion appeared in my ‘Review of Hamlet, the Young Vic’ in Early Modern Literary Studies 5.2 (September, 1999): 13.1–8. Many thanks to both journals for their permission to reproduce this material.



Acknowledgments

The following abbreviations are used in the text, notes and bibliography:

Journals ELH ELR PMLA TES TLS

English Literary History English Literary Renaissance Publications of the Modern Language Association of America The Times Educational Supplement The Times Literary Supplement

Playtexts EII Measure TBH WKK

Edward II (Christopher Marlowe) Measure for Measure (William Shakespeare) The Broken Heart (John Ford) A Woman Killed with Kindness (Thomas Heywood)

Institutions BBC BFI RSC

British Broadcasting Corporation British Film Institute Royal Shakespeare Company

xii



List of Abbreviations

STEPHEN. I did the verse the way you taught me. I did the gestures. And the feeling. And I wouldn’t have changed a thing, except it suddenly seemed so stupid. If you’re playing a woman, what’s the point in being anything else? —Nicholas Wright, Cressida

I. ‘The destined livery’ A madwoman, oblivious of the gaze of a predominantly male court, sings of the seduction and ruin of a too-pliant virgin. An aristocratic widow is tortured and murdered by her brothers when she marries the man of her own choice. A new bride is raped by the sons of her father’s enemy, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out so that she cannot name her violators. A queen, spurned by her husband for his male favourite, forms a sexual and political alliance with a rival lord; eventually, her own son condemns her choice. Another madwoman obsessively recalls the moment when she was forced out of her beloved’s arms into marriage with a jealous husband; she finally starves herself to death. A young wife takes the same way out of life in atonement for her adultery. In each case, the woman’s suffering fascinates—and sometimes transforms—the men around her. It continues to fascinate audiences four hundred years after these scenes were first performed on the public stage. These dark pictures of gender identity and gender relationships come from six plays that span the golden age of the early modern English theatre: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600), John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1613–1614), Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c.1594), Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1592), John Ford’s The Broken Heart (c.1629) and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603). 1



Introduction: The Destined Livery? Tragedy, Performance, Subject and Spectator

Each of these plays received major theatrical or cinematic productions in the 1980s and 1990s. Some of them (for instance, Hamlet and The Duchess of Malfi) have remained in the performance repertoire since the time of their early modern premières. Others (The Broken Heart, A Woman Killed with Kindness and even Titus Andronicus) received more mainstream attention in the 1980s and 1990s than ever before. Those two decades also saw the consolidation of feminist influence in Western society and a high level of feminist performance in theatres throughout Britain and North America (see Goodman, Contemporary). In such a climate, it seems important to ask why audiences are still willing to assist in the reproduction of four-hundred-year-old plays that feature female suffering, madness and death, generally inflicted by men. Can these plays conduct any dialogue with English and North American societies as their citizens strive to re-negotiate gender identities after the impact of Second Wave feminism? Or does their survival only confirm mainstream theatrical and cinematic representation as a site for the comfortable reproduction of the most conservative images of gender? Early modern playtexts are the products of a male-dominated theatre that represented women and performed before them, but generally excluded them from writing and performance on the public stage. Today, they are most frequently performed in theatres where the majority of directors, producers and managers are male (see Gardiner and Long in Goodman, Routledge Reader 97–107). Many gifted and politically committed contemporary actors remain eager to play early modern tragic roles; but are these actors simply reproducing oppressive early modern images of gender? Are they (consciously or unconsciously) appropriating early modern tragic playtexts to reproduce more contemporary but equally oppressive gender norms? Are they working within a framework that effectively forbids any interrogation of gender binarism and heterosexism? The leading feminist theatre scholars of the 1980s and 1990s generally answered these questions in the affirmative. SueEllen Case described early modern playtexts almost solely in terms of their basis in ‘the methodology and assumptions of patriarchal production’ (Feminism 19). Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic argued that contemporary classical performance ‘usually addresses the male spectator as an active subject, and encourages him to identify with the male hero in the narrative, [while t]he same representations tend to objectify women performers and female spectators as passive, invisible, unspoken subjects’ (2). Most recently, Sarah Werner’s Shakespeare and Feminist Performance focused on the gendered limitations of the world’s



2 Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984–2000

most prolific Shakespearean company, suggesting that the notion that ‘the work done by women is supplementary at best—[and that] the real work on Shakespeare is done by men [ ] permeates the RSC’ (49). Though largely just, such evaluations fail to consider all the possibilities inherent in contemporary performances of early modern tragedy. This study argues that the effort to reveal those possibilities is best served by an active model of spectatorship that reads contemporary performance both for its inscriptions of binary gender constructions and for its potential power to challenge or complicate those constructions. The early modern lines that give my work its subtitle offer a clue as to how such a model might work. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), the Duke of Vienna’s puritanical deputy, Angelo, attempts to seduce the young religious postulant, Isabella. He bids her Be that you are, That is, a woman; if you be more, you’re none. If you be one, as you are well expressed By all external warrants, show it now, By putting on the destined livery. (2.4.134–8) Angelo seems to be voicing an essentialist view of gender. He urges Isabella to be what she already is: ‘That is, a woman.’ He bolsters his exhortation with a rhetorical glance at Isabella’s body, declaring that her femininity is ‘well expressed / By all external warrants.’ He implies that Isabella’s biology should be her fate, and by bidding her put on ‘the destined livery’ he associates that fate with servitude. However, Isabella’s non-conformity to this supposedly pre-determined destiny remains at issue. The young postulant has chosen to separate herself from the heterosexual order whose female subjects submit, sexually and otherwise, to men. Angelo is titillated by this act of separation because it speaks to an ideal of feminine virtue founded upon strict chastity; his lustful admiration of Isabella’s virtue shows how easily such apparently disruptive acts can be recuperated within a patriarchal framework. At the same time, it reduces Angelo to a worrying dependence on the interlocutor who is supposed to be his destined servant. In a formulation that disturbs his insistence that Isabella already is the woman he wants her to be, he begs her to assume the characteristics of her gender by acceding to her assigned servitude. Submissive femininity begins to sound less like a natural given and more like a uniform—or a theatrical costume.



Introduction 3

Angelo demands that Isabella prove herself a woman by performing the social actions associated with her (putative) gender for his benefit: by ‘putting on the destined livery,’ while he plays the master. Is anything about gender identity genuinely ‘destined,’ or is it held in place only by the daily actions performed by men and women, amongst themselves and with one another? The complex discursive negotiations of Angelo’s speech offer a useful corollary to the representation of gender in contemporary performances of early modern drama. The roles of that drama might be described as the ‘destined livery’ of many contemporary actors. As Werner shows, they are the parts for which much acting training still works to prepare drama students, especially in England (40–94). They carry great cultural prestige, representing for many the pinnacles of the actor’s art; but they can also place the actor as servant to a tradition where venerable playtexts ‘lend her their lustre, their authority and their power [ ] and the best she can hope to achieve is to leave a little graffiti on the icon once she has disappeared’ (Buzzacott 132). Early modern tragedy in particular can lock contemporary actors either into the roles of women subservient to and destroyed by male hegemony, or the roles of men expected to function as effective patriarchs. Still, early modern roles, and the contemporary actors who embody them, may have a progressive as well as a conservative relationship to our society. Despite Jill Dolan’s insistence that such performances represent only ‘the naturalized ideology of the dominant culture’ (Feminist Spectator 17), they can also denaturalize gender norms by exposing the shifting and constructed nature of identity. As Alisa Solomon argues, theatre is unlikely to bring down the patriarchy, but it might ‘teach us a way to think critically, and to apply that critical consciousness to the world’ (19). This study looks closely at a number of contemporary performances of early modern tragic playtexts through the eyes of a politically engaged spectator who watches performance in a manner that considers critically its engagement with the dominant social order. This project was born out of my own experience as a passionate theatregoer who is also a feminist. However, I use the term ‘politically engaged spectator’ rather than ‘feminist spectator’ in this book because I have learned (particularly from my students) that many audience members who are reluctant to self-identify as feminists nevertheless watch theatre and film in a politicized manner informed by feminism’s ‘critique of male supremacy, formed and offered in the light of a will to change it, which in turn assumes a conviction that it is changeable’




(Gordon 29). They are aware and critical of the asymmetrical gender relations that have governed much of the history of Western representation, and are committed to using what they see in a way that will aid the ongoing effort to change oppressive constructions of gender and sexuality. This study outlines a model of spectatorship through which such audience members might look afresh at early modern tragedy in contemporary performance, and in doing so might come to see themselves, as well as the plays they watch, more clearly.

II. Sam Gosse grows up Much as I enjoyed John Madden’s 1999 film Shakespeare in Love, I felt desperately sorry for poor Sam Gosse. In this popular late twentiethcentury appropriation of an early modern tragedy, Sam (Daniel Brocklebank) is the leading boy player with the Lord Admiral’s Men in early 1590s London. Since male actors generally played female roles on the early modern English stage, the innocent spectator may assume on first viewing that this sweet-faced youth’s position in the company will guarantee him the right to create the major woman’s role in Master Shakespeare’s new play. However, Shakespeare in Love stacks the odds against him. Even before we see Sam we hear Gwyneth Paltrow’s Viola de Lesseps snap, ‘Stage love will never be true love while the law of the land has our heroines played by pipsqueak boys in petticoats!’ Sam’s subsequent career bears out Viola’s assertion. He has scarcely appeared and opened his mouth before Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) begins worrying about a hint of baritone in the all-important childish treble. Sam hastily blames it on a touch of cold, but the rather forced soprano in which he does so gives cause for doubt. Later we see the youth being initiated into the mysteries of the brothel, his voice wobbling unmistakably between registers as he grins postcoitally, ‘I quite liked it.’ He has moved into the adult realm where a real man plays with, but does not play, women. A few days later his voice descends into bass range just as he is about to make his first entrance at the première of Romeo and Juliet. Viola appears in time to take the role and to prove her own point by giving a performance convincing beyond Sam’s wildest dreams. The audience at the Curtain gasps on her entrance; as the published screenplay remarks, ‘Nobody has ever seen a BOY PLAYER like this’ (137). To appropriate the title of another work by the film’s co-screenwriter, Tom Stoppard, Viola (unlike Sam) is ‘The Real Thing.’



Introduction 5

Despite Viola’s own flirtation with the joys and perils of theatrical cross-dressing when she disguises herself as the male player Thomas Kent, both her role in Shakespeare in Love and Sam’s are all about being the real thing. Both characters are ultimately unable to sustain their imitation of the opposite gender; they are exposed by biological factors or by lapses of performance. One needs to be a real woman to play a real woman, a real man to play a real man. Like Angelo’s speech to Isabella, the narratives of both Viola and Sam suggest that gender is a product of physiological destiny, which leads inexorably to adult heterosexual relationships. Sam Gosse’s journey to adult manhood (and away from his career as an actor of female roles) exemplifies one way in which early modern English drama and theatrical culture may be appropriated in contemporary performance. The ill-fated love stories of the early modern theatre and even the all-male companies that played them onstage may be used to reinscribe the binary constructions of gender identity promulgated by such popular millennial bestsellers as John Gray’s Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. Men and women are fundamentally different, and hence cannot ‘pass’ for one another. Such affirmations of binarism are problematic on two counts, both of which help to give context for my methodology in this book. The first is their effect on contemporary subjects. Whether on stage or in society at large, ‘women’ and ‘men’ are not straightforward facts, not simple consequences of the emergence of sexed bodies from the wings or the womb. Rather, writes Judith Butler, the experience of a gendered psychic disposition or cultural identity is considered an achievement. Thus, ‘I feel like a woman’ is true to the extent that Aretha Franklin’s invocation of the defining Other is assumed: ‘You make me feel like a natural woman.’ This achievement requires a differentiation from the opposite gender. Hence, one is one’s gender to the extent that one is not the other gender, a formulation that presupposes and enforces the restriction of gender within that binary pair. (Gender Trouble 22) Binary definitions of gender and sexuality grant clear identity to social subjects by differentiating them from their opposite numbers. However, they do so by generalizing. They ignore the important differences between women and between men: differences of race, class, age, economic position, physical appearance and so on, which inflect the socio-political position of a given male or female subject (Threadgold




6–7). They exclude the possibility of identities that fail to fit neatly into one category or another. Sam’s sexual initiation, Viola’s ability to portray ‘true love’ where her male rival failed, and Aretha Franklin’s need for a male partner to make her feel like a natural woman all suggest gender binarism’s tendency towards heterosexism. It is difficult to imagine an Oscar-winning, widely-released film like Shakespeare in Love depicting Sam as achieving adult masculinity through a sexual encounter with, say, Christopher Marlowe. In order to fit into the binary, one must embrace a normative relationship with the ‘opposite sex.’ Even feminist theory and criticism can promulgate these assumptions by positing a universal ‘patriarchy’ in which all men and women are heterosexual, all men oppressors and all women victims. Michel Foucault’s distinction between domination and power is helpful in complicating such notions. In Foucault’s work, ‘whereas “domination” refers to a situation in which the subject is unable to overturn or reverse the domination relation – a situation where resistance is impossible – “power” refers to relations that are flexible, mutable, fluid, and even reversible’ (Sawicki 170). Power is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy; [ ] one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension, rather than a privilege that one might possess; [ ] one should take as its model a perpetual battle, rather than a contract regulating a transaction or the conquest of a territory. In short, this power is exercised rather than possessed. (Foucault, Discipline 174) I find the power model more useful than the domination model when discussing the historical and representational fluidity of gender relations. Throughout this study, I try to avoid the terms ‘patriarchy’ and ‘patriarchal’ except in reference to political and familial systems based on primogeniture and the governance of the father and his heirs. Instead, I use the terms ‘masculinism’ and ‘masculinist power’ to describe relationships that grant discursive and political control to men at the expense of women whilst remaining vulnerable to disruption, variation and revision. In his influential 1971 essay, ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,’ Louis Althusser argues that Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise



Introduction 7


The notion of interpellation is useful insofar as it explains how individual men and women may ‘choose’ to submit to limiting constructions of identity. The ideological conditions in which they live produce these constructions (including the binary opposition between male and female) as natural. Chris Weedon notes that This process relies on a structure of recognition by the individual of herself as the subject of ideology which is also a process of misrecognition. It is misrecognition in the sense that the individual, on assuming the position of the subject in ideology, assumes that she is the author of the ideology which constructs her subjectivity. (30–1) In other words, interpellation produces subjects in both the (seemingly mutually exclusive) senses of ‘thinking or cognizing agent[s] [ ] (Correlative to “Object”)’ (OED, Second Edition, 2.9) and of people ‘in the control or under the dominion of another’ (OED, Second Edition, 1.3.a). Everywhere we encounter images of possible selves and relationships: in families, in schools, in shops, on sporting fields, on theatrical stages, on film screens like those for which Shakespeare in Love was intended. We choose how to respond to these images: which to identify with and which to find risible or reprehensible. But this very process of choice is shaped in turn by the familiar narratives and discourses that ‘make sense’ to us. Shakespeare in Love is founded on one such narrative. This is not to say that the film sets out to make a social or political statement; it merely seeks to entertain. It depicts its early modern characters in an openly anachronistic manner that reflects certain liberal, late twentieth-century Western ideas about gender identity: for example, the notion that women can play female roles better than men can, and should be allowed to appear onstage. But Viola’s triumph in Romeo and Juliet and Sam’s ousting are also satisfying to a contemporary audience partially because that audience takes it for granted that full maturity (for people and for theatres) is equatable with binary gender and heterosexuality. By recognizing ourselves in this narrative, identifying with it and enjoying it, we are, to a certain extent, subjected by it and by its potentially masculinist implications. The spectator of contemporary performances based on early modern playtexts needs to be aware



operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ (162–3)

Introduction 9

and critical of this process if he is to engage fully with their political potential.

For such a spectator, the second problematic aspect of Shakespeare in Love’s binary construction of gender lies in its re-shaping of early modern performance culture to fit its own narrative purposes. Viola dismisses the very notion that a boy whose ‘fingers were red from fighting’ and who ‘spoke like a schoolboy at lessons’ could convey ‘true love’ or true femininity. When she enters as Juliet at the film’s climax, the audience instinctively recognizes her superiority to the usual ‘BOY PLAYER.’ As Phyllis Rackin notes in her consideration of this sequence, ‘[i]n Shakespeare’s time, the assumption seems to have been just the opposite’ (73). She cites English Thomas Coryate’s description of his experiences in a Venetian theatre at the beginning of the seventeenth century: I saw women act, a thing that I never saw before, though I have heard that it hath been sometimes used in London, and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture, and whatsoever convenient for a player, as ever I saw any masculine actor. (Coryate 247, quoted in Rackin 73) Coryate was pleasantly surprised to find that women could play women as effectively as men could do. His contemporary, George Sandys, was less impressed by performances he saw in Sicily at about the same time: ‘There have they their playhouses, where the parts of women are acted by women, and too naturally passionated’ (247–8). Women’s playing of female parts appears to have lacked the art Sandys associated with good acting. Clearly, neither he nor Coryate shared Shakespeare in Love’s assumption that male actors will play female roles less effectively than women. A politically engaged spectator may find it useful to keep such viewpoints in mind when considering the representations of gender that have come down to us in early modern playtexts. In Shakespeare in Love, the great Bard of Avon writes his female characters with real women in mind, and would clearly prefer to see them performed by real women were his society only a little less restrictive. Sandys’ comments suggest, conversely, that direct mimesis of gender identity as it was encountered in everyday life might have been neither the chief goal of early modern playwrights and actors nor the chief criterion of their



III. ‘No one has ever seen a BOY PLAYER like this’


audiences’ judgements. A number of recent critics have suggested that the presence of male actors in female roles proves that early modern playwrights, actors and audiences were more interested in masculinist images of feminine identity than in ‘real’ femininity. Lisa Jardine, for instance, argues that ‘when a critic tells us that the Jacobean dramatist shows peculiar insight into female character, what he or she means is that a convincing portrayal of female psychology is given from a distinctively masculine standpoint’ (69, emphasis Jardine’s). Sue-Ellen Case, too, concludes that the early modern English theatre was guilty of ‘suppressing real women and replacing them with masks of patriarchal production’ (7). Dympna Callaghan’s Shakespeare Without Women underlines the multiple ways in which women were excluded from agency and participation in the early modern theatre. In such discussions, the figure Harley Granville-Barker dubbed the ‘boy actress’ (14) emerges as the spectacular image of feminine being in a society where woman’s identity is controlled by masculine will. If a politically engaged spectator accepts this notion, then she must consider the idea that some (if not all) early modern female roles were shaped by the same constructions of femininity that appear in many early modern English conduct books. For example, the 1603 edition of A Godly Form of Household (attributed to Robert Cleaver) declares that as the looking-glasse, howsoever faire and beautifully adorned, is nothing worth, if it shew that countenance sad, which is pleasant: or the same pleasant, that is sad: so the woman deserveth no commendation, that (as it were) contrarying her husband, when he is merie, sheweth her selfe sad; or in his sadnesse uttereth her mirth. (P3r ) Similarly, a speaker in Edmond Tilney’s dialogue The Flower of Friendship (1573) exhorts a new-made wife to make her husband’s face ‘hir daylie looking glasse, wherein she ought to be alwaies prying, to see when he is merie, when sad, when content and when discontent, wherto she must always frame hir owne countenance’ (138). Just so, in his 2000 play, Cressida, contemporary playwright Nicholas Wright imagines early modern boy actresses learning to portray femininity by imitating the conventional gestures demonstrated by male teachers. In this view, the feminine identities portrayed on the early modern stage are not independent of masculine identity, but rather shaped by and reflexive of it. Contemporary interpreters of early modern drama cannot ignore such possibilities, but nor can they afford too easily to dismiss early modern English culture as unequivocally misogynist. In Shakespeare



10

and Women, Phyllis Rackin convincingly decries the tendency of much feminist criticism to focus only on ‘the story of patriarchal oppression’ in early modern England (9). Just as Shakespeare in Love emphasizes gender binarism to construct a narrative of Hollywood romance, so, argues Rackin, contemporary criticism emphasizes gender binarism to construct a narrative of misogyny and female disempowerment. In the process, it may place too much importance on conduct books’ efforts to confine gender identities and too little importance on the moments where even such proscriptive texts recognize the impact of female agency. For example, in the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to William Gouge’s highly conservative marriage tract, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), the clergyman author admits that ‘when these Domesticall Duties were first uttered out of the pulpit, much exception was taken against the application of a wives subiection to the restraining of her from disposing the common goods of the family without, or against the husbands consent’ (3v ); clearly, some voices (female or male) spoke up in favour of a measure of feminine autonomy. Rackin notes many instances where early modern women held social and legal power that affected men’s lives: ‘Shakespeare’s mother, for instance, although she had nine older sisters and two older brothers, inherited the only freehold property her father bequeathed and served as one of his two executors’ (33). From queens and duchesses to drovers and weavers, early modern women shaped, as well as submitted to, men’s identities. Other critics have resisted the notion that early modern ‘boy actresses’ embodied successful male dominance. In Men in Women’s Clothing, Laura Levine traces the obsession of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antitheatrical pamphleteers with the idea that cross-dressing on stage could result in loss of masculinity for actor and spectator. She notes that early modern anti-theatrical writers such as Stephen Gosson and Antony Munday viewed the fact that ‘he must become the part in order to play it well’ as ‘the real danger for the actor’ (14). The man who played a woman risked losing his masculine identity within the feminine one he portrayed. His male spectators faced equally great risks. They might, in Philip Stubbes’ words, be tempted to ‘play the Sodomits, or worse’ (Anatomy Sig. L8v ). Though many contemporary readers have jumped to find a reference to homosexuality in Stubbes’ words, his most recent editor, M.J. Kidnie, suggests that Stubbes’ reference to ‘Sodomits’ is likely ‘focused primarily on interaction between members of the opposite sex,’ as he elsewhere uses the term to describe sinners who ‘have sex for fun with someone to whom they are not married’ (34–5). Fired with



Introduction 11


desire for the represented women they saw on stage, the boy actress’ audiences might turn to real-life women to satisfy that desire, becoming effeminized by the lover’s dependence on his mistress. Levine’s arguments rest problematically on the writings of a handful of radical Protestant polemics, whose authors Carol Rutter justly describes as members of ‘the lunatic fringe of Early Modern spectatorly response’ (‘Learning’ 8). Nevertheless, such visions of the ‘boy actress’ are useful insofar as they remind us that early modern constructions of gender were less stable than conduct book dictums would suggest. Perhaps the process of reflection between masculine and feminine identities in this culture went both ways. After all, writes Bruce R. Smith, Galen’s one-sex theory of the human body [which influenced many early modern theories of anatomy] located masculinity not in the possession of distinctive sexual organs (man’s equipment was imagined to be an extruded version of women’s) but in behaviour. To become effeminate was an ever-present possibility. (Shakespeare and Masculinity 106) If this is true, argues Stephen Orgel, in the figure of the boy actress early modern theatre holds the mirror up to nature – or more precisely, to culture: this is a world in which masculinity is always in question. In the discourses of patriarchy, gender is the least certain of boundaries. [ ] [T]he dangerous possibility [ ] is articulated in innumerable ways throughout this society, [ ] that women might not be objects but subjects, not the other but the self. (153) On the other hand, as Dympna Callaghan sharply reminds Orgel, these uncertain gender boundaries were not, in fact, ‘sufficiently flexible to allow women on the stage’ (Shakespeare 14). Boys or young men, likely aged between twelve and twenty-two, played women’s roles on the early modern professional stage in England (Kathman 220). Their sexual attractions remain subjects of scholarly controversy, as does the question of whether early modern audiences accepted their presence as mere theatrical convention (Dawson, ‘Performance’ 40; Rutter, Enter 179; McLuskie, ‘The Act’) or remained sharply aware of the gender difference between the actor and his role (Stallybrass, ‘Transvestitism’). But we can say with some certainty that they were not simply dismissed as inadequate performers of femininity.



12

On the early modern stage, moreover, kings were not played by kings, moors by moors or country gentlemen by country gentlemen any more than women were played by women. The politically engaged spectator of early modern drama needs to be alert to the fact that playtext characters may be shaped by heroic ideals or cultural nightmares, glorified or demonized images of masculinity or femininity; they are not narrowly mimetic of ‘real’ people. Yet they may reflect, not only the rigid constructions of gender difference that shaped some aspects of early modern English thought, but also the inter-dependent and relational nature of lived early modern gender identities.

IV. Paradigms of performance Early in the twentieth century, Harley Granville-Barker counselled modern Shakespearean actresses to think themselves into the position of the early modern boy players, distancing themselves from their own ‘feminine charm’ in order to focus on the rhetoric of Shakespeare’s texts (Prefaces 15). Of Twelfth Night, for example, he wrote that ‘[t]he most important aspect of the play must be viewed, to view it rightly, with Elizabethan eyes. Viola was played, and was meant to be played, by a boy’ (Prefaces 28). Granville-Barker’s efforts to rediscover ‘Shakespeare’s effects by Shakespeare’s means’ (Prefaces 23) bore much fruit in theatrical productions of the later twentieth century, as critical works such as J.L. Styan’s The Shakespeare Revolution attest. This particular suggestion, however, has had little apparent impact on contemporary performers. In her exploration of recent performances of Shakespeare’s comic heroines, Penny Gay remarks thankfully that ‘we are no longer obliged by theatrical convention to watch adolescent boys playing [ ] female roles’ through an imitation of established social ‘codes of femininity’ (16). Instead, contemporary spectators see the roles written for boy actresses performed by women who tend to use their own experiences in order to make early modern female roles ‘as complex in performance as men’s’ (Rutter, Clamorous xxvii). This seems an obvious step forward from the days of the boy actresses, yet it raises problems fundamental to the politically engaged spectator’s experience of early modern drama in contemporary performance. The assumption that an actor who can identify directly with her character and bring psychological complexity to her performance is automatically better than one who performs in a more formal and presentational matter is a hallmark of ‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’ modes of acting,1 as exemplified in the influential work of the great Russian actor,



Introduction 13


director and teacher, Konstantin Stanislavski. Stanislavski’s ‘system,’ outlined in such influential works as An Actor Prepares and embodied in his legendary productions for the Moscow Art Theatre, offers actors tools with which to create characters who seem real and believable, as opposed to stagey and conventionalized. Since Stanislavski’s understanding of human subjectivity is profoundly affected by the rising science of psychology, reality and believability are for him inseparable from psychological depth and consistency. Affective memory casts the actor back into her past in search of experiences that link her emotionally to the character she portrays, while the ‘magic if’ projects her into a world of imagination where the fictional events on stage become actuality. She can then provide ‘given circumstances’ to contextualize and explain her characters’ actions, and a ‘super-objective’ that lucidly ties all of those actions together. In one permutation or another, this model of the acting process proved overwhelmingly influential on mainstream stage and screen performance in the twentieth century, particularly in the Englishspeaking world. A glance at contemporary Shakespearean actors’ accounts of their own performances in such works as Carol Rutter’s Clamorous Voices or the Players of Shakespeare series shows how profoundly naturalistic acting styles shape much of the work of British theatre’s most prominent producer of early modern drama, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). In the former work, for instance, we find Sinead Cusack describing the given circumstances or ‘back story’ she created for Lady Macbeth, in which the loss of a child helps psychologically to explain and humanize the character’s obsession with her husband’s success (56–7). In Players of Shakespeare 3, similarly, Roger Allam describes how he transformed the Duke in Measure for Measure from a chilly and alienating figure to a sympathetic and moving one by portraying him as a man working his way through a nervous breakdown (21–41). Such methods are typical, not only of the fervently mainstream RSC, but also of artists who construct their work in opposition to it. Declan Donnellan, artistic director of the much younger and more experimental Cheek by Jowl, has written a treatise on the acting process (The Actor and the Target) explicitly modelled on the works of Stanislavski. As we shall see, even American director Julie Taymor, avowedly anti-realist in her stagecraft, nevertheless uses the vocabulary of psychological motivation and complexity when discussing the characterizations in her film, Titus. Although (or perhaps because) it so dominates mainstream practice in the United Kingdom and North America, naturalistic acting has



14

come under increasing fire from politically engaged scholars of performance. Within the Stanislavskian paradigm, dramatic character reflects the interior reality and psychology of a unique individual, often represented as opposed to, or even as having comparatively little to do with, the shaping power of social discourses. Such constructions of character may limit actors to the repetition of those gestures and actions that pass for natural in contemporary Western society as a whole. They may also limit audiences to perceiving such gestures and actions as the product of individual psychologies and/or universal human traits. Little room is left for other constructions of identity: as relational, as interdependent, as the product of shifting and contingent social conventions. Little room, in short, is left for the ambiguities that might have been suggested by the performances of the early modern boy actress. Hence, W.B. Worthen argues that ‘although recent stagings of Shakespearean drama have often engaged the themes of gender, class, race and empire, such thematics are conceived as ways of exploring—rather than unseating—conventional conceptions of character’ (Authority 127). Sarah Werner agrees: ‘[a]n acting method that finds meaning solely within a character’s psychology will overlook the ways in which the character’s speech (and lack of it) participates in a pattern of meaning that does not reside in plot or character analysis’ (36)—for instance, in the discourse of binary gender. The entrance of liberal feminism into mainstream Western culture in the 1970s and 1980s brought new energy to institutions such as the RSC and informed new readings of Shakespeare’s characters (as Clamorous Voices, in particular, inspiringly attests). Because naturalism retained its dominance, however, the performances of even the most feminist actors tended not to question the assumption that Shakespeare’s representations of women and men, instead of reflecting historically contingent constructions of gender identity, somehow offered transcendent truths about what it means to be female or male. Should the politically engaged spectator committed to a critique of gender binarism, then, utterly reject mainstream performance in favour of (say) the performance art of Karen Finley, or the avowedly queer theatre of Split Britches: theatrical works which explicitly critique conventionalized gender roles and binaries? Some critics have indeed taken this route with fruitful results. Yet, much extraordinary recent work on Shakespearean performance has struggled instead to evolve new, anti-naturalistic modes of reading mainstream performance. Barbara Hodgdon has suggested that ‘something like a new characterology is in process, taking place and being shaped by the bodies of



Introduction 15


performers’ (Shakespeare Trade 38). Anthony B. Dawson considers the actor’s body as participant in (rather than agent or subject of) representation, and argues that this ‘feeling, personating body’ neither conquers nor is conquered by, but exists in dialogue with the body produced by discursive structures of spectatorship and identification (‘Performance’ 41). Rutter’s Enter the Body and Pascale Aebischer’s Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies apply these insights to the uncomfortable and challenging spectacles of suffering and dead bodies in Shakespearean theatre and film. Jonathan Holmes’ Merely Players explores the ways in which actors’ discourse about their work, even when informed by realist models of character, can nevertheless call those models into question. And Bridget Escolme’s Talking to the Audience reminds us eloquently of the powerful transactions in which stage actors speak directly to the spectators who share their physical space, talking ‘from the perspective of a fiction in which their human subjectivities are unstable and worked for, just as their relationships with the audience are’ (150). In this study, I want to take a slightly different approach, not only by returning to the process by which contemporary actors and directors work with early modern text in order to construct characters, but by considering how the characters so constructed can be interpreted by politically engaged spectators. I hope to make room for the disruptive potential even of apparently conservative theatrical and cinematic productions. My project is driven partly by a sense that total rejections of such productions tend to lock us within a limiting model of performance and spectatorship. For example, in Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, Worthen uses actors’ and directors’ descriptions of their work much as he uses critics’ books and articles: to expose the authors’ underlying assumptions and to problematize their constructions of Shakespeare and of character. He assumes a direct correlation between what actors are trained to do, what they write about what they do and what actually appears on stage when they perform. He recognizes the precariousness of his approach, but admits, ‘I am less concerned to interrogate performance per se here than to consider the attitudes and assumptions that govern its making and reception’ (Authority 42). This has the merit of shifting authorship away from the Immortal Bard and towards theatre artists working today, but by implying that actors’ and directors’ intentions correlate directly with their performances’ meanings Worthen forecloses the spectator’s interpretive options before the curtain rises. As David McCandless writes, it seems a mistake ‘to take the rhetoric of the training as the limit of its effect’ (Gender 29).



16

Introduction 17

he suggests that it is advisable at times for an actor consciously to alter her experiences prior to recording them in memory so as to make them ‘more interesting and suited to the theatre than the actual truth’. [ ] Despite his commitment to the ideal of selfpresence, Stanislavski seems to realize that the self does not exist independently of the processes by which it is revealed to itself and to others[.] (31–2) In other words, ‘Stanislavski states that the actor’s self is the basis of performance, but his own working out of this idea leads him to posit that the self is produced by the very process of acting it is said to ground’ (Auslander 36). Like Angelo’s speech to Isabella, Stanislavski’s system is an apparently essentialist discourse undercut by its own emphasis on the importance of performance in the production of identity. Auslander’s reading thus raises the possibility that the master’s system might contain some seeds of disruption within its totalizing structure. As McCandless notes, while ‘the effects of interiority and continuity produced by Stanislavski-derived approaches may be employed to construct an essentialist self, they conduce equally to delineating the adaptive, decentered self’ (Gender 29). Most contemporary classical actors describe the characters they represent in terms that reproduce naturalistic notions of character, but if we allow for the possibility that their performances might also work to reveal contradictions buried in dominant discourses of identity, then we might find a surprisingly rich range of constructions of the self on this stage after all.

V. Performance and the performative subject The methodology with which I search for these constructions is informed by many strands of feminist theory which appear in chapters to come. Its key influence, however, is the work of Judith Butler. Like Auslander, Butler argues that what we perceive and experience as our self-identity, our internal coherence, is not prior to, but rather is produced through, the social codes and discourses that establish gender and power. In a formulation that correlates with Auslander’s critique



A useful balance to Worthen’s methodology is supplied by Philip Auslander’s reading of Stanislavski. Stanislavski’s theory rests on the notion that actor and character both possess an unmediated and accessible inner life (see Roach, Player’s Passion 206). But Auslander notes that Stanislavski’s writing also contradicts this idea, as when


of Stanislavski, she insists that there is ‘no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (25). In describing gender as ‘performative,’ a term she takes from the linguistic theory of J.L. Austin, Butler means that it ‘constitute[s] the identity it is purported to be’ (Gender Trouble 25); we are not born male or female, but instead we ‘do’ male or female and through our citations of gender norms keep those norms (and our own cultural intelligibility) in place. Calling gender ‘performative’ is not the same as calling it ‘voluntary,’ however, for performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. (Bodies 95) We do not choose our identities but are constituted as agents and subjects by social discourses that slot us from birth into the repetition of hegemonic social norms. This is not to say that dominant norms are immutable, or that human beings are powerless to effect change. Butler proposes that ‘even if we accept the phantasmatic content of identity, there is no reason to assume that the law which fixes the terms of that fantasy is impervious to historical variability and possibility’ (Gender Trouble 66). Each subject’s ‘[i]dentifications are multiple and contestatory’ (Bodies 99), producing ‘conflicts, convergences, and innovative dissonances within gender configurations which contest the fixity of masculine and feminine placements with respect to the paternal law’ (Gender Trouble 67). In other words, our replications of the discourses that produce our identities might ‘miscite’ them in ways that call their power into question. In Gender Trouble, Butler discusses drag as one example of a cultural situation in which ‘parodic repetition’ might take place; by taking on the dress, speech and gestures associated with masculinity, a drag king may undermine the notion that these behaviours are natural products of male bodies. On the other hand, she or he may simply be seen as an excessive exception that proves the rule of normative femininity and masculinity. Butler recognizes that ‘drag is not unproblematically subversive’ (231), but suggests that it may open up a situation in which established gender binaries can be called into question. She argues that we need to seek such moments of denaturalization in multiple domains



18

in order to ‘displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself’ (Gender Trouble 148). Performance might seem an excellent place to execute such a search, since the theatrical conventions and repetitions by which it creates ‘character’ remind us of the conventions and repetitions that ground social identity. But Butler is notoriously uncomfortable with a definition of gender that would associate its performativity with theatricality. She writes that performance as bounded ‘act’ is distinguished from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘will’ or ‘choice’; further, what is ‘performed’ works to conceal, if not to disavow, what remains opaque, unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake. (Bodies 234) Butler’s subject is founded by performative repetitions that he cannot control (or often even recognize). The contemporary actor, on the other hand, generally thinks of himself as a conscious, individual agent who can make specific choices about the part he is playing. One might object, however, that this situation does not radically separate the theatre from the so-called ‘real world’. According to Butler’s argument, social discourses produce the illusions of agency and of interiority. The individual thus produced may be convinced that she is consciously bodying forth the real humanity that arises from inside her while in fact remaining trapped in a forced and largely unconscious reproduction of social norms. Butler’s disdain for theatricality stems from the same assumptions as Worthen’s reading of Shakespearean performance practice. Both reject the natural and naturalism, intentionality and interiority, as effective modes of representing the social world. Nevertheless, both make some surprisingly naturalist and intentionalist assumptions about the theatre. Both define performance in terms of its relationship to the conscious will of the actor who uses her fixed identity to embody that of her character. In the process, they play down the theatre’s profound participation in the assumptions that structure society at large. They deny the possibility that, no matter what actors and directors may say offstage, their productions can body forth the contingent nature of hegemonic gender constructions precisely by playing them out. Most of all, they deny the possibility that theatrical spectators can perform what Butler calls



Introduction 19


‘subversive reiterations’ by learning to watch even the most apparently conventional productions with an eye on exposures of ‘abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction’ (Butler, Gender Trouble 141). Elin Diamond argues that performance remains a ‘site in which performativity materializes in concentrated form, where the concealed or dissimulated conventions of which acts are mere repetitions might be investigated and reimagined’ (47). Spectators can learn to read theatrical representations of all kinds both for hegemonic constructions of gender identity and for moments at which such constructions are denaturalized. Such a mode of reading is particularly suitable to the study of early modern tragedy in performance. Most performances of early modern playtexts give voice to words that are not ours, words marked by alien constructions of identity and value, even as the bodies of contemporary actors and the mise-en-scène within which they perform translate those words into our meanings. As Erika Fischer-Lichte writes, From the script of the play one can understand the role as a symbolic order that may be described as a particular historical concept of identity. By enacting this role, the actor onstage reproduces this symbolic order, in which history has engraved its traces, sometimes more, sometimes less deeply, by means of the actor’s own contemporary body. [ ] Therefore, the identity of the dramatic character onstage [ ] necessarily points to and participates in two different discourses: that of the culture (epoch/society) within which the play was written and that of contemporary culture. Thus, the identity of the dramatic character onstage always represents a certain kind of mediation between a former culture and this culture. (301–2) Such mediation may result in moments that underline the contradictions within and between discourses. Politically engaged spectators can—and should—try to catch these moments of contradiction, for they are tools in the struggle to denaturalize (and perhaps even to subvert) the norms of binary gender. The key point here is not what the actor does with the dramatic character, but rather what the spectator does with what the actor does. While watching the performance, the spectator can consider alternative meanings: alternative ways of interpreting the gestures he sees and the tones he hears, alternative ways of performing the same words and actions. To be sure, the imaginable alternatives are themselves limited by the dominant discourses of the spectator’s culture. Because naturalistic acting so dominates mainstream Anglo-North American theatre



20

and film, most contemporary spectators are used to equating it with good acting (Escolme 152); to call a performance ‘artificial’ or ‘inorganic’ is generally an insult. Even so, other models of acting are available, and even a naturalistic performance need not be interpreted in purely naturalistic terms. Instead of seeking out consistency and clarity, a spectator may embrace the contradictions and tensions that undermine hegemonic regimes of performance and identity from within.

VI. Tragedy, performance and the spectator In order to explore the possibilities and limitations of such a strategy, this book considers a series of recent stage and screen performances based on early modern English tragedies. The condition of great tragedy, writes Raymond Williams, is ‘the real tension between old and new: between received beliefs, embodied in institutions and responses, and newly and vividly experienced contradictions and possibilities’ (54). The tragic hero struggles against the ineluctable effects of time, fate and socio-political order, finally succumbing to them in a blaze of pyrrhic glory. From Oedipus to Othello to Willy Loman, the tragic hero has offered spectators a hyperbolized image of the human animal trapped within rigid religious, social or cultural codes of conduct, yet simultaneously estranged from them by force or by choice. Hence, he offers audiences in search of the fissures within dominant social structures an endlessly fruitful object of study. I use the word ‘he’ deliberately, for from Aristotle onwards the tragic subject has traditionally been gendered male. In his 1923 Introduction to Dramatic Theory, Allardyce Nicoll goes so far as to assert that the ‘feminine in high tragedy [ ] must either be made hard, approaching the masculine in quality, or else be relegated to a position of minor importance in the development of the plot’ (109). Yet, scholars such as Dympna Callaghan, Lisa Hopkins and Naomi Conn Liebler have convincingly demonstrated the extent to which women, as well as men, take on the tragic hero’s role in early modern drama. As Liebler writes, ‘it is in the nature of the [tragic] genre to present the agon of a protagonist who will, for a variety of reasons, be destroyed in its process. The female tragic hero engages in a struggle exactly as rigorous, exactly as dangerous, and exactly as futile as that of any of her masculine counterparts’ (2). In early modern tragedy, both male and female characters ‘serve not just to define limits but also to uncover the limiting structures of society’ (Callaghan, Women 63).



Introduction 21


In the six plays I consider, male and female tragic subjects are both shaped and destroyed by, both submissive to and defiant of, received beliefs about gender and sexuality. In order to emphasize the cracks within even the most apparently hegemonic social orders, I have chosen to focus on tragedies whose tragic heroes try (however temporarily or unsuccessfully) to remain within the bounds of their societies’ normative codes of gender. Male characters struggle to embody patriarchal roles by governing their kingdoms, their families and themselves; women strive to function as daughters, wives and mothers. Their efforts to do the right thing result in instances of violence, madness, imprisonment and death that highlight the contradictions within their social orders. With its inversions of authority, class and gender, comedy offers a fantasy of escape from social constraints; tragedy enacts a fantasy of entrapment that allows us to see those constraints and their effects more clearly. I read theatrical and film performances of my chosen tragedies as texts in their own right: that is, as purveyors of signification distinct from, but involved in exchange with, the playtexts that anchor and inform them (see Hodgdon, End 18–19; ‘He Do Cressida’ 19). The playtexts I consider span forty years of the early modern English theatre, but the historical period that really circumscribes this project is that of the performances treated: the final two decades of the twentieth century in England and America. The first production I treat dates from 1984, the last from 2000. This time-span saw an exceptional number of major productions of early modern tragedy (Bennett 80). More importantly, it witnessed the confirmation of feminism as a political force in society and the production of much groundbreaking feminist scholarship in the academy. My chosen period offers both a wealth of performance material and a framework of feminist theory in which to ground my exploration of the interplay between early modern playtexts; contemporary actors, directors and spectators; and current and past constructions of masculinity and femininity. Materialist practice dictates that a project such as this should recognize playtexts and performance texts as part of a wider field of cultural material (Hodgdon, Shakespeare Trade xiii). It requires consideration of cultural texts ranging from early modern conduct manuals to recent medical arguments about anorexia. Even more, it demands an exploration of the material realities of theatrical production that informed the writing of early modern playtexts, and of the very different material realities that inform their performance today. Thus, I examine early modern writing about the theatre alongside the writing of contemporary actors, directors, theatre critics and theorists. I read these as contextual



22

materials, indices of the theatre’s place and reception in culture, rather than as definitive statements on the meaning(s) of given performances. In particular, I make extensive use of press and academic reviews of the productions I discuss in order to give a detailed picture of the production’s choices and to offer a sense of its reception among one sector of its audience. I do not look to them for authoritative readings of productions, for reviews are always selective evaluations informed by the social positioning of their authors. This partiality is precisely what gives reviews their value, since, as Cary M. Mazer writes, ‘a period’s definitions permeate the way critics sum up their own experience in the playhouse’ (‘Shakespeare’ 658). Theatre reviews open a window on the range of interpretations to which a particular production was subject and the ways in which those interpretations reflected the investments of particular viewers. A glimpse through another such window is the best this study can hope to provide. My interpretations of the performances in question generally depend on multiple encounters with video recordings of the productions in question, which place them at a double remove from the playhouse encounter between theatrical actors and spectators, or from the darkened cinemas in which motion pictures are intended for exhibition. Recordings make it feasible to examine some production choices more minutely than would be possible for a first-time spectator in a theatre or cinema. On the other hand, because of technological limitations of various kinds they often fail to reproduce important components of performance. Details of setting, facial expression or gesture may be erased by dim archival recordings of theatrical productions; DVD and video recordings of films may cut off parts of shots or may cut into discrete ‘chapters’ what was intended for unbroken viewing. Theatrical performances in particular are evanescent and change from night to night. Archival videos substitute the chimera of a stable performance text for the reality of a production that existed in a state of flux and now is gone forever. In the analyses that follow, the acting choices and moments I discuss are those recorded by video and corroborated, as far as possible, by promptbooks, production records and screenplays. They do not represent the only choices and moments that could be associated with these productions. My own imagination, ideological investments and habitual modes of viewing have undoubtedly shaped the ‘performances’ I reconstruct. As Peter Holland writes, the theatrical audience always ‘fragments into its constituent individualities, dissolving the myth of a unity of reception and creating instead an unassimilable and unmeasurable diversity’



Introduction 23


(English Shakespeares 19). The politically engaged critic cannot indicate what whole audiences thought about a production; she can only trace her own interventions with those components of a performance and its reception that her temporal and ideological positions allow her to see. This study, then, does not offer authoritative generalizations about late twentieth-century performances of early modern tragedy. It only aims to read them in a manner that reflects my own investment in exposing the simultaneous power and vulnerability of hegemonic gender discourses. To that end, I emphasize the moments of performance and reading in which binary systems of gender are most clearly inscribed and most subtly disrupted. Prominent among such moments are: representations of the traffic in women on the marriage market and of the kinship relations (especially between father and daughter, brother and sister, husband and wife) that affect it; depictions of social relations, such as those of class, that affect the construction of gender; representations of desire and of the gaze; and versions of the heavily gendered spectacles of suffering, madness and death. In particular, I am interested in the performance choices that reproduce and transform the meanings of such moments for contemporary spectators. I do not examine them in broad terms, offering comparative analytical performance histories of particular playtexts. That dialogical-historical method is superbly illustrated in Susan Bennett’s Performing Nostalgia, in the Manchester University Press Shakespeare in Performance series, and in the work of Hodgdon, Aebischer, Rutter and many others. I have taken another path, deliberately focusing on specific performances of single playtexts in the hope of offering a nuanced sense of the contradictions and tensions laced into them. Given this restricted focus, my analysis inevitably treats only a small (and not necessarily representative) percentage of the vast range of performances of early modern tragedy to appear in the period in question. My selection of performance texts has been affected by my wish to explore differences and similarities between recent treatments of works by major early modern tragic dramatists. Most academic and popular criticism of early modern drama in contemporary performance is dominated by the much-performed and culturally influential works of William Shakespeare. The less-performed works of his contemporaries deserve much more attention precisely because their relative unfamiliarity may help politically engaged spectators to spot the strangeness and contingency of early modern gender norms rather than accepting them as the universal truths often associated with the Immortal Bard. Thus, playtexts by Shakespeare figure here alongside playtexts by Webster,



24

Marlowe, Ford and Heywood. The contingencies of their recent performance history determine the contours of my discussion; half the productions I consider were created by the RSC, for its strong focus on work from the age of Shakespeare creates performance opportunities for his contemporaries that other companies do not. The eight productions treated here illustrate the approaches of a range of practitioners working in both theatre and film, in the mainstream and the avant-garde, and in a variety of venues. In the end, however, my selections were inspired by my fascination with particular performances and with the questions they raised for me. I have structured my discussion according to the progression of these questions, rather than in chronological order based on the dates of the playtexts or performance texts. The book’s first part, ‘Realism and Reinscription,’ considers performances that use realist, Stanislavskian acting techniques to depict characters who fail or refuse to conform fully to limiting constructions of gender. Frances Barber’s avowedly ‘feminist,’ psychologically complex Ophelia opposite Roger Rees’ delicate, feminized Hamlet in Ron Daniels’ 1984 RSC Hamlet; the depictions of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, her chosen husband and her male tormentors in two apparently dissimilar productions by Bill Alexander (RSC, 1989) and Declan Donnellan (Cheek by Jowl, 1995); and the performances of parenthood that dominate Julie Taymor’s 2000 film Titus: all frequently end by reinscribing the very gender binarism they try to call into question. However, they also provide us with glimpses of gender identities that are overtly shaped by social construction, clearly based on social relationships as well as on an assumed individual interiority. In the book’s second part, ‘Performance and Performativity,’ I explore productions that focus on such socially constructed, relational identities. Derek Jarman’s ‘queer’ film version of Marlowe’s Edward II (1991), Michael Boyd’s ghostly production of Ford’s The Broken Heart (RSC, 1994) and Katie Mitchell’s intimate interpretation of Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness stage numerous characters who strive assiduously to embody socially sanctioned gender norms rather than to resist them. I suggest that such performances may critique the repetitions that found gender identity more effectively than those that strive to escape from repetition altogether. By emphasizing the relational and interdependent nature of male and female identities, these productions invite politically engaged spectators to deconstruct the absolute nature of binary gender distinctions. Through a final consideration of Laurence Boswell’s 1999 production of Hamlet at the Young Vic, my ‘Conclusion’ stresses the potentially



Introduction 25


important roles played by actors and theatrical spectators in establishing a vision of gender relations, not as intransigent hierarchical power structures, but as sites of historical struggle and change. The identities of characters, actors and spectators alike are trapped ‘within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat,’ but contemporary performances of early modern tragedy can also remind us of the possibility of variations on that repetition (Butler, Gender Trouble 45). Such a reminder is more crucial than ever in early twenty-first-century Britain and North America. As I write, the secular liberalism which informed many of the productions I discuss is being forced to recognize its own limitations; men and women shaped by quite different cultural discourses are changing, as well as being changed by, Western society. On the world stage as on the theatrical one, apparently opposing constructions of identity are placed in dialogue—or into conflict—with one another. If we can learn to pay closer attention to the products of their negotiations, we may begin to wear our own destined liveries with a difference.



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Part I

When women have their choices, commonly They do but buy their thraldoms, and bring great portions To men to keep ’em in subjection. —Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women



Realism and Reinscription




What We Are, But Not What We May Be: The Feminist Ophelia and the (Re)production of Gender

I. The ‘I’ of Ophelia Among early modern tragic heroines, few rival the power of Hamlet’s ‘fair Ophelia’1 over the Western cultural imagination. Her iconic status is inextricably linked to the stage’s role as a site for the reinforcement of culturally established gender norms. From the Restoration theatre to the nineteenth-century opera house, and from the canvases of Millais and Hughes to the Animated Tales of Shakespeare, her flower-decked form has been appropriated to perpetuate normative discourses of femininity. When critics return to Shakespeare’s playtext in search of a more complex and coherent portrait of feminine identity, they often find only masculinist constructions of frail and passive womanhood. In most representations, Ophelia remains the epitome of Luce Irigaray’s ‘virginal woman,’ who in and of herself simply ‘does not exist’ (186). Even at the moments of her greatest prominence in Hamlet’s narrative, Ophelia lacks autonomy and agency. For example, near the midpoint of Shakespeare’s playtext the King and Polonius plan to place her in Hamlet’s way and watch the results. Debarred from participation at this inquest into her son’s madness, Gertrude turns to the young woman she later claims to have hoped would be his bride: I shall obey you. – And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish That your good beauties be the happy cause 29



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Of Hamlet’s wildness. So shall I hope your virtues Will bring him to his wonted way again, To both your honours.

Ophelia’s response is limited to simple agreement: ‘Madam, I wish it may’ (3.1.42). Her actions and ideas seem determined more by those around her than by herself. How does a contemporary actress cope with such a limited representation of feminine identity and agency? In 1984, Frances Barber played Ophelia to Roger Rees’ Hamlet in Ron Daniels’ RSC production of Hamlet. It would be difficult to imagine a more mainstream staging of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Framed by the institutions most intimately connected with the authority of the immortal Bard, Daniels’ staging opened at the RST in Stratford-upon-Avon. It set the play in a gorgeous Jacobean court, explicitly evoking a Shakespearean rather than a twentieth-century milieu. Some critics saw it as a ‘regression’ from earlier productions that had emphasized the play’s contemporary relevance (Shrimpton, ‘Shakespearean Performances’ 209). It hardly looked a likely breeding-ground for a feminist reading of Ophelia; but Frances Barber’s essay on her performance, which appears in the second volume of Jackson and Smallwood’s Players of Shakespeare, claims that it was. Particularly notable is Barber’s description of her Ophelia’s response to Gertrude’s good wishes in the scene described above, which, she notes, caused ‘an ongoing disagreement between Ron and me as to how I delivered the line “Madam, I wish it may”.’ Barber writes, I emphasized the ‘I’, causing the director to groan each time the scene was played. I was desperate to indicate that the only reason she had agreed to participate in the encounter set up by Polonius was to help Hamlet, hence I wish it may reassemble his wandering mind, as well as the queen. (142) Barber won this argument; her emphasis on the ‘I’ is clearly audible on the RSC archive video of a performance that took place near the end of the production’s two-season run. Barber’s delivery of the line suggested an Ophelia who actively shared Gertrude’s wishes for Hamlet. Moreover, by emphasizing ‘I,’ Barber located an I: a self-willed subject behind the maidenly exterior sketched by her tightly laced gown and primly dressed



(3.1.37–42)

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hair. At the moment in Shakespeare’s playtext when Ophelia is most completely managed by her father and her king, Barber insisted that she was something much more than a puppet. Earlier in her essay, Barber notes another dialogue between herself and Ron Daniels: ‘ “Frankie, you can’t play her as a feminist, it’s not in the text.” “Oh but it is, Ron, oh but it is” ’ (139). Sarah Werner takes this passage as exemplary of ‘the obstacles that actors can face in reinterpreting characters’ (31). A ‘feminist’ interpretation of Ophelia is difficult to achieve, not so much because the conflation of quartos and folios Daniels describes as Shakespeare’s ‘text’ offers a stable vision of Ophelia, as because of the vast accretion of masculinist constructions around the role. In her essay, ‘Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,’ Elaine Showalter has shown how each succeeding age has tailored Ophelia’s image to fit its vision of femininity. Cultural history has manipulated Ophelia just as the men in Hamlet manipulate her. At the same time, another tradition has emerged around Ophelia as a number of performers (notably Glenda Jackson in Peter Hall’s 1965 production) have attempted to give her some power (Rosenberg 238–9). Among them, Frances Barber’s Ophelia is one of the few preserved on archival video. Because it is also extensively discussed in the actress’ Players of Shakespeare essay, Barber’s performance is an ideal one with which to begin an exploration of the interplay between realism, intentionality and gender representation on the contemporary classical stage. More than any other playtext of its period, Hamlet on modern stages has become inextricably linked to the post-Stanislavskian realist acting that dominates Anglo-North-American theatre. Barber used this style in a bid to grant Ophelia the complexity and autonomy denied her by much of Hamlet’s stage history (and perhaps by the text of Hamlet itself). Illustrative of the liberal feminist energies that infused the RSC in the early to mid-1980s, Barber’s performance often reinscribed the very norms it tried to reject. Even so, Barber’s Ophelia, and the production that framed her, occasionally represented gender in a more complex and more disruptive manner than either the actress’ stated intentions or academic critiques of realist acting might suggest.

II. ‘You do not understand yourself’ Jacques Lacan, a theorist frequently invoked by current commentators on Hamlet and the philosopher par excellence of feminine identity as lack, notes of Ophelia that she ‘is linked forever, for centuries, to the figure



The Feminist Ophelia and the (Re)production of Gender


of Hamlet’ (23). Even before reading or watching Hamlet, most contemporary Western spectators associate Ophelia with the most celebrated male figure in early modern English drama. When he walks onto the stage, each new incarnation of Hamlet brings with him a great weight of cultural authority (see Dawson, Hamlet 8). What this boy says matters; and one of his first rhetorical acts is to define feminine identity in unflattering terms. Although it is his mother whose ‘o’erhasty marriage’ (2.2.57) has produced Hamlet’s nausea, his discourse affects his (and the spectator’s) perceptions of Ophelia as well as of Gertrude. ‘Frailty, thy name is woman,’ cries the Prince (1.2.146); women are not just frail but actually define frailty. The behaviour of Hamlet’s mother serves as proof of the assertion: A little month, or e’er those shoes were old With which she followed my poor father’s body Like Niobe, all tears, why she, even she – O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason Would have mourned longer – married with my uncle[.] (1.2.147–51) Hamlet associates his mother – and, through her, women in general – with an animal order whose behaviour does not follow ‘discourse of reason.’ He represents her tears less as signs of dissimulation than as indications that feminine identity is illogical, weak, changeable and sexually voracious. The mention of sexuality reminds us that feminine identity is characterized by its continual association with one man or with another. Gertrude is either Old Hamlet’s widow (and as such a virtuous woman) or Claudius’ wife (and as such an adulterous strumpet). Relationships with men give feminine identity definition; by herself, Hamlet implies, a woman is a constantly changing entity. In the wellknown words of an early modern homilist, she is ‘the weaker vessell, of a fraile heart, inconstant’ and unpredictable (Of the State of Matrimony 258). Any theatrical spectator is free to accept or reject Hamlet’s construction of feminine identity, and a feminist spectator has a particular investment in being what Judith Fetterly calls ‘a resisting reader rather than an assenting reader’ (xii). Moreover, in performance, various strategies can militate against any temptation to apply Hamlet’s words to Ophelia. In Daniels’ Hamlet, for instance, Barber’s Ophelia appeared before Hamlet actually spoke to them. She stood silently among the Danish court throughout the playtext’s Act One, Scene Two, responding to Hamlet’s



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melancholy with visible concern. This choice allowed Barber to convey Ophelia’s love for Hamlet and her acute powers of observation at an early stage in the action, qualifying the authority of Hamlet’s ensuing pronouncements on feminine frailty. In the following scene, however, Barber was faced with the fact that Ophelia’s first speaking appearance in the playtext suggests a girl whose identity is threatened by frailty and almost exclusively determined by men. Her brother Laertes’ first words to her are an attempt to direct her behaviour (he wants her to write to him); her first response expresses surprise that he would doubt her compliance (1.3.2–4). Laertes warns her against ‘Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour’ (1.3.5): Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister. And keep you in the rear of your affection, Out of the shot and danger of desire. The chariest maid is prodigal enough If she unmask her beauty to the moon. (1.3.33–7) In Laertes’ construction, a woman can avoid being frail by fearing ‘the shot and danger of desire’ and (implicitly) by submitting herself to the management of her male relations. From the destined transgressor of Hamlet’s first soliloquy, woman evolves into a creature with two options: obedience or loss of honour. Ophelia’s response seems to confirm her choice of the former; she promises her brother, ‘I shall the effect of this good lesson keep / As watchman to my heart’ (1.3.45–6). Readers seeking a more powerful Ophelia have often found an alternative glimpse of her character in the next lines (Bamber 77–78; Bradby 26; Dreher 79; Rosenberg 272). The apparently demure girl points out the double standard by which her brother would Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven Whiles like a puffed and reckless libertine Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads And recks not his own rede. (1.3.48–51) In Daniels’ Hamlet, Frances Barber took the teasing self-confidence of these lines as a keynote for her performance. She wore a ‘gray silk court dress [ ] almost Victorian in its severity, hinting at repression’ (Warren,





‘Shakespeare’ 80), which presented the straitjacket of convention, but within it she remained surprisingly buoyant. Her gestural language spoke playful resistance to her brother’s dictums: throughout Laertes’ speech she bounced a little on her heels, unable to stay still. As she began to speak, she whirled around her brother playfully; and when Laertes (Kenneth Branagh) chuckled sheepishly at her accusations of hypocrisy, she broke into delighted laughter. Sensitive to the incongruities of the strictures imposed on her, she was unable to take them seriously. The situation darkened with the entrance of Polonius (Frank Middlemass). In all the versions of Hamlet that feed the conflated edition I refer to as ‘Shakespeare’s playtext,’ Laertes has scarcely exited before Ophelia’s father renews his son’s attack on her relations with Hamlet. ‘You do not understand yourself so clearly / As it behoves my daughter and your honour,’ he snaps (1.3.96–7). He has bid his son, ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’ (1.3.78). Rosenberg writes that Ophelia is ‘told, in contrast to her brother, not to be true to her own self’ (280). He defines ‘self’ in terms of twentieth-century individualism: the ‘self’ as ‘the unified, autonomous author of his or her own choices’ (Belsey, Subject 49), but this definition has little to do with Polonius’ meaning. He bids Ophelia be true to the self she seems not to understand: the identity conferred by her position as a woman, a virgin and his daughter. Whatever self might exist in her inner feelings is irrelevant to the case. At this point, the reader of Shakespeare’s playtext confronts an important aspect of the early modern construction of feminine identity: the representation of woman as the possession of her male relations. What Ophelia must come to ‘understand’ about herself is that she belongs to her father. Her ‘chaste treasure,’ her virginity, is to be sold, not given; the rightful seller is not Ophelia, but the father who owns her. Polonius’ language is pitilessly frank in its insistence on Ophelia’s status as sexual commodity. ‘Tender yourself more dearly,’ he snaps, with that mixture of affection, comic volubility and patriarchal menace that has proved such a challenge for actors, ‘Or—not to crack the wind of the poor phrase, / Running it thus—you’ll tender me a fool’ (1.3.107–9). Even as it commodifies his daughter and deprives her of any meaning outside relationship to himself, Polonius’ discourse also situates her within a particularly oppressive specular economy. Polonius tells his child that the report of her intimacy with Hamlet has been ‘put on me, / And that in way of caution’ (1.3.94–5). Willy-nilly, Ophelia has already become a spectacle at this surveillance-ridden court. Her father’s command, ‘I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth / Have you so slander any moment leisure / As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet’



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(1.3.132–4), demands that he be allowed his rightful management of that spectacle. Ophelia’s accession—‘I shall obey, my lord’ (1.3.136)— would seem to justify Philip’s suggestion that ‘the submissive, angelic Ophelia of the opening is not an integrated self but selfless and, hence, “nothing” ’ (74). ‘Nothing’ is a difficult role for an actress to play. Against its threatened void, Barber seized on the love Ophelia’s father bids her forget as a way of giving her independence from Polonius and Laertes. She began the scene hand in hand with Polonius, but when her father asked, ‘What is’t, Ophelia, he hath said to you?’ (1.3.88) Barber disentangled herself from his embrace. The name of ‘the Lord Hamlet’ (1.3.89) emerged reluctantly from her lips, while her justification of her intimacy with the prince—‘My lord, he hath importuned me with love / In honourable fashion’ (1.3.110–1, emphasis Barber’s)—burst out defiantly. Barber took up what she saw as the scene’s subtext of female rebellion, transforming apparently submissive words and gestures into signs of resistance. She delivered Ophelia’s respectful address to her father, ‘My lord,’ in such a tone of frustration that she might have been snapping, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dad!’ Her physical language retained the barely contained energy of the scene with Laertes, but now she was seething rather than playful. Resistance emerged particularly in Barber’s use of the production’s major gestural sign of feminine obedience, the curtsey. Daniels’ Hamlet used curtseys frequently, for instance in the first court scene when Ophelia and other court ladies swept into low obeisances to greet the entrances of Gertrude, Claudius and Hamlet. At the end of the scene with her father, Barber’s Ophelia dipped into a curtsey as Polonius barked, ‘Look to’t, I charge you’(1.3.135). This time, however, the gesture was angrily clipped, and the words of submission, ‘I shall obey, my lord,’ were delivered as if through clenched teeth. Clearly, she would not go gently into the maidenly enclosure her father had set up for her.

III. The observed of all observers Barber’s delineation of an Ophelia wary of Polonius and stubbornly loyal to Hamlet ran into difficulty in her next scene, where Ophelia seems willingly to give up details of Hamlet’s madness to her father. In her Players of Shakespeare essay, Barber describes her effort to ‘tackle the scene’ thus: As I played the preceding scene emphasizing her trust in Hamlet, it seemed unlikely to me that she would reveal her suspicions of





his behaviour so soon afterwards. [ ] I came to the conclusion that she wasn’t seeking out Polonius after all, but stumbles upon him accidentally, relieved to be able to share with someone the dark fears forming in her mind. The ‘cosmic’ and political implications of Hamlet’s behaviour override the domestic circumstances in which she finds herself, making her description a discovery, her first in the spiral of her perceptions up to the end of the play scene. (141) In performance, Barber’s Ophelia ran full tilt into her father’s chamber and, as he was cannily making sure the door was closed, launched immediately into her account of Hamlet’s disconcerting behaviour. Contrary to Barber’s stated intention, this gave the impression that Ophelia had been seeking her father’s support. On the other hand, Barber effectively conveyed the sense of her description as a discovery, suggesting in the process an Ophelia who was as much observer as object of the gaze. Her determination to understand what she had just seen undercut some of the authority of her father’s judgements. At the performance recorded on the RSC archive video recording of the production, Frank Middlemass’ delivery of Polonius’ question, ‘Mad for thy love?’ (2.1.85) elicited a laugh from spectators, who perhaps found his theory ludicrously inadequate. Ophelia’s response, ‘My lord, I do not know, / But truly I do fear it’ (2.1.85–6), on the other hand, was treated seriously both by the actress and by the (silent) audience. In Barber’s version, ‘I do not know’ did not suggest Ophelia’s naïve ignorance, but her intelligently sceptical attempt to puzzle out the situation. Barber moved into the nunnery scene having depicted a woman who was less victim than agent, her interpretation running full force into the moment in the playtext where Hamlet himself most clearly slots Ophelia into the categories of masculinist discourse. The oft-repeated words that give the scene its nickname, ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ (3.1.121, 137), are bitterly significant. The word ‘nunnery’ bears two early modern significations, according to which the Prince offers Ophelia the choice of either convent or brothel. Although many critics doubt that the latter meaning is intended (Holdsworth 193), this is another instance in which meanings engaged by the playtext potentially lock Ophelia into the virgin–whore dichotomy. In Barber’s reading, Ophelia had used her love for Hamlet as a counter against such limiting constructions. At this point in the playtext, however, Ophelia’s Prince takes the field against her. ‘If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny,’ he tells her (3.1.135–7),



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echoing Laertes’ dictum that ‘Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes’ (1.3.38). Polonius has already told Ophelia that she is the object of a censorious gaze; now her beloved Hamlet turns that gaze on her to construct her as his opponent and opposite. He calls on a whole range of misogynist tropes about women’s falsity, vanity and talent for dissimulation: ‘I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another’ (3.1.143–5). His words imply that Ophelia is engaged in some form of self-fashioning or masquerade (see Armstrong 233–4), but in fact Hamlet himself is fashioning an image of Ophelia that degrades her by attributing to her an altogether specious form of self-will (Garner 125). Ophelia is not making herself. In this scene, she does little more than play out the constructions of femininity Hamlet hurls at her. She lies to him when he asks where her father is, conforming (to a pathetically minor degree) to Hamlet’s view of feminine falsehood. Even her dissimulation obeys her father’s command, as does the pretence at prayer with which she greets the Prince. As he enters, Hamlet takes control of the spectacle. He invokes the image of the virginal saint in her niche: ‘Soft you now, / The fair Ophelia! – Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered’ (3.1.88–90). By the end of the scene, Ophelia obeys his bidding, crying, ‘O, help him, you sweet heavens!’ and ‘O heavenly powers, restore him!’ (3.1.134, 142). But Hamlet’s discourse ensures that even her submission to the image of holy femininity does not save her from the imputation of whoredom: the eroticizing term ‘Nymph’ disrupts any straightforward sense of Ophelia as saint. Hamlet is playwright and main actor on this stage; Ophelia is ‘a play within a play, or a player trying to respond to several imperious directors at once’ (Leverenz 142). Even after Hamlet departs, her focus remains on him: ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’ (3.1.151). The mournful simplicity of her only soliloquy contrasts sharply with the labyrinthine selfexamination of ‘To be or not to be,’ which directly precedes the nunnery scene. As Lorraine Helms remarks, ‘the subjectivity of the female character, even in soliloquy, is, for the audience, mediated through their shared concentration on the male protagonist’ (‘Playing’ 199). As she played this scene, it became increasingly difficult for Frances Barber to assert Ophelia’s autonomy. The challenge was increased by the fact that Roger Rees played Hamlet’s misogynist invective not as a ruse to frustrate the listening Claudius and Polonius, but as a response to his horror at his desire for Ophelia. The desire was genuine and gave Barber the opportunity to respond with warmth to an initial passionate embrace. But this reconciliation was short-lived: ‘Roger wanted to show





Hamlet’s disgust at his own ardour, and did so by physically rejecting me, throwing me about the stage and finally to the floor’ (142). Hamlet slapped Ophelia’s face, then dragged her to her feet so roughly that she cried out. He remained in control of the scene until his exit, giving Ophelia a deceptively consoling embrace after ‘[i]t hath made me mad’ (3.1.147–8) and then throwing her to the ground again. Throughout the soliloquy that followed his exit, she remained crumpled on the floor. The actress’ description of this moment depicts with fearful clarity the process by which her Ophelia assimilated Hamlet’s condemnation: The remembrances I was handed as a rehearsal prop was [sic] a locket on a chain that I wore around my neck. [ ] Undoing the neck of the dress only to the throat, to reveal the token, produced an effect of ‘innocent guile.’ Hamlet finds this an irresistible sexual provocation. [ ] By the time we reach her lament for his reason (‘blasted with ecstasy’), I wanted to convey not only her horror as she realises the consequences of this, but also to suggest that she is in some way to blame. I looked down to see the neck of the dress open, and guiltily buttoned it up as I exited. (142–3) After rejecting her brother’s and father’s masculinist dictums, Barber’s Ophelia showed by her actions here that she had on some level accepted the justice of Hamlet’s imprecations against feminine frailty and sensuality. At last she acceded to misogynist versions of her identity. It was the beginning of the end for her. By the time she entered the play scene, she seemed utterly unable to resist the brutal stage management of Rees’ Hamlet. She tried to watch the players’ dumb show in her old capacity as canny observer, managing some intelligent curiosity as she remarked, ‘Belike this show imports the argument of the play’ (3.2.148–9). Scarcely were the words out of her mouth before Rees’ Hamlet dragged her downstage and, in full view of the watching court, shoved his hand obscenely between her legs. A minute later, he patted the crumpled girl on the head in response to her murmur, ‘’Tis brief, my lord’ (3.2.162). ‘As woman’s love,’ he replied (3.2.163), loudly enough for his mother and the rest of the spectators to hear. He was using Ophelia to demonstrate his earlier points about the essential frailty of feminine nature. ‘I could interpret between you and your love, if I could see the puppets dallying’ (3.2.255–6), he told his erstwhile beloved. She had herself become his puppet, the ‘observed of all observers’ (3.1.155).



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In Shakespeare’s playtext, the play scene provides the audience’s last glimpse of the Ophelia it has known to this point. When next she appears, her sanity has disintegrated along with the male structure that once defined her life. The Gentleman who describes her to Gertrude tells the Queen that Ophelia ‘is importunate, indeed distract. / Her mood will needs be pitied’ (4.5.2–3). He goes on to describe the mad girl’s effect on those around her: Her speech is nothing. Yet the unshapèd use of it doth move The hearers to collection. They aim at it, And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts, Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them, Indeed would make one think there might be thought, Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily. (4.5.7–13) His words overdetermine Ophelia’s madness even before she enters. Has this ‘importunate’ Ophelia finally left behind her docile silence? Her mad ‘winks and nods and gestures’ may be crammed with subversive meaning – or that impression may simply be created by the reactions of the men around her. The Gentleman tells Gertrude that her hearers interpret her words in ways ‘fit to their own thoughts.’ Are the men around Ophelia trying to help her by reclaiming her meanings for rationality, or is she finally no more than a spectacle of femininity at its most purely irrational and manipulated? The idea of the madwoman as the epitome of feminine spectacle circulated in Shakespeare’s culture. It appears, for instance, in The Hospitall of Incurable Fooles, an Italian satirical pamphlet translated and adapted for an English audience and published in 1600, around the time of Hamlet’s composition. Readers of the pamphlet are taken on an imaginary tour through the hospital of the title, culminating in the discovery that women have their own segregated domain in this proto-Bedlam. The warden of the hospital points out the women’s quarters, remarking, Bicause with the greater solace you may leave this harbour, and replenished with greater woonder and admiration, goe all over the world, [ ] Fixe therefore your looks I beseech you, on that part, which I will point out unto you [ ] for all those be Cels appropriated to foolish



IV. ‘Incapable of her own distress’

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The position of these enclosed madwomen echoes the dichotomous view of feminine identity hammered into Ophelia by the men around her. In theory, they belong to a ‘Sexe’ towards which ‘modestie’ must be observed; decorum demands that women be kept out of sight, unveiling their beauties (or follies) only to the moon. In practice, the madwomen of The Hospitall of Incurable Fooles are exposed to general view; as far as the reader can tell, the claim that they are shown but seldom is a false one designed to enhance their commodity value. ‘Naked for the most part,’ these female fools are displayed for public delectation. They live an extreme form of the eroticized, spied-upon existence with which Polonius threatens and Hamlet curses Ophelia. Unconscious of their predicament, they do not realize that they are being watched and are unable to look back. Similarly, when Claudius describes ‘poor Ophelia / Divided from herself and her fair judgement, / Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts’ (4.5.85–7), he associates the mad girl both with inanimate spectacle (‘pictures’) and with that irrational animal order invoked by Hamlet in relation to his mother’s sexual trespass (1.2.150–1). When Ophelia enters, Claudius’ construction of her is in many ways confirmed. Trailing flowers and pathos, she is certainly a ‘picture.’ All the court watches her now, and Laertes moans at the terrible beauty of the spectacle: ‘Thought and afflictions, passion, hell itself, / She turns to favour and to prettiness’ (4.5.188–9). But this ‘rose of May’ (4.5.159) is also a sexual figure who sings bawdy ballads. Like the women of The Hospitall of Incurable Fooles, the mad Ophelia is subjected to the male gaze and lacks agency over her own identity. She continues to perform the roles set out for her by her father, so that ‘[e]ven in her madness she has no voice of her own, only a discord of other voices and expectations, customs gone awry’ (Leverenz 142). Later theatrical and cultural appropriations of Ophelia’s image have tended to perpetuate its association with limited constructions of femininity. On stage, she has generally remained either the modest and wistfully pathetic maiden, obedient to social dictates as to what constitutes acceptable feminine behavior, or (increasingly on contemporary stages) the twitching and masturbating psychiatric patient overwhelmed by her sexuality. Scholarly readings of Ophelia, too, tend to perpetuate



women, to behold which leisurely, is accounted no smal favour, it being the custome to shew them seldome, and to few, in respect of the modestie observed towardes that Sexe, naked for the most part as you now see. (141)

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this idea, as when a discussion of her role inspires William Kerrigan to describe Shakespeare as ‘the great poet of the virgin/whore split’ (79). At the same time, many critics believe that Ophelia’s mad scenes haunt our cultural imagination precisely because they trouble masculinist constructions of feminine identity. Duncan Salkeld argues that it is only in madness, which pushes them out of the field of conventional signification, that female characters like Ophelia ‘find they are able to stake their claim to discourse’ (118). Richard Hillman cites the Gentleman’s words about Ophelia’s effect on her hearers to suggest that Ophelia’s descent into madness finally allows her to influence the men around her rather than vice versa. ‘Female madness,’ he writes, ‘far from confirming [masculine] reason’s control of meaning, interpellates would-be interpreters in the [feminine] instability of signification’ (Self-Speaking 245). In fact, Ophelia’s madness remains equivocal and multivalent. As that sensitive observer Horatio notes, there is something dangerous about it (4.5.15), something unsettling to the very discourses that construct and destroy her. Her muttered ‘My brother shall know of it’ (4.5.70) and her strange performance with the flowers suggest some understanding of the rottenness of Claudius’ court. Her songs sketch out criticisms of the suffering occasioned by the binary division between men and women. Moreover, in her madness Ophelia for the first time refuses to listen to others and repeatedly demands attention for herself: ‘Say you? Nay, pray you mark’ (4.5.27). She, not Hamlet, becomes the focus and director of attention onstage and in the auditorium. Daniels’ mise-en-scène emphasized Ophelia’s usurpation of Hamlet’s theatrical dominance by dressing her in his colour, black. Barber writes that she began work on the role with the knowledge that the traditional, pathos-laden version of Ophelia ‘invariably took on a visual image of nightgowns and flowers’ (137). Like Helen Mirren in the 1970 RSC Hamlet and Anastasia Vertinskaya in Grigori Kosintsev’s 1964 film, she defied that conventional image by appearing in mourning rather than in white. Her costume neither reflected nor pre-determined the nature of her insanity. Her elegant black gown matched those worn by the (sane) ladies of Gertrude’s retinue; thus, it allowed Barber’s Ophelia to remain a dignified and formidable member of the court around her, rather than a spectacle set apart (Figure 1). But it was Ophelia’s songs, so long associated with the wistful pathos of the role, that provided Barber with perhaps the most empowering moments of her interpretation. Once permitted access to ‘the beauteous majesty of Denmark’ (4.5.11), Shakespeare’s Ophelia immediately begins to sing: ‘How should I your true-love know / From another one?’





Figure 1 Ophelia in black. Left to right: Cathy Tyson (Lady-in-Waiting), Frances Barber (Ophelia), Sarah Woodward (Lady-in-Waiting), Brian Blessed (Claudius) and Virginia McKenna (Gertrude) in Hamlet, dir. Ron Daniels, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1984. Photo by Joe Cocks Studio, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

(4.5.13–4). Like her earlier soliloquy, this song seems to focus attention on a male figure (the lost beloved) at the expense of Ophelia herself. Moreover, as Roger Warren points out, any Ophelia has to cope with the fact that representations of madness often distract and alienate the audience’s attention from the mad character’s discourse (‘Folio Omission’ 47). In Daniels’ production, Barber’s considerable vocal talents worked against this effect. Planting herself upstage centre, she seemed to have regained some of her earlier self-possession. As she began her second song, standing painfully erect and hitting every note, her beautiful voice riveted attention to her. It was an effective demonstration of Jacqueline Fox-Davies’ conclusion about Ophelia: ‘That she sings and



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what she sings (words and music) suggest that she is [ ] constituting her own story, using her own voice for her own grief’ (222). Some critics were less than enthusiastic about Barber’s use of her vocal talent, finding it unsuitable to the depiction of a madwoman. Nicholas Shrimpton used it to compare Daniels’ production unfavourably with Jonathan Miller’s of 1982; for him, ‘Miller’s Ophelia was a genuinely disturbing mental case,’ while Barber’s ‘was sweetly pretty even in her madness and delivered her songs in a ringingly operatic bel canto’ (209). Barber’s choices in her mad scenes could be seen as a ‘regression’ (Shrimpton 209) to more decorous modes of playing Ophelia. But John Barber applauded Barber as ‘an Ophelia who can really sing and whose mad scenes provide the long evening’s only point of tragic intensity’ (Daily Telegraph, 7 September 1984). His link between Barber’s singing and her tragic power is important for the politically committed spectator. Though it might have consigned Ophelia to a purely aestheticized realm, Barber’s lovely singing also insisted on the girl’s agency. Hers was a lone, strong voice crying against the abuses of the court. When, at the end of her second song, she collapsed in a paroxysm of sobbing, the moment was tragic rather than pathetic. Her observers onstage and off were forced to cope, not with the picturesque wanderings of a cipher, but with the killing grief of an admirable personality. As she left this scene, Barber waved at Claudius and Horatio (Nicholas Farrell), chanting, ‘Sweet ladies, good night, good night’ (4.5.72–3). When she entered the next, she showed little sign of recognizing her brother Laertes, using him as a prop in her performance with the flowers. At such moments, Barber’s Ophelia staged the men who had earlier staged her, placing them in a quasi-feminine position: ‘Good night, ladies, good night’ (4.5.72, emphasis mine). The girl destroyed by a male world had turned the tables slightly in her own favour. It is heartening to see these mad scenes as the triumph against received tradition of a feminist Ophelia. Still, any reading that would interpret Barber’s Ophelia as a depiction of unquenchable feminine self-determination remains untenable. In her performance, Ophelia’s tragic collapse came at the point in her second song when she cited the words of the faithless young man to the girl who expected to marry him: ‘So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun, / An thou hadst not not come to my bed’ (4.5.65–6). Earlier in the same song, she had struck her own breast repeatedly and violently on the words, ‘By Cock, they are to blame’ (4.5.62). Although the words attached censure to men, Barber’s gesture implied Ophelia’s censure of herself, and when she collapsed on the word ‘bed’ her grief evidenced a strong measure of





sexual guilt. Once again, Barber was performing Ophelia’s assimilation of Hamlet’s construction of feminine identity. Soon Ophelia would go to her death; when we next saw her it would be as a dead object tossed between the two men who wrestled over the final right to her. Was she finally an autonomous heroine or a victim of masculinism? Or were these two possibilities closely intertwined?

V. The mirror up to nature In Rutter’s Clamorous Voices, the actress Juliet Stevenson expresses disapprobation of the very idea of representing Shakespeare’s women as victims. ‘That’s of no interest to women, watching women being victims,’ she observes. ‘I want women’s roles to be as complex in performance as men’s, to restore them to their flawed and rounded complexity’ (Rutter xxvii). If we wish to understand the ramifications of Frances Barber’s Ophelia, we must look at her performance, not only in relation to the text of Hamlet, but in the context of statements like Stevenson’s and of the theatrical climate that produced them. The 1980s were a major moment for feminist performance at the RSC, even witnessing the founding of the sadly short-lived RSC Women’s Project (Goodman, ‘Women’s’ 216–20; Werner 50–68). As Stevenson notes, the entry of feminism into the mainstream of popular culture offered ‘a framework that [ ] restructured the possibilities of re-examination, not just for actresses but for audiences too’ (Rutter, Clamorous Voices xv). During this period, a series of important performances at the RSC reread the heroines of classical drama as complex figures pitted against the same social challenges that affect contemporary women’s lives. Along with Barber’s Ophelia, these included, among others: Juliet Stevenson’s constant Cressida in Howard Davies’ 1985 Troilus and Cressida; Harriet Walter’s fiercely determined Imogen in Bill Alexander’s 1987 Cymbeline; and Sinead Cusack’s vulnerable, sympathetic Lady Macbeth in Adrian Noble’s 1986 Macbeth. The process affected non-Shakespearean icons as well. In the same season as her Ophelia, Frances Barber played Marguerite Gautier in Pam Gems’ Camille as a hard-nosed businesswoman struggling with an unromanticized case of tuberculosis and driven by harsh economic imperatives. In each case, the actress transformed a familiar figure from a stereotype into a strong, sympathetic woman. Each woman’s work involved finding the ‘through-line’ of a role—the ‘journey’ of the character—following Stanislavski’s own injunction to ‘develop, above all, the scheme of your physical behaviour in each episode and unite them later in a single line of action’ (Toporkov



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126). As Peter Holland writes, this idea ‘depends for the actor on the notion of a findable and playable inner consistency’ (‘OPHELIA’ 6). The character must make psychological sense both to actor and to audience. In the playtext of Hamlet, much of the discourse around feminine identity suggests that women do not make sense or follow logical courses of action. Frances Barber’s Ophelia was ‘feminist’ largely because the actress pulled Stanislavskian clarity out of this apparent chaos. Her through-line, from rebellion to slow assimilation of male abuse to madness, was eminently logical. In Players of Shakespeare, Barber implies that she used a form of Stanislavskian affective memory to find in her own experience the principle that drove this descent. She cries to her director that Ophelia is ‘guilt-ridden, Ron! She’s utterly guilt-ridden, like every woman I know’ (140). The slow destruction of the vibrant Ophelia made sense to Barber, and would make sense to women in the audience, because it reflected a process familiar to contemporary feminine experience. Thus, Barber gave Ophelia rounded complexity while still tracing her victimization. Barber’s Ophelia was a victim, not of her own inherent frailty or pathology, but of masculine oppression. Her performance conformed to the dominant modes of feminist Shakespeare criticism in the early 1980s: it offered the portrait of a strong, coherent, admirable female character while at the same time showing the destructive effects of male chauvinism on women’s lives. It made the wan water lily of tradition into a human being with recognizable desires, hopes and fears. It offered the spectator the possibility of identifying with, rather than objectifying, Ophelia. Moreover, it potentially worked to incite that spectator’s resistance to destructive masculinist structures of identification. In other words, it seemed to do almost everything materialist feminist critics like Jill Dolan see the classical theatre as incapable of doing. Did it, then, prove Dolan wrong in her argument that the mainstream theatre consistently works to reproduce conservative discourses of gender? Relevant here is Peter Holland’s discussion of another recent Ophelia, Kate Winslet, who played the role in the 1996 film directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh (Laertes to Barber’s Ophelia in 1984). Branagh’s mise-en-scène and Winslet’s performance reproduce some of the interpretations that informed Barber’s work: for instance, the film’s controversial interpolated sex scenes explore Ophelia’s sensuality and its association with her madness. Branagh’s film goes as far as possible (even to the point of adding extra-textual sequences to its full-text version of Shakespeare’s play) to make sure that Ophelia’s journey from sanity to





madness is fully explained. Exploring this journey, Holland concludes that it locks Ophelia within a psychological narrative that naturalizes her insanity as an inevitable product of her personality and circumstances. ‘Far from allowing Ophelia a space of resistance,’ writes Holland, Branagh’s film ‘only increases our sense of her as victim’ (‘OPHELIA’ 10). A languishing beauty likened by Rutter to the heroines of Bram Stoker (‘Snatched Bodies’ 315), Winslet’s Ophelia is a weak figure compared to Frances Barber’s complex feminist. Nevertheless, Barber’s performance assumed, like Winslet’s, that ‘Shakespeare’s characters are susceptible of analysis as people’ (Jardine 6). It did not offer spectators the possibility of seeing ‘Ophelia’ as a fictive, rhetorical construct created by an author writing in a highly specific and contingent historical moment, rather than as an onstage reflection of the universal truths of feminine interiority. As Worthen argues, liberal feminist readings like Barber’s offer ‘ways of exploring – rather than unseating – conventional conceptions of character’ (Authority 127). They protest against the victimization of women, but may reproduce the ‘natural’ opposition between male and female that feeds gender asymmetry instead of exposing the constructed nature of gender identities. Even those committed to eradicating gender oppression replicate the discourses that give rise to it. Even a feminist Ophelia can help to reproduce the terms of masculinist hegemony.

VI. ‘The masculine qualities within them’ Still, the task of reinscription was not the only cultural work performed by Barber’s interpretation. True, her essay on playing Ophelia is marked everywhere by naturalistic ideas about character and by binary oppositions between male and female. Barber writes, for instance, that ‘rather than being an extension of Hamlet’s character, [Ophelia] actually presents the female counterpart and counterpoint to him. She provides the feminine qualities lacking in his sensibilities’ (139). She sees Ophelia’s tragedy as ‘the destruction of a potent feminine force, caught up in a male-dominated power struggle’ (139). At the same time, Barber describes herself as ‘intent upon discovering a way of playing her that revealed the masculine as well as the feminine qualities that Hamlet lacked’ (140). She suggests that ‘Ophelia is so often seen as weak’ because ‘it is only in recent years that women have not become afraid [sic] of revealing the masculine qualities within them, something Shakespeare has always recognised’ (148). Barber’s construction of her own performance contains a contradiction between its explicit interpretation of Ophelia as a ‘potent feminine



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force’ and its implicit suggestion that Ophelia’s strength must reveal a masculine quality within her (a notion that clearly connects femininity with weakness). Nothing about this contradiction necessarily works to denaturalize conventional gender oppositions. On the contrary, in struggling to find a language to describe her Ophelia’s stance Barber becomes tangled in the intractable rhetoric of binary gender. Qualities must be either masculine or feminine, and in the long run femininity always signifies powerlessness. Caught in this system, Ophelia is inevitably trapped in the role of victim. Barber tries to rectify the situation by suggesting that ‘Shakespeare has always recognised’ the masculine qualities within women, opening herself to the charge of speciously invoking Shakespeare’s authority to justify her own interpretations of plays (Worthen, Authority 42). However, the notion that the Bard’s writing—at least insofar as it reflects his cultural milieu—is capable of disrupting binary gender inscriptions is not merely specious. Many areas of early modern writing suggest that anxiety about the stability of gender was current in this society. To take a well-known example, in the Jacobean pamphlet Haec Vir: Or The Womanish Man (1620) the reader is constantly reminded that ‘by the Lawes of Nature, by the rules of Religion, and the Customes of all civill Nations, it is necessary there be a distinct and speciall difference between Man and Woman both in their habit and behaviours’ (sig. C2v ). This assertion of essential difference between male and female identity is equivocal, however, for Haec Vir responds to a potential social disruption of gender difference. A woman is accused of exceeding the bounds of natural feminine modesty by wearing men’s attire. She retorts that the men who accuse her cause her to err by being themselves too feminine. ‘Cast then from you our ornaments, and put on your owne armours’ is her call to the men of England; ‘Be men in shape, men in shew, men in words, men in actions, men in counsell, men in example: then will we love and serve you; then will we heare and obey you’ (sig. C3v). The final effect of Haec Vir is the reinscription of conventional signifiers of gender difference (Henderson and McManus 28), but the transgressive woman’s words raise the possibility that difference (at least as experienced in society) is not based in ‘Nature’ but in the repetition of cultural norms of show, words and actions. Because Haec Vir represents men and women who fail (or refuse) to repeat these norms in the expected manner, it performs a denaturalization of gender binaries even as it reaffirms them. As Judith Butler puts it in Gender Trouble, ‘The abiding gendered self [is] shown to be structured by repeated acts that seek to approximate the ideal





of a substantial ground of identity, but which, in their occasional discontinuity, reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this “ground” ’ (141). Similarly, the playtext of Hamlet is full of strident but strangely ambivalent declarations of a ‘special difference’ between the genders. For example, Claudius’ lecture on the dangers of excessive grief reads Hamlet’s mourning for his father’s death as gender transgression: But to persever In obstinate condolement is a course Of impious stubbornness. ’Tis unmanly grief. It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, An understanding simple and unschooled. (2.1.92–7, emphasis mine) Claudius does not explicitly construct Hamlet’s ‘unmanly grief’ as feminine. But Hamlet’s own subsequent description of his mother’s hasty remarriage suggests that he, at least, associates the qualities Claudius describes as ‘unmanly’ (weakness, wilfulness, irrationality) with femininity. The similarities between Hamlet’s view of Gertrude and Claudius’ view of him blur the gender boundaries the young Prince seems so vehemently to draw. In Shakespeare’s playtext, Hamlet’s own discourse frequently raises the notion that the Prince is somehow feminine, falling short of or exceeding the boundaries of normative masculinity. His third soliloquy, in particular, inscribes him with the ‘frail,’ whorish feminine identity he so reviles in his mother and Ophelia: Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murdered, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must like a whore unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A stallion! (2.2.580–5) From Goethe onwards, nineteenth-century interpreters in particular took up the Prince’s angry equation between himself and whores by finding something feminine in Shakespeare’s hero. Their readings



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culminated in Edward P. Vining’s infamous The Mystery of Hamlet (1888), which argued not only that Hamlet had qualities ‘far more in keeping with a feminine than a masculine nature’ (48), but that he was actually a woman disguised as a boy at birth. Subsequent critics have tended to giggle at the idea, but interpretative focus on the Prince’s feminine nature—the sensitive inwardness so ‘womanishly at odds with the manly roles he must put on’ (Leverenz 148)—has remained strong, particularly among psychoanalytic critics. Ron Daniels’ Hamlet recalled such arguments by casting Roger Rees, whom Nicholas Shrimpton described as ‘a delicate, romantic, slightly posturing Hamlet [ ] a sensitive soul, full of nervous energy and frequently on the verge of tears’ (211), opposite Barber’s strong Ophelia. For a politically committed spectator, this juxtaposition might have helped to disrupt a straightforward equation between male and female bodies on stage and male and female discursive positions, drawing attention to Gayle Rubin’s distinction between biological ‘sex’ and socially constructed ‘gender’ (180). On the other hand, it might simply have reinscribed hegemonic discursive constructions of the categories male and female. The spectator may see a ‘masculine’ Ophelia and a ‘feminine’ Hamlet merely as figures who have failed adequately to inhabit subject positions which nevertheless correspond to the natural truth of human existence. Such a reading continues to imply that certain qualities (strength and rationality) are inherently masculine while others (weakness and sensitivity) are inherently feminine; it merely inverts them in this specific case, creating characters who are exceptions to a normative rule. Leverenz argues that ‘Hamlet succeeds so well, and has lasted so long, because [ ] [w]hether we call it role and self, reason and nature, mind and body, manly and womanly, or the language of power and the language of feeling, we recognise [its] dichotomies in our world and in ourselves’ (149). But my politically engaged spectator is committed to seeing in a manner that undercuts the discursive power of such dichotomies: something neither Barber’s uneasy engagement with them in her Players of Shakespeare essay nor Daniels’ casting necessarily does. Nevertheless, Barber’s insistence that Ophelia presents ‘the female counterpart and counterpoint’ to Hamlet (139) inflected her performance in ways potentially disruptive to gender binaries. At numerous points throughout Ron Daniels’ Hamlet, she appropriated the gestures of Rees’ Hamlet in a manner that emphasized the congruity between the two characters. For instance, in Shakespeare’s playtext Ophelia tells her father how Hamlet





took me by the wrist and held me hard. Then goes he to the length of all his arm, And with his other hand thus o’er his brow He falls to such perusal of my face As ’a would draw it. (2.1.87–91) The gesture of clasping a hand desperately to his brow was habitual with Roger Rees’ vulnerable Hamlet. When she mentioned the action Barber’s Ophelia demonstrated it with a very creditable impression of Rees. More interestingly, she kept her hand on her own brow as she described Hamlet’s ‘perusal’ of her face, even gesturing with her free hand towards that face as she did so. The effect was to collapse the distinction between Hamlet’s face and Ophelia’s. Recounting the story of her encounter with the distracted Prince, Barber’s Ophelia performed both his role and her own. In the process, she suggested both her resemblance to Hamlet and her involvement in the process of interpreting him. More explicitly, Barber’s Ophelia was linked to Hamlet by the black dress of her mad scenes. A hundred years earlier, Ellen Terry had ‘noted wryly that Irving refused her black—only his selfish Hamlet was to have that distinction’ (Rosenberg 774). The difference so fiercely maintained by Irving was effaced in Daniels’ production. In her black gown, Barber’s Ophelia became a doppelgänger of, perhaps even a stand-in for, the absent Hamlet. She appropriated the position downstage centre that had generally been associated with him. At one point she sank, fainting, into her ladies’ arms in a moment whose blocking very deliberately recalled Hamlet’s similar collapse and dependence on Horatio and Marcellus after his encounter with his father’s ghost. Not simply an eroticized feminine spectacle, she was also a spectacle like Hamlet: a demanding, mournful figure whose presence compounded the unease of the heads that wore the crown. Again, this equation between Hamlet and Ophelia was not necessarily a disruptive one; a politically committed spectator might read it as a simple reduction of Ophelia to the feminine position of Hamlet’s mirror. But she might also see in it an instance of the power of mimesis— of reiteration—to call into question the very boundaries it works to maintain. Barber’s Ophelia did nothing overtly masculine by echoing Hamlet’s gestures, but in each case she repeated them in a way that undermined the discursive opposition between her subject position and Hamlet’s. When she re-enacted the scene in her closet by simultaneously



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VII. The feminist Ophelia and the boy actress In Daniels’ Hamlet, then, the mimetic relationship between Barber’s Ophelia and Rees’ Hamlet frequently underlined the process of gender differentiation. Occasionally, however, it also queered our view of gender difference itself so that the spectator saw it differently, encountering the continuities, as well as the divisions, between masculine and feminine experience. Moreover, in its references to Jacobean culture, Daniels’ apparently conventional Hamlet questioned gender boundaries in ways that moved beyond the choices of Rees and Barber. Daniels cast a young male actor (Dexter Fletcher) in the role of the Second Player, so that when Hamlet’s beloved players staged The Mousetrap a boy took the role of the Player Queen. Many modern productions, particularly those that set Hamlet in periods after the disappearance of boy actresses, cast a woman in this part. In order to do so they often cut the lines in the playtext that alert us to the presence of the boy player in the acting company that descends on Elsinore. On the players’ entrance, Hamlet cries, What, my young lady and mistress? By’r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine. Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring. (2.2.423–7) His words constitute a metatheatrical joke about boy players and their untrustworthy voices, but they also point to the fluid onstage identities of the young men trained to play women in the Elizabethan theatre. Hamlet addresses the boy as if he really were a woman, and it is apparent that ‘my young lady and mistress’ is capable of playing femininity convincingly. But the spectator never knows when the ‘lady’s’ voice might drop into baritone register, destroying illusion and forcing a reevaluation of the spectacle on stage. Did early modern audience members perform such re-evaluations frequently? Were they aware of the boy underneath the woman’s clothes, or did they accept his putative femininity for the length of the performance? Thomas Heywood, exasperated with antitheatrical



playing Hamlet and herself, and when she replayed Hamlet’s stances in her mad scenes, she collapsed distinctions between observer and observed, subject and object. By playing out both roles at the same time, she undercut their status as binaries.


complaints about boy actresses’ dissimulating assumption of femininity, asked, ‘To see our youths attired in the habits of women, who knowes not what their intents be? who cannot distinguish them by their names, assuredly knowing, they are but to represent such a Lady, at such a time appoynted’ (Apology sig. C3v ). Henry Jackson, on the other hand, referred to the boy he saw play Desdemona in 1610s as ‘she’ (quoted in Salgado 30). In both formulations, the boy actress disturbs assertions of natural difference between the genders. If a boy or young man can take on femininity as convincingly as Jackson’s testimony suggests, whither then his masculinity? And if Heywood is right and the audience is always aware of watching the conventions of femininity enacted on stage, might this not accentuate the basis of gender in convention? It seems likely that in the early modern theatre, as Kate McLuskie writes, ‘the meaning of boys playing women had to be negotiated in every case’ (Renaissance Dramatists 121); we can never fully know how the boy actress’ impact might have varied according to the different needs and perspectives of those who beheld him. In contemporary performances, on the other hand, it seems fair to assume that the appearance of a young man in a female role might emphasize the artifice of gender performance; contemporary spectators, after all, are unused to the convention of boy actresses and may be jarred into questioning what they are seeing. In Daniels’ Hamlet, the boy actress who entered the play scene was a disconcerting figure. In the gorgeous red dress and luxuriant wig of the Player Queen, his slight form seemed dignified and convincingly feminine. When he spoke, his voice was attractive but difficult to place, a half-broken boy’s voice or a husky woman’s. The young actor’s performance suggested possibilities of ambiguity that the binary gender pronouncements of Claudius, Hamlet, Polonius and Laertes were not quite sufficient to contain. Some of the most distinctive moments in Daniels’ Hamlet were provided by the relationship between Ophelia and the boy actress (Figure 2). Fletcher made his first appearance in the gown of the Player Queen just as Ophelia was exiting from the nunnery scene. The desolate Ophelia did not raise her eyes to him, but the boy, twirling slowly round in his woman’s finery, registered her passing and moved forward to take her place. Throughout the play scene that followed, his eyes were frequently on Ophelia. At one point he stood behind her, imitating (with a barely perceptible wobble) her curtsies to the King and Queen. He fulfilled, here, the role of Ophelia’s uncanny double, for which he had already auditioned at his first appearance. Then, Rees’ Hamlet, mocking his feminine attire, had pushed him over with a casual brutality that



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Figure 2 Ophelia watches the boy actress. Left to right: Roger Rees (Hamlet), Frances Barber (Ophelia), Dexter Fletcher (Player Queen) and Bernard Horsfall (Player King) in Hamlet, dir. Ron Daniels, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1984. Photo by Joe Cocks Studio, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

presaged his later abuse of Ophelia. As soon as the boy actress donned the costume—the ‘livery’—of the woman, he inhabited her position and not only played out her gestures but suffered the abuse to which she was subject. A politically engaged spectator of early modern drama must resist the temptation to idealize the boy actress as an icon of gender subversion. On one level, after all, he merely stands for male exclusion of women, for the historical Shakespeare who did very nicely without actresses. Just as the discourse of Polonius, Laertes and Hamlet bids Ophelia understand herself only from a masculine perspective, so the early modern theatre staged women only as mediated through masculine discourse and male bodies. It locked feminine identity within masculinist conventions as the ‘boy player armed with his arsenal of female characteristics and mannerisms mime[d] out the acceptable form of [ ] womanhood’ (Jardine 33). Contemporary female actresses, conversely, can identify with and flesh out the experiences of female characters. An analysis of Frances Barber’s Ophelia demonstrates many of the positive aspects of this identification between a contemporary actress and an early





modern character. However, as Barber’s performance shows, the psychologized presentation of early modern female characters by contemporary actresses also faces problems that the convention of the boy actress evades. It condemns the actress to identification with her culture’s ideas about the coherence of feminine identity. Her construction of a throughline can work to convince her and her audience that femininity is a natural, historically transcendent state of being; this femininity makes sense. The boy player, as Hamlet’s jokes remind us, never quite makes sense in the woman’s part. He suggests that gender might be less an inescapable fate than a contingent process of repetition. As Claudius rushed off and the court broke up in panic at the end of the play scene in Daniels’ Hamlet, Barber’s Ophelia came face to face with Fletcher’s Player Queen. She looked at a figure like herself, who had played out the woman’s part and met with abuse in reward; Gertrude had just slapped the boy actress hard across the face in a gesture that recalled Hamlet’s slap to Ophelia in the nunnery scene. If Ophelia saw herself in that painted and chastised face, she gave no sign. Her gaze immediately shifted to Hamlet, and she backed off the stage, not to return until her mad scenes. Fletcher’s boy actress watched as she went off, turned his eyes for a minute towards Hamlet, then resignedly joined the other players as they began to pack up their props and costumes. Lugging off the tools of theatrical illusion, he was neither convincingly female nor unequivocally male. ‘Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be,’ cries the mad Ophelia (4.5.43–4). Had Barber’s Ophelia been allowed a moment of real encounter with the ambiguous figure of the boy actress, she might have offered the feminist spectator an image, not only of what we women are, but also of the more sceptical subjects of gender we strive to be.



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An Actor in the Main of All: Individual and Relational Selves in The Duchess of Malfi

I. ‘She and I were twins’ At the climax of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1613–4), the heroine is murdered. Although her brother, Ferdinand, orders his sister’s murder, he is not present at it; he comes to view the result of his commands only when their object is safely (though, as it proves, not definitively) dead. Even then it remains difficult for him to look on her. ‘Cover her face,’ he bids his suborned assassin, Bosola: ‘Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.’1 Then, ignoring Bosola’s bitter comments on the Duchess’ ‘infelicity’ (4.2.265), Ferdinand produces some hitherto unmentioned information: ‘She and I were twins / And should I die this instant, I had liv’d / Her time to a minute’ (4.2.267–9). If the previous chapter ends with a critical fantasy of Ophelia and the boy actress gazing into the transforming mirror of one another’s identities, this one begins through a glass darkly with this sinister moment of reflection between Ferdinand and his dead sister. Of it, M.C. Bradbrook writes that it shows how far ‘Ferdinand feels his life bound up with hers’ (158). In a more psychoanalytic vein, Charles R. Forker suggests that ‘Ferdinand torments and finally kills in his twin sister a reflection of himself, a figure who symbolizes—simultaneously but irreconcilably—his infatuation with and revulsion from his own ego’ (Skull 311). Frank Whigham describes how Ferdinand’s comment restores ‘a lost unity between them even as her death makes him singular’ (200). All three critics emphasize the Duke’s equation between 55



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It seems she was born first: You have bloodily approv’d the ancient truth, That kindred commonly do worse agree Than remote strangers. (4.2.269–72) Against his master’s rhetoric, Bosola insists on the disagreement between the Duchess and her brother. He reinscribes the binary opposition between murderer and murdered; agent and victim; the subject of power and its object; male and female. Is the Duchess, then, the mirror image of her killers, or their opposite? How is the contemporary interpreter of The Duchess of Malfi to negotiate these seemingly contradictory possibilities? Some answers emerge from the recent performance history of Webster’s play. As Susan Bennett remarks, for some years now The Duchess of Malfi has been ‘the [non-Shakespearean] Jacobean play of choice’ (86) on the contemporary stage. In England, for instance, it received at least five major productions in the period covered by this study.2 In the age of Quentin Tarantino, it is easy to assign the play’s popularity to its titillating physical and psychological brutality; hence, many reviewers dismiss The Duchess of Malfi as a mere ‘morbid tragedy’ full of ‘crowd-pleasing schlock moments’ (Edwardes, Time Out, 14 December 1989). In this chapter, I focus instead on the questions raised by the Duke’s exchange with his henchman, asking how similar and how different the Duchess and the men around her are—and how those similarities and differences shape the performance of gender in two recent productions of The Duchess of Malfi: Bill Alexander’s 1989 staging for the RSC at the Swan Theatre and Declan Donnellan’s 1995–96 touring version for Cheek By Jowl. Unlike Ophelia, Webster’s Duchess appeals to contemporary audiences partially because her role equals those of her male counterparts in power and importance. In recent works on female tragic heroism in early modern drama, both Lisa Hopkins and Linda Woodbridge have stressed that, far from relegating her to a supporting role in relation to a male hero, Webster makes the Duchess his eponymous protagonist. She experiences the dual sense of entrapment within and estrangement from social codes of conduct so central to the tragic hero’s subjectivity; her choice of marriage to her steward, Antonio Bologna, alienates her



himself and the sister he has murdered. None notes Bosola’s deflating response:

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from a social order dominated by rigid class and gender hierarchies even as her position of aristocratic power makes her central to it. At the same time, both mad Ferdinand and cynical Bosola suffer similar cycles of attraction to and alienation from their social world. In the play’s original production, when these roles were played by leading King’s Men Richard Burbage and John Lowin respectively, one might have expected them to eclipse that of the Duchess. Yet, the poetic tributes from William Rowley and Thomas Middleton in the earliest published edition of Webster’s play stress the Duchess’ own ability to evoke the tragic emotions of pity and fear in her audiences—‘For who e’er saw this Duchess live, and die,’ wrote Middleton, ‘That could get off under a bleeding eye?’ (Webster, Duchess Commendatory Verses ll.17–8). The Duchess of Malfi stages a struggle between a woman and the men around her, not only for discursive mastery of their world, but also for emotional mastery of themselves, of one another and of the theatrical audience. The contemporary productions I discuss here chose apparently opposing perspectives on the Duchess’ tragic subjectivity and her relationships with the play’s male characters. Alexander’s staging depicted Webster’s protagonist as a loving wife to Antonio and a noble victim of her masculinist society, while Donnellan’s portrayed her as a close sister to Ferdinand and a self-willed collaborator in her culture’s social hierarchies. Nevertheless, these stagings had much in common with Daniels’ Hamlet, as well as with one other. In striving to create realist, psychologically consistent readings of the Duchess and her tormentors, they often locked Webster’s gender-transgressive, haunted characters into the norms of binary gender. Nevertheless, important moments in these performances can be read for their exposition of the instability and desperate interdependence of socially coded identities. Such moments showed male and female identities caught in a process of negotiation that made them one another’s doubles within a discursive system that victimized them all.

II. ‘A healthy set of contradictions’ Entanglement of masculine and feminine identities is evident in the very title of The Duchess of Malfi. True, this is one of comparatively few early modern English tragedies to be named exclusively for its leading female character. However, the Duchess (like the play) is known neither by her Christian name, nor by her maiden name, nor by the name of the husband she chooses for herself, but by the title bestowed upon



Individual and Relational Selves in The Duchess of Malfi


Webster’s heroine by her relationship to her first, dead husband. At the play’s beginning, the Duchess is a ‘sovereign ruler’ (Jankowski 166), but she is so only because she has been widowed and is serving as regent during the minority of her young son. She apparently has a degree of control over her own social and marital destiny of which Ophelia could never dream, but she is also ‘at the mercy both of her brothers’ fears of her remarriage and of early modern notions of the hypersexuality of widows’ (Jankowski 165; see also Jardine 70–93). As the play opens, her identity is already a site of contest. So, too, was the identity of Webster’s real-life prototype, Giovanna d’Aragon, who in 1504 was left with considerable personal power by the death of her husband. In her steward, Antonio Bologna, she chose a second husband who was her social inferior. Webster appears to have found her story in William Painter’s influential narrative collection The Palace of Pleasure, where the Duchess proclaims her self-determination in contentious terms: Let men say what they list, I will doe none otherwyse than my heade and mynd have already framed. Semblably I neede not make accompt to any persone for my fact, my body, and reputation beynge in full liberty and freedome. (13) The historical and fictional fortunes of Giovanna d’Aragon show the dangers of such feminine self-confidence in a rigidly hierarchical society. The real Duchess of Amalfi and her steward-husband were murdered in 1513, apparently by her aristocratic brothers. Telling her story, Painter condemns the murderers but also blames the Duchess for her own tragedy, remarking, Thus I say, because a woman being as it were the Image of sweetnesse, curtesie and shamefastnesse, so soone as she steppeth out of the right tract, and abandoneth the sweete smel of hir duety and modesty, besides the denigration of hir honour, thrusteth her selfe into infinite Troubles, causeth ruine of sutch which should bee honoured and praysed, if Womens Allurementes solicited theym not to Folly. (4) Painter implies that women’s bids for sexual and social agency may lead to a dangerous and inappropriate mingling of masculine and feminine identities. A woman like the Duchess of Amalfi loses ‘hir honour,’ her reputation for the self-containment of chastity, by willingly linking her



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destiny to the man that she has chosen. At the same time, she ‘causeth the ruine’ of the hyper-respectable Antonio, who would have enjoyed a perfect reputation for his own individual qualities had he not been swayed—and transformed—by the Duchess’ attractions. Like Painter’s, Webster’s Duchess is determined to take on the dangerous task of managing the identities around her. She speaks her proud resolve to follow her own will, declaring, ‘If all my royal kindred / Lay in my way unto this marriage, / I’d make them my low footsteps’ (1.1.341–3). But the playtext has scarcely introduced her before her brother, Duke Ferdinand, makes a fierce statement of his determination to control her destiny, telling Bosola, ‘She’s a young widow – / I would not have her marry again’ (1.1.255–6). He then attempts to bend the Duchess to his will by appealing to the same cultural imperative of feminine chastity that supported Painter’s similar argument, reminding her, ‘They are most luxurious / Will wed twice’ (1.1.297–8). But he predicts with misogynist clairvoyance that his sister will fall, thanks to the apparently inevitable feminine desire for the masculine anatomy: ‘women like that part which, like the lamprey, / Hath ne’er a bone in’t’ (1.1.336–7). Meanwhile, the man who will so attract the Duchess, the steward Antonio, offers quite a different vision of her ‘divine’ continence (1.1.199) and ‘noble virtue’ (1.1.201), concluding: ‘I’ll case the picture up:—only thus much— / All her particular worth grows to this sum: / She stains the time past, lights the time to come’ (1.1.207–9). Antonio’s encomium admits the Duchess’ ability to affect and reshape not only those around her, but also their understanding of history and of the future. Yet his reference to ‘cas[ing] the picture up’ presages the Duchess’ later reaction to Ferdinand’s efforts at controlling her: ‘Why should only I, / Of all the other princes of the world, / Be cas’d up, like a holy relic?’ (3.2.137–9). Like Ferdinand’s opprobrium, Antonio’s praise is as much symptomatic of a bid for discursive power over the Duchess’ identity as of her impact on his own. Harriet Walter, who played the title role in Bill Alexander’s production of The Duchess of Malfi, clearly recognized both the Duchess’ self-will and her subjection to masculinist discourse. In an essay on her experience of playing the role, she lists the descriptors that sprang to mind as she approached the Duchess: ‘Womanly. [ ] Mother. Lusty. Reckless. Courageous. Honourable. Autocratic. Wilful. Democratic. Deceiving. Beautiful. Cunning. Dazzling. Wise. A healthy set of contradictions, but you see how hard it is to avoid value judgements?’ (‘Case Study’ 89). She mentions, too, the remarks that other characters make about Webster’s





heroine. Of Ferdinand’s invective and Antonio’s adulation, she remarks, ‘These descriptions probably tell us more about the speakers than the Duchess herself, but they cannot be altogether dismissed’ (‘Case Study’ 90). In Walter’s account, the actress emerges as a negotiator between the Duchess’ self-descriptions and the other (male) characters’ formulations of her image. The parameters of Walter’s own negotiation were defined early by her production’s renaissance setting and its opening tableau, which emphasized the Duchess’ emergence from mourning (Walter, ‘Case Study’ 92). Walter’s Duchess thrust her widow’s weeds aside with an expansive gesture; the assembled courtiers applauded; Ferdinand (Bruce Alexander) stared morosely at his sister; the Cardinal (Russell Dixon) shook his head; Mick Ford traced Antonio’s devotion to his mistress with a low bow. The spectacle of the Duchess surrounded by male gazes and male reactions suggested the great extent to which her identity as marriageable widow was subject to male control. But Walter’s own gestural language—the energy of her unrobing, the smile she flashed at her courtiers—evoked the Duchess’ impact on her surroundings. Her next appearance compounded the impression. In the 1989 Swan performances, she entered above the stage and stood looking down on her court from the galleries as Ford’s Antonio spoke his speech in her praise: the unattainable saint of his words. Then she disrupted his image by re-entering the main playing area to another round of courtly applause. She turned to her guest, Silvio: DUCHESS You are for Milan? SILVIO I am: – DUCHESS Bring the caroches: we’ll bring you down to the haven. (1.1.221–3) With these words Walter’s Duchess grasped Silvio’s arm. Ignoring her brothers’ glares, she laughed and skipped off, followed by her retinue. Clearly, she was very much ‘flesh, and blood, sir’ (1.1.453)—and very much able to shape the behaviour of those around her. Anastasia Hille, Declan Donnellan’s Duchess in the Cheek by Jowl production, stressed the Duchess’ power over others even more strongly (see Figure 4). Ian Sansom described Hille as enjoying ‘cinematic beauty, of the kind possessed by Garbo,’ and declared that casting her as the Duchess was ‘the next best thing to having Bette Davis play the part’ (TLS, 19 January 1996). Garbo was a classical Hollywood beauty associated with exquisite feminine suffering, but Davis’



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persona was that of a voraciously self-willed adventuress. Sansom’s juxtaposition of their images is appropriate to Hille’s Duchess, whose fragile elegance was contradicted by her fierce resolve. In Donnellan’s production, set in an early to mid-twentieth-century world that at some times recalled fascist Italy or Spain and at others the England of Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson, Hille’s Duchess was ‘transformed into an English society girl in a Twenties cocktail dress and tiara’ (de Jongh, Evening Standard 3 January 1996). But she was no mere frivolous debutante. At the opening of the production as it appeared at Wyndham’s Theatre, London, in early 1996, Matthew Macfadyen’s Antonio lifted the proscenium curtain to reveal her standing, frozen, between her brothers. She remained present but frozen throughout the machinations that dominate the playtext’s first scene, then broke out of her immobile stance in the midst of Antonio’s paean as if she were shrugging off the definitions implicit in his words. As he declared her of ‘different temper’ than her brothers (1.1.189), she moved forward to join them. The siblings laughed together; Ferdinand and the Duchess clasped hands as he kissed her. It was clear that, in Benedict Nightingale’s words, ‘This Duchess [was] not some virtuous alien from outer space, but a chip off the same block as her brothers’ (The Times, 24 October 1995). The openings of both productions recognized the tensions and contradictions that surround Webster’s Duchess: her power, the efforts of the men around her discursively to contain it and her resistance to those efforts. Yet the differences between them were equally striking. Walter’s Duchess distanced herself from her brothers; Hille’s Duchess identified with them. Walter’s Duchess tried to avoid Ferdinand’s threatening gaze; Hille’s Duchess met her brother’s eyes with affectionate mockery. When Ferdinand threatened Walter’s Duchess with ‘my father’s poniard’ (1.1.331), she tried to respond with ‘cool command, wit and the occasional unruffled smile’ (Walter, ‘Case Study’ 93), but as soon as he exited her trembling became obvious. Hille’s Duchess, on the other hand, neatly closed her brother’s own hand on the dagger before kissing the wound better. Both productions established the tragic heroism of Webster’s protagonist by showing her as simultaneously resistant to and embedded within the strictures of her aristocratic culture. However, Alexander’s production followed Bosola in stressing the Duchess’ difference from the brothers who would destroy her; Donnellan’s, conversely, followed Ferdinand’s emphasis on their twinship. In the next two sections of this chapter, I examine the contrasting portrayals of the Duchess, Antonio and Ferdinand that resulted from these




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III. ‘An ordinary woman’ Near the end of the two-year run of his RSC production of The Duchess of Malfi, Bill Alexander gave an interview to Yumi Sato in which he discussed his conception of Webster’s heroine. In Sato’s transcription, he begins his comments on the Duchess by saying that he does not see the play as portraying ‘a woman who fights against the social code.’ He continues, I don’t think the Duchess of Malfi, as a person, is a fighter on behalf of change. I think she’s a woman who’s following her instincts [ ] it simply comes from the sort of person she is, that she is incapable as an individual of not following the dictates of her own heart. [ ] I think that in many ways the Duchess is an ordinary woman and that is precisely her problem. [ ] She is like an aristocrat, a leader, of whom much is expected but who essentially is a very motherly, housely, wifely sort of person. (quoted in Sato 224, 228, emphases Alexander’s) As an example of liberal humanist, realist interpretation, Alexander’s description of the Duchess as an ‘ordinary woman’ whose actions arise from ‘the sort of person she is’—an ‘individual’ following ‘the dictates of her own heart’ with little interest in social determination or change— could hardly be bettered. Despite her powerful position, the Duchess is ‘essentially’ a mother and wife. Appropriately, then, Alexander’s production was marked by a glowingly sympathetic treatment of the young widow’s love for her steward. If one regarded the playtext as an inscription of early modern cultural ideals, this positive focus might have been enough to lock Walter’s Duchess into a conventionally feminine position. After all, in early modern conduct books, the married woman is frequently instructed that ‘the whole duty of the wife is referred to two heads. The first is, to acknowledge her inferiority: the next, to carry her selfe as inferior’ (Whately 36). In such formulations, marriage emerges as a straightforward imposition of male power. The Duchess’ choice of marriage might be seen as locking her—and the contemporary actress who plays



apparently polar choices before returning to the similarities between the two productions and their implications for the notion of tragic subjectivity.

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her—within a relationship where feminine identity is fully dominated by the masculine. In Alexander’s staging, however, Mick Ford scarcely played Antonio as a masterful husband. Indeed, Charles Osborne described him as ‘unnecessarily wimpish’ (Daily Telegraph, 11 December 1989). Most reviewers disagreed, confirming instead Emrys Jones’ contention that ‘Mick Ford’s Antonio is admirable, and gives his unshowy role a firmer definition than it sometimes receives.’ Ford’s Antonio, added Jones, ‘is never a heroic figure, sometimes the reverse; he is merely a decent man’ (TLS, 22 December 1989). Dressed in sober and unostentatious black, Ford’s Antonio was the perfect steward. An elegant bow was his most habitual gesture: he knew his place in the court, and kept to it with rather wistful good humour. As Bill Alexander remarked, he ‘would have been contented to love the Duchess from a distance’ (quoted in Sato 229). In other words, Ford played an Antonio who was unlikely to woo the Duchess. Indeed, his firm commitment to the status quo accentuated the social subversiveness of the Duchess’ wooing. His shock when Walter’s Duchess proposed marriage—he straightened with a jerk from the bow in which he had been waiting to receive her ring— emphasized her appropriation of masculine agency in courtship even as she wrote herself back into the conventionally feminine role of wife. The Duchess, meanwhile, evinced considerable frustration at the difficulties she met in convincing her reticent steward to marry her. As she snapped, ‘Awake, awake, man’ (1.1.455), her determination spoke not only of womanly love but also of an insistent bid for control over herself and the man she had chosen. Far from dwindling into a wife, her Duchess forcefully drove both the wooing scene and Antonio’s new identity. This might suggest that Walter’s interpretation swung right away from her director’s stress on the Duchess’ womanliness and towards Laura L. Behling’s argument that the Duchess’ actions reflect ‘a masculine strength [ ] and a conception of selfhood which is autonomous rather than relational’ (38–9). But Walter herself insists that she and Ford were intent on establishing a ‘power balance’ between the Duchess and Antonio. She notes that they drew out ‘those moments when Antonio asserts his control over the Duchess, and there are many’ (‘Case Study’ 94). The instance she chooses is significant: ‘In the wooing scene, for example, he passionately argues for her not to waste her life but to remarry (and in our production Mick Ford did this with what I found an almost frightening anger)’ (‘Case Study’ 94). Ford’s anger comes across vividly even on the archive video of the production, suggesting an





Figure 3 Married bliss in Malfi. Left to right: Mick Ford (Antonio), Sally Edwards (Cariola), Harriet Walter (the Duchess) in The Duchess of Malfi, dir. Bill Alexander, Swan Theatre, 1989. Photo by Joe Cocks Studio, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

Antonio who changes his mistress even as he acquiesces in her radical project of changing him. Ford and Walter played their scenes on a sustained note of reciprocity and exchange (Figure 3). In the bedroom scene (3.2), he lay on her floor in shirtsleeves, surrounded by their children’s toys, while the couple and Cariola (Sally Edwards) laughed at one another’s ribald jokes. After Ferdinand’s violent intrusion, the Duchess took control of the situation, buttoning Antonio’s doublet as she formulated their escape. He took up her suggestions with grace and convincingly inhabited the role she constructed for him. At their final parting, though, it was he who tried to temper her grief. His (largely unsuccessful) struggle to impose



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stoicism on himself was simultaneous with his effort to coax his wife into resignation. The final impression was of two people who were willingly interdependent. When Ford’s Antonio called his Duchess ‘Best of my life’ (3.5.61), the phrase seemed not a glib endearment but a statement of truth. The Duchess had made him the man he was, and he depended on her as she did on him. If this lovingly detailed reading of one of the playtext’s pivotal relationships wrote the Duchess firmly into the role of wife, it did not simply reinscribe the passivity and submission commonly associated with wifedom in early modern (and, to a lesser extent, contemporary) marriage manuals. Rather, like Judith Haber, it suggested that the Duchess ‘effectively positions herself (and Antonio) both as subject and as object’ and that she ‘revises—instead of merely reversing—the fundamental syntax of gender and power’ (140). This interpretation does not affirm conventional gender hierarchies through the Duchess’ submission to her husband or through her straightforward appropriation of male prerogatives. Rather, the identities of both members of this couple are produced through a process of negotiation and exchange, and the Duchess achieves tragic heroism through her insistence on maintaining this process even at the cost of her own life. Alexander’s interpretation of The Duchess of Malfi parallels that of Linda Woodbridge, who writes that the Duchess’ ‘is a heroism not of grandeur but of dailyness, and what’s heroic is her daring to defend the tiny fortress of her ordinary desire’ (‘Queen’ 179). Like Alexander, Walter and Ford, Woodbridge convincingly depicts Webster’s protagonist as a ground-breaking tragic figure who deliberately alienates herself from aristocratic norms and misogynist demands in order to achieve ‘an ordinary everyday marriage’ (‘Queen’ 178). Catherine Belsey, conversely, dismisses such readings as sentimental liberal constructions that ‘suppress recognition of the power relations which structure the family’ (Subject 199). By stressing the charms of ordinary wifeliness, they ultimately slot women (and men) back into the roles ascribed them by more blatant forms of masculinism. In the process, they may confirm female characters’ exclusion from the autonomy, agency and resistance to social norms associated with male tragic subjects. As a description of the Duchess’ relationship with Antonio, Belsey’s strict equation between Webster’s playtext and his cultural milieu seems excessively pessimistic. As Walter and Ford read it, the marriage between the Duchess and her steward allowed both characters to assert agency and to step outside the norms of their society (at great risk to themselves). However, Belsey’s argument relates suggestively to her earlier





essay, ‘Emblem and Antithesis in The Duchess of Malfi,’ where she sees Webster’s playtext ‘juxtaposing the Duchess’s world of innocence, reciprocity, and fertility with Ferdinand’s sterile darkness, isolation, and death’ (102). Here, Belsey readily concedes the attractions of the Duchess’ vision of mutuality. However, she also shows how those very attractive qualities are reinscribed as feminine through their opposition to the brutal masculinity of Ferdinand. Perhaps they are subversive in their defiance of Ferdinand’s masculinist ethos, but they also open the Duchess to masculinist persecution, to the loss of Antonio and to eventual entrapment within the role of the passive feminine victim. As Mary Beth Rose writes, the Duchess ‘ceases to be the maker, and becomes instead the bearer’ of a meaning that reiterates confining constructions of feminine identity (171). Alexander’s Duchess of Malfi, which juxtaposed its celebratory performance of the Duchess–Antonio relationship with a very dark portrayal of Ferdinand, played out this scenario. Bruce Alexander embodied a saturnine ‘great Calabrian Duke’ (1.1.87) who punctuated his remarks with a mirthless, barking laugh. Often unnervingly quiet, he was given to sudden bursts of verbal and physical brutality. He could not take his eyes off his sister, but was also clearly estranged from her. Walter describes how, at the end of their first scene alone together, her Duchess tried to give him ‘an affectionate kiss’ and how ‘Ferdinand dodged it, then on second thoughts sharply returned it in the manner of a woodpecker pecking a tree’ (‘Case Study’ 93). It was a disturbing enactment of the Duke’s obsession with and cruelty towards his sister. The shadow of abuse in the first movement of Bill Alexander’s Duchess of Malfi exploded into outright violence when the enraged Ferdinand entered the Duchess’ bedroom by stealth. In the close quarters of the Swan Theatre, Bruce Alexander must have cut a genuinely frightening figure as he clasped his dagger to the throat of Walter’s gasping Duchess. It was very apparent that he could control his sister physically and (up to a point) mentally, while she could not manage or even comprehend his actions. Alexander emphasized this point by employing unpredictable gestural language, as when (after a bout of particular brutality) he suddenly let go of the Duchess to wander away across her carpet, gently booting a child’s toy out of his path and ruminating on the ‘most imperfect light of human reason’ (3.2.77). When she asked him if he would see her husband (3.2.86), he took her hand softly, murmuring, ‘Yes ’ before throwing her violently to the floor. Through such choices, Bill Alexander’s production represented the Duchess’ relationship with



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Ferdinand primarily as one of helpless female subjection to vicious male domination. Perhaps for this reason, Harriet Walter maintains that Webster’s main concern in The Duchess of Malfi is ‘to force us to examine the sexual hypocrisy and misogyny lying behind the male rule of society’ (‘Case Study’ 90). Her interpretation offers a view of gender oppression which the female subject strives but is ultimately unable ‘to overturn or reverse’ (Sawicki 170), rather than ‘a network of relations, constantly in tension’ (Foucault, Discipline 174). It has the virtue of exposing male oppression of women, but threatens to reduce Webster’s playtext to a melodrama with ‘the Duchess as the Virtuous Victim and her brothers as the Diabolically Wicked Villains’ (Taylor, Independent, 9 December 1989). Walter’s Duchess was a tragic hero insofar as her relationships to Antonio and to her brother embodied a ‘real tension’ between two constructions of identity and socially acceptable conduct (Williams 54). However, Ferdinand’s behaviour was so extreme, so bizarre, that he arguably appeared as alienated from the dominant order of society as is his sister—if not more so. The audience could simply read the Duchess as ‘an ordinary woman’ unfortunately destroyed by a psychopath, rather than as a subject struggling against an order of which she, her husband and her brother are all inescapably a part. Six years later, Declan Donnellan’s Duchess attempted instead to emphasize their entanglement in social norms by interpreting the class and gender politics of Webster’s playtext in quite a different manner.

IV. ‘The helpless dependency of evil on its victim’ By the time Donnellan’s touring production of The Duchess of Malfi opened at Wyndham’s Theatre, its main interpretative thrust was signalled for the spectator by the first pages of its programme. They featured juxtaposed photographs of Anastasia Hille and Scott Handy, accentuating the physical resemblance of the two actors. Unlike Walter and Alexander, this Duchess and Duke were clearly twins—and Hille’s Duchess was easily the more formidable of the pair. Very young, gangling and clumsy, with a blonde fringe that flopped over big, liquid eyes, Handy’s Ferdinand could hardly have been less like Bruce Alexander’s festering tyrant. Elizabeth Schafer described him as ‘often boyishly likeable’ (51) and Benedict Nightingale agreed that he exuded ‘fresh-faced insecurity rather than arrogance or malice’ (The Times 24 October 1995). Perverse and turbulent (1.1.169) he remained, going off into sudden fits of laughter or working himself into a frenzy as he





pictured ‘those joys, / Those lustful pleasures’ (1.1.325–6) in which his widowed sister might engage. But his family’s reaction to these outbursts was usually dismissive: the Duchess and the Cardinal both greeted his worst exhibitions by boxing his ears. In short, Handy’s Ferdinand was ‘the family fool’ (Nightingale, The Times 24 October 1995), the ‘unruly kid brother’ (Macaulay, Financial Times 4 January 1996) who sobbed helplessly in the Cardinal’s lap on learning of the Duchess’ liaison with Antonio. In the bedroom scene, his armed entry into her boudoir, knife in hand, was not so much threatening as ludicrous; the Duchess soon snatched the knife away. While he flung tearful invective at her and stormed around the room knocking over furniture as he went, she sipped a glass of whisky and repeated his insults in mocking tones. Eventually, he fell weeping into her arms. Handy’s Ferdinand needed the Duchess: needed her to fulfil the womanly roles of mother/sister/wife for him, needed to push her to provide him with the caresses that assured him of his position as her son/brother/husband. When her remarriage broke these bonds, he responded with escalating efforts to repossess his place. His insults and threats against his sister, and even her imprisonment and murder at his hands, spoke not a priori misogyny but rather a frantic attempt to keep contact with the woman whose existence was necessary to his own. Hence, John Peter praised Handy for exploring ‘the helpless dependency of evil on its victim’ (Sunday Times 7 January 1996). The last half-century has seen a great deal of critical speculation about the nature of this ‘dependency’ as it may or may not be inscribed in Webster’s playtext. Onstage, the idea that Ferdinand’s need for his sister is actually the product of a taboo passion for her has been canonical at least since John Gielgud played an incestuous Ferdinand to Peggy Ashcroft’s Duchess in 1945 (McLuskie and Uglow 42). Scholars remain divided on the issue. Frank Whigham suggests that Webster wrote an incestuous Duke, but argues that in this case incest constitutes a social rather than a psychological posture. In Whigham’s view, Ferdinand’s desire for his sister is connected to the early modern aristocrat’s sense of the precariousness of his own social position; it is ‘a desperate expression of the desire to evade degrading contamination by inferiors’ (191). Richard A. McCabe objects that ‘Ferdinand’s overtly canvassed pride is at best a sexual posture’ (251) and insists that ‘Ferdinand is not representative of any class or social outlook, but remains imprisoned within his own private melancholy’ (252). Molly Smith agrees, and further suggests that the Duke’s sexual obsession is



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a symptom of ‘hysteria, a traditionally female disease linked directly to sexuality’ (85). Like Smith, Handy associated Ferdinand’s potentially incestuous desires with his ‘feminized nature’ (89). Longing and lack disrupted his efforts to project ‘masculine’ autonomy, placing him in a quasi-feminine position of subjection (even of abjection) before his sister’s will. Thus, instead of appearing victimized, Hille’s Duchess was often the victimizer; instead of being dominated, she was in command. This was a risky strategy. Like the feminization of Hamlet in Ron Daniels’ production, it threatened to maintain conventional gender positions by reversing them, representing characters who failed to occupy them as merely inadequate (Handy) or excessive (Hille). Where Alexander’s Duchess of Malfi stressed the Duchess’ heroism in abandoning class privilege for ordinary human desires and a proto-bourgeois marriage, Donnellan depicted her as a regal overreacher who, Lear-like, counted too confidently on her class power and ability to control those around her. Like Alexander’s production, however, Donnellan’s complicated its view of the Duchess’ relationships with men by insisting that they were based as much on negotiation as on simple dominance. In the Cheek by Jowl production, this point was made clear by Ferdinand’s ability to affect, as well as to be affected by, his sister’s iron self-will. If Hille’s Duchess retained a physical upper hand throughout her bedchamber confrontation with Handy’s Ferdinand, her control faltered when he began his long fable about Love, Death and Reputation (3.2.119–35). Her brother pulled her down to sit in his lap on the floor and clutched her as he sketched out his narrative, creating spaces for each of its characters with the movement of his torch. For the first time he possessed the stage completely, and the Duchess was drawn into the world of his imagination. When Ferdinand declared that love was to be found ‘’Mongst quiet kindred that had nothing left / By their dead parents’ (3.2.129–30), she leant her head against her brother’s shoulder and even began to sob. When he insisted, ‘I will never see you more’ (3.2.136), she tried desperately to pry his fingers away from his eyes, attempting to re-establish contact and exchange between their identities. She could no more dismiss him from her life than he (stumbling over a chair in his haste to escape her conciliating hands) could tear her from his. Bound together inexorably by the same ‘kindred’ ties that shaped their haughty and self-willed bids for dominance, they could live neither with nor without one another. If the marriage of Walter’s Duchess and Ford’s Antonio was the high point of Alexander’s Duchess, the agon of Hille’s Duchess and Handy’s





Ferdinand was the crux of Donnellan’s. It exposed the ramifications of Ferdinand’s fevered refusal of Bosola’s pleas for the Duchess: ‘Damn her! that body of hers, / While that my blood ran pure in’t, was more worth / Than that which thou wouldst comfort, call’d a soul’ (4.1.121–3). Handy’s Ferdinand was not simply a lunatic, nor was he totally detached from the sister he victimized and the social order in which they lived. On the contrary, he himself viewed their identities as radically symbiotic and interdependent. His ‘blood’—both the honour of his family and his own survival as a living subject—depended on his control over ‘that body of hers.’ She struggled against his stranglehold on her agency with precisely the same tools of aristocratic command as he used to maintain it. They were both, in a sense, tragic figures. Both were simultaneously empowered and threatened by social codes of class identity; both responded by trying to estrange themselves from the relationship that founded their being. The dividing line between their subject positions was unstable, and threatened to break down rigidly binary gender distinctions. However, as in Alexander’s Duchess, so here the establishment of one powerful and potentially subversive exchange between masculine and feminine identities had the effect of reifying other oppositions. A strong identification between the Duchess and Ferdinand depends on a strong consciousness of their shared class position, just as a sense of the Duchess as appropriating a masculine subject position depends on a recognition of her quasi-masculine power as regent of Malfi. An emphasis on that power, however, brings out the inequalities within the apparently reciprocal alliance between the Duchess and her lowerborn steward. Class anxieties glimmer behind Antonio’s rueful response to the Duchess’ proposal—‘These words should be mine, / And all the parts you have spoke, if some part of it / Would not have savour’d flattery’ (1.1.472–4)—and his recognition at the height of their intimacy, ‘Indeed, my rule is only in the night’ (3.2.8). Alexander’s production shows some of the strategies through which a contemporary production can circumvent such anxieties and present a relatively untroubled vision of the Duchess–Antonio relationship. Given its emphasis on the class-based bond between the Duchess and her brother, Donnellan’s production conversely had to cope with the problem—and did so in ways that threatened to reinstall gender binaries. Despite its insistence on the Duchess’ identification with masculine power, Donnellan’s Duchess of Malfi did not ignore the vulnerability engendered in her by her courtship of her steward. Anastasia Hille began the wooing scene on a typically arrogant note, perfunctorily



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bidding Cariola (Avril Clark), ‘Leave me: but place thyself behind the arras, / Where thou mayst overhear us’ (1.1.357–8). At the outset, indeed, it appeared that she might be courting Antonio only in order to assert her independence from her brothers. But this project was risky, placing her in a new position of dependence. On Antonio’s appearance, she lost her composure altogether and tripped over her words. Later, her voice shook as she stripped back her ceremonial gloves to show her steward that her long, thin arm was ‘flesh, and blood, sir’ (1.1.453). Many of her statements ended on a tentative, almost questioning note, as if she hoped that Antonio’s response would complete them. Her hope was in vain. Determinedly unsentimental about Webster’s celebrated love story, Donnellan’s Duchess of Malfi confronted its Duchess with an unresponsive beloved. Matthew Macfadyen played Antonio as a very young and desperately prim civil servant, a junior Malvolio in place of Ford’s older and wiser Romeo. He entered the Duchess’ boudoir sporting ‘wing-collars, a frock-coat and pinstripes, [ ] like a stiff-backed Charlie Chaplin’ (Sansom, TLS 19 January 1996). When the Duchess asked him, ‘What do you think of marriage?’ (1.1.392), Macfadyen brought out a strain of glibness in Antonio’s response. ‘I take’t, as those that deny purgatory – / It locally contains, or heaven or hell; / There’s no third place in’t,’ he joked (1.1.393– 5), greeting his own witticism with a guffaw. Clearly subscribing to very conventional constructions of gender, he was offended when he realized that the Duchess was courting him. He agreed readily enough with her admiring description of him, remarking stiffly, ‘I have long serv’d virtue, / And ne’er ta’en wages of her’ (1.1.439–40, emphasis Macfadyen’s), but he replaced her proffered ring fastidiously on a chair in demonstration of his strict rectitude. Locked within strict codes of social conduct, he almost stonewalled the Duchess’ effort to defy them. In Donnellan’s version, the Duchess’ wooing succeeded at last only because Macfadyen’s Antonio was, as Peter J. Smith noted, ‘a degraded and cowardly opportunist’ (79). He eventually laid aside his outrage to grasp the tempting bargain offered him, and after some minutes of backing fearfully away from Hille’s advances lunged for her with a schoolboy’s clumsy lustfulness. She withdrew, startled, but soon offered herself to him again in a moment well described by Smith: Movingly, she undressed in front of an invisible mirror down stage and turned naked to his embrace.3 He remained in frock coat and




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For a politically engaged spectator there was a potentially interesting double edge to this scene, punctuated as it was by Antonio’s protests that, ‘These words should be mine, / And all the parts you have spoke, if some part of it / Would not have savour’d flattery’ (1.1.472–4). Macfadyen performed Antonio’s strong sense of having been displaced from his proper discursive role by the Duchess’ wooing. He experienced with distress the vulnerable feminine position of love object, and his inability to negotiate it ended the scene with the image Smith describes. With a forced smile, Hille’s Duchess restored order by re-establishing herself as the object of Antonio’s very male gaze. Her risk had been for naught; the marriage that would destroy her simply reinstated the binary power positions of male and female she so rejected in her relations with her brother. Donnellan’s harsh view of the Duchess–Antonio relationship had some fascinating and productive effects. It succeeded in dramatizing the tenacity of the playtext’s gender and class hierarchies. Antonio’s desperately performative reassertions of his masculinity and the Duchess’ eventual replacement of herself in the feminine situation by taking her clothes off suggested the discursive (rather than natural) basis of gender identities. By injecting rancour and sarcasm into Webster’s scenes of tender domesticity, Hille and Macfadyen rejected any view of the Duchess as ‘an ordinary woman’ who embraced the subsidiary position of a bourgeoise housewife. Still, many critics and audience members were uncomfortable with this vision of the Duchess’ marriage. John Peter, for example, complained that the playing of Hille and Macfadyen, ‘though superbly controlled, contradicts both text and subtext on every point’ (Sunday Times 7 January 1996). Such comments assume that the playtext might have been directly productive of a more ideal performance: a problematic assumption, given that, as H.R. Coursen reminds us, performance is not realization but interpretation, ‘heavily conditioned by the historical moment into which it intrudes’ (Shakespeare in Performance 24). Alexander’s sympathetic reading of the Duchess–Antonio relationship was as much a selective interpretation as Donnellan’s unsympathetic one. One might argue, however, that in that selectivity both performance texts, conditioned as they were by contemporary naturalistic performance styles, excluded some of the potentially productive negotiations implicit in the playtext. If the Duchess’ through-line was based on a notion of her as



buttoned-up, Victorian formality, and the image of the two of them dramatised her vulnerability and his prissy egotism. (79–80)

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the womanly and affectionate wife of steward Antonio, she could not ‘pull rank’ and still maintain naturalistic consistency; if it was based on a vision of her as Ferdinand’s autocratic sister, she could not plausibly enjoy a reciprocal exchange with her low-born husband. Hence, Alexander’s Duchess scarcely recognized the dialectic of power between the Duchess and her brother because of its emphasis on her embattled love for Antonio; Donnellan’s Duchess gave short shrift to that love and its socially productive exchange by focusing instead on the Duchess’ class-based power. In both cases, contemporary theatre worked to reimprison the Duchess within, as well as to liberate her from, binary constructions of gender.

V. Dialogues of the galley-slaves Perhaps this imprisonment was not the fault of contemporary naturalism; perhaps liberation is simply impossible for the Duchess, trapped as she is in a male-dominated world and constructed as she is by a male playwright for an all-male theatre. As if recognizing the odds stacked against her, in the fourth act of Webster’s playtext the Duchess herself describes the theatre as a prison-house. Incarcerated by her brother and confronted with what she believes to be the body of her beloved husband, she cries out, ‘Who must despatch me? / I account this world a tedious theatre, / For I do play a part in’t ’gainst my will’ (4.1.83–5). Even in her own construction, these words suggest, the Duchess has lost agency over her own identity and become nothing more than a puppet manipulated by cruel men. Moreover, they stand as an indictment of the theatrical audience watching her. The first sentence of McLuskie and Uglow’s performance history of The Duchess of Malfi insists on the centrality of the Duchess’ suffering to Webster’s playtext, ‘which has as its climactic moment the torture and murder of a beautiful woman’ (1). As the Duchess’ explicitly metatheatrical discourse insists, any pleasure derived from the spectacle of her suffering is identifiable with the misogynist glee of her brother and his agents. Both Worthen and Andrea Henderson identify the Duchess’ pain at her entrapment with a sense ‘that her enduring self [ ] is being eroded by her theatrical world’: a world of cruel dissimulation in which she is forced to perform roles pressed upon her by her (male) enemies and loses the autonomy often associated with tragic subjectivity (Worthen, Idea 65; see also Henderson 199). Like these critics, both Walter and Hille stressed the Duchess’ sense of despair and powerlessness as her death neared. To be sure, they





stayed true to their established visions of the Duchess’ ‘enduring’ identity as they moved through the potential grand guignol of the fourth act. Walter’s Duchess remained the committed wife of Antonio and the noble but increasingly hopeless victim of Ferdinand. She panted with fear when trapped alone in the dark with her malevolent brother (4.1.29–53), shrieked in horror when she realized that he had left a dead man’s hand with her (4.1.53), and exploded into self-destructive grief on the sight of Antonio’s corpse (4.1.56–66). Hille, on the other hand, wrestled Ferdinand to the ground and slapped him when he called her children ‘bastards’ (4.1.36). Alone with the dead man’s hand, she picked up the revolting item and dropped it into a nearby bin. She greeted everything, even the apparition of Antonio’s body, with icy irony. Her wry reading of the Duchess’ response to Bosola’s efforts at consolation—‘Good comfortable fellow / Persuade a wretch that’s broke upon the wheel / To have all his bones new set’ (4.1.80–2)—scarcely resembled the anguished treatment Walter gave the same lines. Yet Walter’s and Hille’s impersonations of the Duchess reached a meeting place at this very point. Walter fell to her knees as she cried out that her world was ‘a tedious theatre’; Hille remained still and murmured the words in a tone of desolate perception from which irony was suddenly absent. Walter beat the supporting arms of Bosola and Cariola away from her; Hille stood alone in the middle of an almost bare stage. They depicted a Duchess who found herself completely isolated, who desired death but who could not move those around her to end her life. Each actress had represented a Duchess capable of shaping her world; now, both suggested that her bright days were done. She had retreated into herself and found nothing but an identity in a state of dissolution. In Webster’s playtext, the Duchess seems to emerge from this abyss to assert herself anew. When Bosola enters to make her tomb, he insists on the futility of all human existence (4.2.124–33). His words accord well with the Duchess’ earlier sense of her own lack of agency, but now she refuses to accept them. ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still,’ she replies (4.2.142). It is one of the most famous statements in the early modern canon: one which, as Catherine Belsey notes, has often been read as an affirmation of ‘the continuity of inviolable identity’ (Subject 35). But Belsey mentions the line’s iconic status in character criticism only to tear it down. She writes that the ‘Duchess, who has no name, is claiming a political place not a personal identity [ ] [and] the claim is in practice false’ (Subject 39). Mary Beth Rose puts it more sympathetically: ‘The Duchess’ courage and dignity in facing death are indissolubly conjoined



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with her royal stature. On the other hand, the sociopolitical conditions that make heroism possible [ ] unquestionably reside in the decay of and need to defy the order from which her status derives’ (169). The rebel against a masculinist and hierarchical establishment claims the power and dignity of her late husband’s aristocratic title. The contradictions inherent in the Duchess’ tragic subjectivity are at their most apparent as she prepares to die for them. This sense of contradiction appeared in both Alexander’s and Donnellan’s productions. Harriet Walter pronounced the famous words through gritted teeth and with painfully determined emphasis: ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still.’ Her reading squared with her stated belief that ‘despite [the Duchess’] despair, she defies madness and tries to defeat death’ (‘Case Study’ 98). Hille’s Duchess, conversely, responded to Bosola’s disquisition on vanitas mundi by placing a paper crown on her head. ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still,’ she declared sardonically, laughing ‘as if she had just lifted [the phrase] from a dictionary of quotations and was uncertain now of its applicability’ (Taylor, Independent 4 January 1996). While Walter’s ‘ordinary’ Duchess suddenly claimed her aristocracy, Hille’s autocratic Duchess suddenly mocked it. In both cases, words that seemed like a defiant statement of individual coherence emerged instead as signs of identity’s instability. By escaping the strict coherence of the Stanislavskian through-line, both Walter’s and Hille’s performances evoked the collision of the Duchess’ various discursive positions as she approached death. In neither case could any spectator have known with certainty whether or not the evasion of coherence was intentional. Perhaps, paradoxically, it sprang out of a need to portray the Duchess’ embattlement naturalistically and hence to mitigate the confidence of her earlier selfconstructions. Regardless of the cause, the effect was to undermine a sense of the Duchess either as essentially the proto-bourgeoise wife or as essentially the quasi-masculine aristocrat. Rather, these possibilities emerged as interwoven components of her discursive position. Instead of seating the Duchess like Patience on the monument of her own consistency, performance here could be read as showing her ability to claim previously occluded aspects of her identity in order to defy male domination. In Webster’s playtext, the Duchess’ achievement of tragic defiance and dignity at the point of death gains yet another layer of complexity when the Duchess, having affirmed her class identity, once more negates it in order to claim her place within the great Christian drama of salvation. She forgives her executioners, bidding them,





Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength Must pull down heaven upon me: — Yet stay; heaven-gates are not so highly arch’d As princes’ palaces, they that enter there Must go upon their knees. (4.2.230–4) In these final moments, the Duchess not only steps decisively outside the hierarchical order in which she has lived, but embraces a new identity within a spiritual world alternative to that constructed by the worldly-minded ‘religion’ of her brother, the Cardinal. In this new guise, the Duchess will be more than ever the tragic figure who revises and reproaches a world from which she is (now irretrievably) other. Once dead, she seems to shine in the darkness of her torture chamber like Caravaggio’s Virgin of Loreto—or so we gather when Ferdinand demands that her face be covered because it so dazzles his eyes. Moreover, Ferdinand is not alone in being radically affected by the Duchess’ final performance. His suborned assassin, Bosola, responds to her death by rejecting the ‘painted honour,’ the socially constructed success, he so longed for (4.2.336). When his victim briefly revives, he cries out: ‘her eye opes, / And heaven in it seems to ope, that late was shut, / To take me up to mercy’ (4.2.347–9). Like a perverse Dante contemplating his Beatrice, Bosola envisions a Duchess who can transform, not just the social identities of the men around her, but even their immortal souls. Working from a secular, late twentieth-century Western perspective far distanced from the profound religious concerns of Webster’s culture, Alexander’s and Donnellan’s productions payed little attention to the role of Christian discourse in the Duchess’ heroism. Yet, it was the assumptions of naturalism, as much as the omission of spirituality, that led both stagings to minimize the transformative nature of the Duchess’ relationship with Bosola. No matter how much a politically engaged spectator managed to read into the performances of Walter and Hille, she would surely have had difficulty doing the same with those of Nigel Terry and George Anton in the role of the Duchess’ last great interlocutor. Both productions placed great emphasis on Bosola’s detached, theatrical stance during the Duchess’ last moments. Anton appeared in white makeup, dark glasses and the dapper dark suit of Cabaret’s MC (Figure 4), while the black-clad Terry wrapped the Duchess in her shroud and sprinkled powder on her hair with the crisp precision of a conjurer setting up an illusion. The overt theatricality of these



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Figure 4 The Duchess and her Executioner. George Anton (Bosola) and Anastasia Hille (the Duchess) in The Duchess of Malfi, dir. Declan Donnellan, Cheek by Jowl, 1995. Photo by John Haynes, reproduced by kind permission of the photographer

scenes engaged aspects of Webster’s playtext, where Bosola refuses to appear to the condemned Duchess ‘in my own shape’ (4.1.134) and instead plays for her the roles of ‘old man’ (4.2.114.sd), tomb-maker and ‘common bellman’ (4.2.173). But their rigid detachment pointed to a more disturbing aspect of the performances of Anton and Terry. Alastair Macaulay spoke for a number of reviewers when he complained that, in Donnellan’s production, ‘Bosola, the most complex character of all, is given a virtually monochrome performance by George Anton: a [sic] uninflected and uninvolved Scots outsider, in whom Bosola’s occasional flights of wit, intellect, and remorse scarcely ring true’ (Financial Times 4 January 1996). If Nigel Terry’s finely spoken





malcontent had more proponents among critics, Paul Taylor found him ‘lacklustre’ (Independent 9 December 1989), and Jane Edwardes remarked that he played ‘the fascinating Bosola [ ] almost too rationally’ (Time Out 14 December 1989). Indeed, both actors took a rather static view of Webster’s anti-hero. Anton’s Bosola was unalterably angry and hyperactive; Terry’s was immovably sardonic and detached, articulating his lines ‘like a BBC announcer’ (Osborne, Daily Telegraph 11 December 1989). Like Walter and Hille through most of their respective productions, Terry and Anton took particular lines on their characters and played them relentlessly. As with the determinedly coherent readings of the Duchess–Antonio and Duchess–Ferdinand relationships elsewhere in these stagings, so here the effect was to privilege certain representational options at the expense of others. Terry coped brilliantly with Bosola’s detached observations on the loathsomeness of ‘this outward form of man’ (2.1.45) and (rather disconcertingly for a politically engaged audience member) raised laughter with his sardonic deliveries of Bosola’s misogynist diatribes (2.1.23–44, 2.2.1–27). Anton did better with Bosola’s corrosive anger at his own degradation: ‘Oh, this base quality / Of intelligencer!’ (3.2.327–8). Both performances were almost stereotypically realist in their interiority. Indeed, their focus on Bosola’s inner life sometimes blocked communication with other actors. Most noticeably, both Bosolas preached mortification to the dying Duchess, but neither of them seemed much affected either by her aristocratic defiance or by her embrace of Christian transcendence. At the performances recorded by the archive videos of the two productions, neither actor so much as paused or changed tone when answered with ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still.’ The Duchess and Bosola of Webster’s playtext can be read as something more than the clearly antithetical figures sketched by the vibrant Walter and the sardonic Terry, or by the aristocratic Hille and the roughly working-class Anton. Lee Bliss argues that ‘Bosola woos the Duchess while tormenting her’ since ‘[s]he alone challenges his carefully constructed philosophy’ (151). Jacqueline Pearson, too, asserts that the Duchess and Bosola ‘are not only enemies but are also almost allies’ (87). To be sure, she begins the play as a wealthy and powerful daughter of privilege, while he enters it as the impoverished former galley-slave who ‘for two years together, [ ] wore two towels instead of a shirt’ (1.1.34–5), but she is as much oppressed by gender as he by class position. Both strongly claim the social roles that help them to power: she is ‘Duchess of Malfi still,’ he a vociferous misogynist who



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asserts himself over women when he can assert himself nowhere else (Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories’ 133). Both, in short, can lay claim to the tragic hero’s simultaneous engagement with and estrangement from society. Just before their final confrontation begins, the Duchess speaks to Cariola about her experience in a manner that both rewrites her earlier construction of herself as a helpless actor in a ‘tedious theatre’ and hints at the nature of her exchange with the man who will kill her. ‘I’ll tell thee a miracle,’ she declares, I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow. Th’heaven o’er my head seems made of molten brass, The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad: I am acquainted with sad misery, As the tann’d galley-slave is with his oar; Necessity makes me suffer constantly, And custom makes it easy[.] (4.2.23–30) The Duchess’ rejection of madness stresses the limits of Ferdinand’s stage-management; the simile by which she describes her position, conversely, explicitly identifies her with the former galley-slave, Bosola. This pattern recurs when Bosola appears through the crowd of madmen sent her by Ferdinand. ‘I am not mad yet,’ she has proclaimed; now she turns to the disguised Bosola and recognizes him as a fellow in sanity: ‘Thou art not mad, sure – dost know me?’ (4.2.121). She begins by interrogating Bosola, searching in this last crisis for some definition of her identity and depending on him to provide it. Luckyj notes that her questions ‘signal a characteristic vulnerability, a reaching out that comes before affirmation’ and that ‘however the actor delivers them, the questions modify the answering assertion’ (‘Acting’ 42). On the other hand, Bosola’s negative emphasis on the abjection and filth of the human condition seems only to heighten the Duchess’ determination to struggle against his discursive mastery. The assertion comes: ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still.’ As Walter’s and Hille’s readings suggest, bids to interpret these lines as an assertion of stable identity tend to undercut themselves. But if we read them instead as one stage in an ongoing negotiation, their effect is rather different. Bosola’s next attempt at deflation, complete with copy-book sententiae about glories and glow-worms (4.2.144–5), does not unsettle the Duchess. She responds, not with another question about





her own identity, but with a definition of his: ‘Thou art very plain’ (4.2.146). Thereafter, the exchange becomes a rapid-fire colloquy that ends only with the Duchess’ command, ‘Let me know fully therefore the effect / Of this thy dismal preparation’ (4.2.163–4). The quest for meaning has become a dialogical process, rather than a monological one on either character’s part. Even the Duchess’ death can be read as another stage in her ongoing dialogue with the men who destroy her. It is, after all, her passing that permits her to achieve the greatest impact on her assassin’s self-construction. Looking down at her corpse, Bosola is struck with his sudden fit of conscience; he begins explicitly to identify with the Duchess and to voice the very constructions of her identity she had herself insisted upon before her death. He not only seeks the mercy of the heaven he had earlier rejected, but he tells the Duchess that he will ‘execute thy last will; that’s deliver / Thy body to the reverent dispose / Of some good women’ (4.2.370–2). Significantly, his last accession to the Duchess’ ‘will’ is delivered in direct address to her body; in a sense, Bosola is still negotiating with her. This argument is no more and no less an interpretation of Webster’s playtext than were Terry’s and Anton’s performances; what is worth noting is simply the fact that their highly consistent, Stanislavskian readings excluded the dialogical possibilities that this one raises. Both Terry and Anton cried out and wept during Bosola’s final encomium to the Duchess’ corpse, but neither seemed to be representing a man who could be fundamentally changed by his dialogue with the Duchess. Derek Jacobi complains that, as an actor, ‘One is frequently criticized for not playing one of the possibilities as though one hadn’t been aware of it; the fact that one didn’t play something does not, however, mean that it wasn’t considered, but that on this occasion the other road was chosen’ (200). In the cases of Terry and Anton, this process of exclusive choice—a crucial one in realist performance—left little space for the representation of the one-time galley-slave who can kill Cariola without a thought but in whom the Duchess ‘excites a fellow-feeling that wishes her release, not through death but comfort’ (Wiggins, Journeymen 178). They could consistently represent the man who victimizes the Duchess, but not the man who (like Antonio and Ferdinand before him) is radically transformed by, as well as transformative of, her tragic subjectivity.

VI. An actor in the main of all In his influential 1574 courtesy book, Civil Conversation, Stefano Guazzo asserts that ‘the judgement which wee have to knowe our selves, is not



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ours, but wee borrow it of others’ (Bk.2:4). His view fits the relational, dialogical identity formations we see in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, but does not sit easily with many sectors of our own, individualistic society— nor with the schools of acting they have spawned. My exploration of Alexander’s and Donnellan’s Duchesses, like my analysis of Daniels’ Hamlet, suggests that contemporary discourses of acting and character place restraints on the ability of mainstream theatrical productions effectively to interrogate the relations of gender and power inscribed in early modern texts. The insistent coherence that crippled Terry’s and Anton’s performances was not limited to them; it also affected their productions as a whole. Here, as in Daniels’ Hamlet, actors’ choices responded to the urgent demand for internal consistency, as opposed to any notion of character as an unpredictable variable dependent on shifting relationships. A very different idea of the actor’s vocation is traced in the early modern ‘Character of an Excellent Actor,’ long ascribed to Webster himself, which appeared in the additions to Thomas Overbury’s Characters in 1614. Of his ideal player, the author writes that All men have been of his occupation: and indeed, what hee doth fainedly that doe others essentially: this day one plaies a Monarch, the next a private person. Heere one Acts a Tyrant, on the morrow an Exile: A Parasite this man to-night, t[o]-morow a Precision, and so of divers others. (43) The use of the word ‘essentially’ should not confuse us: this ‘Excellent Actor’ does not body forth the stable inner realities that define men and women. Rather, he feigns on stage the continual shifts between such roles which are the essence of other men’s real-life actions. In one of the commendatory verses published with The Duchess of Malfi, John Ford describes this world as one in which ‘men / Act one another’ (ll.35–6, Webster, Duchess 5). Like the ‘Character of an Excellent Actor,’ Ford’s enigmatic phrase suggests that early modern subjects were not necessarily seen as consistent but rather were constructed according to shifting social and discursive positions. They acted one another, reconstructing not only their own identities but also the identities of those around them through social interaction: a process that seems quite unlike the individualistic and interiorized modes of performance common on the mainstream classical stage today. It is easy for the politically engaged spectator simply to reject mainstream classical performance on these grounds. In the end, however,





we need to look at its products in all their contradictions, limitations and productivity. If Alexander’s and Donnellan’s productions of The Duchess of Malfi sometimes reinscribed normative contemporary notions of gender identity, they also did more. Their representations of some of the playtext’s relationships—that of Walter’s Duchess with Bruce Alexander’s Ferdinand, that of Hille’s Duchess with Macfadyen’s Antonio— underlined the power of social hierarchies and the insistent reiterations by which subjects in those hierarchies strive to keep them in place. In other cases—Walter’s Duchess with Ford’s Antonio, Hille’s Duchess with Handy’s Ferdinand—they used the playtext to depict complex exchanges between male and female identities, to blur pat distinctions between male and female subjectivities, and to stress that female as well as male characters can inhabit the tragic hero’s position. As he lies dying at the end of Webster’s playtext, Bosola is questioned about his role in the bloody proceedings. He describes himself as the avenger of ‘the Duchess of Malfi, murdered / By the Arragonian brethren,’ but soon admits that he has been ‘an actor in the main of all, / Much ’gainst mine own good nature, yet i’th’ end / Neglected’ (V.v.81– 2, 85–7). It is an equivocal moment, with the assassin first occluding his own agency in the Duchess’ death, then foregrounding it, then reinscribing his own unwilling, class-based submission to the neglect of the great. Like many of the reversals of subject positioning that characterize The Duchess of Malfi, it reminds us that men and women are both victims and agents, trapped in a discursive system that their actions sustain, modify—and sometimes subvert. Just so, as these first two chapters have shown, even explicitly feminist performances can reiterate the terms of binary gender. Yet, just as contradictions and inconsistencies appear in actors’ and directors’ descriptions of their work, so too they surface in performance. By seizing on them as potentially productive sites for politically engaged analysis, spectators can join theatre artists as ‘actors’ in the process of rethinking and contesting gender binarism.



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The Natural Father and the Imaginary Daughter: Patriarchy as Realism and Representation in Titus

I. A very female gesture In his commentary on the DVD edition of Julie Taymor’s 2000 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1594), actor Anthony Hopkins describes a conflict between himself and his director over his performance of the play’s leading role. ‘Julie wanted a certain interpretation from me, especially with my daughter, Lavinia,’ he remarks: some gesture she had become obsessed with, which she saw in her mind’s eye as a director which is valid and legitimate and why not? But I said to her, I said, ‘I can’t do it that way because that’s very female,’ and I said, ‘I can’t do a gesture that is so balletic’[.] (Chapter 3) Hopkins’ second adjective for the disputed gesture, ‘balletic,’ suggests that much of the blame for this disagreement between director and actor can be ascribed to their different working methods. Hopkins, though classically trained at London’s RADA, has declared his admiration for the ‘richer, [ ] more immediate’ tradition of American naturalism (Hopkins, ‘Scene-Specific’ Chapter 23). Taymor, though American-born, has experimented with many anti-naturalistic techniques, including ‘ideographs’ like the one she asked of Hopkins: ‘compact, spare’ movements that ‘express the kernal of each action without the distracting details’ (Blumenthal and Taymor 12). Seeking the ‘organic’ inner truth beloved of realist acting methods, Hopkins reportedly told Taymor, ‘I can’t do it if you impose a technique on me, or impose a performance on me’ (Hopkins, ‘Scene-Specific’ Chapter 3). Although eventually resolved, this argument offers a clue as to why some reviewers found the film’s 83



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‘mixture’ of different acting styles ‘jarring’ (Holden, New York Times, 24 December 1999). So, too, does Hopkins’ description of the controversial gesture as ‘very female,’ and hence as impossible for him to perform. His words suggest that Taymor’s anti-naturalistic stylistic demands threatened Titus’ (and perhaps Hopkins’ own) masculinity. Hopkins’ discomfort with this potential effeminization of Shakespeare’s Roman general was resolved only during principal photography for the film, when, feeling ‘very much like the soldier with [his] huge breastplate,’ he encountered Laura Fraser’s Lavinia—‘a little woman, [ ] a frail-looking girl.’ At last, says Hopkins, the sequence ‘just made sense’ (‘Scene Specific’ Chapter 3). In warlike costume and facing an actress whose ‘feminine’ vulnerability emphasized Titus’ rocklike power, Hopkins could execute the tender gestures desired by Taymor without dissolving clear gender binaries. But just as some critics felt that clashes between acting styles had not been completely eradicated from Taymor’s completed film, others argued that its representations of gender remained disturbingly ambivalent. David McCandless, comparing Taymor’s film to her 1994 OffBroadway stage production of Titus Andronicus, viewed the film as reifying masculinist gender binaries, particularly by rendering Lavinia ‘passive and liminal’ (‘Tale of Two Tituses’ 506). Wesley Morris took another stance, complaining that Titus featured a gallery of ‘effete male[s]’ and describing Harry Lennix’s villainous moor Aaron as ‘the only man with a shred of virility’ (San Francisco Examiner 28 January 2000). This chapter suggests that such conflicting readings reflect the film’s own contradictions. Where the stage productions of my first two chapters privileged psychological depth, consistency and interiority, Titus juxtaposes these realist approaches to character with other, more stylized ones. At the same time, it opens to its viewers both critical and laudatory perspectives on a patriarchal social order. Taymor’s film attacks such traditionally ‘masculine’ traits as reliance on primogeniture and habitual recourse to physical violence. Titus, Saturninus, Chiron and Demetrius constantly betray the masculinist constructions of identity to which they adhere; their overt presentations of hyper-masculinity contrast with naturalistic moments of interiority in which we glimpse feminizing vulnerabilities and failings. Similarly, Tamora’s (Jessica Lange’s) presentations of kittenish feminine softness are juxtaposed with views of her more authentic inner rage and grief at the loss of her son, Alarbus. Such contrasts may be interpreted as advancing a critique of patriarchal binaries, disclosing both masculine weakness and feminine agency. However, these moments of truth construct



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the parent–child relationship as the wellspring of humanity. Especially when it is exemplified in the father–son coupling, this construction can as easily reinscribe as deconstruct patriarchal assumptions. Only Fraser’s Lavinia, I would suggest, threatens to disrupt Titus’ back-handed affirmation of patriarchal masculinity. Her exquisite visual image, highly referential to the feminine icons of artistic and film history, moved many of Titus’ spectators. From one perspective, the affective power of Lavinia’s image can be seen as the film’s ultimate affirmation of the patriarchal order. From another, it can be interpreted as working to expose patriarchy’s status as a system founded in artifice and performative repetitions. Although Taymor’s control over the field of meanings created by her film’s juxtapositions finally appears incomplete, her work shows vividly how such combinations of realism and artifice may work to expose both the attractions and the terrible dangers of limiting gender binaries.

II. ‘He is not with himself’ While all of the playtexts I discuss here depict social systems that tend to bolster masculine power, the world of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus is explicitly patriarchal. In his pamphlet Patriarcha, circulated during the English Civil War, Robert Filmer defines a patriarchal order as one in which the ruler’s relationship with his subjects directly parallels the father’s dominion over his children (Aughterson 162–3). Although rulers may accede to this fatherly position by many means, the state– family parallel remains clearest when ‘the right of the father descends to the true heir’ (Filmer, quoted in Aughterson 162). Unlike Hamlet (a play named for a dispossessed son, in which fathers and the principle of primogeniture are murderously cast aside) and The Duchess of Malfi (a play named for a ruling woman, in which ‘dead parents’ have left their male and female offspring to the uneasy exercise of power), Titus Andronicus is named for a father-figure and presents a world whose power structures are clearly based on father–son inheritance. As the play begins, the dead emperor’s two sons squabble over the inheritance of the Roman Empire. Although Bassianus, the second son, begs the Roman tribunes and populace to ‘let desert in pure election shine,’1 it is Saturninus’ insistence on a clear line of succession that eventually wins the day. ‘I am the first-born son that was the last / That wore the imperial diadem of Rome,’ he maintains: ‘[t]hen let my father’s honours live in me’ (1.1.5–7).



Patriarchy as Realism and Representation in Titus


Saturninus’ reliance on primogeniture is challenged not only by his brother, but also by the threatened popular election of the returning general, Titus Andronicus. But Titus—who is, after all, paterfamilias to twenty-five brave and soldierly sons and one lovely and virtuous daughter—is on the side of the patriarchal angels. Backed by the military victories that construct him as a father of the Roman empire, he speaks authoritatively in favour of ‘our emperor’s eldest son, / Lord Saturnine’ (1.1.228–9). His words apparently assure the survival of a social structure founded on the rule of the fathers and on power’s smooth passage to their sons and heirs. Saturninus’ offer to marry Titus’ daughter Lavinia, advancing Titus’ ‘name and honorable family’ (1.1.243), appears to seal the bargain with the exchange of a virgin. Almost immediately, contradictions rend this apparently successful order. Bassianus seizes Lavinia from Saturninus, citing a previous betrothal that makes her his own (1.1.410). ‘Suum cuique is our Roman justice,’ assents Titus’ brother Marcus. Saturninus, conversely, identifies Bassianus’ act as a ‘rape’ (1.1.409) in the sense of a theft of male possession (Detmer-Goebel 77). This fissure in the edifice of Roman patriarchy spreads outwards to undermine the whole construction. Titus, the paterfamilias par excellence, kills his own son for abetting Bassianus’ act. Saturninus turns from the virginal and apparently submissive Lavinia to the sexually active and brilliantly manipulative Tamora, Queen of Goths. Incensed by Titus’ sacrifice of her eldest son to the spirits of his own lost children, Tamora begins a programme of revenge that results in the deaths of Bassianus and of two more of Titus’ sons; the rape and mutilation of Lavinia; and the loss of Titus’ hand. By the mid-point of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, both of its leading figures of patriarchal authority have been symbolically emasculated. The Emperor of Rome is ruled by a foreign queen and her Moorish lover, while the oncevictorious Andronicus is reduced to physical and emotional abjection, bewailing the truncation of his family and of his own body. Rome, meanwhile, becomes ‘a wilderness of tigers’ (3.1.54) ruled by hatred, chaos and murder. Since this spiral into blood-soaked tragedy proceeds inexorably from a set of actions determined by the paternalistic assumptions of the play’s leading male characters, it is easy to understand Coppelia Kahn’s view of Titus Andronicus as ‘a serious critique of Roman ideology, institutions, and mores,’ and especially of Roman patriarchy (47). Similarly, the opening movement of Julie Taymor’s Titus not only emphasizes the association between patriarchy and violence, but also focuses sharply on the inability of male characters to cope with its results. Taymor begins her film with a wordless sequence in which



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a young boy (Osheen Jones) plays with plastic soldiers in a middle class kitchen. His personal mimesis of war culminates in a table-top slaughter where ketchup and splattered cake stand in for the blood and guts familiar to him from the TV that plays in the background. In her commentary on the DVD edition of the film, Taymor describes the boy as ‘almost like a god, [ ] manipulating and violently playing with the food on his table’ (Chapter 1). Rapidly, however, as if conjured by the boy’s bloodthirsty imagination, the scene is interrupted by the clamour of bombs and the boy dissolves into terrified weeping. The boy, remarks Taymor, seems ‘very innocently [to have] created’ a violence which quickly escalates far beyond his control. Such godlike engendering of destruction, followed by paralysis or panic when faced with its effects, will form a recurrent pattern in the behaviour of the film’s masculine subjects. This pattern begins to emerge as the boy is rescued from his burning kitchen and spirited, like Alice down the rabbit hole (Taymor, ‘Director’s Commentary’ Chapter 1), into a Roman Coliseum. Assuming the role of Young Lucius, grandson to Titus Andronicus, he is confronted by the entrance of a huge corps of soldiers whose mud-spattered, robotic appearance recalls that of his food-stained plastic soldiers. Into their midst rides Hopkins’ Titus, preceded by the bodies of his twenty-one dead sons and followed by the cart that bears the imprisoned Tamora and her sons. Titus’ bullish head and his impassive, even stony, expression seem perfectly continuous with the metallic impermeability of his breastplate and helmet. His very presence evokes a precisely drilled display of military manoeuvres from his soldiers, and he greets them in the gruffly confident voice of a seasoned officer. Praising Rome’s victories and the contributions of his own ‘five-and-twenty valiant sons’ (1.1.82), he seems every inch the ‘great patriarch’ described by Harry Lennix in his commentary on Hopkins’ performance (Chapter 23). But this very patriarchal stance, apparently so affirmative of violent and decisive action, contains the seeds of self-undermining vulnerability. Scarcely has Hopkins’ Titus triumphantly proclaimed that ‘[h]ere Goths have given me leave to sheathe my sword’ (1.1.88) than he reels as if struck by an unforeseen weakness. ‘Titus, unkind and careless of thine own,’ he mutters while his grandson supports him; ‘Why suffer’st thou thy sons unburied yet / To hover on the dreadful shore of Styx? / Make way to lay them by their brethren’ (1.1.89–92). Clearly, his weakness is as much emotional as physical, a result of the very combination of military aggression and fatherly pride that hitherto appeared to give him his strength.





During the ensuing funeral rituals of the twenty-one dead Andronici, Hopkins’ Titus regains his stoical demeanor. Jessica Lange’s Tamora pleads passionately for her eldest son’s life, stressing the hypocrisy of Titus’ ruthless allegiance to his country and lineage: ‘O, if to fight for king and commonweal / Were piety in thine, it is in these’ (1.1.117– 18). Titus is completely unmoved, drily bidding her ‘patient yourself, madam, and pardon me’ (1.1.124) before calmly slashing Alarbus’ bare chest with his sword. He maintains that his surviving sons, ‘their brethren whom your Goths beheld, / Alive and dead’ (1.1.126), have every right to ask a sacrifice. Titus appears the consummate patriarch, without emotional weakness, but his position is revealed as heartless and self-contradictory. Taymor and her collaborators further ironize Titus’ confidence in ancient ritual and family ties by placing this scene back to back with Saturninus’ contention with Bassianus for the imperial diadem, moved from the play’s opening. The time appears literally out of joint as Saturninus (Alan Cumming) and Bassianus (James Frain)—wearing garments that variously reference the ancient world, the Edwardian age of empires, Nazi Germany and contemporary fashion—trumpet their competing claims over the loudspeakers of campaign cars. The buildings of Rome are festooned with images of the late Emperor, who according to Titus held the Roman sceptre ‘upright’ (1.1.203); but the great phallic father is dead and his realm is visibly plunged into factionalism and chaos. Alan Cumming’s performance as Saturninus embodies this crisis of patriarchy. At the time of Titus’ release, Cumming had recently gained widespread recognition for his appearance as an androgynous and mocking MC in Sam Mendes’ Tony Award-winning production of Cabaret. He brought some of the spirit of that performance to his turn in Titus; his Saturninus was described by critics as ‘flamboyantly prancing [and] leering’ (Holden, New York Times 24 December 1999) and even (in a notable example of sexual stereotyping) as ‘a drag queen’ (Messier, filmcritic.com). Although he never appears in women’s dress, Cumming’s Saturninus—his dark hair falling in a foppish fringe, his long eyelashes and large dimples prominently displayed, his lips pursed and his gestures mincing—frequently exhibits the overt theatricality and gender boundary-crossing associated with the drag queen in contemporary popular culture. When he is finally elected to the Imperial seat, his slight figure is dwarfed by the gigantic, wolf-headed throne of Rome. Gorgeously dressed in a red silk uniform, he twiddles his feet and makes moues at his tribunes: scarcely a fitting son to the previous, dominant Caesar.



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Combining feminized feyness with the menacingly authoritarian stance of a fascist dictator, Cumming’s performance insistently questions clear gender boundaries. His expensive haircut recalls the androgynous ‘New Romantic’ pop stars of the 1980s and Adolf Hitler in equal measure. Similar juxtapositions characterize his gestural language when he harangues the crowd outside in the Roman Forum, figured significantly by Mussolini’s ‘square coliseum.’ Thanking the ‘Friends that have been thus forward in my right’ (1.1.59, emphasis Cumming’s), Cumming barks out ‘right’ in a manner that stresses Saturninus’ prerogatives as eldest son as well as his masculine dominance. A moment later, however, he delivers the lines, ‘And to the love and favour of my country / Commit myself, my person, and the cause’ (1.1.61–2), with tears in his eyes, his voice breaking audibly on ‘my country.’ One hand fluttering emotionally over his heart to indicate ‘my person’ (1.1.62), he is the very picture of a diva bidding a fond farewell to her fans. His insincere and overplayed display of feeling is a moment of pure camp in the OED’s sense of ‘ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate’ (OED, Second Edition, 5), justifying reviewer Wesley Morris’ praise of the ‘expert campiness’ of Cumming’s performance (San Francisco Examiner, 28 January 2000). Yet, it is immediately juxtaposed with a renewed display of fascistic potency as Cumming thrusts a fist into the air and invokes his ‘cause,’ to the rapturous cheers of his followers. As Julie Taymor admiringly remarks in her commentary, Cumming’s unpredictable Saturninus, who ‘could turn on a dime’ at any moment, is ‘a perfect foil for Titus’ (Chapter 5). Titus keeps a determinedly stiff upper lip; Saturninus displays his emotions with abandon. Titus, as established by Hopkins at the film’s outset, seems unable to dissimulate; Saturninus, as ‘wittily, slyly and playfully’ interpreted by Cumming (Nechak, Seattle Post-Intelligencer 21 January 2000), seems constantly to be performing. The parallels to the early modern constructions of masculinity and femininity we saw emerge in Hamlet are obvious: Hopkins’ reserved, solid and reliable Titus is masculine, while Cumming’s hysterical, fluid and erratic Saturninus is a feminized ‘weaker vessel.’ But the visible opposition between these two characters belies a deeper kinship. As Titus recognizes when he speaks in favour of Saturninus’ candidature, both men envision themselves as representatives of a clearly established order dominated by military might, masculine power and clear patterns of father–son inheritance. In Hopkins’ and Cumming’s performances, moreover, both men’s identities are characterized by dualities that trouble the apparent solidity of this order. Titus’ stoicism is interrupted





by physical and emotional vulnerability; Saturninus’ imperiousness is undermined by his emotional instability. Neither man quite embodies the patriarchal ideal to which they both aspire. The unattainability of this ideal becomes ever clearer as Taymor’s film goes on. Hopkins’ Titus kills his son Mutius in a blind rage, claiming that the boy has ‘dishonoured all our family’ (1.1.350) by helping Bassianus to steal Lavinia. He regains his usual composure in the face of his family’s protests, smiling with dangerous calm as he asserts that ‘My foes I do repute you every one, / So trouble me no more, but get you gone’ (1.1.371–2). His sons, however, recognize the rift in his identity: ‘He is not with himself, let us withdraw’ (1.1.373). By killing his own son to defend his family’s honour, he has performed his patriarchal identity in a manner that undermines it from within. Cumming’s Saturninus, too, drifts further and further from a normative patriarchal persona. He takes up his imperial mantle by presiding over a vast sexual orgy, his face slathered in garish makeup. Pettishly submitting to Tamora’s manipulations, he momentarily forgives Titus for his children’s transgressions, only to ‘turn on a dime’ once more when he believes that Titus’ remaining sons have conspired to kill Bassianus. He comes close to tears at the loss of his (previously muchdespised) brother, then bursts into a childlike tantrum. Titus’ plea for his sons meets with an intemperately shouted refusal before, in a final reversal, Cumming dooms Quintus and Martius with a quiet menace worthy of Titus himself: ‘For, by my soul, were there worse end than death / That end upon them should be executed’ (2.2.302–3). Cumming plays this scene clad in a steel breastplate; a leopard-print-trimmed coat that would not look amiss on a contemporary supermodel; and a helmet of German imperial design, trimmed with the same leopard print. Performance and design conspire to suggest a man whose (feminized) emotional instability has completely infected his given social identity as the (masculine) head of his family and his state. As Rome disintegrates in the latter half of Taymor’s film, both Titus and Saturninus have completely abandoned any pretense at patriarchal mastery; the earlier glitches in their commanding façades are now revealed as glimpses of their true inner selves. Threatened by Titus and his son Lucius, Saturninus has hysterics in the middle of the Roman Senate and can only be calmed by Tamora. A tearful Titus, divested of his armour, grovels in the streets before the disdainful patricians who will condemn his sons to death. By this point, neither of the two great ‘fathers’ of Roman order, the Emperor or the General,



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is ‘with himself.’ Instead, the divisions within their identities have widened until both appear as madmen whose inner disorders reflect the outward disorder of the state. Saturninus is still told to be ‘imperious like [his] name’ (4.4.80) and Titus still barks commands at a pitying band of kinsmen who consent to function as his troops, but in such scenes patriarchal constructions of masculinity are reduced to utter absurdity. As we saw in the Introduction, the anatomical constructions of the male sex current in early modern English culture suggested that ‘even the most manly of men was susceptible to becoming a woman’ (Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity 106). Such constructions of masculine identity may well have helped to shape the chaotic world of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In its turn, Julie Taymor’s Titus is characterized by an insistent reiteration of the threat of feminization. This reiteration appears even in such individual scenes as that in which Tamora’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius, determine to win the sexual favours of Titus’ daughter Lavinia. The two boys, depicted by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Matthew Rhys as peroxide-blonde neopunks, begin the scene with a performance of aggressive masculinity. Demetrius taunts his little brother’s sexual immaturity, Chiron counters with fisticuffs, and the brothers finally draw knives against one another. Challenged by Aaron to explain their designs on Lavinia, however, the boys suddenly fall into perfect accord and begin to perform them. ‘Why makes thou it so strange?’ asks Demetrius: ‘She is a woman, therefore may be wooed, / She is a woman, therefore may be won; / She is Lavinia, therefore must be loved’ (1.1.581–4). As he pronounces these words, Rhys grabs a long, stuffed pillow and mimes a vast erection. Chiron, so recently resistant to his brother’s claims of manly supremacy, happily sprawls on a bed and spreads his legs, taking on the role of Lavinia as his brother ‘copulates’ with him. This disturbingly comic little scene can be seen as presaging the brothers’ forcible possession and destruction of Lavinia’s identity in the rape sequence. It can also be read as a demonstration of the manner in which their lust for her robs them of manly selfcontrol, leaving them open to Aaron’s manipulations and, ultimately, to the acts that will bring about their own horrifying losses of identity in death. In Shakespeare’s age, writes Bruce R. Smith, ‘to love a woman was, or so it could feel, to become a woman’ (Shakespeare and Masculinity 107); Taymor finds a performance language to express this threat.




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Does Taymor’s Titus use this language directly to critique patriarchy, or does the film finally contain its critique, rather as Hopkins perceived his final performance as containing the effeminizing gestures Taymor desired from him? To begin to answer this question, we must follow Hopkins in considering the relationship between men’s and women’s performances, male and female characters, in Shakespeare’s playtext and Taymor’s film. As my consideration of Haec Vir in Chapter 1 indicated, the direct correlative of feminized masculinity is the presence of the masculine woman: the feminine subject who claims clothing, characteristics or prerogatives traditionally assigned to the male. Critics of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus have generally identified Tamora, Queen of Goths, as just such a figure: a woman who not only assumes masculine attributes and power, but explicitly breaks down the distinctions between herself and the men around her. David McCandless, for example, describes her as Titus’ ‘symbolic emasculator’ (491), and Carolyn Asp notes that she acts as an agent in the play and that ‘because agency is coded “masculine”, she is seen as “usurping” power and creating disorder in the highly patriarchal Symbolic Order’ (335). Tamora enters the play as a vulnerable captive begging her conqueror to ‘rue the tears I shed, / A mother’s tears in passion for her son’ (1.1.108–9). However, her apparent subordination is immediately called into question when she constructs her own maternal status as analogous to Titus’ status as patriarch: ‘If thy sons were ever dear to thee,’ she tells him, ‘O, think my sons to be as dear to me’ (1.1.110–11). Titus’ failure to accept any equivalence between their positions leads to Tamora’s systematic razing of his family. As her vengeance begins, Tamora declares that she will force the general to understand ‘what ’tis to let a queen / Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain’ (1.1.459– 60). Sure enough, her machinations ensure Titus’ own humiliation as he kneels in the streets and begs unsuccessfully for the grace of Rome’s tribunes. As Deborah Willis argues, ‘[i]n triumphing over Titus, Tamora also makes him into her double’ (46). She breaks down patriarchal divisions between men and women even further in her marriage to Saturninus. After his proposal, she appears to observe strict propriety in constructing herself as a ‘handmaid to his desires’ (1.1.336). However, her additional description of herself as ‘[a] loving nurse, a mother to his youth’ (1.1.337) hints that she will manipulate established feminine roles in order to gain mastery over her much younger husband. Soon, she is openly bidding the



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Emperor to ‘be ruled by me’ (1.1.448)—not to mention cuckolding him. Tamora’s career, contends Kahn, is a demonstration of what happens when, ‘[e]luding [patriarchal] control, the maternal womb burgeons aggressively, pollutes patrilineal descent, and destroys civil order’ (55). According to this reading, the presence of Shakespeare’s masculinized Queen of Goths shifts the blame for Rome’s disintegration away from a self-destructive patriarchy and towards the transgressive feminine. Similarly, Dorothea Kehler sees Shakespeare’s construction of Tamora as a movement away from ‘naturalistic character’ and towards a compilation of misogynist images of femininity, ‘freighted with such taboo attributes as perversity, hypocrisy, cunning, violence, vengefulness, cruelty, and willfulness’ (320). In her commentary on Titus, conversely, Julie Taymor reads the Queen of Goths’ development as a continuous process. ‘What’s so fabulous about this character, Tamora,’ she remarks, ‘is that you see her raison d’etre in the first scene’: you see her as a mother begging for the life of her sons [ ] and that sets the chain of vengeance in motion. Unlike some of the other Shakespearean plays, Lady Macbeth for instance, we have no idea why she’s such a bitch, [ ] we don’t see what created the monster of Lady Macbeth, but here [ ] you see it so totally—she’s raw, she’s un-made-up, she’s wet, she’s natural, so that when Jessica as Tamora becomes this goddess of vengeance incarnate, you see the evolution. (Chapter 3) Despite Taymor’s avowed interest in non-realist performance techniques, the interpretative process at work in these comments is precisely the Stanislavskian one we saw shaping Daniels’ Hamlet and Alexander’s and Donnellan’s productions of The Duchess of Malfi. Far from discontinuous, her Tamora ‘evolves’ from a catalytic experience in which we see her ‘raw,’ ‘un-made-up’ self. Because we are allowed a glimpse of the real, inner Tamora and her maternal ‘raison d’etre,’ we can understand her motives for so cruelly avenging her son’s death upon Titus. The trajectory of Jessica Lange’s performance reflects Taymor’s comments. Initially seen muddy and without makeup, her hair short and tousled and her clothing made of ‘natural’ animal skins, Lange’s Tamora becomes increasingly artificial in appearance as the film goes on. By its latter scenes, she is heavily made-up and adorned with precious metals, her face framed by stiff arrangements of gold-encrusted braids. When pleading for her son’s life, she is passionately emotional. Tears





stream down her face, she gasps in the middle of the text’s verse lines as she gropes for words, and her voice is hoarse and unsteady. Once she becomes Empress, however, Lange’s Tamora ‘reveals herself [ ] for the extraordinary actress that she is’ (Taymor, ‘Director’s Commentary’ Chapter 10). She declares that she will ‘undertake / For good lord Titus’ innocence in all / Whose fury not dissembled speaks his griefs’ (1.1.441–3), but the uncharacteristically high, sweet voice in which she does so suggests that her good will is dissembled even if Titus’ fury is not. On the word ‘griefs,’ moreover, Lange’s Tamora pats her heart gently with her hand; her gesture recalls Saturninus’ fluttering body language in his speech to the people of Rome. Where Saturninus may or may not have been in control of this stereotypically ‘feminine’ gesture, Tamora clearly is; she is performing the role of a soft-hearted, gentle woman in a manner so exaggerated that only a very unperceptive audience member could be taken in. Even the gullible Saturninus is quickly disabused, for as Tamora approaches him Lange drops her voice to a whisper and convinces him that he must temporarily pretend reconciliation with Titus to avoid censure by the Roman populace. In her important psychoanalytic essay, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ (1929), Joan Rivière famously argued that ‘women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men’ (35). Lange’s Tamora appears to be using just such a strategy; she seems less a ‘natural’ woman than one who uses the façade of femininity in order to usurp masculine power and prerogatives. The next moment in Lange’s performance, however, returns us to the realist emphasis on inner truth and motivation. After instructing her husband to hide his ire against the Andronici, Tamora declares, I’ll find a day to massacre them all, And raze their faction and their family, The cruel father and his traitorous sons To whom I sued for my dear son’s life, And make them know what ’tis to let a queen Kneel in the streets and beg for grace in vain. (1.1.455–60) In Shakespeare’s playtext, these lines may be directed to Saturninus; nothing in the early editions suggests a division between them and those that come before. Taymor’s film creates such a division by having Tamora turn away from her husband and directly to the camera. This could be seen as an anti-realist move, breaking the ‘fourth wall’ usually



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constructed by the film actor’s apparent unawareness of the camera. But its effect is to reveal Tamora’s inner emotions and motivations in an entirely Stanislavskian fashion. Here, at last, her voice regains the timbre we heard in her earlier supplication: low, urgent and charged with emotion. The clenched jaw and cold eyes with which she declares her intention to ‘massacre them all’ chillingly express the true depth of her fury against Titus. But the most significant shift occurs when she recalls the sacrifice of Alarbus. After smoothly delivering most of her phrases, Lange breaks the line, ‘To whom I sued for my dear son’s life’ in the middle with an almost sobbing breath after ‘sued,’ just as she had broken up the verse lines in her plea for Alarbus. The words, ‘for my dear son’s life,’ are delivered in an intense whisper with another audible breath after ‘life,’ as if Tamora were close to tears and trying to gain self-control. Stressing Tamora’s anger at Titus’ willingness to ‘let a queen / Kneel in the streets,’ Deborah Willis argues that ‘Tamora reads the trauma of loss primarily as a wound to her own identity’ (37), whereas Jonathan Bate suggests that ‘[g]rief and anger over her dead son motivate Tamora’s aside’ (1.1.443n). Though not ignoring Tamora’s wounded pride, Lange’s performance takes the latter route, making Alarbus’ death the key source of her vengefulness. As Bate remarks in his Introduction to the published version of Titus’ screenplay, ‘Tamora is fierce because she is protective of her young’ (12). The same pattern recurs when the Empress directs her sons’ murder of Bassianus and rape of Lavinia. Lange delivers Tamora’s monologue of accusations against Bassianus and Lavinia (2.2.91–115) in a deliberately over-the-top style. For example, she emphasizes the sibilants in Tamora’s description of the ‘thousand hissing snakes’ (2.2.100) with which she was threatened in a self-consciously theatrical manner. Her whimpering fear of the ‘detested vale’ (2.2.93), again delivered in an unnaturally high voice, is so brazenly artificial that it seems to spoof clichés of timorous femininity. But her fury against Lavinia, expressed in the hoarser and deeper tones associated with her true self, is clearly undissimulated. Once again, we are given a clear sense of its motivation. Already half stripped by the Goth boys, Fraser’s Lavinia begs, ‘O, let me teach thee for my father’s sake, / That gave thee life when well he might have slain thee’ (2.2.158–9). Provoked out of the contemptuous distance she has been keeping, Lange’s Tamora strides across the glade to grasp Lavinia roughly by the arm: Had’st thou in person ne’er offended me, Even for his sake am I pitiless.




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Remember, boys, I poured forth tears in vain To save your brother from the sacrifice, But fierce Andronicus would not relent.

Once more, Lange reprises the performance language of her maternal love and grief. Her voice shakes with emotion and even breaks on ‘poured’; her eyes scan her remaining sons’ faces as she bids them (and the audience) recall the primal scene of her loss. Lange refuses to allow us to forget why Tamora is, in Taymor’s terms, such a bitch. Although Taymor’s film slowly dehumanizes Tamora, its treatment of the Queen of Goths is somewhat more complex than David McCandless implies when he writes that it ‘bespeaks complicity with the scapegoating logic of the play, which transforms Tamora from sympathetic, supplicating victim to pitiless, lascivious monster, from good mother to bad’ (493). McCandless references Taymor’s commentary (493), but ignores her explicit description of Tamora’s maternal ‘raison d’etre’ and neglects to offer any detailed analysis of Lange’s performance. Such an analysis discloses a Tamora who is not simply a ‘scapegoat’ or an overdetermined ‘monster,’ but a ‘natural’ woman whose grief and rage at Titus’ ‘pious’ cruelty drive her vicious behaviour. Juxtaposed with the film’s feminization of male authority figures and its emphasis on the contradictions within Roman values, this interpretation of Tamora might be used to support a reading of Titus as a sustained critique of patriarchal order. As we have seen, however, realist psychological readings of early modern tragic characters are as likely to encourage contemporary audiences to accept their universal humanity as to prompt critical consideration of the historically contingent constructions of gender that shaped them. Where a fully artificial performance of Tamora might inspire the audience to view her as a ‘simulacrum modeled out of a patriarchal society’s fears and to note the fissures in her construction’ (Kehler 328), Lange’s performance encourages it to see her vicious actions as comprehensible results of her son’s death. Just so, the spectator is encouraged to think, a mother might indeed behave if violently robbed of her child. Her brutality and manipulation may be reprehensible, but for much of the film they can still be accepted as determined by the infinite value the mother places on her son. Such a formulation of feminine identity recalls Freud’s essay, ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ (1925), which argues



(2.2.161–5)

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that the little girl ‘gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a wish for a child’ (191) in order to emerge into maturity. Although Lange portrays Tamora as a woman whose actions disrupt patriarchal order, her performance also helps to reinscribe one of that order’s deepest assumptions: that a woman’s primary concern must necessarily be for her children.

IV. The importance of being paternal One might argue, indeed, that Lange’s Tamora only finally and irrevocably loses any claim to humanity when she betrays her maternal role by ordering the death of her son by Aaron the Moor. In Shakespeare’s playtext, the newly delivered Tamora does not appear in person to convey this command. Instead, a Nurse appears to give Aaron the baby, speaking by proxy for Tamora: ‘The empress sends it thee, thy stamp, thy seal, / And bids thee christen it with thy dagger’s point’ (4.2.71–2). Taymor cast the diminutive and very English Geraldine McEwan in this role because, as she comments, ‘she has the most foully racist language that comes out of her mouth and I wanted the sweetest little white woman to do that’ (‘Director’s Commentary’ Chapter 23). McEwan’s Nurse appears a very psychologically comprehensible, if humorous, little person at her first entrance, shrieking in fear when threatened with attack by Chiron and Demetrius. But her descriptions of Aaron’s baby, played by the adorable Bah Souleymane, as ‘[a] joyless, dismal, black and sorrowful issue’ and ‘as loathsome as a toad / Amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime’ (4.2.68, 69–7) push her into the realm of the monstrous. By the time Aaron skewers the Nurse with a broken billiard cue, she has become so repugnant that her death is at least partly ‘comical’ (Taymor, ‘Director’s Commentary’ Chapter 23). Yet, she is Tamora’s surrogate in this scene, giving voice to Tamora’s perspective. If she loses audience sympathy, then so, by extension, does Tamora—not only because of the racial slurs flung at Aaron’s baby, but because in commanding its death Tamora has clearly valued self-interest over parental duty. In the playtext, the Nurse refers to Tamora as ‘empress’ four times (4.2.61, 71, 130, 144) and as ‘the mother’ only once (4.2.84). Taymor’s mise-en-scène strongly implies that by valuing empire and safety over motherhood, Tamora has lost her earlier claim to comprehensible humanity. The reverse process also takes place in this scene, beginning Titus’ movement towards a qualified re-affirmation of the patriarchal values it had earlier seemed to repudiate. Up until this point, Harry Lennix’s Aaron has been a deliciously cool, detached and ironic villain who





appears calmly to enjoy torturing the Andronici. As in the case of Tamora, the audience has been allowed direct access to his point of view: he addresses the camera directly both in his first soliloquized description of his mistress’ triumph (1.1.500–24) and in his gleeful response to his taking of Titus’ hand (3.1.203–6). Yet, even these moments establish no deep psychological motivation for his crimes. When he declares that ‘Aaron will have his soul black like his face’ (3.1.206) while hanging Titus’ severed hand in a plastic baggie over his car’s dashboard, his voice is light and he appears quite unconcerned by the racist slur he cites. The introduction of the child, however, has a radical effect on Taymor’s and Lennix’s representation of Aaron. In Shakespeare’s playtext, Aaron reacts to the deprecations of the Nurse and the Goth boys with a vigorous defense of black identity and its integrity: What, what, ye sanguine, shallow-hearted boys, Ye white-limed walls, ye alehouse painted signs! Coal-black is better than another hue In that it scorns to bear another hue. (4.2.99–102) He goes on to declare allegiance to his son over Tamora: ‘My mistress is my mistress, this myself, / The vigour and the picture of my youth. / This before all the world I do prefer’ (4.2.109–11). In these passages, abandoning the playfully two-dimensional style he has hitherto affected for a more Stanislavskian approach, Lennix grants Aaron a multi-layered psychology. Laughing and joking with the Goth boys on the Nurse’s entrance, he turns away from them when he realizes the nature of her errand and stands alone, looking soberly through a row of metal bars. He has realized his own imprisonment and is summoning his forces to combat it. When the Nurse bids him kill the child, he pronounces ‘the play’s only oath’ (4.2.73n) with a sudden fury: ‘Zounds, ye whore, is black so base a hue?’ (4.2.73). For the first time, we see him moved to an anger fuelled by deep-seated resentment of the derogations of racial prejudice. He violently threatens those who would harm his son, then takes the child up and wraps it in a blanket with remarkable gentleness. Where his earlier sexual encounter with Tamora had been relatively cold and calculated, his rapport with his son evidences genuine engagement and exchange. When the child gurgles at him, he looks it in the eye and laughs tenderly: ‘Look how the black slave smiles



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upon the father, / As who should say, “Old lad, I am thine own” ’ (4.2.122–3). Alexander Leggatt writes that Aaron’s ‘feeling for the child [ ] has a quality of natural, unguarded affection we hear nowhere else’ in Shakespeare’s playtext (15). Lennix’s performance of this affection makes his character appear ‘natural’ (and naturalistic) as never before. Lennix himself remarks on this effect, praising Shakespeare as ‘the most revolutionary and radical playwright of all time. I mean, this guy has now humanized the chief villain in the play by giving him a son and making his paternal instincts as equally poignant as the artistry of his evil’ (Chapter 23). Unlike Tamora, Aaron ‘absolutely defends his son, and it does not matter what happens to, at this point, even his own personage’ (Chapter 23). As Lennix observes, in making these choices his Aaron assumes the mantle of patriarchy which had earlier rested on the shoulders of Hopkins’ Titus: What actually happens is that Titus Andronicus and Aaron switch places. Titus, the great patriarch, the father who loves his sons, becomes a practitioner of evil and the art of evil; and Aaron, who has been the artist of evil, is now the man who defends his son. So it’s really a brilliant three-dimensionalizing aspect of what Shakespeare has done and I think really unparalleled in dramatic literature, certainly of today. (Chapter 23) Lennix pays tribute to Shakespeare’s trans-historical and ‘revolutionary’ genius precisely because the playwright grants humanity to his Moorish villain through fatherhood. In the actor’s eyes, then, the film is far from a critique of patriarchy. On the contrary, gaining status as a ‘great patriarch’ makes Aaron a three-dimensional character to rival any in the canon of contemporary drama, informed though it is by psychological realism. The identification of full humanity with parenthood, or at least with the parental function, is borne out by the final scene of Taymor’s Titus. Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus closes after the deaths of most of its leading characters, with the election of Lucius Andronicus to the empery, his condemnation of Aaron to death, and his deliberate desecration of Tamora’s corpse: ‘Her life was beastly and devoid of pity, / And being dead, let birds on her take pity’ (5.3.198–9). Taymor radically transformed this bleak ending through the addition of a wordless coda in which Young Lucius rescues Aaron’s baby from a cage and carries it out of the coliseum towards the light of dawn. The director remarks




that this image represents ‘almost the coming-of-age of this child.’ ‘His understanding, his involvement and then his true understanding of this story is what I wanted to tell,’ she elaborates, ‘so the child moves into a certain kind of knowledge at this point, through the journey and then potentially, hard to say it in words, but potentially to redemption’ (Taymor, ‘Director’s Commentary’ Chapter 31). ‘Coming-of-age,’ ‘true understanding’ and the potential for ‘redemption’ all hinge on Young Lucius’ recognition of the need to break the cycle of violence by rescuing and protecting Aaron’s soon-to-be-orphaned son. Like Aaron, the violent young ‘god’ of the film’s opening sequence (and, by extension, Shakespeare’s unrelentingly violent play itself) are humanized and redeemed by the defense of the son. By closing with the installation of Lucius as Emperor, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus arguably counters its earlier representation of disastrous masculine leadership with the reinstatement of a good patriarch. But this ending is a disturbing one, notes Brecken Rose Hancock, for ‘Lucius, in spite of his role as nurturer to both young Lucius and Rome, is a violent, unreliable patriarch without a female counterpart. Vengeance is still the governing principle and Rome, in the end, is doomed, for it is without women and therefore without a way to be reborn’ (par. 25). By ending her film with a vision of two children moving towards the sunrise, Taymor does offer her audience ‘a way to be reborn’: humans must reject the blinkered and self-defeating value systems that perpetuate violence and recognize their responsibility to care for and defend their children. But as we watch one boy ‘coming of age’ by assuming the role of father to a second boy, the world the film leaves us with is still ‘without women.’ One might argue that such an exclusion of women is an unavoidable side effect of engagement with Shakespeare’s playtext; since both of the play’s female characters are dead, they can scarcely play an active part in the final tableau. But it is also a side effect of Titus’ particular form of realist character-construction. Given that the film takes the parental instinct as the sine qua non of three-dimensionality (not to mention as the potential source of the world’s redemption), and that the film’s only female parent eventually fails to protect her newborn son, we are left with a dénouement in which women are not only invisible, but actually appear incapable of sustaining full humanity. Truly ‘natural’ behaviour finally seems to be the prerogative of male subjects. Even Titus’ initial weaknesses, which seem to contradict his rocklike self-image, can be seen as signs of his inner decency. The film begins by deconstructing cruel and inadequate patriarchs; but ends by offering its audience the dream of a kinder, gentler patriarchy.



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For a politically engaged member of Taymor’s audience, however, that dream is troubled by an earlier, more disturbing image of closure: that of the death of Titus’ daughter, Lavinia, at her father’s hands. Taymor herself gives a detailed description of this scene in her commentary on the film: She comes to him in a black veil [ ], almost like a bride, with complete knowledge of what is going to happen; it’s been planned. [ ] Lavinia looks at her father, and we know there’s we don’t know what’s going to happen and he’s very controlled and very calm. She reveals her face like a bride and goes into his powerful chest, and then with his one good hand he strokes her face again [as in their first scene]—again I wanted to repeat that action—and we’re not quite sure and then he intimately, lovingly breaks her neck. (Chapter 30) Taymor goes on to justify Titus’ shocking action by suggesting that within her cultural context ‘this woman, this Lavinia, is not alive any more’; Titus ‘has released her’ from the agony of life after her terrible rape and mutilation (Chapter 30). Certainly, Fraser’s calm and self-possessed Lavinia appears fully to embrace her fate. Nevertheless, her tranquil beauty also qualifies Taymor’s apologia for Titus’ act. Once unveiled, she shows no visible sign of her ordeal. Her tongueless mouth is clean, closed and slightly smiling; her mutilated arms, with their prosthetic wooden hands, are covered by the elegant sleeves of her white dress; her eyes turn calmly heavenwards as her father strokes her face for the last time. Of course, the deep trauma of her violation lies beyond the spectator’s sight. Nevertheless, on the surface Titus appears to exterminate, not a broken woman who is ‘like a severed limb or head, grotesque’ (Bamford 65), but a flawless image of ideal femininity. This aestheticized view of Lavinia relates directly to her representation in the language of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Well before she actually appears, she enters the discursive world of the playtext via Bassianus’ description of her as ‘Rome’s rich ornament’ (1.1.55). From the first, Lavinia is viewed as something decorative, an adornment to the sphere in which she moves. This construction of her persists after her rape, most notoriously in the long, Ovidian speech with which her uncle, Marcus, responds to his discovery of her. In terms painfully reminiscent of the blazons which enumerate ladies’ charms in Petrarchan sonnets,



V. The martyred sign

Marcus laments her hands, ‘those sweet ornaments / Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in’ (2.3.18–19), and her ‘rosed lips’ and ‘honey breath,’ now tainted with ‘a crimson river of warm blood’ (2.3.22–5). Later, he likens the tears on his niece’s cheeks to ‘the honeydew / Upon a gathered lily almost withered’ (3.1.113–14). The last image is particularly significant: married and then brutally violated, Lavinia is ‘a gathered lily,’ but is not yet completely ‘withered.’ Her ornamental appeal, so key to her identity, is constantly recuperated by her male viewers. The play’s critics, both past and present, have objected to such representations of Lavinia. Marcus’ speech, ‘to a modern ear or eye, seems ornate, even leisurely, rather than an anguished reaction to this horrible sight’ (Dessen, Shakespeare in Performance 54). At worst, his rhetoric, ‘which fixes on each injury and romanticizes it, turning her into a loveobject in a way that recalls the initial love language of Chiron and Demetrius,’ may lead its readers to the sense that Lavinia ‘is being raped all over again’ (Leggatt 18). At best, Marcus’ speech may be read as a ‘deeply moving attempt to master the facts, and thus to overcome the emotional shock, of a previously unimagined horror’ (Stanley Wells, quoted in Dessen, Shakespeare in Performance 59). Even if the aestheticization of Lavinia does not actively victimize her, it foregrounds male characters’ emotions at the expense of any engagement with Lavinia’s own experience. Astute and politically engaged critics have advanced similar critiques of the disturbingly beautiful Lavinia portrayed by Taymor’s film. McCandless’ ‘Tale of Two Tituses’ offers a nuanced feminist critique of the cinematic Lavinia’s bella figura, which he compares unfavourably with the more overtly ‘freakish’ representation of Lavinia of the earlier stage version. Where the staged Lavinia was ‘a walking trauma potentially afflicting spectators not only with the dread of their own abjection but also with the guilt of passively occupying a culture that breeds predators of women’ (506), the film version ‘assimilate[s] her trauma to an image of iconic, doomed beauty’ (507) which can still ‘attract a desiring look’ (508). Meanwhile, ‘the fixation of Taymor’s camera on the wounded, eruptive Titus, combined with Hopkins’s intrinsic gravitas and eloquent pathos, create precisely the sort of “star turn” conducive to heroizing’ Lavinia’s father (493). Pascale Aebischer also concludes that, despite its arresting mixture of beauty and horror, ‘the representation of Lavinia’s plight is ultimately not allowed to compete with [ ] the central grief of Anthony Hopkins’s Titus’ (49). In these readings as in Karen Bamford’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s playtext, ‘Lavinia’s chief




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function [ ] is to evoke Titus’s emotions: His pity, his grief, his anger’ (Bamford 65). The father attains heroic status; the daughter is marginalized and objectified. In her influential ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Laura Mulvey famously argued that ‘[i]n their traditional exhibitionist role [in narrative cinema] women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness’ (841). So powerful is the image of the woman that ‘her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation’ (841). Mulvey suggests that most classical Hollywood film narratives cope with this ‘freezing’ effect either through a sadistic ‘devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object,’ or by a fetishization of the feminine that ‘builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself’ (844). Citing the case of Louise Brooks in G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), Mary Ann Doane shows how, at its most extreme, the latter strategy pushes the represented woman ‘toward the timeless and the spaceless realm of the idea rather than the fact’ (150). The image ceases to signify a ‘real’ woman and her predicament within a particular narrative context, and instead signifies an ‘eternal feminine’ that elides the ‘temporal and contingent’ nature of historical gender constructions (Butler, Gender Trouble 141). In one sense, the image of Fraser’s Lavinia confirms such arguments. She is sadistically devalued and punished by her rape and mutilation; ‘saved’ by her father’s ‘release’ of her into death; and fetishized by the camera’s tendency to focus ‘less on Lavinia’s wrecked body and more on her [unmarked and still beautiful] face’ (McCandless 506). Moreover, Taymor’s mise-en-scène links Lavinia to a number of iconic classical Hollywood actresses. Lavinia first enters garbed in an elegant ensemble that combines Classical draping with the New Look of the 1950: ‘I always thought of her as an Italian Grace Kelly: so pure, so virginal, so good,’ comments Taymor (Chapter 4). Later, the raped Lavinia is figured as Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, trying to hold down her billowing white skirts. Both images fetishize Lavinia; the second also punishes and devalues her, since ‘the association with Monroe codes [her] both as a victim of male exploitation and as “available” and “asking for it” ’ (Aebischer 47). One of the film’s strangest scenes, in which Young Lucius visits a shop crammed with fragments of religious statuary in order to procure a pair of prosthetic wooden hands for his aunt, may be read as continuing this




dual process of sadistic punishment and fetishization. Scattered around the shop are the lovely, decapitated heads of wooden saints. Their eyes, cast up to heaven in supplication or submission, will soon be mirrored by Lavinia’s: first, when she looks up at her nephew in tearful thanks for his gift, and later, when she relaxes into the deadly embrace of her father. Lavinia is simultaneously identified as suffering martyr and—once her maimed body is completed by the addition of the wooden hands—as a flawless saint (McCandless 507–8). Hollywood goddess, religious icon, bride, willing sacrifice: all of these images fix Lavinia in the timeless, spaceless realm described by Doane. She becomes, not a human being who has suffered physical and psychological abuse, but an ‘idea’ of the universal feminine. However, this is not the only way to look at Fraser’s performance and Taymor’s framing of it. Mary Lindroth describes the reaction of an 18-year-old Caldwell College student who remarked that ‘the audience could really feel the hurt of Lavinia’ in Titus. Instead of objectifying or dismissing Lavinia, this spectator seems to have identified with her. The student describes Marcus’ (Colm Feore’s) discovery of his niece as a ‘scene that will stay with me forever’: [Lavinia] was standing on a stump in the distance. We could see that she was hurt and in pain. In her white dress she stood there needing help. Her hair had been let out and it was all over. Her hands were replaced by sticks. As Marcus approached he asked her to speak. We were then shocked to see blood pour from her mouth. [ ] This scene was the most heartfelt scene in the movie. (quoted in Lindroth 107) Reviewers of Taymor’s film returned again and again to this same, ‘disturbingly beautiful’ scene (Aebischer 48). The New York Times critic called it ‘the film’s most searing image’ (Holden, 24 December 1999). Even critics who disliked the film were haunted by it. Charles Taylor described it as Taymor’s ‘one genuinely striking image,’ arguing that it ‘makes the play’s cruelty transcendent and horribly lyrical, instead of just garish’ (Salon.com, 7 January 2000). And Vladimir Zelevinsky declared, ‘When I recall [ ] that slow zooming shot of [Titus’] daughter Lavinia standing all alone on a tree stump, I can’t help but shiver’ (The Tech, 18 February 2000). What gives this scene such affective power over its viewers? The answer, I think, lies in the strongly visual manner in which each viewer describes the scene. Lindroth’s student remembers the tree stump, Lavinia’s white dress, her dishevelled hair, the sticks where




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her hands should be, the blood pouring from her mouth. Many of these same details appear in Holden’s, Taylor’s and Zelevinsky’s reviews. The student paraphrases one of Marcus’ lines, but largely ignores his much-debated speech. Most strikingly, neither the student nor any other reviewer is particularly interested in the emotions or inner motivations of Lavinia or of Marcus; it is enough that Lavinia is visibly ‘hurt and in pain.’ In short, for these spectators the force of this ‘searing’ and ‘heartfelt’ scene proceeds from the image of the woman. Even more than the theatrical productions I have considered so far, a cinematic production like Titus is well-placed to remind us of the image’s great affective potential. According to Christian Metz, film differs from theatre precisely insofar as the former is dominated by the image (43). In the cinema, moreover, ‘[p]rojection and reflection take place in a closed space, and those who remain there, whether they know it or not, [ ] find themselves chained, captured, or captivated’ (Baudry 362). Unlike the stage director, the film director can force her audience to gaze fixedly at a particular image. As Jessica Lange comments on one of the documentaries that accompany the DVD version of Titus, ‘by filming [the play, Taymor] was able to explore a lot more from a visual point of view than perhaps she was able to do onstage, because on camera [ ] you’re able to really show the audience exactly the moment you want them to concentrate on’ (‘Making,’ Chapter 7). In the wake of second-wave feminism and its demand that women be recognized as fully individual, free and self-determined human beings, feminist critics have tended to reject any and all perceived objectification of women. Nevertheless, precisely because it is the object of the gaze, an image like that of the raped Lavinia might move the spectator not just emotionally but socially, encouraging him to reconsider the ‘hurt’ of the woman subjected to sexual violence. Such affective visual effects were not unknown on the early modern stage. The image of Fraser’s Lavinia parallels the image of Desdemona as witnessed by Henry Jackson in 1610. Jackson explicitly stresses the visual as well as the rhetorical aspects of the performance of Othello he saw, remarking that not only by their speech but by their deeds [the actors] drew tears. But indeed, Desdemona, killed by her husband, although she always acted the matter very well, in her death moved us still more greatly; when lying in bed she implored the pity of those watching with her countenance alone. (quoted in Salgado 30)




Just as the (visual) pathos of a boy actress’ Desdemona eclipsed that of the play’s male characters in Jackson’s experience, so too did the pathos of Fraser’s Lavinia, as shot by Taymor, eclipse Titus’ dominance in the experiences of the spectators I have cited. Haunting their imaginations, it sidelined the masculine in a manner that Lange’s effort to psychologize Tamora finally failed to achieve. This way of looking at Lavinia recognizes some of the spectatorial possibilities commonly excluded by feminist criticism of Taymor’s film, but it remains problematic. As McCandless points out, this Lavinia gains affective power only by losing ‘interiority and agency’ (506). Where the film’s other characters are three-dimensional, she lacks any contradictions that might disrupt her visual impact. The menu screen of the DVD edition of Titus, which flashes up images and descriptions of the film’s characters, calls Titus ‘Warrior. Madman,’ and Aaron ‘Adulterer. Weapon. Father’ (Titus, DVD 1). Lavinia, conversely, is simply ‘Daughter. Gentle. Victim.’ Before the DVD viewer begins to watch the film, she is encouraged to notice contradictions in the male characters, but to view Lavinia as a simple icon of virtuous female suffering. The Lavinia who haunts the gaps between the lines of Shakespeare’s playtext is ‘unknowable, uncanny’ in her silence; even after her death, ‘the problem of how to read her’ remains (Leggatt 18, 26). For all its pathos, the image of Fraser’s Lavinia can finally be seen as neutralizing the character’s ability to disturb patriarchal certainties. Just as Demetrius is confident that Lavinia ‘is a woman, therefore may be won’ (1.1.582), the film seems to reassure us that she is a daughter and gentle, and therefore must be a victim.

VI. Mourning the imaginary daughter I wish, however, to close this chapter by suggesting that a spectator informed by Judith Butler’s call to discover ‘local strategies for engaging the “unnatural” [that] might lead to the denaturalization of gender as such’ (Gender Trouble 149) could interpret the image of Lavinia in yet another manner. Looking again at the key images of Lavinia the film puts forward—as Grace Kelly; as Marilyn Monroe; as Bernini’s Daphne with her arms half-transformed into branches; as sculpted saint—such a spectator might note that they share one key characteristic: artificiality. Even when Fraser’s Lavinia attempts to communicate inner truth or individual experience, the artificial intervenes. In one scene, Hopkins’ Titus attempts to interpret his silenced daughter’s ‘martyred signs’ (3.2.36); pleased at receiving a nod to one of his conjectures, he grasps her




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wooden hand, squeezes it as if it were living flesh—and almost immediately loses the thread of her gestural discourse. He cannot fully understand Lavinia’s desires, but he remains oblivious to the fact and even takes pleasure in grasping the cold, rigid hand that is not really hers. If, unlike Titus, the film’s spectator notes the artificiality of the imagery that surrounds Lavinia, he may be moved to question its cultural currency. Aebischer comments that ‘the representation of the raped Lavinia interrogates art’s (and the media’s) capacity simultaneously to expose violence and to gloss over it’ (48). But it can also be interpreted as interrogating art’s (and the media’s) capacity to reinscribe patriarchal assumptions by promulgating images of victimized women in desperate need of male protection. The spectator participates in this process by wallowing in the tragic beauty of the image and taking it for a ‘true’ representation of femininity. The overt artificiality of Fraser’s Lavinia may work to trouble such moments of misrecognition. The operative word here is ‘may,’ for I do not wish to claim that Taymor’s Titus finally offers an unequivocal critique of patriarchal gender binaries. As many of its critics complained, the film is stylistically discontinuous. As Worthen recognizes, actors such as Lange, Lennix and especially Hopkins use ‘fundamentally realistic, modern acting’ to discover the psychological truths that render their characters’ actions coherent (Force 73). Fraser’s Lavinia, conversely, emerges as a representation modelled on other representations rather than on any interior reality. Both approaches can be read in ways that disrupt masculinist constructions of gender identity. The realist technique allows spectators to glimpse the inadequacies of patriarchal leaders while revealing the humanity of characters like Tamora and Aaron, who might otherwise be dismissed as ‘Others’. The more imagistic approach exposes the cultural artifices that lie under dominant constructions of gender identity. But just as the film oscillates between these approaches, it oscillates between challenging and confirming the core values of patriarchal order. Its contrasting acting styles suggest that some of its characters (especially the boys in the final tableau) can escape the evils of their social order while retaining its good points; others (especially Lavinia) can find no agency at all. For visions of subjects interpellated into their social order but retaining qualified forms of agency within it, we must look to performances that mix realist and non-realist styles more strategically; the search for such performances will occupy the second half of this book. At the end of Titus Andronicus, Lucius pledges ‘to heal Rome’s harms and wipe away her woe,’ but delays doing so because, he says, ‘nature




puts me to a heavy task’ (5.3.147, 149). He must mourn his father before he rights his country’s wrongs; this is only ‘natural.’ Just so, in their realism, the performances of Hopkins, Lange and Lennix portray human ‘nature’ as shaped by the unchanging psychological imperatives of the parent/child relationship. Yet, Lucius and the other surviving male members of the Andronici seem to ignore the dead Lavinia (Leggatt 25); ‘nature,’ it seems, does not dictate any attention to the fallen sister other than enclosure in her ‘household’s monument’ (5.3.193). Julie Taymor’s film is not quite so forgetful; Fraser’s Lavinia is the last of its dead to be covered by plastic, her image—still gently smiling in death— again superseding that of her father. The spectator, unlike Lucius, may be moved sentimentally to mourn her. As he watches the Clown ‘placing the plastic on these people as if they’re pieces of dead furniture’ (Taymor, ‘Director’s Commentary’ Chapter 31), however, he may be moved to a deeper mourning for all those who, like Lavinia, are shaped by constructions that destroy the very subjects they idealize. Only by re-thinking our own implication in such constructions can we avoid reproducing the error Titus commits when he treats the product of an artist’s atelier as if it were his daughter’s sentient flesh.




Part II

LYNGSTRAND I often think about things like that. Especially marriage. And I’ve read various books about it too. I think that marriage must be considered rather like a kind of miracle. The way a woman gradually comes to be more and more like her husband. BOLETTE Has it never occurred to you that a man might also be drawn closer to his wife, somehow? Grow more like her, I mean. LYNGSTRAND A man? No, I never thought of that. —Henrik Ibsen, The Lady From the Sea



Performance and Performativity




‘Let Me Forget Myself’: What a Queen is Good For in Edward II

I. Don’t cry for me Near the midpoint of Derek Jarman’s 1992 film adaptation of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1592), King Edward’s spurned queen, Isabella (Tilda Swinton), appears in one of the resplendent evening gowns that are her trademark dress throughout the film (Figure 5). Flawlessly made up and glittering with jewels, she maintains the bland facial expression and cultivated tones of a BBC news announcer. In Queer Edward II, the published screenplay of the film, Jarman writes of ‘Tilda recording her speech, mike stand, spotlight, like “Evita”—the musical, not the politician’ (124).1 Isabella’s glamorous dress and demeanour in this sequence do indeed recall Lloyd-Webber’s fascist madonna, but in fact she resembles the ruthless real-life ‘politician’ more than the popular West-End ‘musical.’ As she declares that her husband’s ‘looseness hath betrayed the land to spoil, / And made the channels overflow with blood / Of [his] own people’ (QEII 124), her elegance is in striking contrast to the violence of her words.2 The placement of Swinton’s very heterosexual, spectacularly chic and coolly vicious Isabella within Derek Jarman’s self-proclaimed ‘film of a gay love affair’ (QEII Frontispiece) has occasioned much debate among its critics. According to Colin MacCabe, the homosexual Edward’s (Steven Waddington’s) spurning of his queen is mirrored in the homosexual Derek Jarman’s refusal of any redeeming factors in Marlowe’s representation of Isabella. Jarman’s Edward II, writes MacCabe, is ‘unambiguous in its misogyny;’ he argues that ‘[i]n that gay dialectic where identification with the position of the woman is set against rejection of the woman’s body, Edward II is entirely, and without any textual foundation, on the side of rejection’ (12). Susan Bennett agrees that the film is 111



4

Figure 5 Isabella as Evita. Tilda Swinton (Isabella) in Edward II, dir. Derek Jarman, Working Title, 1991. Reproduced by kind permission of Universal Pictures

‘breathtakingly misogynistic’ (110). Kate Chedgzoy, on the other hand, views such complaints as ‘a confusion of Jarman’s critique of what has been called compulsory heterosexuality with an attack on individual heterosexual women [that is, misogyny]’ (207). Chedgzoy argues that ‘Tilda Swinton’s performance as Isabella incarnates an understanding of the simultaneous excess and lack of femininity as it is constructed in a patriarchal culture’ (212). The two interpretations seem irreconcilable, and the blank face of Swinton’s Isabella offers few clues as to which is more just. Using the critical model outlined in the first section, this chapter offers a reading of Jarman’s Edward II, and of the early modern tragic playtext that informs it, that negotiates between these two interpretations. My first three chapters considered theatrical and cinematic performances that relied largely on the conventions of Stanislavskian realist acting to stage qualified critiques of masculinist gender binaries. In this second section, I will consider three productions that strategically mix realism with more stylized forms of performance in order to portray male and female subjects whose identities are explicitly founded in performative repetitions of social norms. The first of those productions, Jarman’s film,



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explores the performativity of gender with an explicitness almost unparalleled in contemporary productions of early modern tragedy. Despite this, it may seem an unsuitable performance text to set alongside the others I discuss here. They were created for a relatively mainstream and apparently apolitical theatrical and cinematic context; it belongs to an explicitly political ‘art cinema tradition’ which deliberately sets out to problematize the assumptions of dominant forms of performance (Chedgzoy 210). As I have already suggested, however, excessive focus on the modes and intentions of specific performance texts can limit the interpretative scope of the politically engaged spectator. It allows little room for analysis of the normative constructions of gender that are reiterated in—and potentially complicated by—all modes of contemporary performance of early modern drama. An apparently misogynist but avant-garde cinematic work such as Jarman’s shares many characteristics, for good and for ill, with an apparently feminist but conservative theatrical production such as Ron Daniels’ Hamlet. Like the performances I have discussed so far, Jarman’s Edward II uses and departs from an early modern playtext to produce a contemporary engagement with binary constructions of gender and sexuality. Marlowe’s representation of Isabella negotiates discourses of masculine dominance and inadequacy, of feminine chastity and transgression, similar to those traced in the preceding chapters. Jarman’s and Swinton’s appropriation deploys the playtext in what I, like Chedgzoy, read as a blistering critique of the construction of femininity in a masculinist, heterosexist society. The politically engaged spectator needs to understand the performance conventions that help to make that critique more unequivocal and more politically inflected than those we have seen so far. However, she also needs to recognize that Jarman’s film, like those texts, reinscribes the norms it criticizes and participates in the social interpellation of subjects even as it shows interpellation’s terrible consequences.

II. The displacement of a lady In the preceding chapters, we saw how masculine and feminine identities in early modern drama are shaped in relationship to one another. Woman’s submissive position as a belonging or item of exchange can ground man’s position as father, husband or lord, but identities may easily be destabilized when circumstances grant even temporary ascendancy to a woman such as the Duchess of Malfi or Tamora. Marlowe’s



What a Queen is Good For in Edward II 113

Edward II also explores the destabilization of masculinist systems of identification, but here the catalyst is a relationship between men rather than a woman’s assertion of will. The first words of the playtext (and of Jarman’s film) are those of the new-made King Edward’s invitation to his favourite, Piers Gaveston: ‘My father is deceased; come, Gaveston, / And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend’ (1.1–2). Reading these lines from the King’s letter, Gaveston responds, Sweet prince, I come; these, these thy amorous lines Might have enforced me to have swum from France, And, like Leander, gasped upon the sand, So thou wouldst smile and take me in thy arms. (1.6–9) Imagining himself as one of the leading (male) protagonists of classical romance, Gaveston tacitly casts King Edward in the feminine role of the welcoming Hero. In the next scene, Edward dissolves even these distinctions between himself and Gaveston, bidding his favourite, ‘Embrace me, Gaveston, as I do thee! / Why shouldst thou kneel; knowest thou not who I am? / Thy friend, thy self, another Gaveston!’ (1.140-2). The precise import of Edward’s terms of endearment is hotly debated among scholars. Bruce R. Smith claims that in Edward II ‘Marlowe introduces us to the possibility of a homosexual subjectivity’ (Homosexual Desire 223), but Alan Bray’s study of Homosexuality in Renaissance England finds it ‘anachronistic and ruinously misleading’ to speak of ‘an individual in the period as being or not being “a homosexual” ’ (16–17). For many interpreters, Edward’s love for Gaveston emerges as transgressive precisely because it marries sexual and social misdemeanours. Mario DiGangi argues that the King’s sin, sodomy, is ‘not a form of homoerotic desire but a political trespass often associated with inappropriate forms of intimacy between men’ (108), and Emily C. Bartels suggests that ‘what is significant here is that sexuality, whether homoerotic or heteroerotic, implements power’ (Spectacles 168). What most readers fail to note is the disruptive similarity between Edward’s mode of describing his relationship with Gaveston and the discourse of works like Tilney’s Flower of Friendship, which instructs a wife to make her husband’s face her glass (138). Edward makes Gaveston his glass and asks his favourite to do the same for him. In the process, he transgresses not only class and (possibly) sexual taboos but gender boundaries as well. He declares his identity interdependent with Gaveston’s, but the wife who should confirm his masculinity is totally excluded.




Isabella’s first appearance in Marlowe’s Edward II makes the instability of her position clear. As she enters, Young Mortimer asks, ‘Madam, whither walks your majesty so fast?’ (2.46), his use of titles drawing a rapid discursive sketch of her as married woman and (hence) Queen. Isabella’s response shows this identity fracturing under the pressure of her husband’s love for Gaveston. She tells Mortimer that she is hurrying to ‘the forest’ (a singularly unqueenly location), there to ‘live in grief and baleful discontent’: For now my lord the King regards me not, But dotes upon the love of Gaveston. He claps his cheeks and hangs about his neck, Smiles in his face and whispers in his ears; And when I come he frowns, as who should say, ‘Go whither thou wilt, seeing I have Gaveston.’ (2.47–54) Edward’s demonstrations of affection for Gaveston expel Isabella from her given place in a rigidly hierarchical universe. Neverthless, despite what Edward’s looks suggest, the spurned wife is not free to go whither she will; she is enclosed within a royal court that resembles those of Elsinore and Malfi in its highly evolved systems of surveillance. Isabella is pushed into the no-(wo)man’s-land where we first encounter her by her husband’s transgression, but the familiar tropes of feminine lasciviousness and frailty remain in place and her sexuality is rigorously policed. As Dympna Callaghan notes, the man who has assumed Isabella’s place at Edward’s side actually ‘endeavors to control how Isabella is represented’ (‘Terms’ 286). When Edward rejects her, snapping, ‘Fawn not on me, French strumpet; get thee gone,’ Isabella responds with an appeal to appropriate spousal relations, asking, ‘On whom but on my husband should I fawn?’ (4.145–6). Gaveston intervenes: ‘On Mortimer, with whom, ungentle Queen – / I say no more; judge you the rest, my lord’ (4.147–8). Calling Isabella ‘ungentle’ and branding her an adulteress, Gaveston deprives her of the Patient Griselda role that is her last defense against the erosion of her identity as aristocratic and virtuous queen (Deats, Sex, Gender 168). No wonder so many of Isabella’s lines in this scene end in question marks, from her desperate first words, ‘Whither goes my lord?’ (4.144) to her plea to Edward, ‘Wherein, my lord, have I deserved these words?’ (4.163). She is left rudderless, displaced from the discourses that found her.




Many critics of Derek Jarman’s Edward II have argued that the director effectively takes Gaveston’s part in this struggle, depriving Isabella of any meaningful share in the spectator’s sympathy. Brian McFarlane comments that ‘Isabella (Tilda Swinton) has a hard ruthlessness of demeanor that denies her the sympathy Marlowe allows her’ (35). Oscar Moore, too, accuses Jarman and Swinton of ‘stripping Isabella of her pathos’ (38). Thomas Cartelli notes Jarman’s ‘indifference to contemporary efforts to reconcile queer and feminist agendas’ and quips that, in Jarman’s Edward II, ‘as far as women are concerned, it is every man for himself’ (220–1). The reasoning behind such conclusions is not hard to trace, for Jarman’s film unquestionably distances itself from its source text in its treatment of Isabella. No word from Marlowe’s play introduces Swinton’s Isabella to the spectator. Rather, as Jarman himself describes it, her first appearance is an entirely silent cinematic scene ‘showing two characters in bed when it’s not working out and with no dialogue’ (O’Pray, ‘Damning Desire’ 10). Swinton, first seen in close-up and clad in an alluring negligée, attempts to kiss and caress Waddington’s Edward only to be repeatedly rebuffed. Finally, overcome with frustration, Waddington gets out of bed and bangs his head violently against the wall until the blood flows. The filmmaker’s palpable sympathy for Edward’s predicament is presumably one of the reasons why Colin MacCabe describes the scene as a ‘truly chilling’ depiction of the King’s fateful inability to be aroused by his wife’s feminine body (16). But MacCabe ignores the fact that Jarman establishes Edward’s all-consuming passion for Gaveston long before Isabella appears; his lack of desire for Isabella may stem from his desire for Gaveston, rather than vice versa (Chedgzoy 209). He also ignores the ambiguities surrounding Swinton’s first appearance. Jarman responded to MacCabe’s remarks by commenting, ‘Colin MacCabe thinks of it as my misogyny in a way. I’m not certain it is. We discussed this with Tilda. [ ] I was trying to keep up this psycho-sexual tension all the way through. All these people trapped in a merry-go-round of conflicting emotions’ (O’Pray, ‘Damning Desire’ 10). The politically engaged spectator’s search for discursive contradiction both corroborates and complicates Jarman’s viewpoint. True, the sequence allows space for Isabella’s vulnerability as she bares her shoulders in an attempt to arouse her husband, and for her despair as she eventually flops down on the bed and turns her face to the wall. On the other hand, her face refuses to mirror the emotional reactions spoken by her body. What lies behind that plastic countenance?




A look at Isabella’s only soliloquy in Jarman’s Edward II is revealing here. It occurs just after a sequence in which Waddington’s tall, muscular Edward rejects his wife in such violent terms that even Jarman describes his behaviour as ‘frightening’ (QEII 72). Livid with rage at his lover’s departure, he grasps Isabella by the neck, hissing: ‘Thou art too familiar with that Mortimer, / And by thy means is Gaveston exiled’ (QEII 72, from EII4.154–5). His words delineate not only his exclusive focus on Gaveston, but also the power of Gaveston’s deployment of misogynist tropes to determine Edward’s attitude towards his wife. After Edward stalks off, Swinton drops to her knees and begins to speak: Would, when I had left sweet France and was embarked, That charming Circes, walking on the waves, Had changed my shape, or at the marriage day The cup of Hymen had been full of poison, Or with those arms that twined about my neck, I had been stifled, and not lived to see The King my lord thus to abandon me. I must entreat him, I must speak him fair, And be a means to call home Gaveston, And yet he’ll ever dote on Gaveston, And so am I for ever miserable. (QEII 74, from EII 4.171–7, 183–6) Swinton delivers this soliloquy in a long, static take and in extremely tight close-up. The shot recalls one of her earlier appearances in a Jarman film: the Sanctus sequence in War Requiem (1986). Michael O’Pray describes the latter as One of the most brilliant scenes in Jarman’s entire output, in which the understanding between him and Swinton is epitomised, [ ] a long static take (of about seven minutes) in which Swinton, sitting at the base of an altar dressed in a loose, almost classical dress, her hair a mass of plaits, performs a mime of body and gesture [ ], a personal ‘choreography’ of astonishing intensity, beauty and awareness. (Dreams 170) In the earlier film, the extended shot of Swinton conveys an extraordinary range of emotions. In Edward II, on the other hand, Swinton’s facial expression hardly changes; she delivers her lines very





III. Clothes and the woman In Marlowe’s playtext, Isabella soon finds a new source of identity, her allegiance shifting from Edward to Young Mortimer with notorious rapidity. As Judith Weil notes, within ‘some fifty lines, Isabella weeps for Edward, who has abandoned her, advises Mortimer on how to trap Gaveston, and begins to think about leaving the King’ (157). A mere few scenes after denying Gaveston’s charges about her overfamiliarity with Mortimer, the Queen is musing, ‘So well hast thou deserved, sweet Mortimer, / As Isabel could live with thee forever’ (8.60–1). This sudden volte face has occasioned most of the critical attention Isabella has received. Many scholars write off her protestations of love and loyalty to Edward as self-interested attempts to retain political power. Kathleen Anderson describes the Queen as ‘an intriguer, a liar, an actress—a Machiavellian politician’ (38); and Lawrence Danson notes that the ‘plausible assumption that Isabel’s devotion to Edward arises from the same political self-interest as does her defection, yields a sufficient through-line to motivate her otherwise inexplicable shifts’ (232). Jonathan Goldberg celebrates Isabella’s adultery with Mortimer as a reflection of Edward’s transgressive relationship with Gaveston, arguing that Isabella’s ‘ “strength” as a woman lies in refusing the limits of marriage’ (126). On the other hand, Dympna Callaghan notes that Isabella merely trades her dependence on Edward for dependence on Mortimer, who silences her at Harwich and smugly asserts, ‘The Prince I rule, the Queen do I command’ (23.46) (Callaghan, ‘Terms’ 288). Judith Weil, meanwhile, argues despairingly that Isabella ‘seems to act without definitive, responsible choice’ (157). Perhaps the difficulty here lies in critics’ insistence on seeking ‘definitive, responsible choice’ in Marlowe’s Isabella at all. Once again, we are dealing with the dominant late twentieth-century construction of the subject as autonomous individual agent and (in theatrical terms) with the search for a through-line. As Wiggins remarks, ‘actors, accustomed to taking their characters on a linear “journey,” are sometimes perplexed by the discontinuous way in which they behave’ in Edward II (Introduction xxvii). He argues that, on the contrary, ‘[t]hese characters



slowly and almost without inflection. Isabella’s words express longing to be something other than what she is, or even to be a socially acceptable nothing (a corpse) rather than a socially anomalous nothing (a rejected wife). Swinton bodies forth an Isabella who is almost literally nothing; left alone, she seems denuded of emotion, of reaction, of identity itself.

don’t change according to internal factors which might provide a clear through-line of psychological development: they are subordinate to the shifting dispositions of power in the broader progression of the action’ (Introduction xxvii–xxviii). In a somewhat similar vein, I would suggest that, in Isabella, Marlowe represents a woman who, having been suddenly made redundant in the system of power relations that founds her identity, repeatedly seeks a way back into it. Thus, the first section of Marlowe’s play finds Isabella attempting to cling to her husband as the ordained source of her self. With exquisite decorum, she depicts Edward’s will as the source of her actions, telling the barons: I am enjoined To sue unto you all for [Gaveston’s] repeal. This wills my lord, and this must I perform Or else be banished from his highness’ presence. (4.200–3) But the nobles are disinclined to please either Edward or Gaveston, and Isabella suddenly changes tack, claiming, ‘’Tis for myself I speak, and not for [Gaveston]’ (4.219). Her use of ‘myself’ can be read as the virtuous wife’s elision of her identity with her husband’s, but it also excludes the husband who is supposed to give her definition. Isabella de-emphasizes her relationship with Edward and underlines instead the ‘thou’ and ‘me’ of her burgeoning relationship with Mortimer: ‘And therefore, as thou lovest and tend’rest me, / Be thou my advocate unto these peers’ (4.211–12, emphases mine). Once again, Isabella depicts herself as dependent on a man’s voice and favour—but now that voice is Mortimer’s. Goldberg sees this shift as a defiance of conventional constructions of feminine identity. I am not so sure. The affair between Isabella and Mortimer is confirmed only much later, after her unsuccessful attempt to re-establish a rather more conventional relationship of dependence and support between herself and her brother, the King of France (8.66–8). When that project fails, she leans on Sir John of Hainault and his brother (15.31–3) before finally cementing her alliance with Young Mortimer. Even then, her identity does not depend only on the man who becomes her lover. Her ‘strength’ does not lie only in ‘refusing the limits of marriage’ (Goldberg 126), but also in claiming a conventional feminine role generally associated with marriage. Isabella bids Mortimer




Be thou persuaded that I love thee well, And therefore, so the Prince my son be safe, Whom I esteem as dear as these mine eyes, Conclude against his father what thou wilt, And I myself will willingly subscribe. (21.15–20) Like Shakespeare’s Tamora, Isabella here appears driven by maternal feelings that are inextricably bound up with the urge to survive politically. Whereas formerly her performance depended on Edward’s wishes, here Isabella literally gives Edward up to Mortimer, identifying her will with her lover’s. However, her choice is conditional on an assurance regarding her son’s safety. Clearly, her identity is contingent, not only on her relationship with Young Mortimer, but also on her role as mother of the next King. Like the other feminine identities I have discussed so far, Isabella’s is consistently, and often quite conventionally, defined in relation to masculinity. In her 1997 study, Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe, Sara Munson Deats argues convincingly that of ‘all the characters in Edward II, Isabella is perhaps the most salient example of social constructionism, of an Althusserian interpellation into ideologically available subject positions’ (172). Her next statement is more problematic: ‘Throughout the play, therefore, Isabella skillfully adapts her masquerades to respond to the drama’s vertiginous power shifts’ (172). In depicting an Isabella who is able ‘skillfully’ to manipulate the stereotypical personae available to her, Deats depicts, in Judith Butler’s terms, ‘a willful and instrumental subject’ who can ‘peruse the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice’ (Bodies xi). Deats’ Isabella is a brilliant actress, putting culturally constructed roles on and off like so many costumes. Yet Marlowe’s Isabella remains strictly interpellated into a relational discourse of feminine identity. To be sure, she conforms to that discourse by transgressing it, rupturing her identification with her husband by committing adultery. She dissembles; indeed, at one point in the playtext Mortimer congratulates her on doing it so well (21.73). Even so, this very moment shows how closely even Isabella’s apparent transgressions are linked to her submission to the men who shape her sense of self. Her allegiance to masculinist social order remains clear even as her conduct points up the fissures and contradictions inherent in that order.




At first sight, Derek Jarman’s ‘improvement’ of Edward II seems to advance a clearer interpretation of Isabella as autonomous manipulator: one reinforced by what looks like an emphasis on the clothes that make the woman. Jarman consistently decks Isabella in the most conspicuous signs of her gender and class, and he repeatedly shifts Mortimer’s playtext lines and actions to the Queen. Significantly, the first such shift occurs when Swinton’s Isabella takes up Mortimer’s playtext complaints about Gaveston’s extravagant taste in dress (QEII 54, from EII 4.403–20). The transfer of sartorial conservatism from Mortimer to Isabella foreshadows darker things to come. Whereas the playtext at most implies that the idea of killing Gaveston originates with Isabella (4.225–99), Jarman is explicit about her agency in the persecution and death of the favourite. Judith Weil argues that Marlowe’s Mortimer ‘achiev[es] the radical—and sub-human—freedom of the Machiavel’ (157). In Jarman’s film, Isabella gains not only some of Mortimer’s lines but also some of his Machiavellian quality. Certainly, she can justly be described as ‘sub-human,’ particularly in Jarman’s version of the murder of Kent (Jerome Flynn). Colin MacCabe cites this scene as conclusive proof of the film’s misogyny, describing how ‘Tilda Swinton’s magnificent Isabella literally tears the life out of [Kent] with her teeth; every fantasy of the castrating woman, the vagina dentata, rendered into all too palpable image’ (16). Whereas Marlowe’s Isabella allies herself with Mortimer but remains largely absent from—and possibly ignorant of—his cruelest acts, Swinton’s Isabella, coolly wiping Kent’s blood from her face, has a bite much worse than her bark. This horrifying scene finds her typically soignée in a catwalk ensemble of orange and blue satin with elbow gloves. The glamorous upper-class woman is explicitly constructed as a destructive parasite; the costume of the haute-couture model becomes the costume of the vampire. Just as Taymor’s Titus links Lavinia and her beautiful clothes with cinematic icons of feminine vulnerability, Jarman’s Edward II links Isabella and her conspicuously gorgeous attire with powerful filmic images of feminine evil. The performance text situates Isabella’s shift of allegiance from Edward to Mortimer in a sequence the filmmaker describes as having ‘an element of a real horror film (Corman’s “The Tomb of Ligeia” perhaps?)’ (‘Damning Desire’ 11). As Mortimer walks down a darkened corridor of Jarman’s great ghost-palace, Swinton suddenly materializes as a Gothic heroine. Her white dress recalls Wilkie Collins’ Anne Catherick—a white veil embroidered here and there with ominous blotches of red covers her face. Her identity, usually telegraphed by her lavish costumes, is so far obscured by this weird attire that Mortimer




starts (‘Who’s this, the Queen?’ [QEII 90, from EII 8.23]) when Isabella nestles against his chest and casts her veil over his head. She seems less a woman than a beautiful and malignant spirit, an embodiment of the terrors of monstrous feminine sexuality. Isabella’s appearance in this scene also evokes another powerful contemporary image: that of the white-clad, veiled bride. The happy, normatively heterosexual associations of that image are even more thoroughly deconstructed here than in Lavinia’s appearance as black-veiled bride/sacrifice in Taymor’s film. While a politically engaged spectator can justly read Isabella’s uncanny encounter with Mortimer as a misogynist representation of feminine evil, she can also intervene in it to find a ‘subversive repetition’ (Butler, Gender Trouble 147) of the norms of masculinist compulsory heterosexuality. Isabella goes out to meet her new lover in a garb that recalls the marriage from which she has been unwillingly expelled. Her second ‘marriage’ with Mortimer is depicted as a frightening moment of excess that parodies normative marriage rites and exposes their unnatural qualities. Vitally, though, Isabella does not seem to engineer this effect; she appears unconscious of it, locked within the image of the bride as within those of the vampire and the mummy. Her identity is totally infected by cultural idealizations and demonizations of women, but she is oblivious to its contradictions. Jarman’s Isabella can no more be identified as a Machiavellian figure than can Marlowe’s. In an Elizabethan translation, Machiavelli’s own infamous dictum reminds his putative Prince that ‘itt is good to seeme pittifull in punishmente, iuste of thy woorde, and courteouse in thy behaviour, and to be soe, but not to have thy mynde so precisely bent to the observation thereof, but that upon occasion thowe mayest be content to practise the contrarie’ (77). Swinton’s Isabella, like Marlowe’s, never exhibits such distance from her personae. When Mortimer (Nigel Terry) stabs Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan), she wrests the knife from him as if to perform either her support or her hypocritical criticism of his act, but then freezes in mid-action like her son’s battery-operated robot when its power-source sputters out. In this sequence, as frequently throughout Jarman’s film, Swinton is a lone figure. The camera frames her in isolation from those around her. Her face, however, registers no loneliness. She resembles a shop mannequin, an automaton playing out culturally constructed feminine roles from that of the weepy abandoned wife (astutely wearing waterproof mascara) to that of Dracula’s consort. Underneath this elaborate exterior, Swinton gives us only the most remote glimpses of anything resembling interiority or motivation.





Isabella’s roles are not strategies she manipulates at will; if her clothes make her, they are not costumes she can easily put off.

We cannot easily pity Swinton’s Isabella or even take uneasy pleasure in the beauty of her image, as we do in the case of Fraser’s Lavinia. How, then, are we to interpret her blank façade? For the politically engaged spectator, the implications of Swinton’s performance may be clarified by a consideration of the relationship between Isabella and the man who displaces her, Gaveston. Consistently clothed (like Swinton) in heavily signifying costumes, Andrew Tiernan’s Gaveston is an explosive force at the heart of Jarman’s Edward II. He first appears in an ironically biblicallooking white robe, exulting in King Edward’s invitation while John Lynch’s gentle Spencer (buttoning unambiguously twentieth-century male clothing) eyes him fearfully. From then onwards, neither his reactions nor his costume are ever predictable. Cartelli remarks that ‘Tiernan’s Gaveston generally keeps the space of lovemaking free of the impulse to travesty that characterizes his other appearances [where he] variously plays Gaveston as loutish, vicious and demonic’ (219). In mint-green pyjamas he is quietly rueful, even affectionate, sighing, ‘’Tis something to be pitied of a King’ (QEII 62, from EII 4.130). In leather jacket and jeans, a rebel with a hopeless cause, he is spat upon by a row of bishops. In a sharp black suit and looking ‘as if he’d stepped from “The Krays” ’ (QEII 44), he brutally abuses his opponents. Naked, he ‘turn[s] himself into a frightful clucking demon’ (QEII 30) on Edward’s throne and mocks Mortimer with the ultimate Protean threat: ‘Were I a King –’ (QEII 30, from EII 4.27). There could hardly be more distance between him and the conservative figure of Queen Isabella. Cartelli speaks of ‘Jarman’s desire to insist on differences to which Marlowe was indifferent’ (219), and the extreme contrast between Gaveston and Isabella in Jarman’s film is one such difference. In Marlowe’s Edward II, Isabella and Gaveston are parallel figures struggling for the same place from a similar position. Both are disqualified from independent social action: Isabella by gender, Gaveston by class. Both can succeed only through alliance with a powerful man. Isabella’s claim to Edward has the social recognition and approval that Gaveston’s lacks, but Gaveston has Edward’s affection, and, as Isabella discovers, ’tis something to be pitied (and something quite different not to be pitied) of a King. As Deats notes, both ‘are French, strangers in a strange land struggling to survive in an inhospitable environment’ (Sex, Gender



IV. The difference between Gaveston and Isabella

176). Their one exchange, in which Isabella snaps, ‘Villain, ’tis thou that robb’st me of my lord’ and Gaveston replies, ‘Madam, ’tis you that rob me of my lord’ (4.160–1) plays out in its titles and pronouns the gender and class differences between them, but its thrust and counter-thrust suggest the similarity of their positions. Like Isabella’s, Gaveston’s identity is represented as performative, created by the social exchanges that supposedly express it. The favourite spends much of Marlowe’s Edward II trying to form alliances that will keep him powerful and alive. His primary association, of course, is with Edward. This alliance is never ruptured, as Isabella’s is, by Edward’s indifference, but like Isabella’s marriage it finally proves insufficient to give him an invulnerable position. Like Isabella, Gaveston continually seeks to stabilize his identity through more normative social relationships than his liaison with the King. He allies himself with Edward’s niece, Lady Margaret, who becomes his adoring bride. He even attempts a rapprochement with Isabella via Edward, whom he successfully bids ‘dissemble with her, speak her fair’ (6.226). Marlowe’s text, then, draws parallels not only between Gaveston’s and Isabella’s dependent situations, but also between the unstable identifications into which this dependence interpellates them. Jarman’s film, by contrast, seems to freeze the identities of its characters. In Queer Edward II, one of Jarman’s scene descriptions neatly suggests the difference between Tiernan’s Gaveston and Swinton’s Isabella. Jarman writes, ‘Gaveston blocks the Queen’s way in the staircase, his jeans and T-shirt in sharp contrast to her lavish black dress. His action belligerent, he kisses her contemptuously’ (QEII 46). In the film, Tiernan’s performance takes this scenario further. He corners Swinton and begins to touch her mouth and neck with his lips, urging her to respond. When she tentatively raises her mouth to return his kiss, he bursts into derisive laughter, prompting her response:

QUEEN Thou wrongst me Gaveston. Ist not enough that thou corruptst my lord, And art a bawd to his affections, But thou must call mine honour thus in question? GAVESTON I mean not so, your grace must pardon me. (Mocking) QUEEN Villain, ’tis thou that robst me of my lord. GAVESTON Madam, ’tis you who rob me of my lord. QUEEN Fair blows the wind for France, blow gentle gale. (QEII 46, from EII 4.149–153, 160–1, 14.1)




Backed into a dark corner of Edward’s castle, the two characters are locked in an opposition that will end only with death. In this round, Tiernan’s Gaveston scores a victory: his performance points up cracks in Isabella’s professed strict faithfulness and makes her respectable heterosexuality appear nothing more than indiscriminate promiscuity. Still, the scene worried Jarman. Often depicted as unequivocally sympathetic to his homosexual characters, he nevertheless wrote: ‘I’m certain most will see this sequence as an assault on Isabella, though Gaveston’s reaction is understandable. Not all gay men are attractive’ (QEII 46). In fact, the confrontation between Gaveston and Isabella in Jarman’s Edward II underlines the parallels between two figures whose qualities, attractive or not, are profoundly determined by their placement in a particular social nexus. Gaveston’s subversive charisma is tempered by his utter brutality, while a little vulnerability glimmers out from behind Isabella’s cold mask. Moreover, another aspect of the scene keeps it from enacting the binary opposition Jarman’s original description suggests. Gaveston does not wear the screenplay’s ‘jeans and T-shirt’; rather, he sports a black suit which Jarman describes as ‘rather unusually and beautifully cut’ (‘Damning Desire’ 10), every bit Isabella’s match for elegance. Black-clad, pale-faced and auburn-haired, the rivals begin to look disconcertingly similar. Their costumes, both distinguished by eye-catching style and crossreferences to previous cinematic images, offer some suggestions as to why this should be. Tilda Swinton’s Queen becomes increasingly excessive as she enacts stereotyped cultural constructions of feminine identity, and in this she consistently resembles Tiernan’s Gaveston. In his black suit, he is gangster; in her lavish black dress, she is femme fatale. If Marlowe brings Queen Isabella and her husband’s lover together in a manner that suggests the contingency and instability of social positions, Jarman brings them together to suggest the constructed nature of identity and its determination by pre-existing cultural images and gender roles. However, Swinton’s Isabella and Tiernan’s Gaveston are differentiated by their radically different relationships to their destined liveries. Gaveston plays with his given roles as well as playing them. His anarchic sense of fun initiates parodic sequences like the dance that pays tribute to Jack Lemmon’s cross-dressed tango with ‘her’ millionaire fiancé in Billy Wilder’s classic transvestite comedy Some Like It Hot (1959) (see QEII 88). He is given license to disrupt Marlowe’s text with expletives: ‘As for the multitude, that are but sparks / Raked up in embers of their




poverty, / Fuck them!’ (QEII 10, from EII 1.20–2). As Jarman remarks, ‘these light-hearted decisions endear you to a character or should do’ (O’Pray, ‘Damning Desire’ 10). Isabella, on the other hand, appears totally unconscious of her similarity to Evita as she stands before her microphone. If the spectator laughs, she does not: a relationship that can hardly be called endearing. In Jarman’s film, both Gaveston and Isabella are represented through a more complex employment of camp than that we saw in Alan Cumming’s performance as Titus’ Saturninus. This is camp not simply as artifice, effeminacy and over-theatricality, but camp as defined in Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’ (1964). Sontag writes that ‘Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated [ ] [and] sees everything in quotation marks’ (56). With their overblown performances of cultural norms, both Tiernan’s Gaveston and Swinton’s Isabella belong to this tradition. But they are in no way the same kind of camp figure. Sontag distinguishes between ‘naïve, or pure’ camp, which is ‘unintentional,’ and ‘deliberate’ camp, which selfconsciously parodies the norms performed by its naïve cousin (58). As Fabio Cleto remarks, her distinction has been widely criticized but remains highly influential in critical discussions of camp (23). Recently, Pamela Robertson has appropriated it to offer an astute reading of the gendering of camp. She notes that Most people who have written about camp assume that the exchange between gay men’s and women’s cultures has been wholly one-sided; in other words, that gay men appropriate a feminine aesthetic [ ] but that women [ ] do not similarly appropriate aspects of gay male culture. This suggests that women are camp but do not knowingly produce themselves as camp and, furthermore, do not even have access to a camp sensibility. Women, by this logic, are objects of camp and subject to it but are not camp subjects. (5) This argument intersects suggestively with Jarman’s Edward II. It sets up a contemporary echo of the early modern framework traced in Belsey’s The Subject of Tragedy, where men are granted self-knowledge and agency from which women are excluded. Tiernan’s Gaveston appropriates images of excessive masculinity rather than ‘a feminine aesthetic,’ but he stands in the knowing, parodic relationship to those images that Robertson associates with camp. Swinton, on the other hand, portrays a woman who becomes more and more excessive without ever seeming to notice. As far as Isabella is concerned, she is a normative representative





of the status quo even when biting out her brother-in-law’s neck. If this is not misogyny, what is it?

The sequence in Jarman’s Edward II where Isabella employs the assassin Lightborn (Kevin Collins) to kill King Edward suggests both why the film has been justly read as misogynist and why it remains possible for a politically engaged spectator to advance a more hopeful interpretation. Once again Jarman connects Isabella, rather than Mortimer as in the playtext, with the planning of Edward’s murder. Queer Edward II transcribes the scene thus: LIGHTBORN I, I, and none shall know which way he died. ISABELLA I care not how it is so it be not spied. Commend me humbly to his majesty, And tell him that I labour all in vain To ease his grief and work his liberty. She cuts a lock of her hair. ISABELLA And bear him this, as witness of my love. ISABELLA (Decisively) He shall be murdered when the deed is done. (QEII 148, from EII 23.24, 23.39, 21.68–71, 23.20) Like the earlier ‘Evita’ sequence, this scene underlines a radical disjunction between Isabella’s words and her actions. Young Mortimer’s playtext determination to see Edward dead nestles disconcertingly against the Queen’s playtext expression of concern for her husband. Moreover, the sequence shows Isabella apparently manipulating her sexuality in order to encourage Lightborn’s murderous resolution. Enticingly clad in a white negligée, she more than once leans towards the kneeling assassin, her lips inches from his. Her action echoes Tiernan’s in the scene where Gaveston sexually entices and mocks Isabella, but her sexual feinting is even less attractive than his, for unlike Gaveston Isabella seems to get no subversive pleasure from it. Her gestures have their usual mechanical quality, as if she were going through long-accustomed motions of desire and coyness. Jarman describes his favourite actress’ performance in this scene as ‘dream-like’ (QEII 148); one might go further and call it somnambulistic. Isabella seems utterly disengaged from what she is doing, to the point that she murmurs: ‘He shall be murdered when the deed is done’ while Lightborn is still



V. The queen’s masquerade

in frame and thus apparently still within hearing range. She is represented simultaneously as hypocritically manipulative and as fundamentally lacking in perception. No male character in Jarman’s Edward II—not even Nigel Terry’s viciously militaristic Mortimer—is constructed as so evil and yet as so conspicuously lacking in interiority. If we take this as a sweeping judgement on the nature of women, then the film is misogynist indeed. On the other hand, Jarman’s comments on the scene in Queer Edward II suggest the necessity of placing Swinton’s performance in a wider context. Jarman writes, ‘Ian [Wilson, Jarman’s Cinematographer] said afterwards, “She’s a cross between Joan Crawford and Christine Keeler” ’ (148). The recollection of Keeler is appropriate to Edward II’s volatile mixture of sexuality and politics, and scarcely frees Isabella from the image of the manipulative temptress. But Wilson also associates Swinton with classical Hollywood icon Joan Crawford. In her discussion of the gendering of camp, Pamela Robertson identities Crawford as a practitioner of Riviere’s ‘feminine masquerade,’ in which, as we saw in the previous chapter, the woman dons a mask of acceptable femininity in order to conceal her longing for masculine power. In Robertson’s definition, feminine masquerade becomes a form of ‘feminist camp’ that distances the female subject from culturally coded notions of femininity. As Robertson writes, ‘the concept of the masquerade allows us to see that what gender parody takes as its object is not the image of the woman, but the idea—which, in camp, becomes a joke—that an essential feminine identity exists prior to the image’ (12). She is influenced by Mary Ann Doane’s 1982 essay, ‘Film and the Masquerade,’ according to which the masquerade ‘constitutes an acknowledgement that it is femininity itself which is constructed as a mask—as the decorative layer which conceals a non-identity’ (25). Can we associate Tilda Swinton’s Isabella, who evidences a total lack of distance from her own image, with such a style of performance? Yes, for Robertson’s version of masquerade associates this crucial distance not with the character portrayed, but with the actress and director who portray her. Unlike Laura Fraser and Julie Taymor, Swinton and Jarman are clearly aware of the political implications of their imagistic portrayal of an early modern tragic character. In Queer Edward II, Jarman remarks on Swinton’s response to the association between her performance and classical Hollywood actresses: ‘Tilda said as long as they don’t all agree on the reference—she’s happy’ (148). Swinton refuses the idea that her performance might be a mechanical reproduction of one given image, one reference; she does not refuse the implication that her mode of




representing Isabella evokes a performance tradition associated with feminine masquerade or ‘feminist camp.’ Indeed, in discussing Edward II in an interview with Lindsay Mackie, Swinton emphasized the cultural importance of ‘icons of women like Joan Crawford, Audrey Hepburn, Margaret Thatcher, Empress Wu,’ and noted that it ‘occurred to me that the only way of questioning them, or attempting in some way to deconstruct them, was to represent them all, or many of them’ (Scotsman Weekend, 26 October 1991). Similarly, speaking with Lizbeth Goodman before the filming of Edward II, Swinton declared herself very interested in images of women, in getting to the root of them. [ ] Deconstruction has to be interested in structures. [ ] I suppose it’s the images I’m interested in, and creating them is only a part of knocking them down. [ ] So long as they come down. (‘Subverting’ 219, 216) As Michael O’Pray notes, ‘Brechtian acting theory—the notion that a distinction between the actor and his or her role must be enforced—has been particularly influential on Swinton’s approach’ (Dreams 162). Clearly, then, Swinton is capable of adopting a mode of representation that underlines the masquerade-like distance between the actress and her role. Critics who accuse Jarman of misogyny in Edward II ignore the distancing mechanisms that obtain in Jarman’s film and particularly in Swinton’s performance. Filmmaker and actress create an extremely negative and artificial image of woman, but they do so only to reveal it as such—and thus to knock it down. To call their portrait of Isabella misogynist, one must believe that Isabella’s evil shows something essential about all feminine identity. But Swinton’s performance and Jarman’s mise-en-scène endlessly depict Isabella as a figure of phantasmatic excess. To prove this, the politically engaged spectator need only recall the moment when Swinton’s Isabella staggers determinedly down an incredibly steep ramp in a designer suit and ‘a pair of gold high heels, clutching a little black bag by Hermes that cost £3,900 (!)—more than the set’ (QEII 38). In Queer Edward II, Swinton remarks of this scene, ‘If a Queen’s no good for a 1:1 ramp in stilettos with a four grand pocket of crocodile skin clutched to her breast what is she good for?’ (38). Her ironic tone suggests how far she is from seeing her performance as a portrait of essential feminine nature. The numbers say it all: Swinton’s Isabella is not a ‘natural woman’ but a commodity, a constructed figure so determined by cultural images of femininity that she becomes a parody of them.




All this is very promising; but such celebration of Swinton’s and Jarman’s agency sits uneasily with my earlier arguments against the critical privileging of artists’ intentionality. It sounds as if I am simply transferring Deats’ argument about Isabella’s manipulation of the tropes of femininity from Marlowe’s character to the actress who plays her in Jarman’s film. To a certain extent, such a movement is just, or at least has cultural likelihood on its side. Marlowe’s Isabella is a rhetorical representation produced by a deeply masculinist culture and a playwright often seen as uninterested in feminine subjectivity; Tilda Swinton is a passionately political actress steeped in late twentieth-century feminist theory. The latter is much better qualified to manufacture distance between herself and her image than the former. Even so, I wish to avoid conflating the notion of the masquerade with complete agency over one’s own image. Rivière wrote that she could not ‘draw the line between genuine womanliness and the “masquerade” ’ because ‘they are the same thing’ (38). As Butler notes, two different possible interpretations of masquerade emerge from this statement: On the one hand, masquerade may be understood as the performative production of a sexual ontology, an appearing that makes itself convincing as a ‘being’; on the other hand, masquerade can be read as a denial of a feminine desire that presupposes some prior ontological femininity regularly unrepresented by the phallic economy. (Gender Trouble 47) Deats interprets the former of Butler’s alternatives, like Rivière’s refusal to differentiate between masquerade and ‘genuine’ womanliness, as a positive vision of woman’s ability to realize the constructed nature of femininity and to play with it (172). Butler’s point is surely the opposite. Even the most radical feminist is inevitably part of the sweeping cultural masquerade that passes as ‘being,’ founded by the very discursive fields she seeks to undermine. She cannot ‘be’ legibly in society without repeating dominant constructions of gender. Even Tilda Swinton can only critique dominant images of femininity by reproducing them, and in reproducing them she may confirm their power even as she deconstructs them. No amount of intentionality on the performer’s part can fully determine the cultural ends her performance serves. As Lynne Huffer remarks in her critique of Butler, the politically engaged interpreter must remember to ask, ‘How might a performance be read? What might cause the performance to fail, to make it work in ways that veer dangerously off




course, away from the liberatory intentions of its agents?’ (102). Linda Charnes too, in her remarks on Bodies That Matter, notes that ‘we have to wonder (à la Audre Lorde), is it possible to dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools?’ (142). Readings such as MacCabe’s and Bennett’s, which see Jarman’s and Swinton’s representation of Isabella as misogynist, cannot simply be dismissed offhand. They are part of the field of meaning produced by Swinton’s performance, and no citation of her intentions can change its contours. But neither can Swinton’s performance be rejected as a simple reinscription of misogynist constructions of femininity. As Butler writes, construction is neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms; sex is both produced and destablised in the course of this reiteration. (Bodies 10) As any actor performs the norms of gender that help to shape his or her culture’s perception of identity, he or she is likely both to reiterate them and to cite them ‘with a difference’ shaped by contingent circumstances of production and reception. Differences between established norms and their repetition in performance then allow politically engaged spectators to interrogate, if not to deny, dominant constructions of identity. This point not only clarifies the links between Jarman’s Edward II and the other performance texts I have discussed, but also elucidates the relationship between Jarman’s film and the early modern tragic playtext it appropriates for its own ends. Like the other playtexts I have discussed, Edward II is heavily inscribed by dominant early modern constructions of gender, sexuality and power, but it also shows those constructions undermined by the subjects they found. Thurn argues that self and state in Edward II ‘both appear to rely upon gestures of expulsion and inclusion to sustain an illusion of integrity’ (128), but that this illusion of integrity breaks down when Edward, instead of expelling Gaveston and including the barons and wife who lend him kingly identity, does the opposite. Along similar lines, McAdam suggests that ‘Edward II explores the idea of role-playing in the sense of establishing socially viable, if ultimately illusory identities’ (‘Edward II’ 209; Irony 204). Jarman’s film takes up this representation of an elaborate system of signification cracking under the pressure of Edward’s transgressive refusal to follow the script set out for him. It is a blatant ‘surrogation’ of the playtext (Worthen,




‘Drama’ 1102), but the text inflects its exploration of the processes of interpellation and subversion. Marlowe’s Isabella is a woman clinging to the roles offered to her by social construction in a universe where even royal identity has become a void. The status quo is so thoroughly undermined that the old roles, though still powerful, are evacuated of meaning. At the end of Marlowe’s Edward II, she tries to forestall her son’s determination to send her to the Tower, crying, ISABELLA Shall I not mourn for my belovèd lord, And with the rest accompany him to his grave? SECOND LORD Thus, madam, ’tis the King’s will you shall hence. ISABELLA He hath forgotten me; stay, I am his mother. SECOND LORD That boots not; therefore, gentle madam, go. ISABELLA Then come, sweet death, and rid me of this grief. (25.87–92) Isabella is forbidden to take back her role as Edward’s wife, the role from which she was excluded at the beginning of the play. This may be mere justice; after all, her protests of love for Edward sound conspicuously hollow after her association with Young Mortimer. But she is still Young Edward’s mother, isn’t she? As it turns out, not even that supposedly material, irreducible relationship ‘boots.’ At the last, the world of Marlowe’s Edward II is a world in which no performance of stable identity seems altogether plausible—and yet in which no other options are available. In Jarman’s film, Isabella’s final words to her son are replaced by a fascinating visual equivalent. The spectator last sees Swinton’s Isabella imprisoned with Mortimer in a huge cage, reaching up towards the uncaring little figure of Prince Edward, now King Edward III. Jarman’s comment on the scene evokes the association between performance and gender performativity in his film: ‘I wanted to turn everyone into a mannequin as if they’d been drained of life. Tilda wanted the dead flowers in her hands. [ ] It looked like she had received a bouquet for some performance and I like that’ (O’Pray, ‘Damning Desire’ 11). Here as in Marlowe’s Edward II, the old actions continue to be performed, but in a context which underlines their artificial nature. Marlowe’s play and Jarman’s film rehearse the gestures that establish gender and class only to render them ‘thoroughly and radically incredible’ (Butler, Gender Trouble 141, emphasis Butler’s).





Unlike the other performance texts I have described, then, Jarman’s film explicitly recognizes that male and female subjects are forcibly, even violently, interpellated into their societies’ constructions of gender and sexuality. But does it offer any way out of the series of ossified gestures that performatively constitute its characters’ identities? Marlowe’s Isabella hints at that question when she sighs, ‘Would when I left sweet France and was embarked, / That charming Circe, walking on the waves, / Had changed my shape’ (4.171–3). The dream of escaping the bounds of given roles through metamorphosis haunts Marlowe’s Edward II from the beginning, and from the beginning is associated with the power of performance. In the play’s first scene, Gaveston fantasizes about presenting King Edward with ‘speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows’ (1.55), including one in which Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape, With hair that gilds the water as it glides, Crownets of pearl about his naked arms, And in his sportful hands an olive tree To hide those parts which men delight to see, Shall bathe him in a spring; and there hard by, One like Actaeon peeping through the grove, Shall by the angry goddess be transformed[.] (1.60–7) As Brady remarks, Gaveston’s dream pictures ‘erotic bliss as spectacle, as an ideal confusion of gendered boundaries. [ ] His is a theatrical aesthetic, a culture of play where all likenesses are trompe l’oeil’ (185–6). In his projected spectacle, members of one gender are no longer frozen within their given roles; they are able to imitate the gestures of the other to the delight of onlookers. Gaveston’s fantasy functions partially as a reference to the material reality of the Elizabethan stage and particularly to the boy actress. In the original production of Marlowe’s Edward II, a boy would have played Isabella’s part. Hence, for all her imprisonment within conventional feminine roles, Marlowe’s Isabella may also have spoken in her original cultural context for the more unstable construction of gender associated with the boy actress by early modern anti-theatricalists and by some contemporary critics. At an early point in his planning for Edward II Derek Jarman wondered, ‘Should Isabel be played by a boy?’ (Jarman,



VI. Charming Circe; or, the art of transformation

Modern Nature 233), but finally gave the part to his longtime collaborator Tilda Swinton. His choice had the effect of fixing gender within the sexed body conventionally assigned to that gender, but it also allowed Swinton to make the point that gender is not essential even when one is ‘playing oneself.’ An actress, too, can manufacture the distance of feminine masquerade between herself and the roles assigned to women by society. Even so, Isabella is locked in a cage at the end of Jarman’s Edward II. Swinton’s performance critiques imprisoning images of femininity; it does not point to any way out. There is, however, a boy actor in Jarman’s film who may take the subversion of gender identity rather further. This is Isabella’s and Edward’s son, the diminutive Edward III (Jody Graber), who at the end of the film dances on the cage which holds his mother and Mortimer. A sort of apprentice player able to perform his way out of the conventional gender roles inhabited by his elders, he functions as a link between Jarman’s film and late twentieth-century fantasies about Marlowe’s theatre. Over the course of Edward II, he experiments with both ‘masculine’ roles (sitting on Gaveston’s knee and making believe that the sword of state is a machine gun) and ‘feminine’ roles (trying on his mother’s hat and crown). In his final appearance, he pairs a black suit that recalls Gaveston’s with silver pumps and a slick of Isabella’s red lipstick, reconfiguring within himself the adversaries’ previously irreconcilable positions. The film’s critics generally love little Edward. Cartelli claims that his ‘questions, perceptions, and experiments in gender displacement speak eloquently on behalf of subjects and sexualities still in the process of formation’ (220). Bennett argues that the little boy ‘tests and exceeds the traditional iconography of power and of gender identity. He shows them as only performative’ (115). Such formulations surely overstate the positive side of the case. The little boy is shaped by the horrors he has seen: a point chillingly made when, wearing his mother’s makeup, he curiously tastes the blood of his murdered Uncle Kent. Escape from this cycle of emulation is not simple; ‘performativity,’ with its forced repetition of norms, is not simply equal to ebullient, voluntary ‘performance.’ However, the boy Edward at least suggests that performance’s promise of transformation may mitigate the hegemony of the normative/performative. The last words of Jarman’s Edward II, spoken in voiceover by Edward, invoke a sense of the hollowness of existing roles, as well as a longing for escape from them:




But what are Kings, when regiment is gone, But perfect shadows in a sunshine day? I know not, but of this I am assured, That death ends all, and I can die but once. Come death, and with thy fingers close my eyes, Or if I live, let me forget myself. (QEII 168, from EII 20.26–7, 152–3, 110–11) This longing for self-forgetfulness is, I think, also evoked at the end of the film’s sexual confrontation between Isabella and Gaveston. Here, the director juggles with Marlowe’s playtext to surprising effect. As Gaveston stalks off down the corridor, Tilda Swinton’s Isabella is framed in profile, staring into space. Then, in voice-over, she speaks Kent’s words from the playtext, ‘Fair blows the wind for France, blow gentle gale’ (QEII 46, from EII 14.1), her voice charged with unusual emotion. As the voice-over ceases, Swinton lifts her beautiful face towards the camera and gazes upward. One may interpret this moment as speaking Isabella’s longing to escape from Gaveston’s abuse into Mortimer’s arms, but another reading is possible. Throughout the film, Swinton stands back from Isabella, demanding that we reconsider the images she represents. At this one moment, however, the spectator catches a glimpse of the actress capable of such heart-rending emotion in War Requiem. The politically engaged spectator may imagine that this frame suggests Tilda Swinton’s own longing for a transformation that could unmake Isabella. After all, she has only been performing these images of femininity in order to bring them down.




Death and the Married Maiden: Gender Reproduction as Destruction in The Broken Heart

I. The ghost bride Most early modern tragedies end in multiple deaths, and many feature ghosts, but Michael Boyd’s 1994 staging of John Ford’s The Broken Heart (c.1629) at the RSC’s Swan Theatre began with a haunting before the character who appeared as a phantom was actually dead. In the production’s prologue, the spectator encountered Orgilus (Iain Glen), gaunt and black-clad, playing on a lute. He sang of the joys of marriage, of ‘Hearts by holy union wedded, / More than theirs by custom bedded; / Fruitful issues; life so graced, / Not by age to be defaced.’1 These were pleasures he himself had lost. The Broken Heart hinges on the abortive betrothal between Orgilus and his beloved Penthea, destroyed when her brother Ithocles forces her into marriage with Bassanes. As Glen’s Orgilus finished singing, Boyd’s production evoked those broken nuptials. The frail, white-clad figure of Penthea (Emma Fielding) appeared, her face hidden by a bridal veil. Orgilus drew it aside to gaze at her face, but immediately his father Crotolon (Tony Britton) entered, speaking the first words of Ford’s playtext: ‘Dally not further’ (1.1.1). At this, Penthea turned from Orgilus and began to walk slowly upstage. Crotolon did not register her presence as she passed him, for she was not a bride of flesh and blood, but a figment of Orgilus’ imagination—or a ghost. The spectral quality of this initial image pervaded Boyd’s whole production, which Jack Tinker likened to ‘a deathly masque being played out.’ Set in a lavish Caroline version of Ford’s Spartan court, it followed The Broken Heart’s recent critics by emphasizing the entrapment of Ford’s characters within a kind of living death. This was only fitting; after all, this tragedy sees its four leading characters accept death willingly, one of them with the frightening affirmation, ‘Welcome, thou ice, that sittest 136



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about my heart; / No heat can ever thaw thee’ (5.2.154–5). Set in classical Sparta, it portrays men and women of strict rectitude who bear suffering in silence until it kills them. Many critics have focused on the codes of virtue that govern these characters, tracing their relationship to ancient and early modern versions of stoicism; most argue that the play exposes the destructive effects of stoical philosophy on Spartan society. Kristin Crouch has shown how the imagery of Boyd’s production supported such interpretations by showing a world whose citizens ‘bury all unacceptable human experience, inner desire and emotional impulse under the weight of silence, stillness and death’ (270). Her analysis agrees with that of R.J. Kaufmann, who describes the play as ‘Ford’s Waste Land,’ and remarks that its ‘characters are doomed by tragically narrow, nonorganic identifications of their own natures’ (184). Yet if these identifications are narrow, they are also multiple, and not limited to the workings of stoical philosophy. During a crucial scene between the playtext’s leading female characters, Penthea traces the confines of her own identity by describing how on the stage Of my mortality my youth hath acted Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length By varied pleasures, sweetened in the mixture, But tragical in issue. (3.5.15–19) Penthea seems to turn on her rapidly failing life in a motion of self-condemnation that is also a motion of self-definition—and of self-dismissal. This chapter explores that paradoxical motion as it was performed repeatedly by Penthea and by other characters throughout Michael Boyd’s production of The Broken Heart, where Ford’s ‘stage of mortality’ became the stage on which a profoundly conflicted discourse of gender was exposed as a death-trap. The appearance of Penthea’s ‘ghost’ epitomized the theatrical strategies that facilitated this exposure. The production’s restrained style defined a world deeply inflected by regulatory ideals, with almost no room for resistance or transgression; in this performance, every character gave evidence of the automatic obedience to social norms that made Swinton’s Isabella relatively exceptional in Jarman’s Edward II. No performance encapsulated the tensions attendant upon these performative repetitions more perfectly than Fielding’s ‘pale, still Penthea who [gave] you the feeling she only need pull a tiny pin to activate the



Gender Reproduction as Destruction in The Broken Heart

grenade she ha[d] become’ (Nightingale, Times, 8 June 1995). Wafting about the stage as a visible reproach to the system that had constructed her, she offered a fearful illustration of the potentially destructive power of a woman obedient to masculinist discourse. With its elaborate Caroline costumes and self-conscious historicity, Boyd’s production might have seemed nostalgic and conventional. Watched with Penthea’s ghost always in mind, however, it showed more clearly than any performance I have discussed how the engagement between an early modern playtext and the contemporary theatre can unveil the fatal power of oppressive gender ideologies over the subjects they found.

II. Virgin wives and married maids Superficially well-ordered and even liberal, The Broken Heart’s discourses of gender are characterized from the first by deep contradictions and struggle. In the opening scene of Ford’s playtext, Orgilus describes the situation of his beloved Penthea, yoked against her will to an obsessively jealous husband and consigned to ‘a hell on earth’ (1.1.80). ‘Beauteous Penthea,’ he cries, wedded to this torture By an insulting brother, being secretly Compelled to yield her virgin freedom up To him who never can usurp her heart, Before contracted mine, is now so yoked To a most barbarous thraldom, misery, Affliction, that he savours not humanity Whose sorrow melts not into more than pity In hearing but her name. (1.1.49–57) Orgilus contrasts the state of ‘virgin freedom,’ in which a maiden is still to some degree mistress of her own inviolate body, with the coercion and slavery suffered by a wife forced into marriage (and sexual relations) with a man she does not love. He presents Penthea’s ‘most barbarous thraldom’ as the result of an exceptional act of tyranny on the part of her ‘insulting brother’ and the usurper Bassanes, and implies that any man with a vestige of common ‘humanity’ will join him in condemning their actions. Orgilus’ description of Penthea’s predicament links Ford’s playtext with many other early modern English texts that excoriate forced




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marriage (see Blayney 470). Lawrence Stone argues that although early modern conduct books generally advocated getting children’s consent before marrying them off, ‘almost all children until the end of the sixteenth century were so conditioned by their upbringing and so financially helpless that they acquiesced without much objection in the matches contrived for them’ (180). Stone describes the transitional pattern of marriage among the early seventeenth-century English landed classes as they moved uneasily between one set of values based on kin interest and marriage arranged by others [ ], and another set based on allowing children a right of veto in order to provide a better chance of marital harmony. (189) In a study that takes issue with aspects of Stone’s methodology and conclusions, Susan Dwyer Amussen nevertheless agrees that early modern marriage ‘was not just the business of the couple. Decisions to marry inevitably balanced prudence and affection’ (105). Penthea’s story is an extreme one, with the will of the bride utterly disregarded by her family. Still, any virgin on the early modern marriage market was unlikely to be completely free: her marriage and her identity were generally not so much a matter of absolute freedom or coercion as of negotiation between her family’s interest and her own precarious right of veto. The contradictions inherent in such negotiations appear early in The Broken Heart when Orgilus, his condemnation of Ithocles’ ‘insulting’ manipulation of Penthea scarcely out of his mouth, turns to his own sister, Euphrania. He begs her to ‘pass never to any man, however / Worthy, your faith, till with our father’s leave / I give a free consent’ (1.1.93–5). He is careful to distance himself from Ithocles’ draconian methods, assuring Euphrania, ‘Trust me, sister, / It shall be my first care to see thee matched / As may become thy choice and our contents’ (1.1.107–9, emphasis mine). He refuses to admit his father’s glibly patriarchal response, ‘I’ll promise for her, Orgilus’ (1.1.96), depending instead on the power of Euphrania’s own word: ‘Your pardon. / Euphrania’s oath must yield me satisfaction’ (1.1.96–7). But his apparent generosity covers a rather more conflicted reality, and Euphrania’s own language indicates that her ‘virgin freedom’ is far from absolute. When Orgilus asks leave to ‘prefer a suit’ to her, she responds, ‘You may style it, / My brother, a command’ (1.1.91–2). Thoroughly inhabiting the role of the dutiful sister, she can later respond to Prophilus’ courtship only with ‘language suited / To a divided mind’ (1.3.66–7). She tells her suitor that




The law of my desires kept equal pace With yours, nor have I left that resolution. But only, in a word, whatever choice Lives nearest in my heart must first procure Consent both from my father and my brother, Ere he can own me his. (1.3.75–80) No matter how much she loves, her will is dependent on her male relations. Still, she can speak of a ‘law of my desires’ separate from, though affected by, her brother’s ‘contents.’ In Boyd’s Broken Heart, the dialogue between Orgilus and Euphrania offered the first hint of the representational language with which the production would cope with this tension between masculine ‘command’ and feminine ‘freedom.’ Reluctance peeked out from under the obedience with which Elaine Pyke’s Euphrania acceded to her brother’s request that she await his consent for her marriage. When Glen’s Orgilus determinedly asserted that ‘Euphrania’s oath must yield me satisfaction,’ Pyke paused and then gave an uncomfortable laugh before delivering her response, ‘By Vesta’s sacred fires I swear’ (1.1.98). Her words bowed to Orgilus’ demands; other components of her performance suggested another perspective struggling to gain a foothold. When Orgilus’ departure from Sparta replaced her marriage as the topic at hand, Pyke’s Euphrania looked worriedly into Glen’s haunted face, murmuring, ‘Heaven / Does look into the secrets of all hearts. / Gods, you have mercy with ’ee, else-’ (1.1.113–15). Given a challenging note by the actress, the words evoked Euphrania’s own effort to look into her brother’s secrets. Her pause after the word ‘else’ sounded slightly threatening, as if she were predicting the outcome of Orgilus’ bitterness and trying to turn him back. Under the ritualistic vows of the scene, Pyke thus suggested not only a Euphrania shaped by her brother’s management, but also one who attempted to affect his behaviour. Orgilus made no response to her efforts. His last words reminded her of her promise, of the control he had asserted and the obedience she had pledged: ‘I have your oath’ (1.1.110). The audience was soon to see him spying on her courtship with Prophilus (William Houston), no affectionate brother but a voyeur condemning his sister’s smallest act of self-will. Even when he gave his permission to the match and Euphrania appeared, a newlywed bride, before the court of King Amyclas, Orgilus





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Our sister looks, methinks, mirthful and sprightly, As if her chaster fancy could already Expound the riddle of her gain in losing A trifle, maids know only that they know not. Pish, prithee blush not. ’Tis but honest change Of fashion in the garment, loose for strait, And so the modest maid is made a wife. Shrewd business, is’t not, sister? (4.3.60–7) Orgilus’ reference to Euphrania’s change of a ‘strait’ garment for a ‘loose’ one may be read either as reasonably tender joke about her ‘honest’ change into a future mother, or as a ‘salacious witticism’ (4.3.65n) that brands her a whore. Glen chose the latter interpretation, snapping out the words with sarcastic mockery. Euphrania’s only response was an uncomfortably murmured, ‘You are pleasant’ (4.3.67), which attempted ineffectually to diffuse her brother’s slurs by depicting them as mere jokes. The disruption of her wedding was painfully apparent. Despite the widespread condemnation of Ithocles’ enforcement of his sister’s marriage, Sparta was obviously riddled with the same impulses towards control that had informed it. In Ford’s playtext, those impulses surface even more strongly in the language of the drama’s female characters than in that of Orgilus. The play’s narrative consistently discredits any misogynist point of view: its women are among the most conspicuously virtuous in early modern drama. But they gain this designation precisely by declining any identification with those other women whom they define according to bluntly misogynist constructions of feminine identity. Penthea strenuously separates herself from any ‘thought / Of female change’ (2.3.55–6). The playtext’s other major female character, Princess Calantha, draws an explicit boundary between herself and those ‘mere women’ whose tears (like those of Hamlet’s mother) conceal their protean ability to survive the deaths of loved men (5.3.72). Coded by the same dread of female fickleness that disrupts the liberality of the play’s men, these women gain identity from their strict subjection to ideals of constancy and chastity. In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler argues that ‘a subject is not only formed in subordination, but that this subordination provides



immediately re-asserted authority over her identity. He painted a rhetorical portrait of his sister’s transformation:

the subject’s continuing condition of possibility’ (8); subjects such as Penthea and Calantha gain identity and social intelligibility from the constructions that shape their culture’s ideals of feminine virtue. Hence, ‘[p]ower that at first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity’ (3). This construction of the subject as ‘the effect of power in recoil’ (6) is borne out in Ford’s playtext, and particularly in the discourses of Penthea and Calantha. At one point in their encounter, Penthea praises virgin wives, such as abuse not wedlock By freedom of desires, but covet chiefly The pledges of chaste beds, for ties of love, Rather than ranging of their blood; and next ] [M]arried maids, such as prefer the number Of honourable issue in their virtues Before the flattery of delights by marriage. (3.5.52–8) As T.J.B. Spencer notes in his edition of the play, Penthea ‘seems to be contrasting “virgin-wives” (who chastely bear children to their husbands) and women who are married to virginity (and who prefer virtue to the delights of marriage)’ (3.5.56n). Both constructions are shaped by the imperative of controlling woman’s notoriously ‘frail’ nature and wide-ranging desire, placing her at the disposal of one man. But Penthea’s discourse is troubling: it insists on a feminine virtue so strict that it is actually difficult to express in the language of masculinist categories. The terms ‘virgin wives’ and ‘married maids’ are essentially paradoxes, but Penthea wants feminine identity to inhabit them. Her portrait of ‘married maids,’ in particular, suggests something of the disturbing nature of these paradoxes. These maids reject ‘the flattery of delights by marriage.’ By espousing a strict construction of female virtue, they produce ‘honourable issue,’ modeling their qualities to their society and reproducing them through imitation. Unnervingly, however, they do so in a manner that threatens to exclude men altogether. Like the woman who praises them, Penthea’s ‘married maids’ can be interpreted as products of the potentially self-contradictory—even self-destructive—discursive power that grounds feminine subjectivity in Ford’s Sparta. Representatives of a system ‘relentlessly marked by a figure of turning, a turning back upon oneself or even a turning on oneself’





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(Butler, Psychic Life 3), they nevertheless replicate masculinist power in a manner that tends to work against it.

In Michael Boyd’s Broken Heart, restrained and ritualistic performances helped to embody Ford’s self-policing subjects and their struggle to overcome the tensions buried within their society. Even the most openly coarse and flirtatious scene in the play, the encounter between Calantha’s ladies-in-waiting and the returning soldiers Lemophil and Groneas (1.2.106–48), was played as a stately court dance. Dancing, the ladies moved through the men’s vulgar remarks with their dignity and decorum intact. If this Sparta was riven from the first by acts of male power and undercurrents of misogyny, dance asserted the will of the characters to regulate themselves, to fit into received discourses of ideal virtue and of harmonious exchange between the genders. The metaphor of dance is used similarly in Ford’s playtext, for instance when Penthea’s brother Ithocles declares that ‘[m]orality applied / To timely practice keeps the soul in tune; / At whose sweet music all our actions dance’ (2.2.8–10). But Ithocles rejects the dance’s dream of order as ‘form of books and school-tradition’ which ‘physics not the sickness of a mind / Broken with griefs’ (2.2.11–13). In Boyd’s production, too, agony disrupted the dances. At his sister’s wedding, the embittered Orgilus sang an epithalamion that clashed against the music of her wedding dance to terrifying effect, suggesting that the song’s construction of an order where male and female desires could exist reciprocally did not really apply to Sparta. In this harsh world, one figure stood out for her commitment to the ideals and demands of the dance. This was Calantha, Princess of Sparta: in Boyd’s production as in Ford’s playtext perhaps the best placed of the characters to conduct a successful negotiation between the extremes of The Broken Heart’s gender debate. Calantha is both an obedient daughter like Ophelia and Lavinia, and a royal woman like the Duchess of Malfi and Queen Isabella, but she seems at first sight able to avoid the pitfalls that engulf them. For one thing, her father is willing to give her desires scope. King Amyclas echoes Orgilus’ professed views on the role of woman’s will in marriage choices, telling his daughter’s suitor Prince Nearchus that ‘we have ever vowed / Not to enforce affection by our will, / But by her own choice to confirm it gladly’ (3.3.10–12). When Calantha chooses the lower-ranked Ithocles, her father assents: ‘Still th’art my daughter, / Still growest upon my heart’ (4.3.81–2).



III. Disrupted dances


You shall not value, Sweet cousin, at a price what I count cheap, So cheap, that let him take it who dares stoop for ’t, And give it at next meeting to a mistress. She’ll thank him for ’t, perhaps. (4.1.25–9) When Ithocles, kneeling, gives the ring back to her, she responds, ‘This is pretty. / I am, belike, a mistress’ (4.1.32–3). The quip is masterful: Calantha manages simultaneously to speak herself into the position of Ithocles’ lover and to re-assert her power and control as princess. She remains the ‘mistress’ of Ithocles and of all the men who rank beneath her in the hierarchy of the Spartan court. Olivia Williams was very young when she played Calantha in Boyd’s production, and perhaps lacked the full range this complex role demands. Still, she translated some of Calantha’s skills into theatrical terms very effectively. Formal and self-contained, she seemed always to be stretching out a hand to be kissed or an arm for a dancing partner. She stood upright among men; often they knelt to her. Her voice was controlled, her tone genially mocking. It seemed that her personal qualities, as well as her position in the social structure, helped her to evade the problems inherent in Sparta’s codes of identity. But did her selfpossession speak a successful negotiation of the court’s pitfalls, or did it mask a more painful reality? In Boyd’s production, answers began to emerge at the point in the play’s second act when Calantha entered to present the newly returned general Ithocles with his sister, Penthea (Figure 6). Clad in stark white, Fielding’s Penthea looked disturbingly small and emaciated beside the tall, elegant Princess. Her austere, almost wizened appearance contrasted with the pathetically childlike quality of her face, as did what Greg Walker described as the ‘deep rasping groan’ of her voice (103). If Williams’ Calantha was a perfect flower of courtliness, Fielding’s Penthea seemed a compendium of contradictions precariously held together, very visibly the outsider Calantha suggested when she told Ithocles that his sister was a ‘stranger here in court, my lord’ (2.2.62). So far, the court had managed to negotiate the tensions beneath the surface of its 10.1057/9780230597488 - Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000, Roberta Barker


Calantha is not simply dependent on her father’s liberality. She is also accomplished at using the gestures and rhetoric of courtly relations to assert her own desires. The greatest example of her expertise occurs when she shows her preference for Ithocles by denying Nearchus the ring that he requests and instead throwing it to the young general:

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Figure 6 ‘A stranger here in court, my lord’: Calantha presents Penthea. Left to right: Olivia Williams (Calantha), Emma Fielding (Penthea), William Houston (Prophilus) in The Broken Heart, dir. Michael Boyd, Swan Theatre, 1994. Photo by Malcolm Davies, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

gender relations, but the arrival of this uncanny figure was to bring them explosively to the surface.

IV. Behold the handmaid Fielding had her work cut out for her, using the restrained style of Boyd’s production to perform a character whose attitude has been described by Sharon Hamilton as one of ‘almost catatonic passivity’ (175). Ford’s Penthea seems the epitome of a submissive wife. On her first appearance, her husband offers to deck her out in jewels and finery for her appearance at court. She refuses modestly: My attires Shall suit the inward fashion of my mind; From which, if your opinion, nobly placed, Change not the livery your words bestow, My fortunes with my hopes are at the highest. (2.1.98–103) 10.1057/9780230597488 - Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000, Roberta Barker



Penthea’s use of the word ‘livery’ echoes Angelo’s speech in Measure for Measure, when the deputy bids Isabella prove her womanhood by ‘putting on the destined livery’ (Measure 2.4.138). Unlike Shakespeare’s recalcitrant novice, Penthea seems willing to accede to this command. In a formula that clearly distances her position from Calantha’s, she assures her husband, ‘I am no mistress. / Whither you please, I must attend. All ways / Are alike pleasant to me’ (2.1.107–9). Her behaviour recalls Philip Stubbes’ 1591 postmortem celebration of his wife Katharine, who refused to go out without her husband and who, ‘If she saw her husband to be merry, then was she merry. [ ] She would never contrary him in any thing’ (Crystall Glasse sig.A3r ). Having become a victim of the marriage market, Penthea seems to have acceded completely to her husband’s dominion. ‘Seems,’ however, is the operative word. After all, Penthea’s deferential remarks come in response to her husband’s plea that she follow her own desires. He bids her Choose thine own recreations. Be a queen Of what delights thou fanciest best; what company, What place, what times. Do anything, do all things Youth can command; so thou wilt chase these clouds From the pure firmament of thy fair looks. (2.1.84–8) Penthea’s answer encapsulates the contradictions inherent in their relationship: ‘Alas, my lord, this language to your handmaid / Sounds as would music to the deaf’ (2.1.91–2). In words of exquisite conduct-book correctness that even evoke Mary’s ecce ancilla Domini (Luke 1:38), she constructs herself as her husband’s ‘handmaid.’ At the same time, she suggests how completely her ears and heart are closed to his bidding. ‘Rule me as thou canst wish,’ begs Bassanes (2.1.107); Penthea categorically refuses to rule. Her perfect (and, as her subsequent actions show, sincere) obedience is also an act of defiance. One can interpret the playtext in a manner that minimizes this defiance. Anne Barton, for instance, describes Ford’s heroine as ‘the magnanimous and loving Penthea’ (82) who refuses to ‘repay the insufferable Bassanes in kind, to encourage Orgilus’ passion in the garden, or to revenge herself on her brother’ (81). Her reading justly emphasizes Penthea’s extraordinary adherence to a very demanding code of conduct, but it applauds that adherence without noting the contradictions it highlights. Emma Fielding, whose performance suggested




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both Penthea’s irreproachable submission and the resistance inextricably bound up with it, offered a more complex interpretation. To be sure, as Elizabeth Schafer noted, Fielding’s Penthea was ‘a very, very angry young woman’ (131). But the actress stayed carefully within the bounds imposed by the production’s restrained style. In the first scene with Bassanes, she spoke with deadly composure and sat very still, her body expressing nothing but rigid self-control. She spoke with quiet disdain of ‘such, if any such there are, who covet / A curiosity of admiration / By laying out their plenty to full view’ (2.1.95–7). Her refusal to lay out her plenty to full view was in strict conformity with social demands on a modest wife. Before she entered the audience had heard Philip Voss’ Bassanes pant with possessive fear as he expounded the misogynist maxim, ‘No woman but can fall, and doth, or would’ (2.1.40): a reminder of the vision of femininity that helps to justify Chiron’s and Demetrius’ rape of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. It had seen him try to dispel that fear by blocking his wife off from the eyes of the world. The behaviour of Fielding’s Penthea seemed designed to calm his anguish. In fact, its effect was the opposite. Voss’ pathetically comic Bassanes, trumpet-voiced and garishly overdressed, was thrown into panic by Penthea’s inscrutability. He was a man who did lay out his plenty to full view: his whole identity had visibly come to revolve around his precarious possession of, and strenuous efforts to win over, his beautiful young wife. But Penthea’s perfect façade refused to allow him any access to her inner life; he was blocked off from exchange with her, and her submission folded him in the cloud of unknowing that gave rise to his brutal jealousy. Their interaction provided a frightening spectacle of a powerful discursive system undermining itself from within. As Boyd’s production progressed, spectators had repeated opportunities to trace Penthea’s strict performance of feminine submission and its paradoxically ruinous effects on male control. In Ford’s playtext, it is not only Bassanes who trembles before Penthea’s irreproachable purity. Orgilus, encountering his onetime beloved, cries to her, ‘I would possess my wife. The equity / Of very reason bids me’ (2.3.71–2). He argues that he and Penthea have been legally and bindingly betrothed and that her enforced marriage does not deserve to be respected. According to her erstwhile betrothed, ‘Penthea is the wife to Orgilus, / And ever shall be’ (2.3.96–7). Penthea answers him with a stricter understanding of ‘the laws of ceremonious wedlock’ (2.3.54): How, Orgilus, by promise I was thine, The heavens do witness. They can witness too




A rape done on my truth. How I do love thee Yet, Orgilus, and yet, must best appear In tendering thy freedom. [ ] [ ] In a word I’ll tell thee why. The virgin dowry which my birth bestowed Is ravished by another. My true love Abhors to think that Orgilus deserved No better favours than a second bed. (2.3.77–81, 98–102) As Barton remarks, Penthea’s sad career throws up contradictions knit into the structure of the early modern marriage market. In a system where betrothal and marriage ceremonies each constitute formal commitments, both of her contracts ‘are legally and emotionally binding. Each one contaminates and nullifies the other’ (80). Orgilus has the eternal—and legal—pledge of her heart, which Bassanes to his huge distress will never be able to usurp. But Bassanes has the legal—and eternal—possession of her body. By her own reckoning, Penthea is a glorified prostitute who belongs to everybody and nobody, but certainly not to herself. In Boyd’s Broken Heart, the cold rationality of Penthea’s argument was translated into a theatrical vocabulary at once restrained and brutal. When Fielding’s Penthea bid Glen’s desperate Orgilus ‘Lend your hand’ (2.3.64), their physical rapprochement, turning slowly around one another, recalled the production’s many formal dance scenes. For a moment, it seemed as if the old harmony between them might be restored. When Fielding took his hand, Glen gave a sharp sigh of physical longing and relief, audible even on the archive video of the production. She knelt with him as if to renew their binding vows. As soon as he kissed her hand, however, she sprang to her feet and put as much distance between them as she could. Twice over the course of the scene, as if in explanation of that flight, her hands flapped out from her sides in a despairing gesture towards herself. First they seemed to conjure the potential body that might have participated in her blighted love when she remembered ‘from what fortune I am fallen’ (2.3.88, emphasis and pause Fielding’s). Next, they motioned with corrosive self-disgust towards her actual body when she reminded Orgilus that her virginity was ‘ravished by another’ (2.3.100). Her physical being had become the site of her loathed and insoluble dilemma; possessed by Bassanes, it divided her from Orgilus forever. Their proximity was itself a violation




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of her strict purity, and it was with searing anger that Fielding cried, ‘Go from me!’ at the scene’s close (2.3.123). After Orgilus had gone, she sighed in agonized frustration, ‘Honour, / How much we fight with weakness to preserve thee!’ (2.3.130–1). Her cry was made more poignant by the fact that throughout the foregoing scene her ‘honour’ had never slipped for a moment. She was haunted by the possibility of a ‘weakness’ that she, the strict votaress of her society’s ideal of womanhood, was incapable of manifesting.

V. ‘A perfect mirror’ Perhaps the most painful thing about this scene in performance was the spectacle of Glen’s Orgilus crumpling under the force of Penthea’s rationale. As soon as Penthea recognized him, she reproached him with his failure to respect their society’s misogynist ideal of virtuous behaviour: I have not given admittance to one thought Of female change, since cruelty enforced Divorce betwixt my body and my heart. Why would you fall from goodness thus? (2.3.55–8, emphases mine) When he persisted in his attempts to touch her, she took her argument to its last degree and threatened to call his ‘former protestations lust’ (2.3.115). Fielding spat the last word with such viciousness that Glen sobbed openly. For the man who boasted of his ‘holy and chaste love’ (1.1.30), this was the worst possible imprecation. He cried, ‘I would possess my wife’ in terrible desperation, and to her cold ‘Is that all?’ responded: ‘Why, ‘tis the all of me myself’ (2.3.72–3). Rowland Wymer argues that Penthea’s fidelity to her contradictory vows helps to give her a ‘sense of personal identity’ (Webster and Ford 119); Orgilus’ words suggested, conversely, that the loss of the object of his vows deprived him of such a sense. Faced with Penthea’s strict self-definition, which left no space for the restoration of his lost ‘me myself,’ Orgilus discovered that he had no identity left. Well might Penthea sigh as he groped his way offstage: ‘Alas, poor gentleman, / ’A looked not like the ruins of his youth, / But like the ruins of those ruins’ (2.3.128–30). Sharon Hamilton suggests that ‘Penthea’s tragedy—or rather her interpretation of her tragedy—precipitates all the others in the play’ (179), which sounds a little like blaming Penthea for the catastrophe instead




of examining the ideological structures that determine ‘her interpretation.’ Still, Penthea’s conformity does reveal the inexorable reality of those structures to the men who love her. In her scene with Calantha, Penthea describes herself as ‘a perfect mirror’ (3.5.27); she functions as such, not only for the Princess, but also for the play’s men. She presents them with a perfect image of the subject constructed by the discourses to which Sparta subscribes: a subject whose ferociously self-regulatory will can finally only be directed towards self-destruction. Both Bassanes and Orgilus respond with horror because they are staring, not only at the broken heart of the woman they love, but also at the void of their own selves. Penthea’s brother Ithocles, whose act of control in forcing his sister’s marriage begins the tragedy, is fittingly the third man forced to gaze into this ‘perfect mirror.’ By the time we see him with Penthea in Ford’s playtext, the successful young soldier has fallen in love with the unattainable Princess Calantha. This bitter experience forces him to grapple with his class-based lack of power over his own destiny and with his sister’s suffering, which he now sees as reflexive of his own. He refers to his existence as ‘this chaos of my bondage’ (3.2.91), a phrase that speaks both his loss of a clear, stable sense of self and his entrapment within a form of ‘thraldom’ like Penthea’s slavery within marriage. Begging his sister to heal the breach between them, he insists that her forgiveness will somehow free him from the self that wronged her. ‘I consume / In languishing affections for that trespass, / Yet cannot die,’ he tells her (3.2.52–4); ‘And till thou wilt forgive, I must endure’ (3.2.92). The man who once claimed so much ‘insulting’ power over his sister’s identity now confesses her power over him. As Dorothy M. Farr writes, Ithocles is ‘a man on the deathbed of his old self, without a new self to put in its place’ (85). Penthea refuses to offer him one. As in her scenes with Bassanes and Orgilus, she insists on her continuing subjection to male authority in a manner that denies any male effort at exchange. She will not release her brother even into death. To his contention that his heart is ‘now a-breaking’ (3.2.46), she responds,

Not yet, heaven, I do beseech thee. First let some wild fires Scorch, not consume it. May the heat be cherished With desires infinite, but hopes impossible. (3.2.46–9)




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‘Wronged soul, thy prayers are heard,’ mutters Ithocles (3.2.50). Penthea has done for her brother what she did for her beloved, applying her own ruthless logic to their dilemma until its insolubility is plain. In Boyd’s production, Ithocles tried to cajole his sister into a brighter view of her situation and was met with tightly controlled rage. In a voice dripping with hatred and self-loathing, Fielding’s Penthea described herself as ‘such an one / As only you have made me: a faith-breaker, / A spotted whore’ (3.2.68–70). She greeted Ithocles’ horrified reaction with a sharp insistence on his culpability: ‘Forgive me, I am one / In act, not in desires, the gods must witness’ (3.2.70–1). She went on to explain with the condescending, step-by-step clarity of a schoolmistress dealing with a maddeningly dull pupil that ‘she that’s wife to Orgilus and lives / In known adultery with Bassanes, / Is at the best a whore’ (3.2.72–5). Bowman’s Ithocles, described by Greg Walker as ‘a slow-witted, harmless man’ (103), was jarred into the muttered realization, ‘After my victories abroad, at home / I meet despair’ (3.2.80–1). Penthea had forced him to see how his act of gender inscription had fixed them in ‘a situation from which no repentance, no courage, no goodwill [could] extricate them’ (Waith 164). In Ford’s playtext, Ithocles strives to form a new self beyond his fatal error. The relationship through which he attempts to do so is almost unimaginable under the class and gender hierarchies of the play. If the young general initially appears like Webster’s Ferdinand, he now takes on the role of Antonio, pining for a match with a woman more socially powerful than he. Like his interview with his embittered sister, the young general’s love for Princess Calantha tries to rewrite his identity in terms of exchange with woman’s will rather than in terms of male domination. And indeed, Ithocles’ eventual confession of this love seems to bring Penthea to the point of forgiving him and of trying to help him in his project of self-refashioning:

We are reconciled. Alas, sir, being children, but two branches Of one stock, ‘tis not fit we should divide. Have comfort. You may find it. [ ] [ ] If sorrows Have not too much dulled my infected brain, I’ll cheer invention for an active strain. (3.2.111–14, 115–17)




Is this Penthea, she of the ‘catatonic passivity,’ talking of active strains? Has Ithocles turned the mirror around, so that instead of Penthea’s showing him their mutual bondage he will be able to show her the possibility of a new self? In Boyd’s production even this moment of apparent hope was caught in the gridlock of Penthea’s identification with masculinist codes. When Bowman’s unheroic Ithocles stammered out Calantha’s name in response to Penthea’s insistent demands, it seemed not that he was breaking new ground but that he was losing the last inch of power over himself. On hearing his secret, Fielding produced from her thin little girl’s chest the cackle of a fairy-tale evil queen. She forced her brother to see her situation as a reflection of his impending tragedy: ‘Suppose you were contracted to her, would it not / Split even your very soul to see her father / Snatch her out of your arms against her will[?]’ (3.2.106–8). Then she pronounced Penthea’s apparent about-face—‘We are reconciled’ (3.2.111)—in a tone of such satisfied venom that it was impossible to see the moment as one of genuine reconciliation. Ithocles’ original assertion of authority was still so much at the core of his sister’s construction of her world that she could only further its ongoing, tragic consequences.

VI. ‘The stage of my mortality’ As Boyd’s Broken Heart moved towards its conclusion, its sense was increasingly that of a set of characters imprisoned within a system of discourse over which they had little or no control. The first sign that this system would prove fatal came when Fielding’s Penthea, hitherto so rigidly controlled, suddenly lost her reason. In Ford’s playtext Orgilus describes his beloved’s descent into madness in an ambiguous formulation, telling Bassanes that Penthea is ‘left a prey to words’ (4.2.44). Many critics have had difficulty with Orgilus’ description: Spencer comments that ‘the phrase is strained’ (4.2.44n), while J.C. Maxwell proposes emending ‘words’ to ‘madness’ to clarify the sense (309). Another (anonymous) critic praises it for a ‘queer, simple, and expressive phrase, which suggests that Ford’s heroines are better wordless; for them, to speak is to be mad’ (‘John Ford’). In Boyd’s Broken Heart, it was possible to read even further into Orgilus’ gnomic pronouncement. There, the ‘words’ that preyed on the mad Penthea were the words that constructed her paradoxical identity as a ‘married maid.’ Her madness and death exemplified the complex relationship between masculinist discourse and the woman who asserted herself through it even as she succumbed to its demands. 10.1057/9780230597488 - Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000, Roberta Barker



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When Fielding’s Penthea lost her reason, it seemed at first that her madness had in some sense expelled her from her carefully constructed world of silence and restraint into a realm of uncontrollable speech and action. Her hair, until this point scraped severely back, now straggled down about her face; her high collar was unbuttoned; her pristine white dress was soiled. Abandoning her slow, measured movements, she entered her mad scene at a run. Her first act was to fling her arms around Orgilus, snatching the passionate embrace they had been denied since her appearance as a ghostly bride at the beginning of the production. It seemed that the audience was at last about to see the real Penthea, the uninhibited inner self they had hitherto sought in vain behind the mask of her exquisite propriety. What they saw, among other things, was a reflection of Hamlet’s mad Ophelia. A number of critics have compared Penthea with Ophelia, some to Penthea’s detriment, as when Kate Bassett’s review of Boyd’s production tartly asserted that Emma Fielding ‘loses it in the mad scene, as the play turns into Hamlet Rehashed’ (The Times, 24 September 1994). The stage direction that describes Penthea’s entrance in the first quarto of The Broken Heart, ‘Enter Penthea her hair about her ears’ (4.2.57.sd), is in the conventional tradition of the one that introduces the mad Ophelia in Q1 Hamlet: ‘Enter Ofelia playing on a Lute, and her haire downe singing’ (Sig.G4v ). Davril remarks that the two characters share ‘the same gentleness and patience, the same resignation in front of calamity, the same poetic madness and pathetic death’ (123). Is Penthea’s madness, then, simply Ophelia’s distraction reduced to its simplest form? Does she become a mere spectacle of poignant feminine victimization and uncontrollable feminine sexuality? In fact, the congruity between Ophelia and Penthea is more complex. In both cases, the madwoman is a figure who speaks—and is spoken by—masculinist constructions of female passivity and guilt. Ophelia’s second song describes the experience of a too-trusting maiden whose lover, having bedded her, refuses to marry her; it concludes that ‘Young men will do’t if they come to’t – / By Cock, they are to blame’ (Hamlet 4.5.61–2). Penthea cries out to Ithocles,

Truly, brother, My father would have picked me out a husband, And then my little ones had been no bastards. But ’tis too late for me to marry now. I am past child-bearing. ’Tis not my fault. (4.2.90–4) 10.1057/9780230597488 - Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000, Roberta Barker



This speech is haunted by Penthea’s stifled longing for Orgilus, and to that extent lets us into what we might consider the inner sanctum of her self. But it also reveals how deeply that inner sanctum is determined by the same constructions that have governed her behaviour all along: the sense of her own helpless submission to her brother combined with the self-condemnation attendant on her conviction that her marriage to Bassanes is adulterous. Like Ophelia, she speaks herself as a fundamentally passive creature destroyed by male power: ‘’Tis not my fault,’ for ‘they are to blame.’ In performance, this seemingly straightforward transference of agency to men can be complicated by gestural language. Just as Frances Barber’s Ophelia beat her own breast while claiming that men were to blame for women’s fall, Fielding’s Penthea cried ‘’Tis not my fault’ with the agony of a woman trying to convince herself and her hearers of something she could not believe. When she embraced Orgilus and then broke away from him racked with sobbing, the audience was not watching some liberated inner self. Fielding’s performance reminded the politically engaged spectator that Penthea, like Ophelia, is trapped in a double bind. She is unable to speak except in terms which depict her as helpless to prevent, but responsible for, her own downfall. Even the physical cause of Penthea’s insanity underlines this conclusion. When Ithocles asks her ladies about the source of her ravings, they admit that she has not slept for ten days, adding, ‘We cannot any way pray her to eat’ (4.2.137). Penthea has chosen to die slowly from selfstarvation, causing the extreme physical and mental debility of her mad scene. A contemporary auditor may easily process this information in a limited manner. The reception history of Boyd’s Broken Heart suggests how difficult it has become for us to understand Penthea’s refusal to take nourishment without instant reference to the eating disorder we know as anorexia nervosa. Reviews of Boyd’s production continually return to this theme. Roger Foss describes ‘the virginal Penthea’s slide from despair to anorexic anguish’ (What’s On, 14 June 1995). Nicholas de Jongh speaks of ‘Emma Fielding’s magnificent, anorexic Penthea’ (Evening Standard, 7 June 1995). Clive Hirschorn explicitly links eating disorder to social helplessness, depicting Fielding’s Penthea as a ‘sacrificial virgin [ ] carried off by a seventeenth-century version of anorexia nervosa’ (Sunday Express, 18 June 1995). In the scholarly literature, even so historically astute a critic as Anne Barton engages these assumptions when she writes that Penthea ‘gives way to the anorexic’s “terrified passion for purity” ’ (80). Such formulations are dangerously anachronistic. They limit the meaning of women’s fasting in early modern drama




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to the meanings associated with anorexia in our own time, most particularly to the belief that women starve themselves because of ‘fear and disgust at the appetites’ (MacSween 193). Penthea’s references to her pitiless fasting certainly relate it to disgust with her own sexuality. In a chilling passage she speaks of herself in the third person, reasoning that since her blood was seasoned by the forfeit Of noble shame, with mixtures of pollution, Her blood – ’tis just – be henceforth never heightened With taste of sustenance. Starve. (4.2.149–52) Her words engage with the conviction, expressed in a number of early modern conduct manuals, that fasting will help to tame potentially excessive feminine sexuality. In The Instruction of a Christian Woman (1523), Juan Luis Vives enjoins ‘moche fasting , whiche doth nat feeble the bodye, but brydell it, and presse it downe, and quenche the heate of youthe’ (sig. F2v ), and Bartholemew Batty suggests in The Christian Man’s Closet (1581) that a virtuous young girl ‘so eat as that she may be always an hungered’ (76). But Penthea’s clinical use of the third person, as if she were the conduct book writer and her dying body merely the object of her rhetoric, suggests that her self-starvation might involve a more complex cultural process than that sketched in the manuals. In John Ford’s Political Theatre, Lisa Hopkins links Ford’s imagery with the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church that was so embattled in the England of his day (76). Her argument suggestively draws Penthea into a sphere of religious signification that has productive implications for our interpretation of her fasting. Caroline Walker Bynum’s seminal work on medieval women’s relationship to food, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, argues that female fasting in pre-reformation Europe often functioned, not only as an act of accession to masculine demands on female behaviour, but also as an assertion of feminine control. Medieval holy women, she concludes, ‘manipulated far more than their own bodies by fasting. They manipulated their families, their religious superiors, and God Himself’ (207). Self-starvation was both an accession to cultural demands and a statement of woman’s control over herself and over those around her. If, as writers such as Eamon Duffy and Alison Shell have suggested, Catholic practice haunted Reformation England in complex ways, then Penthea’s self-starvation might plausibly be read in terms of this frightening form of social dialogue.




Nancy Gutierrez argues that Penthea ‘appears to deliberately choose her fate, thus suggesting that female food refusal [ ] is overtly exemplified as a transgressive undertaking’ (Shall She 53). Fielding’s performance in Boyd’s Broken Heart went further, depicting Penthea’s actions as both transgressive and strictly normative. Her portrayal of Penthea supported Donnalee Frega’s argument that woman’s self-starvation can be ‘a powerful and erotic (if dangerous) form of discourse’ (4), as well as Elisabeth Bronfen’s belief that dying may function as ‘women’s one effective communicative act, in a cultural or kinship situation otherwise disinclined towards feminine authorship’ (141). As reviewer Elizabeth Schafer remarked, Fielding presented Penthea’s fasting ‘as a gesture of anger and aggression’ (131). Although her weeping and the flailing fists with which she intermittently beat at her own body suggested the destructive extent of her self-condemnation, the overriding note of her performance in the mad scene was rage turned outwards against the men around her. She spat the words, ‘I loved you once’ (4.2.108) malevolently at Orgilus; she forced her grief-stricken brother to join her in a jagged parody of the stately dancing beloved of the Spartan court. Her fasting and madness did not allow her any liberation from the self into which she was locked—but they did provide her with a form of discourse through which she could make the men around her understand their collaboration in her tragedy. At one of the most charged moments in Ford’s playtext, Penthea ‘points at Ithocles’ (4.2.116.sd) and speaks for Orgilus’ benefit: But that is he – And yet he paid for ’t home. Alas, his heart Is crept into the cabinet of the princess. We shall have points and bridal laces. Remember When we last gathered roses in the garden I found my wits, but truly you lost yours. That’s he, and still ’tis he. (4.2.116–22) At this moment in Boyd’s production, Fielding’s gesture towards Ithocles was implacable. All along she had insisted, not only on her own fateful place in Sparta’s ideological structure, but also on the entrapment of the men around her. Her final indictment of her brother determined the destinies of those men, ensuring that Ithocles’ fate would be sealed by his oppression of her and that Orgilus would affirm his identity as wronged lover by taking up the role of avenger. ‘She has tutored




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me,’ Glen’s Orgilus responded wonderingly; ‘Some powerful inspiration checks my laziness’ (4.2.124–5). He would carry out her commands, trapping and murdering Ithocles at the very moment of the latter’s engagement to Calantha and paying for his deed with his own life. Clearly, Penthea’s madness reflected not only woman’s loss of agency, but also her powerfully self-willed reproduction of ‘male’ power.

VII. The dance of death Even faced with that reproduction, some around Penthea in Ford’s playtext continue to resist the titanic force of her conservative imagination. Foremost among these, as one might have predicted from her earlier negotiation of courtly power structures, is Princess Calantha. The pivotal encounter between the two women during which Penthea constructs her chilling image of herself as a player on the stage of her own mortality is dominated by Penthea’s ‘will,’ a spoken testament through which Penthea insists upon her demanding construction of feminine virtue. Calantha responds with somewhat back-handed compliments, reducing the will to ‘harmless sport / Of mere imagination’ (3.5.66–7). She refuses to assent to Penthea’s dictums on the bleakness of existence. Instead, she answers crisply, ‘Contemn not your condition for the proof / Of bare opinion only’ (3.5.24–5). If another woman can stand so firmly apart from some of the most governing assumptions of Spartan society, dismissing them as ‘bare opinion,’ is Penthea’s only an isolated tragedy? Calantha is sharply critical when Penthea reveals her desire to shape the princess’ identity by ‘bequeath[ing her] in holiest rites of love / Mine only brother Ithocles’ (3.5.77–8), responding, ‘What new change / Appears in my behaviour, that thou darest / Tempt my displeasure?’ (3.5.93–5). Unlike Penthea, Calantha has consistently refused to relinquish power over herself; now she refuses to relinquish it even to another woman. In Boyd’s Broken Heart, however, Calantha’s self-command did not finally allow her to escape Penthea’s will. Olivia Williams’ Calantha sat in regal splendour throughout this scene. Her voice hardened from noble kindliness to cold rebuke when she realized Penthea’s matchmaking intentions, and her last words, ‘Lady, / Your check lies in my silence’ (3.5.107–8), were a curt dismissal which offered no glimmer of encouragement to Penthea or to Ithocles. Yet Fielding’s Penthea— lit very brightly in this dim scene and more uncanny than ever— left Calantha’s presence on a note of triumph, murmuring, ‘My reckonings are made even’ (3.5.111). Calantha had finally responded to




Penthea’s insistence on her own impending death, not only with tears, but also with an unmistakably misogynist construction of those tears: ‘Now, beshrew thy sadness. / Thou turnest me too much woman’ (3.5.42–3). Compassion, uncontrollable emotion, tears—and the sense that these qualities are ‘womanly’ and unacceptable: these were the chinks in Calantha’s royal armour through which Penthea slipped the name of Ithocles. In the process, though she failed directly to undermine the princess’ insistent self-determination, she succeeded in nudging Calantha towards the dangerous position of the chaste Spartan wife. As Orgilus takes on his role of revenger and traps Ithocles forever in the image of cruel and oppressive brother, Ford’s Calantha, now Ithocles’ betrothed, finds herself in a position that stretches her self-construction to the breaking point. As announcements of her father’s, her friend Penthea’s and finally her lover’s deaths are made to her, she dances on among the revelers at Euphrania’s wedding in a determined re-assertion of all the principles of order and harmony that the dance implies. Her actions seem to speak her final triumph over derogatory images of feminine identity; Charles Lamb certainly thought so, swooning at her ‘holy violence against her nature’ (203). The same admiring response to Calantha emerges from within the playtext: ‘She has a masculine spirit,’ affirms Bassanes (5.2.95). Calantha herself associates her fortitude with masculinity rather than femininity: ‘Be such mere women, who with shrieks and outcries / Can vow a present end to all their sorrows, / Yet live to vow new pleasures and outlive them’ (5.3.72–4). However, Calantha’s is not a clear-cut appropriation of masculine identity. She also reinscribes her feminine position, insisting on the necessity of her marriage in a nation which ‘cannot brook / A feminate authority’ (5.3.11–12) and then ‘new-marry[ing] him whose wife I am,’ the dead Ithocles (5.3.66). Once again, the contradictions in the Spartan construction of feminine virtue surface in a manner that proves fatal. Ford’s Calantha is a brilliant self-fashioner to the last. She stages herself in a spectacular ceremony, simultaneously coronation, marriage and funeral, that speaks not only her own royal identity but also the identities of the men and women who surround her. In the process, however, she inscribes both her own death and the death of the tenuous ‘feminate authority’ she has achieved. She parcels out her kingdom to a handful of men; Ithocles-like, she consigns her two waiting-women, one to marriage, the other to the permanent virginity of ‘Vesta’s temple’ (5.3.53), without consulting them. At the last, Calantha affirms the destructive gender norms of the play’s beginning. Like Penthea, she




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imagines men as active rulers and women as passive brides or maidens. Refusing to position herself among changeable ‘mere women,’ but all the while speaking her feminine need for a husband ‘whose abilities / Can better guide this kingdom’ (5.3.14–15), she finally constructs herself as one of the ‘virgin wives’ so praised by Penthea. She avoids misogynist constructions of feminine vice through strict faithfulness to oppressive and contradictory constructions of feminine virtue. Like Penthea, Calantha seals this identity with her own death. ‘This is a testament,’ protests Bassanes as he hears Calantha’s final words; ‘It sounds not like conditions on a marriage’ (5.3.53–4). In the end, Calantha’s ‘will’ is like Penthea’s: not the will to negotiate with the realities of the Spartan court, but the last will that locks those realities into place. Boyd’s staging of The Broken Heart made this point with bleak clarity. Olivia Williams’ Calantha entered the final scene dressed in gorgeously embroidered white. A fairy-tale Princess Bride, she knelt before a whitecovered altar and then rose with magnificent composure to deliver her ‘testament.’ In a moment, however, she drew aside the white cloth to reveal that the altar of her coronation was actually the coffin of Ithocles. Opening it, she bent over his corpse in a paroxysm of barely-controlled grief: ‘Now I turn to thee, thou shadow / Of my contracted lord. [ ] / Death shall not separate us’ (5.3.62–3, 67). The coup-de-théâtre economically suggested the reality that underlay Calantha’s performance of power: beneath the royal trappings was the coffin that symbolized the virgin Princess’ dwindling into wifedom and death. After taking ‘[o]ne kiss on these cold lips, my last’ (5.3.77), Williams walked centre stage to perform her last ceremony. ‘Crack, crack,’ she cried to her heart (5.3.78)—and immediately it did. For many, this was the most haunting moment in Boyd’s haunting production. Peter Holland responded to its depiction of ‘Calantha’s absolute authority over her body with its instantaneous obedient response,’ describing Williams’ delivery of the cry, ‘Crack, crack’ as ‘one of the most extraordinary and appalling sounds I have ever heard in the theatre’ (TLS, 28 October 1994). Again, this powerful image embodied the multiple contradictions in the Spartan lady’s identity. Calantha’s commanding voice contrasted with its self-destructive command. Her glittering wedding-coronation gown jarred with the self-abnegation of her final gesture as she flung out her arms as if upon a crucifix of the mind. In this mise-en-scène, power to fashion the self was power to accede to a construction of feminine virtue that, for Calantha as for Penthea, could be perfected only in death.





In a 1998 issue of New Theatre Quarterly, two feminist performance scholars debate the question of women’s bodies in theatre and their relationship to limiting cultural constructions of feminine identity. Anna Cutler mourns the fact that ‘traditional representations of the female form on stage embody centuries of censorship, oppression, and construction,’ producing ‘a female body so thoroughly inscribed that dominant readings of Woman are impossible to avoid in performance’ (113). In response, Susan Melrose argues forcefully that ‘discourse is an institution, to be sure, but it is [ ] in us as well as out there’ (120). She insists that men as well as women are victims of a system in which subjects assimilate, produce and reproduce the very discourses that oppress them. Masculinity, like femininity, is ‘a masquerade, amongst others, that each of us [ ] can choose, or not, to rehearse’ (124). The argument raises the issue that dominates this study. Do performances of texts produced by masculinist societies merely reproduce masculinist constructions of gender? Can they help us to understand the mechanisms ‘in us as well as out there’ that keep those constructions in place? And if so, can they help us to ‘choose, or not, to rehearse’ the masquerade of gender? Ford’s Broken Heart is an ideal playtext through which to explore such questions. Reviewing Boyd’s production in the Financial Times, David Murray noted with surprise that ‘The Broken Heart is actually a minor national treasure’ (7 June 1995). But what meanings, what social value, can this most unremittingly dark of early modern tragedies hold for spectators today? One might argue that Ford’s Broken Heart is implicated in the same acts of reinscription it so frighteningly depicts. It opens, after all, with a Prologue that constructs the play in opposition to the ‘jests, fit for a brothel’ which incite ‘vulgar admiration’ (Prologue.6–7). The Prologue remarks that Such low songs, Tuned to unchaste ears, suit not modest tongues. The virgin sisters then deserved fresh bays When innocence and sweetness crowned their lays. (Prologue.7–10) Such terms imagine an ideally decorous play not far removed from the ideally decorous wife of Penthea’s speeches to the jealous Bassanes. At the other end of the playtext stands the death-song of Calantha,



VIII. ‘Without distinction’: Dreaming the impossible dream

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with its conclusion that ‘Love only reigns in death; though art / Can find no comfort for a broken heart’ (5.3.93–4). Here, Ford seems to construct as inevitable the fact that ‘love’ and harmony between the genders are only achievable in death. A glance back at the Prologue from this vantage point may leave readers with the uneasy feeling that The Broken Heart is all about the demand that art, like women, behave with decorous restraint in the face of a situation it is powerless to change. However, the fate of Ford’s Broken Heart in Michael Boyd’s production shows that this text can also work as an impassioned protest against oppressive gender systems. Boyd cut both the Prologue and the play’s final song; he began with the image of Orgilus’ and Penthea’s ghostly nuptials, and ended with Calantha’s terrifying death-cry and collapse. His production made it difficult for a politically engaged spectator to applaud the decorum and aplomb with which these Spartans lived up to—and died of—the demands of their society. Fielding’s Penthea, manipulated and manipulative, corrosively angry at her situation but determined to confirm rather than to change it, exemplified the effect. As the production’s most avowedly feminist reviewer, Elizabeth Schafer, remarked, ‘the decision to play Penthea this way was brave; it did not play for easy sympathy from the audience’ (131). The revolutionary potential of Boyd’s production lay in its insistence that the heroic virtue of Ford’s married maids was reactionary as well as admirable. By staging the deathly motions of a set of identities struggling with, but unable to separate themselves from, the social roles assigned to them, it asked spectators to look again at the identities into which they were locked. Faced with Calantha’s extraordinary, ‘masculine’ restraint at the end of Ford’s Broken Heart, Bassanes asks, ‘And wherefore should I pule, and, like a girl, / Put finger in the eye? Let’s be all toughness, / Without distinction betwixt sex and sex’ (5.2.96–8). It is typical of Spartan misogyny that Bassanes’ dream of a world without gender distinctions should reject girlishness and call for a reversion of both genders to those ‘tough’ characteristics associated with masculinity. But the very presence of the phrase, ‘Without distinction betwixt sex and sex,’ seems significant in a playtext that teeters between the reinscription and the critique of oppressive gender norms. Like Penthea and Calantha, the text is haunted by the possibility of a freedom it can scarcely articulate. Appropriately, then, the idea of the brides Penthea and Calantha might have been haunted the margins of Boyd’s Broken Heart while bodies hopelessly inscribed by a brutally conflicted construction of femininity took centre






stage. By faithfully representing the married maiden’s deadly constancy, Boyd’s production engendered spectatorial resistance to her tragically narrow construction of gender identity. Through the ruined bodies of its characters, it pleaded for an end to binary distinctions betwixt sex and sex.


Tricked Like a Bride: A New Traffic in A Woman Killed with Kindness

I. Blood wedding: Representing power A servant lies dead before the weeping young aristocrat who has stabbed him in a quarrel of honour with another gentleman. A young woman whose plain black dress contrasts with her bridal white veil and floral wreath lies spread-eagled between her brother and his arch-enemy as the former offers her to the latter. An adulterous wife discovered in flagrante delicto by her husband collapses before him and his faithful retainer in a crumpled heap. These moments of abjection were among the most powerful in Katie Mitchell’s 1991 staging of Thomas Heywood’s domestic tragedy A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) for the RSC at their smallest and most experimental Stratford theatre, The Other Place. Taken together, they formed a kind of visual leitmotif: a haunting, recurring image of vulnerability that seemed to speak in broad terms of gender and class domination. In each scene, the prone body on the floor affirmed its subjection to the power of the man who stood over it. But that power was scarcely unchallenged. Looking down at the servant he had killed, Sir Charles Mountford (Jonathan Cullen) seemed pathetically young, small and grief-stricken in his voluminous overcoat. The servant had died as a mere piece of property, a stand-in for his master, Sir Francis Acton (Valentine Pelka); but, having murdered him, Sir Charles found himself on the verge of losing everything that made him Sir Francis’ equal. When, later, he offered his sister Susan (Sylvestra le Touzel) to Sir Francis, Sir Charles seemed to be asserting his ownership over the last piece of his property. But here again he was, in a sense, the weakest figure on the stage, utterly dependent both on Susan’s acquiescence and on Sir Francis’ reaction. Male power 163



6

was similarly undercut in Mitchell’s staging of the climactic scene of A Woman Killed with Kindness’ main plot. Exposing his wife’s adultery, John Frankford (Michael Maloney) seemed to wield absolute control over her fate. However, his own shaking frame and desperate efforts to decide on a course of action reminded spectators that Anne’s (Saskia Reeves’) liaison with his best friend Wendoll (Barry Lynch) had implicitly undermined her husband’s authority over her. In each of these linked scenes, then, the figure on the floor was an ambiguous one, charged with power in its hour of most absolute vulnerability. Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness differs from the other playtexts discussed in this study in that it is set, not in an aristocratic milieu, but in an ordinary, plain-spoken Yorkshire community as different as possible from Shakespeare’s, Webster’s and Marlowe’s corrupt courts or from the stoical Sparta of Ford’s Broken Heart. In this chapter, I argue not only that A Woman Killed with Kindness repays consideration alongside more aristocratic early modern tragedies, but that it offers contemporary artists and audiences the opportunity to encounter one of the early modern English literature’s most complex visions of the relationship between individual agency and social determination. The period covered by this study has seen an upsurge of interest in the gender and class politics of domestic tragedy. Heywood’s playtext was long seen as a dramatized sermon whose cardboard characterizations served a straightforward moral tale. New readings of A Woman Killed with Kindness have privileged the complicated roles played by Anne and Susan, Frankford and Sir Charles, in an order uneasily dependent on the traffic in women. Heywood’s women in particular bear many similarities to those later created by Ford in The Broken Heart: heavily coded by their society’s normative constructions of feminine virtue, they constantly threaten to disrupt those constructions. Like those of Penthea and Calantha, the bodies of Anne and Susan become stages on which masculinist order is inscribed. But like those of Penthea and Calantha, the careers of Anne and Susan can be interpreted in ways that figure masculinism’s instabilities. Such a reading of Heywood’s playtext relates productively to Katie Mitchell’s production and its contradictory images of class and gender oppression. The 27-year-old Mitchell faced a daunting challenge when she chose to stage A Woman Killed with Kindness for the RSC and thus to grapple with its deeply foreign gender politics. Like Boyd’s Broken Heart, her production eschewed representations of feminine resistance, instead exploring the process of women’s and men’s subjection by social norms. Even more than Boyd’s production, it found representational




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strategies to trace the cracks in those norms. Using a style both more and less naturalistic than any I have so far discussed, it played out the cruel interdependence of male and female identities in a struggle waged at the expense of everyone involved. Despite its bleak ending and its characters’ apparent acquiescence in their society’s implacable dictates, Mitchell’s production challenged its audience to action that might change contemporary gender relations for the better.

II. The barren subject and the production of ambiguity ‘Look for no glorious state,’ declares the Prologue to Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness: ‘our muse is bent / Upon a barren subject, a bare scene.’1 Firmly anchored in the everyday reality of an imagined group of early modern Yorkshire gentlefolk and their servants, Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness begins with a marriage and ends with a deathbed. As Kathleen McLuskie remarks, a ‘use of detail which is both realistic and symbolic is evident at all the key moments of the action’ (Dekker and Heywood 91). She demonstrates the play’s realism by citing stage directions like ‘Enter FRANKFORD as it were brushing the crumbs from his clothes with a napkin, and newly risen from supper’ (8.22.sd). Like the Prologue’s determined emphasis on the mundane, the evocative detail noted by McLuskie seems designed to break down the divisions between Heywood’s dramatic world and the everyday lives of his spectators. Playtexts like A Woman Killed with Kindness have long been read in terms of their address to the rising early modern English middle classes (Adams 184; Wright, Middle-Class Culture 638). In the book that for many years remained the dominant study of the genre, Henry Hitch Adams described such ‘domestic, or homiletic’ tragedies as ‘the dramatic equivalent of the homiletic tract and the broadside ballad’ expressly designed ‘to teach the people by means of examples couched in terms of their own experience’ (185). A Woman Killed with Kindness, then, would seem to come down to us as a record of a comparatively straightforward early modern social transaction in which dominant values were reinscribed through the spectators’ identification with the world they saw represented on stage. Such dramatic strategies aim to preclude the kind of distance that might have allowed the early modern spectator of The Broken Heart critically to evaluate the codes of virtue that dominate Ford’s ossified Sparta. For a contemporary reader or spectator, on the other hand, the homiletic aspect of A Woman Killed with Kindness can clash with its emphasis



A New Traffic in A Woman Killed with Kindness


O women, women, you that have kept Your holy matrimonial vow unstained, Make me your instance: when you tread awry, Your sins like mine will on your conscience lie. (13.142–5) Here, the contemporary interpreter can scarcely help but see Anne less as a ‘character,’ an individual with a coherent inner life and moral agency, than as an allegorical personification of sin, an incitement against feminine transgression of the social order. If contemporary spectators feel uncomfortable with the social ideals she emblematizes, they may find themselves unable to identify with her or to view her as realistic figure. Thus, Adams complains that her characterization ‘is, at no point, completely convincing’ (157). Rather, she seems one of those early modern stage figures of whom Alan Sinfield remarks, ‘a character is not a character when he or she is needed to shore up a patriarchal expectation’ (Faultlines 54). Responding to such feelings of discomfort, many recent critics have successfully sought out moments in which A Woman Killed with Kindness seems to complicate or undermine, rather than to reiterate, dominant masculinist constructions of marriage, gender and power. Some, including Nancy Gutierrez and Jennifer Panek, have foregrounded the aspects of early modern legal and religious discourse that might have undermined the early modern spectator’s identification with masculine power in the playtext. Others, such as McLuskie and Diana E. Henderson, have read Heywood as a representative of Christian humanism, negotiating between absolute morality on the one hand, and a compassionate understanding of both sinner and saint on the other. Viviana Comensoli steers between these interpretative options when she argues that although in general A Woman Killed with Kindness ‘adheres to dominant ideologies,’ it only ‘ambivalently legitimizes the institutions of marriage, civility, and private life, the action’s structures alerting the spectator to the contradictions that render those institutions vulnerable’ (69). Comensoli’s statement might apply to any of the plays I have discussed so far. Like them, A Woman Killed with Kindness is open both to interpretations that affirm masculinist cultural norms



on identification. An instance of such a clash occurs at its climax when Anne Frankford, having been taken in adultery by her husband, is left alone on stage. After some lines of anguished self-recrimination she turns to a specific contingent in the theatrical audience:

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and to interpretations that contest them. Which of these options dominates a given reader’s experience depends on her own political engagements—and, in performance, on the production’s interpretative choices. In Katie Mitchell’s production of A Woman Killed with Kindness, the dominant mode of representation was highly naturalistic. The social milieu of Heywood’s country community was depicted in detail, down to the dirt and potatoes that strewed the floor of The Other Place to represent Sir Charles Mountford’s ‘husbandry’ (7.3). Candles lit and held by actors often provided much of the light. The smells of burning tallow, bark and pine filled the small, intimate space of the theatre, drawing the spectator into the world on stage.2 The acting style was generally understated, with the players introducing stammers and pauses into Heywood’s already comparatively unpoetical blank verse. Everything encouraged the spectator to regard Heywood’s characters as recognizable figures, and Benedict Nightingale praised Mitchell for having ‘successfully suggested that this is an unsophisticated yet not unreal world’ (The Times, 31 October 1991). So far, so Stanislavski. Yet, Mitchell disturbed the apparent naturalism of the playworld in a number of ways. The social ambience looked real, but her production more closely resembled stylized films like Titus and Edward II than the other productions I have discussed insofar as it could not easily be fixed in one place or time period. The costumes were a mixture of Elizabethan, Victorian and twentieth-century English elements, but the stage was dominated by a huge cross to which characters genuflected in a manner that recalled medieval or continental Catholicism. The music evoked Eastern Europe, but Frankford, his wife and his servants alike spoke in Yorkshire accents. This juxtaposition of elements displeased some reviewers, as did the perceived lack of a clear, consistent journey in the performances. Paul Lapworth remarked that ‘at times characters lack definition of time and place in a story which oozes contracts, wealth, property and class’ (Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 1 November 1991), drawing a link between the vagueness of Mitchell’s setting for the play and the vagueness of characterization within it. Irving Wardle’s complaint about ‘the lovers’ arbitrary transitions between virtue, pleasure, and remorse’ followed hard upon a statement of uneasiness about Mitchell’s interjection of Slavic elements into a story of Puritan Englishness (Independent, 3 November 1991). Andrew St George thought the fault lay with the play; he asserted that Mitchell, despite ‘trying to focus the production [ ] by interpolating slabs of devotional music,’ had been unable to find ‘anything




at the heart of Heywood’s world view.’ In St George’s opinion, this was because Heywood’s ‘work as a whole, and Kindness in particular, lacks certainty and ethical consistency’ (Financial Times, 31 October 1991). Reviewers’ cavils about Mitchell’s production hinged on its disruptions of conventional naturalism, on the moments in which it denied the spectator access to a fixable social milieu, to logical character development, or to a clear moral outlook. Yet, it was precisely in its simultaneous engagement with and disruption of naturalistic modes that Mitchell’s production found a language to represent a society in which power relations were not fixed and irreversible, but mutable and fluid. A typical example of her approach to Heywood’s playtext occurred when Nick (Sean Murray) offered his condemnatory opinion of Wendoll and Anne. ‘If they proceed as they have done before,’ the blunt servant snaps in the playtext, ‘Wendoll’s a knave, my mistress is a &c’ (6.182).3 In the ideological climate of early modern England, a compositorial avoidance of the epithet that rhymes with ‘before’ in the published versions of A Woman Killed with Kindness makes some sense. In 1991, it would have been quite easy for Mitchell to insert it; instead, she retained the text’s evasion and brought Frankford’s servants on to interrupt Nick’s imprecations with the singing of the Paternoster. By filling the space where Anne’s identity should have been defined with sacred music, Mitchell allowed a multiplicity of readings. Was the audience hearing the voice of the world view that determined Nick’s condemnation of his mistress? Was it hearing a contradiction of Nick, as if the music were asserting Anne’s comparative innocence and the importance of forgiving others if one hoped for forgiveness from God? Either way, the word ‘whore’ remained a powerful, if unspoken, brand; but either way, the whoring of Anne Frankford appeared not as a simple fact but as an action susceptible to a number of interpretations in a world which constructed her identity from multiple, sometimes conflicting perspectives.

III. Getting married; or, writing on the body Heywood’s text certainly depicts a society in which women are subject to men, and Mitchell’s production represented their subjection in graphic terms. In both of the marriages whose unfolding constitutes the play’s plot, women are commodified and treated as male property. Sir Charles Mountford, attending the Frankfords’ wedding on the last day of his own prosperity, tells Frankford that his new wife




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is no clog, as many are. She doth become you like a well-made suit In which the tailor hath used all his art, Not like a thick coat of unseasoned frieze, Forced on your back in summer. She’s no chain To tie your neck, and curb you to the yoke. But she’s a chain of gold to adorn your neck. (1.58–64) The newlywed Anne will be an honoured and valued possession. In terms reminiscent of those applied to Titus Andronicus’ Lavinia, her husband describes her as ‘the chief / Of all the sweet felicities on earth’: ‘a fair, a chaste, and loving wife, / Perfection all, all truth, all ornament’ (2.9–12). ‘Supplied / With every pleasure, fashion, and new toy’ (13.109– 10), she will be rewarded with her husband’s status and possessions. In return, she will stand as a visible sign of Frankford’s social position and of his status as a model gentleman. As Bowers remarks, Anne ‘is before all else ornamental, as a middle-class chatelaine is supposed to be’ (295). Neither young Sir Charles nor any of his fellow wedding guests see any contradiction between this and his later assertion that ‘[t]here’s equality / In this fair combination’ (1.66–7). Sir Charles is largely referring to the social equality between Frankford and his gently born wife. Still, the construction of marriage as a relation of gender ‘equality’ nevertheless contingent on the subjection of one partner to another occurs in a number of early modern conduct books. Like the early modern debate about enforced marriage discussed in the previous chapter, it seems to have evolved through the dialectical encounter between two rather simpler discursive options. One of these is the sense that, as Peter Stallybrass writes, ‘ “woman,” unlike man, is produced as a property category’ (‘Patriarchal Territories’ 127). Like Ophelia to her father, woman in this construction is merely cultural tender. On the other hand, early modern society also saw the emergence of the discourse of companionate marriage in works like the leading puritan William Perkins’ Christian Oeconomy (written in Latin in the 1590s and translated into English in 1609). Perkins exalts the ‘communion of man and wife’ as ‘that dutie, whereby they do mutually and willingly communicate, both their persons, and goods each to other, for their mutuall helpe, necessitie, and comfort’ (110–11, emphasis mine). Perkins clearly sees no contradiction between this statement and his later assertions that the husband has ‘authoritie over the wife’ (123) and




that the wife, ‘being subject to her husband, yeeldeth obedience unto him’ (129). The relationship between these two constructions of marriage produces a third, in which the wife’s active will is given priority even as she is exchanged between men. Woman’s consent becomes the linchpin of a system that subordinates her; she must acknowledge her inferiority and carry herself accordingly (Whately 36). At the beginning of A Woman Killed with Kindness, Heywood’s Anne Frankford conforms to this ideal vision of a wife who willingly performs, rather than being coerced into, submissive obedience. She responds modestly to the adulation of Sir Charles and the other wedding guests: I would your praise could find a fitter theme Than my imperfect beauty to speak on; Such as they be, if they my husband please, They suffice me now I am married. (1.29–32) Her words meet with immediate approval from her brother, Sir Francis Acton: ‘’Tis good; / You that begin betimes thus must needs prove / Pliant and duteous in your husband’s love’ (1.39–41). Anne’s marriage is the ceremony of her reconstruction as the ideal wife of Mountford’s, Acton’s and Frankford’s encomiums. Masculinist discourse remakes her in its own image—or rather, it confirms her position within it by endowing her with a radically limited form of agency. This point was explored in Mitchell’s staging of the first scene of A Woman Killed With Kindness, where Anne and Frankford were carried in on the shoulders of their friends to stand together at the foot of the large cross that dominated the stage. They listened hand in hand as the men around them rained praises on the new bride (Figure 7). After she gently turned aside the compliments, Reeves’ Anne curtsied to Maloney’s Frankford without any of the underlying defiance of Frances Barber’s curtsies in Ron Daniels’ Hamlet or the hypocrisy of Tamora’s curtsies to Saturninus in Taymor’s Titus. Submitting gracefully to her new role, she significantly changed the levels of Mitchell’s staging. From a figure among equals, she became the one kneeling woman in a room full of standing men—and appeared radiant with joy all the while. As in Boyd’s Broken Heart, the politically engaged spectator was faced with images that established not only the subordination of women to men but also the individual woman’s assimilation of it. In a sense, Mitchell’s was the more disturbing of the two depictions. In Boyd’s




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Figure 7 Anne Frankford among men: the wedding. Saskia Reeves (Anne) and Michael Maloney (Frankford), centre, with Jonathan Cullen (Sir Charles Mountford), right, in A Woman Killed with Kindness, dir. Katie Mitchell, The Other Place, 1991. Photo by Joe Cocks Studio, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

production, after all, the destructive import of Sparta’s gender codes and of women’s submission to them was evident, expressed from the first through Euphrania’s discomfort and Penthea’s simmering fury. At the opening of Mitchell’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, the spectator met not the ghostly nuptials of two frustrated subjects of tragedy but the joyous espousals of a pleasant, diffident young gentleman and his deliriously happy bride. Subjected to her husband, subjected by her society’s discourses of femininity, Reeves’ Anne seemed perfectly pleased with the results. Was the twentieth-century spectator being treated to a version of the effect achieved by early modern depictions of companionate marriage: depictions that, according to Catherine Belsey, simply




‘suppress recognition of the power relations which structure the family’ (Subject 199)? Answering that question demands a move forward in Mitchell’s production to consider a later scene that did not involve Anne or John Frankford at all. In Heywood’s playtext, a subplot follows the fortunes of the young man who praises Anne Frankford in that first scene. Sir Charles Mountford and his sister Susan are at the end of their resources when Sir Francis falls in love with Susan and enfranchises her imprisoned brother in an effort to win her favour. Unable to bear this debt, Sir Charles resolves to offer his sister to Sir Francis, knowing that she is too poor to be Sir Francis’ bride (14.124) and that she must therefore be his whore. Though it is rich in such episodes, the early modern dramatic canon contains no more blatant scene of traffic in women. In Mitchell’s production, Jonathan Cullen’s Sir Charles carried his bewildered sister towards her meeting with their vindictive and lustful enemy just as he had carried Anne Frankford into her wedding party. Susan was dressed, as Anne had been, in bridal veil and wreath. Unlike Anne, she was confused about the purport of the spectacle being made of her: ‘Brother, why have you tricked me like a bride? / Bought me this gay attire, these ornaments? / Forget you our estate, our poverty?’ (14.1–3). During the convoluted explanation of his motives that followed, the theatrical spectator watched Sir Charles literally constructing his sister as a terrible parody of the chaste bride Anne Frankford had been. He painted colour onto her white face and fastidiously arranged her veil as she stood mannequin-stiff with shock. The scene was a shocking enactment of Levi-Strauss’ assertion that ‘the total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as a partner’ (115). When she finally understood her position in this exchange, le Touzel’s Susan ran screaming from her brother, then beat furiously at him when he tried to restrain her. It was the production’s only performance of a woman’s direct resistance to her enforced subordination. In a moment, however, she wiped away her tears: ‘I see your resolution and assent; / So Charles will have me, and I am content’ (14.82–3). Her flailing attempt to escape her brother’s plan for her melted into a zombie-like acceptance. On the one hand, this seemed disjunctive and anti-naturalistic; on the other, it was consistent with le Touzel’s performance style, which throughout had been detached and monotonous, like a long illustration of Susan’s words, ‘My heart’s so hardened with the frost of grief / Death cannot pierce it through’ (7.72–3). One reviewer




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remarked disapprovingly that le Touzel’s Susan was ‘a study in numbness rather than a personality’ (Denford, City Limits, 23 April 1992), but for a politically engaged spectator this might have proved precisely the point. The actress was performing the sort of ‘personality’ Karen Newman describes when she writes that the early modern woman ‘is doubly a subject: subject to her husband in obedience, [ ] but also, and more importantly, constructed as a subject by a system of relations [ ] that fashion her very subjectivity and the shape and kind of available perceptions of her’ (18). Le Touzel’s Susan was the subject her society and situation had made her: resilient, obedient, dutiful and drained. Looking back at the scene of Anne Frankford’s wedding through this dark glass, it became clear that feminine assimilation of masculinist structures was not necessarily a process to be celebrated. As Mitchell’s production went on, the transmission of masculinist power by and through Anne Frankford’s body was expressed in ways that confirmed the similarities between her and her fellow commodity. Her continual obeisances to her husband and her willing withdrawal when he asked to be left alone with Wendoll attested to the magnificent domestication of her body to its role as the servant of Frankford’s will. Her stance recalled Foucault’s argument that ‘power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who ‘do not have it’; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them’ (Discipline 174). Anne’s adultery might have seemed an instance of resistance, but in Mitchell’s staging Frankford’s discovery of it provoked Reeves’ Anne to show her adherence to her society’s constructions of feminine virtue. Heywood’s playtext shows Anne surprised at her husband’s refusal to lay violent hands on her: ‘When do you spurn me like a dog? When tread me / Under your feet? When drag me by the hair?’ (13.93–4). At this point in Mitchell’s production, Reeves crawled on the floor, her body pressed into imitation of the bestial creature she saw herself as having become. Later she beat violently at herself, trying to enact the punishments she imagined: ‘O to redeem my honour / I would have this hand cut off, these my breasts seared, / Be racked, strappadoed, put to any torment’ (13.135–7). The moral laws that condemned her were not imposed on her from without but choked her from within; they determined her actions as Susan’s numb acceptance of her brother’s authority determined hers. The masculinist traffic in women and its requirements invest Anne and Susan with identity in the first place, creating arenas in which men depend on the exercise of their agency. However, that putative agency is formed and constrained by the very discourses it reiterates and ratifies. The cycle seems unbreakable.





However, from the first there are fissures within this structure. If feminine obedience in The Broken Heart subtly disrupts the system it reiterates, some constructions in A Woman Killed with Kindness perform a similar function. The most important of these hinges on the words ‘eye’ and ‘eyeball,’ which appear prominently throughout the playtext. The feminine image is as crucial in Heywood’s playtext as it is in Laura Mulvey’s vision of classical narrative cinema. Here, too, women are constructed as ‘to-be-looked-at’; here, too, the two fates of woman are fetishization and sadistic punishment. The former is roughly what happens to Susan Mountford when Sir Francis Acton sums her up as ‘an angel in a mortal’s shape’ (7.100); the latter is what Anne looks for when she asks her husband why he fails to tread her under his feet. However, many critics have noted that Mulvey’s theory homogenizes multiple spectatorial perspectives into one, implausibly unified male gaze (Solomon 13). Mulvey ignores the ways in which ‘gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constructed identities’ (Butler, Gender Trouble 3). Such intersections can complicate and even undermine the totalizing force of the male gaze. Just so, in A Woman Killed With Kindness, the separate agendas of masculine lookers actually weaken the hegemony of masculinist power. In Heywood’s playtext, discords appear even amid the chorus of adulation at Anne Frankford’s wedding. Sir Charles Mountford (so often a young man who performs masculinism in a manner that foregrounds its more unpleasant aspects, like a hunting puppy proudly presenting his owner with unwanted dead birds) goes a little too far in his praises of Anne. ‘She’s beauty and perfection’s eldest daughter, / Only found by yours, though many a heart hath sought her,’ he tells Frankford (1.23–4). In Mitchell’s version, Jonathan Cullen illustrated this remark by pressing a hand to his own heart, like the youth in Hilliard’s famous Elizabethan miniature Young Man among Roses (see Fumerton 82). Sir Charles’ words thus suggested an expression of his own desire for Frankford’s beautiful wife. This reading engaged intelligently with the playtext, where Frankford responds, ‘But that I know your virtues and chaste thoughts, / I should be jealous of your praise, Sir Charles’ (1.25–6) and Cranwell has to remind the new husband that Sir Charles ‘speaks no more than you approve’ (1.27). Unity of male perspective is already lacking. As his recommendation of her to his beloved friend, Wendoll, shows, Frankford wants his wife to be seen and admired by other men (Figure 8).



IV. The badge with eyes

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Figure 8 Anne Frankford among men: the triangle. Left to right: Michael Maloney (Frankford), Saskia Reeves (Anne), Barry Lynch (Wendoll) in A Woman Killed with Kindness, dir. Katie Mitchell, The Other Place, 1991. Photo by Joe Cocks Studio, reproduced by kind permission of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

Indeed, this process is necessary if she is to perform her function as his ‘ornament,’ a possession that helps to express and augment his own status in the eyes of others. However, the scene of Anne’s seduction by Wendoll shows that her identity is not simply dependent on Frankford’s; it is unstable, determined by the conflicting perspectives of a number of men. Wendoll explicitly constructs his desire for Anne as a result of his uncontrollable gaze, swearing, ‘when I come by chance into her presence, / I’ll hale these balls until my eye-strings crack, / From being pulled and drawn to look that way’ (6.14–16). The potential pun on ‘balls’ in this line, which might amuse a late twentieth-century auditor, likely did not strike Heywood’s audience (OED, Second Edition, ‘ball,’




3.15.b). For a contemporary listener, it makes a nice point about the connection between Wendoll’s gaze and other parts of his anatomy. Although both men’s gazes objectify Anne, Wendoll’s ‘balls’ cannot simply be equated with Frankford’s. Meanwhile, a considerable part of Wendoll’s seductive power over Anne seems to lie in his ability to control the power of other people’s eyes. She finally accedes to his enticements only when he asserts that their liaison will be invisible to those around them: I will be secret, lady, close as night, And not the light of one small glorious star Shall shine here in my forehead to bewray That act of night. (6.146–9) Almost helplessly, Anne passes from the orbit of one male gaze to another, but she seems to hope that Wendoll’s illicit gaze will do what Frankford’s licit gaze could not: protect her from the interpretative invasions of yet more eyeballs. Her hope is in vain. Wendoll is no sooner telling Anne that her ‘bed’s no blab’ (6.164) than Frankford’s servant Nick arrives on the scene ‘just in the nick’ (6.166). ‘I’ll henceforth turn a spy, / And watch them in their close conveyances,’ he declares, determining to ‘have an eye / In all their gestures’ (6.174–5, 179–80). The servant reports Anne’s transgressions to Frankford, effectively making her a whore in the eyes of her husband. ‘Eyes, eyes,’ he responds when Frankford asks him what proof he has for his accusations (8.85). One male gaze has come into direct conflict with another, with Anne as their unhappy object. Both Wendoll and Nick define Anne primarily through her relation to Frankford. As Laura Bromley remarks, Wendoll behaves ‘rather as if he were considering stealing a valuable possession of Frankford’s, for [ ] Anne’s virtue is more Frankford’s than her own’ (272). Nick, too, reads Anne’s actions primarily as they affect Frankford, spitting, ‘I love my mistress, but these tricks I like not. / My master shall not pocket up this wrong’ (6.168–9). In their relation to Frankford, however, these two men are using the whoring of Anne for quite different ends. Wendoll is asserting his power over ‘Frankford’s richest treasure’ (11.116); he both obeys Frankford’s command to ‘be a present Frankford in his absence’ (6.78) and defies Frankford’s proprietorial attitude towards him. Nick, on the other hands, suggests the reason for his eagerness to expose Anne’s adultery when he tells Frankford, ‘’Sblood sir, I love




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you better than your wife. / I’ll make it good’ (8.43–4). If the whored Anne of Wendoll’s gaze signifies Wendoll’s possession of his patronizing friend’s treasure, the same spectacle seen through Nick’s eyes becomes a means of affirming the servant’s passionate loyalty to his master. In Mitchell’s production, Frankford and all his men wore badges— Frankford’s livery, as it were—decorated by a few stripes of colour and what looked hauntingly like a pair of eyes.4 This detail of costuming could be read as evidence of Frankford’s attempt to unify his household’s gaze, as if he dreamt that all the men who wore his badge might see with the same pair of eyes. When the playtext’s Frankford effectively buys Wendoll’s companionship (4.70–2), he seems to expect to co-opt Wendoll into this same economy of looking. But Wendoll and Nick have their own agendas in looking at Anne. Anne’s identity proves to be, not a monolithic result of male domination, but the discursive product of a power struggle between at least three major male characters. As such, it is open to multiple interpretations, and perhaps to change—through her own actions as well as theirs. This point was magnificently explored in Mitchell’s A Woman Killed with Kindness by the playing of the relationship between Anne and Nick. Sean Murray gave a seething performance of Nick’s vehement loyalty to Frankford and his disgust with Anne until the point when Frankford entered Anne’s bedchamber to discover her with Wendoll. Over the course of the next scene, his perspective visibly changed. His gaze seemed to diverge from his master’s, and Anne became something more than an object whose degradation would improve his own standing. ‘’Sblood, sir, she sounds,’ exclaims Nick when Anne faints at Frankford’s feet (13.84); Murray invested the line with genuine, profound surprise. All of a sudden he seemed to see Anne as a creature with emotions: a subject rather than an object. By the time he brought Anne news of the husband who had banished her from his presence, the meaning of the badge with eyes Nick wore was revised. In the playtext, Nick responds to Anne’s request that he tell Frankford of her grief with apparent emotion: ‘I’ll say you wept; I’ll swear you made me sad. / Why, how now, eyes? What now? What’s here to do? / I am gone, or I shall straight turn baby too’ (16.67–9). In Mitchell’s version, Reeves’ Anne was weeping at this point. Murray’s Nick, if anything, wept more violently, stumbling away from her and covering his face with his hands. His eyes were no longer the reliable witnesses he had once thought them; he could not even see Anne clearly through the tears her suffering had occasioned. Her grief governed his





Would you had words To express but what you see; my inward grief No tongue may utter. Yet, unto your power You may describe my sorrow, and disclose To thy sad master my abundant woes. (16.78–83) ‘I’ll do your commendations,’ replied Nick (16.84). Anne’s sense of her own experience had affected not only his perspective on her but also his discourse about her. Some form of feminine agency seemed to be at work, reversing and co-opting the power of the male gaze.

V. Losing which name? What form of feminine agency can exist in a world where masculinist power founds woman’s very subjectivity? Heywood’s text seems occasionally to imply the possibility that a woman’s identity might be autonomous, separable from the identities of the male figures in her life. Perhaps the most notable such moment occurs during Wendoll’s seduction of Anne, when he bids her, Go, tell your husband; he will turn me off, And I am then undone. I care not, I – ’Twas for your sake. Perchance in rage he’ll kill me. I care not – ’twas for you. Say I incur The general name of villain through the world, Of traitor to my friend – I care not, I. Beggary, shame, death, scandal and reproach, For you I’ll hazard all – what care I? For you I’ll live, and in your love I’ll die. (6.130–8) Throughout, Wendoll emphasizes the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you,’ leaving little space for Frankford, the man to whom Anne’s identity is supposedly referable. He suggests that there could be an Anne who ceased to be Mistress Frankford, ceased to be the woman who depends on her husband; that there could be an Anne on whom Wendoll depends. This vision of herself moves Anne ‘to passion and to pity’ (6.139). 10.1057/9780230597488 - Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000, Roberta Barker


reactions. ‘You have beheld the woefullest wretch on earth, / A woman made of tears,’ she told him:

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Wendoll’s depiction of Anne as a discrete subject is specious, given that he is merely trying to convince her to define herself by his perspective rather than by her husband’s. But it suggests that the order in which a woman can stand as a sign for one man’s identity is hardly as stable as it looked at the beginning of the play. What of Susan Mountford, pushed this way and that by her hopelessly luckless brother and seemingly so determined by what ‘Charles will have’ (14.83)? When she goes to beg their rich relations for help, she declares, I was not born a beggar; though his extremes Enforce this language from me, I protest No fortune of mine own could lead my tongue To this base key. (9.6–9) Susan’s language suggests that she has some kind of interiority that can be separated from her brother’s will. To be sure, she delivers these words while representing her brother. As in the scene when he tricks her like a bride, Susan’s discursive references to her own autonomy are undercut by the fact that the theatrical audience sees her only as governed by Sir Charles’ demands. Then again, Susan’s representation of Sir Charles suggests that the effect of one identity on another is not a one-way process. Perhaps it is not only Susan whose actions are affected by her brother, but also Charles whose identity is taken up and reconstructed by his sister. Even in a masculinist system, a male subject cannot manipulate a feminine one without becoming, in some sense, as dependent on her as she is on him. In Heywood’s playtext, Susan’s relationship with her brother’s enemy, Sir Francis Acton, seems to reassert absolute masculine control over feminine identity. Acton’s acquaintance with Susan begins with his assumption that he will easily be able to dominate her. Considering Sir Charles’ predicament, he remembers that They say he hath a pretty wench Unto his sister: shall I, in mercy sake To him and to his kindred, bribe the fool To shame herself by lewd dishonest lust. I’ll proffer largely, but the deed being done I’ll smile to see her base confusion. (7.79–84) 10.1057/9780230597488 - Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000, Roberta Barker



This villainous gloating stops abruptly when Susan turns to look at him: ‘But stay, my heart, O what a look did fly / To strike my soul through with thy piercing eye’ (7.91–2). The sudden rhyming couplet suggests Acton’s stunned reaction to what sounds like a female gaze, but it also reminds the interpreter that in idealizing Susan Sir Francis continues to assert verbal control over her. Applying the sonneteer’s tropes to her embattled form, he moves his new beloved from one masculinist category (whore) into another (angel). His valuation of her as property rises, but he does not, like Nick with Anne, suddenly register the reality of her predicament. Nor does Susan’s disgusted reaction suggest agency on her part. ‘Acton, that seeks our blood!’ she cries, running away from him (7.95, emphasis mine): her opinion of Sir Francis is determined by her brother’s situation rather than by any autonomous response to him. Even her determined chastity confirms her subjection by a society that defines feminine honour and virtue in terms of controllable and saleable virginity. Still, in Mitchell’s production Susan Mountford became the figure who most clearly suggested the reciprocal dependence of masculine on feminine identity. Even while tricking her like a bride, Cullen’s Sir Charles had tearfully to beg her to offer herself to Sir Francis. More importantly, Mitchell’s staging of the encounters between Susan and Acton granted Susan a surprising amount of leverage. When, on their second meeting, Susan realized that the gold Malby offered her came from Acton, le Touzel delivered her response—‘Acton! O God, that name I am born to curse’ (9.52)—dully, dryly, almost sarcastically. A transcription of this moment in the performance recorded by the archive video of the production might appear thus: ‘Acton. (Sigh) Oh God. (She shakes her head) That name I am born to curse,’ followed by a laugh from the theatrical audience. The laugh suggests how successfully Susan’s jaundiced perspective deflated Sir Francis’ melodramatic view of the situation. After she ran from the stage, Pelka’s Sir Francis called after her in frustration: ‘She hates my name, my face; how should I woo?’ (9.57). Reading this line as an address to Susan (‘How should I woo?’), he underlined the extent to which Sir Francis’ self-definition had been affected by the woman with whom he had fallen in love. At the end of the scene, Pelka turned to the great cross downstage and shrugged at it in perplexity. The centre did not hold as he had expected. Hierarchical binaries were breaking down. No scene in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness dramatizes that breakdown more clearly than that between Anne and John Frankford when the husband discovers the wife’s adultery. Here, Anne voices her





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O by what word, what title, or what name Shall I entreat your pardon? Pardon! O I am as far from hoping such sweet grace As Lucifer from Heaven. To call you husband – O me most wretched, I have lost that name; I am no more your wife. (13.79–84) Diana E. Henderson rightly argues that Anne ‘has lost her name by forfeiting her domestic identity’ so that ‘her name and identity no longer match, the word no longer corresponds perfectly with the thing’ (286). However, Anne’s equivocal syntax implies that she is not alone in her loss of identity. The ‘name’ whose loss Anne deplores is not primarily that of ‘wife,’ but that of ‘husband.’ Words with which she can properly voice her relation to Frankford no longer exist. If Anne is no longer a wife, then Frankford is no longer a husband: he too has ‘lost that name.’ He responds with anguish to Anne’s lament: Spare thou thy tears, for I will weep for thee; And keep thy countenance, for I’ll blush for thee. Now I protest, I think ’tis I am tainted, For I am most ashamed, and ’tis more hard For me to look upon thy guilty face Than on the sun’s clear brow. (13.85–90) He appropriates his wife’s sorrow, refusing to allow her a reaction that has not already been suffered by himself; but he also attests to the interdependence of their two identities, both of which are slipping inexorably away. In Mitchell’s Woman Killed With Kindness, Michael Maloney’s performance embodied marital interdependence through an act of abortive violence. Walking around the prone body of his fainting wife, he slapped her viciously and coldly across the face to revive her. Otherwise he refused to touch her until Anne, with typically submissive gestural language, reinforced her plea that Frankford not mutilate her body by lying before him face down on the floor. With sudden extreme brutality Maloney



sense of expulsion from the discursive system that has written her identity. She asks her husband,

grasped Reeves as if to throttle her, then turned her over and threw himself on top of her, yanking one of her legs up. The image was unmistakably one of rape. Reeves struggled against him until he paused and, with a moan, rolled away from her. For a moment both lay on the floor curled into fetal positions, terrible mirror images of one another, their experience collapsing into a mutual moment of pain and vulnerability. Both of them had lost their names, the respected personae of Master and Mistress Frankford they presented to the world. If masculinist power had inscribed itself brutally on Anne Frankford’s body, it had also maimed her husband.

VI. Killed with kindness; or, re-writing on the body One might argue, of course, that Frankford’s suffering is not occasioned by the masculinist hierarchies to which he subscribes, but by Anne’s failure to respect them. William Gouge insistently reminded his early modern readers that the sin of adultery threatened not only the sinners themselves but also ‘the whole family appertaining to either of them (for this is as a fire in an house)’ (220, emphasis Gouge’s). As Mary Beth Rose remarks, ‘Gouge, in this vision of the inexorably escalating communal violence resulting from a single adultery, assigns a new, public significance to the actions of private individuals’ (120). In the minds of conduct book authors who bid the wife make her husband her glass, the equivalence between Anne and John Frankford at the moment of her exposure might have appeared simply a tragic reversal brought about by a woman’s transgression. This point underlines the problematics of any critical model that celebrates the power of feminine transgression to occasion a critique of patriarchy. In the fantasies of entrapment offered by early modern tragedy, transgressions like Anne Frankford’s frequently seem to point only to the fact that frailty’s name is woman and that masculinist oppression is required in order to keep social order in place. The emotional impact of John Frankford’s heartbreaking meditation on his wife’s fall supports such a view. The betrayed husband cries, ‘O God, O God, that it were possible / To undo things done, to call back yesterday’ (13.53–4). He wishes ‘that I might take her / As spotless as an angel in my arms,’ then admits despairingly, ‘But O! I talk of things impossible, / And cast beyond the moon’ (13.62–5). As McLuskie notes, this ‘speech emphasizes the pathos of his situation [ ], insulating the sense of his loss from any consideration of his wife’s or her lover’s feelings’ (Dekker and Heywood 92). It suggests the ‘enormous forfeiture




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that attends Anne’s violation of the civil order’ (Comensoli 83), but does not undermine the essential justice of that order. Thus, Comensoli concludes that Heywood’s playtext finally ‘constructs the social order in such a way that none of the characters fears its power to root out contradiction and instability’ (83). Perhaps, then, the politically engaged spectator looking for disruptions of masculinist order in performance texts would do better to seek them, not in transgressions that may ultimately serve to reinscribe it, but rather in reiterations that fail completely to confirm its stability. That search leads us back to the equivocal spectacle of feminine mortality, which is first evoked in A Woman Killed with Kindness when Susan Mountford faces the possibility of her own prostitution. This moment seems completely to reinscribe masculine control over feminine identity; Sir Charles’ temporary dependence on Susan is rewarded when Sir Francis, impressed by his offer, declares, ‘[W]here before I thought her for her wants / Too base to be my bride, to end all strife / I seal you my dear brother, her my wife’ (14.144–6). In Mitchell’s staging, Sir Charles stepped right around his prone sister to shake hands with his enemy. Their homosocial exchange was ratified by Susan’s inert body, just as Bronfen argues that Western representation is energized by the image of the beautiful feminine corpse. When Susan finally exited arm in arm with Sir Francis, she was performing her part as the gift that ratified the peace treaty between two warring groups of men. But what of the Susan who had almost refused to assent to her brother’s proposal? At one key point, after all, she had brandished a knife and declared, ‘Before his unchaste thoughts shall seize on me / ’Tis here shall my imprisoned soul set free’ (14.98–9). That Susan shocked her brother (and, I suspect, many members of the audience) with her unexpected assertion of control over her own body. She was coldly assured and seemed quite capable of the act she threatened. Pointing the knife at her own bosom, le Touzel’s Susan seemed ready to turn herself into a dead monument to female virtue and male brutality. Could the memory of that spectacle be effaced by the apparently successful exchange between her brother and Sir Francis? Arguably, this disturbing moment is recuperated for masculinism in the playtext of A Woman Killed with Kindness. Unlike Penthea’s selfdestruction in The Broken Heart, Susan’s threat of suicide pleases her brother (14.86–7); clearly, the death of the female body can speak masculine power as well as its life can do. Anne Frankford’s penitent death from self-starvation, which according to Comensoli ‘upholds a conservative ideology of gender’ by suppressing ‘power, self-assertion, and




autonomy, all forms of control forbidden to women’ (82), can also be read as an affirmation of masculinist order. In this interpretation, Anne acts as ‘the emblem on which the tragic action is played out’ (McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood 93), and Heywood’s playtext emerges as a textbook on the diverse ways in which married women can be written into the position of mirrors for men. The playtext’s final scene supports this perspective. At this point, as Luce Irigaray might put it, the commodities are at last among themselves (192). But when Anne and Susan finally meet at Anne’s deathbed, Susan seems less interested in Anne’s suffering than in Frankford’s, speaking of ‘the patience of that gentleman’ and remarking on the ‘strange virtue’ with which he ‘demeans his grief’ (17.7–9). Sir Francis too finds Frankford’s conduct strange: My brother Frankford showed too mild a spirit In the revenge of such a loathed crime. Less than he did, no man of spirit could do. I am so far from blaming his revenge That I commend it. (17.16–20) However, Anne’s death helps Sir Francis to understand the effectiveness of Frankford’s methods. He remarks, ‘Brother, had you with threats and usage bad / Punished her sin, the grief of her offence / Had not with such true sorrow touched her heart’ (17.133–5). Frankford responds: I see it had not; therefore on her grave I will bestow this funeral epitaph, Which on her marble tomb shall be engraved. In golden letters shall these words be filled: Here lies she whom her husband’s kindness killed. (17.136–40) The uncontrollable female body is rewritten by the ‘golden letters’ which declare it an index of ‘her husband’s kindness.’ Even the play’s other major female character accedes to the justice that makes the dead Anne more than ever a commodity. The questions of whether this is what Frankford wants, and whether Heywood intended his actions are to be applauded or deplored, continue to preoccupy critics. Ronald Huebert’s discussion of the playtext, bluntly




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entitled, ‘A Woman Killed With Kindness?: Or How to Get Your Own Way and Be a Nice Guy Too,’ condemns Frankford as a coldly vicious patriarch and A Woman Killed With Kindness as a hyper-conservative tract that invites the audience to sympathize with him. Jennifer Panek agrees with his condemnation of the husband, but argues that ‘the play is constructed to make the reader or audience less than comfortable with Frankford’s methods of punishing adultery’ (377). Conversely, Laura Bromley insists that ‘Anne’s death, however distasteful to a modern sense of justice, is the logical, acceptable, indeed inevitable close to her story in her time’ (273). She argues that Frankford’s actions must be just, for Anne herself recognizes them as such and ‘her repentance is genuine’ (273). Most interestingly, Nancy Gutierrez compares Anne’s self-starvation to acts of exorcism and passive resistance on the part of early modern puritans, and argues that ‘patriarchal authority is reinforced, but by the equivocal means of individual self-assertion’ (‘Exorcism’ 55). Turning from this debate to Katie Mitchell’s Woman Killed with Kindness highlights the power of performance to appropriate early modern tragic playtexts in a manner that undermines their potentially conservative nature. Mitchell’s staging vividly produced the equivocal quality Gutierrez finds in the ending of A Woman Killed with Kindness. As performed by Michael Maloney, Frankford’s reaction to Anne’s death was hardly one of calm satisfaction, acceptance, or resignation: he grasped Reeves’ slumping body and howled out Frankford’s words, ‘New married, and new widowed; O she’s dead, / And a cold grave must be our nuptial bed’ (17.123–4). Frankford’s determination to write Anne’s epitaph received an equally anguished delivery. It sounded as if Frankford was not so much taking his wife back into the bosom of masculinist discourse as voicing a sense of guilt at her death. Read this way, the speech suggested that Anne’s marble tomb would be a monument, not to her husband’s kindness, but to his culpability. If the spectator was presented with Frankford’s grief, she also encountered Nick’s deflation of what Panek calls ‘all those pious remarks about salvation around the deathbed of the confused and suicidal Anne’ (374). In Heywood’s text, Frankford compassionately tells Anne that ‘mere pity’ of her weakness makes him wish to die with her (17.96–7). ‘So do we all,’ chorus most of the surrounding figures, affirming the justice of Frankford’s perspective. Nick, however, turns aside: ‘So will not I! / I’ll sigh and sob, but, by my faith, not die’ (17.99–100). After his noisy tears in his previous encounter with Anne, Sean Murray very noticeably did not ‘sigh’ or ‘sob’ while delivering this line. Rather, his




sardonic tone undercut Frankford’s discourse to point out that there was more than one perspective on this death scene. Only Anne was dying, and Frankford was no more going with her than Nick. The spectator was denied any easy identification with Frankford’s point of view. At the same time, she watched the reactions of an Anne so grateful for Frankford’s (obviously heartfelt) compassion that it remained difficult to dismiss him as a cruel dominator. In this context, indeed, it seemed wrong to say that Frankford was dominating the action or that Anne’s role was simply that of an emblem. With the manner of Anne’s death we return to an issue raised in the preceding chapter: the contemporary ramifications of feminine acts of self-destruction that might have signified quite differently for early modern spectators. Reviewing Mitchell’s production, Claire Armistead noted that Reeves’ dying Anne was ‘not a beautiful, fading rose, but an anorexic who jerks and judders horribly in her wooden cot, having paid the price society demands for her adultery’ (Guardian, 21 April 1992). Nightingale, too, spoke of Anne’s last illness as ‘a sort of conscientious anorexia’ (The Times, 31 October 1991). Like that of Boyd’s Broken Heart, the reception of Mitchell’s Woman Killed with Kindness attests to the late twentieth century’s eagerness to read anorexia into performances of early modern playtexts that depict women’s self-starvation. As I argued in the previous chapter, this is a limited reading of a complex discursive act. Comensoli repudiates it on the grounds that ‘Anne’s starvation [ ] would have been interpreted by early modern audiences as a form of purification of the soul, a practice synonymous with the suppression of lust’ (81–2). She supports her argument with the passage from Bartholemew Batty’s Christian Man’s Closet, already cited in the previous chapter, which instructs a virgin to ‘so eat as that she may be always an hungered’ (76). Unlike Gutierrez, however, she discounts the impact of other structures—such as emergent puritan and residual Catholic discourses of fasting—that could locate social assertion as well as submission in such acts of self-control. The contemporary identification of Anne’s ailment may do the same, with Nightingale’s ‘conscientious anorexia’ in particular reducing her to the status of an acquiescent victim of a strict moral order and denying the idea that her death might disrupt that order in some way. However, there is a crucial difference between the reception of Penthea’s death in Boyd’s Broken Heart and that of Anne’s death in Mitchell’s Woman Killed with Kindness. Fielding’s powerful Penthea was unjustly contained by readings like Clive Hirschorn’s, which saw her as a ‘sacrificial virgin [ ] carried off by a seventeenth-century version of




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anorexia nervosa.’ Armistead’s depiction of the horrible agony of Reeves’ Anne goes further. It suggests that the representation impressed at least one critic with a sense both of Anne’s accession to masculinist demands and of the violence inherent in those demands. And indeed, even on the (very dim) RSC archive video of the production Reeves’ enactment of Anne’s suffering remains disturbing as she convulses and gasps for breath, too weak to lift herself from her bed. Like Fielding, Reeves played a woman whose suffering daunted the men around her—especially Maloney’s weeping, guilt-stricken Frankford—into a sense of their own complicity in her death. Once again, feminine mortality became the stage for a critique of masculinist power, and ‘the choice of death emerge[d] as a feminine strategy within which writing with the body is a way of getting rid of the oppression connected with the feminine body’ (Bronfen 142). In an interview with Katie Normington, Katie Mitchell remarks of A Woman Killed with Kindness that ‘ultimately the best way of approaching it is to put the woman in the historical context, be as true to that as is possible, even if it is offensive, because [...] it can actually awaken people to more sense of the need for equality’ (105). Thus, unlike Emma Fielding, Reeves did not suggest that the woman she played was angry at, or even aware of, her socially imposed powerlessness. Far from seeing herself as unjustly oppressed, she described herself as ‘a spotted strumpet’ (17.78). It was clear that ‘what makes disciplinary power so effective is its ability to grasp the individual at the level of its self-understanding – of its very identity and the norms that govern its practices of self-constitution’ (Sawicki 161). Moreover, Mitchell’s production accentuated Anne’s continued reliance on the men around her. She remained upright in her last moments only because Maloney’s Frankford supported her; in the most literal sense, her final declaration of her own identity depended on her husband. She was ecstatic at the last, ‘ever look[ing] for the good hour’ (17.36–7). Taken back into the fold, she joyfully regained her identity as Frankford’s wife. Soon, however, Maloney’s Frankford was wrestling with death for her, shaking her limp body, trying to call her back to life. Anne had slipped out of his grasp. Lying in her pathetically small wooden bed as the assembled cast around her sang a lament, she was the only silent person on stage: altogether spectacle at last. But the interpretation of that spectacle had passed out of Frankford’s hands, out of Nick’s and Wendoll’s and Sir Francis’ and Sir Charles’ hands, into the discursive control of the spectator. It would be the audience’s task to read the





spectacle Anne had made of herself, and to decide whether her death would challenge the structures that had determined her life.

Near the end of Heywood’s playtext, after Anne has been banished from her husband’s home, Nick brings her a lute Frankford had once given her. She sings a lament to its strains, then bids him Go break this lute upon my coach’s wheel, As the last music that I e’er shall make – Not as my husband’s gift, but my farewell To all earth’s joy; and so your master tell. (16.72–5) It is possible to read the shattered lute as one of the naturalistic touches by which the playtext establishes its small-scale, detailed, domestic world (Bowers 293). It can be seen as a metonym for the Frankfords’ civilized marriage, and its breaking as symbolic of the loss precipitated by the wife’s sin (Comensoli 82–3). It might also be related to the lutes often included in early modern vanitas mundi paintings, making Anne’s rejection of it a sign of her final break with the enticements of sin. Mitchell’s production took another tack. It actually showed Frankford giving the lute to Anne in a small scene interpolated after Frankford welcomed Wendoll to his house. This choice emphasized the notion that Anne’s subsequent destruction of it symbolized the dissolution of their marriage bond. She claimed that she was destroying only the image of her own lost joy, but her very denial of the intention to destroy her husband’s gift underlined the fact that she was doing just that. In this staging, Anne’s fall did not destroy only herself; it also destroyed her husband’s control over the ways in which she could be interpreted. Like hers, his identity was fluid and terrifyingly vulnerable to revision. Both of them were broken like the lute. As for the literal destruction of Anne’s lute, it took place offstage, interrupting Anne’s expressions of self-loathing with the strange, jangling noise of breaking strings. Any spectator lulled into a complacent sense of the justice of Anne’s quiet determination to die might have been startled into a reconsideration of the scene she was watching. The moment was typical of Mitchell’s production in its use of a naturalistic prop to disrupt the potentially conservative ideological impact of a naturalistic



VII. Breaking the lute

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performance style. Mitchell has remarked that an important insight of the Stanislavski system lies in its emphasis on our uses of language ‘to effect a change in the person or persons we are talking to’ (Giannechi and Luckhurst 97). This study has advanced a number of criticisms of Stanislavskian characterization, but Mitchell’s work proves that such criticisms should not be allowed to gain the status of generalizations. Mitchell’s Woman Killed with Kindness used its version of naturalism to show the ongoing processes of change that affected the characters on stage. Moreover, as the breaking of the lute suggested, those processes reached out beyond the confines of the onstage world to negotiate with the perceptions of spectators. That Mitchell’s production can be read as a counterblast to rules about the inherent conservatism, not only of naturalism, but also of text-based theatre and of appeals to the authority of the past, is clear from its use of open address. Addresses to the audience were common in Heywood’s theatre and are demanded by his playtext’s multiple asides and soliloquies; in such moments, writes Bridget Escolme, early modern characters ‘conspire with us, plead with us, confront us, bully us, vow to please us, and [ ] the unpredictability of our reactions—the multiplicity of our readings, the uncertainness of our pleasure and support—are integral to the readings that the plays make possible’ (19). As Escolme argues, such moments tend to defy naturalism’s imaginary ‘fourth wall,’ but Mitchell’s actors solved the potential problem by turning very simply to their audience, as if they were addressing another citizen of their community. In the tiny space of The Other Place, they executed this turn with great intimacy, particularly at two crucial junctures. Cullen’s Sir Charles literally begged the audience to Observe [Susan’s] love; to soothe them in my suit Her honour she will hazard, though not lose. To bring me out of debt, her rigorous hand Will pierce her heart. O wonder, that will choose Rather than stain her blood, her life to lose. (14.88–92) Similarly, Reeves’ Anne actually spoke to her female spectators when she asked them to make her their instance (13.142–5). It is difficult to guess how Heywood’s early modern spectators might have received such addresses, but easier to surmise that few members of an RSC audience in 1991 could have been comfortable with Sir Charles’ satisfaction in his sister’s determination to commit suicide. As Henderson remarks,




‘[n]othing can make Charles’ behavior quite acceptable to a twentiethcentury audience’ (‘Many Mansions’ 287). And how many theatregoing women of the 1990s would happily take Anne Frankford as their instance? Mitchell’s production asked these questions literally in its audience’s face, demanding that its spectator constantly re-evaluate her own feelings and opinions about the spectacles of submissive femininity and dominant masculinity. Like Boyd’s Broken Heart, it used conventional methods of staging to expose the entrapment of both male and female subjects within conventional discourses of gender identity and gendered power. Unlike Boyd’s production, however, Mitchell’s Woman Killed with Kindness suggested that those potentially fatal discourses were not static. Anne’s words changed Nick; Frankford came to repent his cruel kindness to his wife; the fissures in the male gaze became apparent; even Sir Francis and Sir Charles came to a limited recognition of their dependence on Susan. Thanks to Mitchell’s qualified use of naturalism and her willingness to ‘play along with’ her perception of the playtext’s politics, contradictions tenuously negotiated by early modern marriage discourse and inscribed in Heywood’s playtext exploded into vivid, politically engaged theatrical life.




IRMA. Dress up ah, the disguises! Distribute roles again assume my own. Prepare yours. You must now go home, where everything—you can be quite sure—will be falser than here. —Jean Genet, The Balcony In many performances, writes Teresa de Lauretis, the ‘construction of gender is both the product and the process of its representation’ (5). Dominant gender norms shape the ways in which male and female roles are directed, acted and placed within theatrical and cinematic miseen-scène; the resulting performances help to keep the original norms in place. In Shakespeare in Love, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Viola de Lesseps plays a woman more convincingly than Daniel Brocklebank’s Sam Gosse because the film’s screenplay, its hairstyling and makeup, its cinematography and its editing tell us so. The film assures its spectators that a female body will naturally perform femininity more effectively than a male one. Still, in watching the film I couldn’t help noticing that Sam’s—or Brocklebank’s—impersonation of femininity was really quite delicate, subtle and convincing, despite the stiff wig and heavy makeup that stressed its artificiality. For the few moments she or he was allowed to appear, Sam’s Juliet threatened to unbalance the binary construction of gender the boy actress was used to support elsewhere in the film. In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler celebrates instances of gender parody, such as drag, in which ‘we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity’ (138). Yet she admits that ‘there is no guarantee that exposing the naturalized status of heterosexuality will lead to its subversion,’ since some denaturalizing 191



Conclusion: Cultural Drag; or, Hamlet and Ophelia Redux

parodies simply ‘reidealize heterosexual norms without calling them into question’ (Bodies 231, emphasis Butler’s). Sam Gosse’s role in Shakespeare in Love briefly denaturalizes gender by suggesting that a young man can convincingly portray femininity; here, ‘the transferability of a gender ideal or gender norm calls into question the abjecting power that it sustains’ (Butler, Bodies 231). However, the film then re-idealizes heterosexual norms by concluding that Sam’s performances are really less than adequate, and that only a female actor playing opposite a man can convey ‘true love.’ If Brocklebank’s performance occasionally disrupts such norms, the result is a small ripple on the film’s smooth surface of compulsory heterosexuality and gender binarism. Small though it may be, that ripple is produced by the film’s engagement with the texts and material conditions of the early modern theatre. Over and above its representations of gender crossing, Shakespeare in Love is an example of a process I want provisionally to dub cultural drag. Cultural drag occurs when anyone—actor or actress, reader or spectator—tries to put on and explore the gender norms of another culture. Unlike some other forms of drag, it can take place as easily when a contemporary woman plays an early modern woman, a contemporary man an early modern man, as when gender positions are explicitly switched. Unlike some other forms of drag, it is rarely an overtly subversive act. Indeed, as Shakespeare in Love shows even more clearly than the other performances I have discussed in these pages, it can be an extremely conservative act, appropriating early modern texts in order to confirm contemporary gender binaries. On the other hand, the concept of cultural drag complicates the notion that early modern playtexts, and the historical discourses they inscribe, are simply ‘absorbed into the multifarious verbal and nonverbal discourses of theatrical production, transformed into an entirely incommensurable thing’ (Worthen, ‘Drama’ 1100). Rather, it suggests some dialogue between historical discourses and the performance texts that transform them for new actors and audiences. Even in Shakespeare in Love, ‘the transferability of a gender ideal or gender norm’ from early modern to contemporary society and vice versa can work to ‘question the abjecting power that it sustains.’ The film’s celebration of Viola’s incomparable performance of femininity critiques the early modern theatre’s masculinist exclusion of women from the stage even as it reinscribes the gender binarism that fed that exclusion. Less obviously but more interestingly, Brocklebank’s donning of the livery of the early modern boy actress suggests that contemporary gender boundaries may be less impermeable than they appear. Looking at these performances as cultural drag




helps the politically engaged spectator to see both the ways in which they sustain established norms and the ways in which they call those norms into question. To show in more detail how this process might work, I would like to close this book by offering an example of my own politically engaged spectatorship at a performance that engaged in cultural drag: Laurence Boswell’s 1999 production of Hamlet. This production of the archetypal early modern playtext played the Young Vic, London: a small, flexible theatre quite different from the stately RST where Ron Daniels’ Hamlet had played fifteen years before. Destined for a Japanese tour, Boswell’s production was immediately remarkable for its amalgamation of theatrical styles and historical periods. The traverse set (designed by Es Devlin) featured black-lacquered, retractable Noh-style bridges. The Ghost appeared clad in Samurai armor, but the majority of the cast was costumed in an eclectic parade of Western European historical styles: Richard Lintern’s brooding Horatio sported a very Gen X leather jacket; Suzanne Bertish’s Gertrude wore Queen Mary corsets and chokers; and Megan Dodds’ Ophelia appeared in a green brocade gown straight out of medieval tapestry. In short, this was a staging that from the first seemed committed to playing with apparently disparate elements. The images of Hamlet and Ophelia, however, did not seem likely to be under interrogation. The production’s leading actor, Paul Rhys, had risen to prominence with his acclaimed interpretations of Edgar in King Lear and the young A.E. Housman in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love: performances marked by intelligence, nervous intensity and careful mapping of psychological states. I expected a naturalistic Hamlet from him. I even thought I could imagine what kind of naturalistic Hamlet it would be: something rather like the ‘sentimental’ version of the prince lambasted by A.C. Bradley, ‘a graceful youth, sweet and sensitive, full of delicate sympathies and yearning aspirations [ ]; but frail and weak, a kind of Werther, with a face like Shelley’s’ (101). When I read the production’s reviews, they seemed to confirm my expectations. Paul Taylor’s review for the Independent began, ‘Paul Rhys is most people’s mental picture of the perfect Hamlet’ (9 April 1999). Susannah Clapp actually echoed Bradley, describing Rhys’ Prince as ‘both Shelleyesque poet and school prefect’ (Observer, 11 April 1999). Others stressed the psychological depth of Rhys’ performance. John Peter applauded Rhys’ understanding of ‘the dynamics of inner crisis: the effort to fend off breakdown and the harsh thrill of unleashing it on yourself’ (Sunday Times, 11 April 1999). Less impressed, Benedict Nightingale described Rhys’ Hamlet in Freudian terms as ‘a bereft but inadequate son who



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actually uses his last moments to cradle [his] mother’ (Times, 9 April 1999). Each critic sought one or two central images or emotional states with which to convey the performance’s cohesion. The same search for coherence prevailed in readings of Megan Dodds’ Ophelia. ‘I’ve never seen an Ophelia as exquisitely lovely and as convincingly demented as Megan Dodds,’ enthused Georgina Brown (Mail on Sunday, 11 April 1999). Nightingale disagreed, remarking that the girl remained ‘too cool, too unfazed by Hamlet’s rejection, for her falling apart to be wholly credible.’ Alastair Macaulay sighed that ‘[a]s usual, alas, the (very elusive) role of Ophelia falls into two halves: Megan Dodds is too pallid and contained at first, then too artful and fakey in the mad scenes’ (Financial Times, 9 April 1999). He related Dodds’ failings to those usual in onstage Ophelias and seemed to judge them according to some platonic version of the role: more expressive in the first half, more ‘natural’ in the second and more consistent throughout. If I had gained my only impressions of Boswell’s Hamlet from its reviews, I would have assumed that this was a run-of-the-mill production informed by the naturalistic approach to character that so dominates mainstream English and American theatre. As I arrived at the Young Vic, I expected to encounter conventional, late twentieth-century Western images of the play’s characters. What I encountered was something quite different. At Rhys’ first entrance—clad in capacious black greatcoat, smiling shyly through a flood of tears and clutching a battered Penguin paperback—the familiar, time-hallowed reading of the Prince as intellectual poet-hero seemed firmly in place. But closer observation revealed that the actor’s face, though pale enough and half-swallowed by improbably large dark eyes, was no Romantic cliché. It was in a state of constant and violent metamorphosis. Over the course of the evening, Rhys’ expressions suggested by turns an aloof aristocrat, a frightened public schoolboy, a society beauty, a clown, a drooling idiot and a death’s head. The first encounter between Hamlet and his father’s ghost was typical of the performance’s range. At the sight of the ghost, Rhys’ Hamlet flashed from fastidious mockery of his uncle’s drinking to hideously drooling shock. His mouth wide open in a soundless scream, his arms stretching out as if across the river of Lethe itself, he seemed a man sunk in an irrevocable breakdown. Yet, the ghost had scarcely exited before the same mouth was pursed into a mocking moue and the arms produced a flamboyant shrug, sloughing off Horatio’s sympathy, the audience’s assumptions and the whole weight of Romantic tradition with a deliberately camp flourish. This was Hamlet without a throughline.




Many reviewers managed to choose certain elements out of this volatile mélange in order to write it back into the naturalistic tradition. But I would suggest that Rhys’ acting produced a vision of subjectivity as an unpredictable appropriation of multiple, sometimes contradictory social possibilities. This Prince of Denmark was one moment Ophelia’s tender lover, the next almost her giggly girlfriend, the next a frighteningly violent misogynist. Nicholas de Jongh described him as an unlikely hero who ‘never looks as if he could effectively wield a rapier let alone plunge it into human flesh’ (Evening Standard, 4 April 1999). Rhys’ Hamlet partook in the actor’s own deceptively fragile appearance; he also mocked the final duel fight’s formality with a series of parodic gestures. Still, he showed himself at last a very effective, and even brutal, fighter. In the play scene, similarly, the actor queered one of the most pivotal masculine images of Western thought: that of Christ Himself. Donning a crown of thorns, a girlish wig and an array of mincing gestures culturally inscribed as ‘feminine,’ he appropriated the role of the Crucified Lord. Because Rhys’ Hamlet was explicitly a devout Roman Catholic (genuflecting and lighting candles before his father’s tomb in the production’s prologue), the moment was complicated, simultaneously performing a parody of and an identification with the sacred. It threw up the paradoxes that inhere in Hamlet’s role, with its radical juxtapositions of masculinity and femininity, brutality and gentleness, martyrdom and iconoclasm. Moreover, it threw them up in a way that underlined their incoherence instead of occluding it. Boswell’s casting of Megan Dodds as Ophelia closely approximated that of Rhys as Hamlet. The characterization she offered was very different in style and impact from Rhys’ rendition of the Prince, but it began from a similar basis in what might be called ‘type-casting.’ Tall, slender, glacially blonde and porcelain lovely, Megan Dodds initially looked a very conventional Ophelia indeed. The surprise was that she cultivated stillness in a part that often sends actresses into Stanislavskian overdrive. De Jongh described her as ‘strait-laced,’ ‘an apparently cool, controlled girl.’ Throughout most of her earlier scenes she stood straight and composed, a veritable icon of feminine perfection that might have been equally at home—and equally silent—in the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries or on the cover of a 1999 issue of Vogue. Unlike Frances Barber’s feminist Ophelia in 1984, Dodds evinced no strong resistance to Polonius’ (Robin Soans’) dictatorial fathering or to Hamlet’s violent misogyny. Her economy of gesture emphasized Ophelia’s frozen obedience to patriarchal authority; the girl on stage seemed less an



Conclusion 195

individual graced with self-will than an exquisite masterpiece of social construction. R.S. White has remarked upon the ‘incompleteness in Ophelia’s personality’ which ‘tempts critics [and actors] to add some dimension’ (‘The Tragedy’ 41). Dodds did not succumb to the temptation. She held to her restraint even in her final scenes, refusing to psychologize or make sense of Ophelia’s sudden descent into madness. At Ophelia’s last appearance, she kept to a quiet, automaton-like repetition of the old gestures of feminine charm and submission. Her insanity appeared not as an expression of self or as a social transgression, but as the logical outcome of her entrapment within masculinist discourse. It opened up a critique of the fetishization of Ophelia’s insanity from within the very scenes whose familiarity encourages a simple reinscription of that fetishization. Her skirts saturated with water and mud, her hands full of dripping water weeds, Dodds’ exquisite, mad Ophelia was clearly always already condemned to death. Relating this performance to Rhys’, it became possible to evolve a reading of Boswell’s production as an intelligent critical engagement with Hamlet’s complex cultural history. Rhys and Dodds had both put on the livery of the characters constructed by Shakespeare’s early modern rhetoric and the four hundred years of cultural discourses that had accrued around them. Of course, Rhys could make a blazing show of histrionic agency; after all, his character was the one of whom Bloom writes, ‘the prince alone is real; the others, and all the action, constitute theatre’ (Shakespeare 13). Ophelia, a centuries-old emblem of feminine passivity and suffering, could conversely only appear as a beautiful cipher. The power of the male subject both to transform itself and to control the transformations of the female subject was clearly played out in the contrast between Rhys’ protean Hamlet and the Ophelia who so strictly kept up her feminine decorum. Because I read the production in this way, many of its features took on new significance for me. Devlin’s eclectic costumes, for example, did not seem to me to ‘float in time and space, suggesting universality’ (Bassett, Daily Telegraph, 9 April 1999). Rather, they drew attention to the relationship between history, gender and the very model of a canonical playtext. Privileged by their masculinity, their youthful iconoclasm and their association with ‘Shakespeare our Contemporary,’ Hamlet and Horatio could wear 1990s dress. The representatives of reigning male power, Claudius (Donald Sumpter) and Polonius, wore timeless court robes. Caught between both worlds, Christopher Bowen’s Laertes appeared in court dress in the early scenes only to return from Paris in




contemporary trousers and jumper. But the period costuming of Ophelia (like that of Suzanne Bertish’s frozen Gertrude, a displaced Edwardian) critiqued any suggested equivalence between Shakespeare’s era and our own, marking the imprisonment of the play’s women within painfully limiting, historically contingent images of femininity. By so clearly rehearsing the differences that have traditionally informed the representation of gender in Hamlet, did Boswell’s Hamlet finally reinscribe them? It would certainly be possible to read a kind of representational despair into its depictions of Hamlet and Ophelia. Crucially, however, Paul Rhys played a Hamlet who, for all the power built into his subject position, never quite managed either to hold together the contradictions inherent in his own identity or adequately to describe the nature of the women around him. The freedom associated with masculine identity allowed him to explore and even parody a number of personae. Equally, the freedom associated with playing Hamlet allowed Rhys to play with a huge range of cultural images, with his own abilities, and even with the text that had given rise to the whole situation in the first place. Still, Nicholas de Jongh wrote, his Hamlet remained a Prince who lacked ‘the right male stuff.’ Or rather, he was a Prince whose performances showed the ‘right male stuff’ undermining itself from within, morphing its way through roles that mocked it or abandoned it altogether. Thus, the very freedom that Hamlet’s—and Rhys’—masculine privilege bestowed on him served partially to deconstruct normative masculinity. The career of Dodds’ Ophelia, locked in on all sides by men who demanded her silence, chastity and obedience while presupposing the likelihood of her fall, likewise attested to the simultaneous power and inadequacy of masculinist discourse. Even as Ophelia buckled under the weight of summations like ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ (1.2.146), the careful decorum of the actress who played her made such terms seem inapplicable to the identity they so cruelly determined. The identity of a woman who conformed strictly to social demands on feminine behaviour ended by questioning the validity—and indicting the cruel power—of those demands. Similarly, in Rhys’ case, the identity of a man who clearly inhabited a masculine subject position bled disturbingly over the boundaries of that position. This was neither a reiteration of more or less naturalistic, coherent images of Hamlet and Ophelia, nor a demonstration of the power of normative gender discourses to limit agency and destroy coherence. Instead, it was a representation that played out the constant dialectic between these two alternatives. Rhys and Dodds represented the culturally overdetermined identities



Conclusion 197

of Hamlet and Ophelia in a complex and pleasurable way while still exposing the contradictions and constraints that inflect them. In a good example of cultural drag, actors who seemed completely subjected by the discursive power of the early modern roles they portrayed became ethical and social agents, inviting us to revise our notions of the complex negotiations by which we ourselves become both agents and subjects. As Boswell’s Hamlet shows, mise-en-scène ‘is not the staging of a supposed textual “potential” ’ (Pavis, Theatre 26). We cannot know the dramatic text as an autonomous, stable entity with clearly given meanings that a particular performance may or may not express; we can only know it as mediated through our own norms and the expectations to which they give rise. Nevertheless, performance ‘always implicitly invites a comparison of the textual discourse and the staging chosen to accompany (follow or proceed) the text’ (Pavis, Theatre 31). Rhys played a prince who is described both as ‘unmanly’ (1.2.94) and as ‘the courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,/Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state’ (3.1.152–3). The playtext constructs Hamlet first as an inadequate, then as an ideal, specimen of masculinity, and Rhys responded with a performance of radical juxtapositions and almost frightening energy. Ophelia, meanwhile, is the ‘rose of May’ (4.5.159) who ‘does not understand [her]self’ (1.3.96); hence, Dodds gave us a figure who, though exquisitely lovely, appeared to lack consciousness. In these instances, as in the others this book has offered, contemporary actors grapple with early modern constructions of gender inscribed in early modern playtexts as well as with the layers of interpretation that have accrued around these constructions. Their very efforts to occlude or mitigate, foreground or critique the gender norms inscribed in their roles suggest that such inscriptions continue to affect the shape of contemporary performance. The encounter between actors’ and texts’ systems of gender discourse remains a potentially productive site of cultural contradiction and exchange. In their use of the psychological realism that so dominated mainstream English and North American performance in the late twentieth century, productions such as Ron Daniels’ Hamlet, Bill Alexander’s Duchess of Malfi, Declan Donnellan’s Duchess of Malfi and Julie Taymor’s Titus may seem proof that contemporary appropriations of early modern texts merely authorize our own liberal ideas about subjectivity (not to mention our binary constructions of gender). Still, in all these cases the complex interplay between text and performance undermined, as well as reinscribed, those very binaries. Derek Jarman’s Edward II, Michael Boyd’s The Broken Heart and Katie Mitchell’s A Woman Killed with




Kindness, meanwhile, offer examples of the ways in which contemporary representational tactics can act in tandem with early modern playtexts to expose the processes of subjection and interpellation. We cannot afford simply to dismiss the political possibilities of contemporary classical performance, even if a great onus is placed upon the spectator if she is to uncover those possibilities. It remains important to read these representations in conjunction with the texts that inspired them, the institutions and modes of production that determine them, and the culture that watches and interprets them. In so doing, we encounter the historical contingency of our own processes of subjection and recognize the forces of transformation at work within even the most conservative cultural productions. Pavis reminds us that ‘mise en scène as a structural system exists only when received and reconstructed by a spectator from the production’ (Theatre 25). My companion at Boswell’s Hamlet, a longtime friend and feminist film scholar, read the production as I did; many of its critics did not. Different spectators will receive and reconstruct different systems of meaning from the same production. Throughout this study, the viewpoint has been that of a spectator with particular ideological commitments and particular ways of looking; spectators with other agendas might (and did) see the same productions differently. For the politically engaged spectator, even the most mainstream theatre and film can create productive encounters between historical and contemporary gender norms. Watching instances of cultural drag onstage, spectators can also practise it, remembering early modern constructions of gender even as they watch the playing out of contemporary ones and thus exploring the instability and contingency of both systems. In this way, they (like the actors they watch) can occupy the terms of gender that still abject men and women, and can transform them into sites of resistance. In Measure for Measure, Angelo is trying to seduce Isabella when he bids her Be that you are, That is, a woman; if you be more, you’re none. If you be one, as you are well expressed By all external warrants, show it now, By putting on the destined livery. (2.4.134–8) Spectators can be seduced in a similar way. They can be seduced into wearing the livery of dominant gender norms when they accept without



Conclusion 199

question the binary assumptions implicit in many contemporary representations of gender and sexuality. They can be seduced into wearing another kind of livery when they allow wholesale dismissals of social institutions and theatrical discourses to blind them to the productive contradictions that arise from within those sites of cultural meaning. Inevitably, some version or mixture of these two alternatives will inflect most, if not all, acts of spectatorship. Spectators cannot escape the subject positions into which they are interpellated by their societies any more than actors can. Just as Isabella can find no position in her society that frees her from the operations of discursive power, so we would be deceived to think that we (or the actors we watch on stage, or the characters they play) can ever put off the livery of normative gender altogether. After all, that livery is part of the process of subjection that allows us to read, to act, and to watch in the first place. Ophelia and Hamlet; Bosola and his Duchess; Titus and Lavinia; Isabella and Gaveston; Orgilus and Penthea; Anne and John Frankford: these cultural signifiers evoke a system of gender identification that destroys the very subjects it enables. But they can also help committed contemporary spectators to understand the complexity and fluidity of relationships within that system. Like dramatic characters, we as spectators are situated within a ‘fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency’ (Butler, Psychic Life 2). The survival of that discourse depends on its reiteration. Just as the tragic careers we watch on stage can perform repetitions that disrupt the systems that produced them, so our modes of watching can simultaneously repeat and disrupt the gender identifications that found us. If we practise cultural drag in order to recognize the excess of significance that marks every representation of gender, then perhaps we can discover ways of transforming the livery that we, as actors and spectators and as men and women, are always already destined to wear.




Casts, Production Teams and Opening Dates of Productions Discussed

I. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Royal Shakespeare Company. Opening performance: Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 5 September 1984

Main production team: Director Designer

Ron Daniels Maria Bjornson

Main cast (in alphabetical order): Ophelia Claudius Laertes Horatio Player 2 (Player Queen) Player 1 (Player King) Gertrude Polonius Hamlet

Frances Barber Brian Blessed Kenneth Branagh Nicholas Farrell Dexter Fletcher Bernard Horsfall Virginia McKenna Frank Middlemass Roger Rees

II. The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster. Royal Shakespeare Company. Opening performance: Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 6 December 1989


Bill Alexander Fotini Dimou 201



Appendix

202 Appendix

Duke Ferdinand The Cardinal Cariola Antonio Bologna Julia Daniel de Bosola The Duchess of Malfi

Bruce Alexander Russell Dixon Sally Edwards Mick Ford Patricia Kerrigan Nigel Terry Harriet Walter

III. The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster. Cheek By Jowl. Opening performances: Bury St. Edmunds, 19 September 1995 Wyndham’s Theatre, London, 2 January 1996


Declan Donnellan Nick Ormerod

Main cast (in alphabetical order): Daniel de Bosola The Cardinal Cariola Duke Ferdinand The Duchess of Malfi Antonio Bologna Julia

George Anton Paul Brennen Avril Clark Scott Handy Anastasia Hille Matthew Macfadyen Nicola Redmond

IV. Titus, based on Titus Andronicus, by William Shakespeare. Motion Picture. Opened (United States): 11 February 2000 (General Release)

Main production team: Director Producers Director of Photography Editing Production Design Costume Design Music

Julie Taymor Conchita Airoldi Jody Patton Luciano Tovoli Françoise Bonnot Dante Ferretti Milena Canonero Elliot Goldenthal



Main cast (in alphabetical order):

Appendix

203

Saturninus Lavinia Titus Andronicus Young Lucius Tamora Aaron Chiron Demetrius

Alan Cumming Laura Fraser Anthony Hopkins Osheen Jones Jessica Lange Harry Lennix Jonathan Rhys Meyers Matthew Rhys

V. Edward II, by Christopher Marlowe. Motion Picture. Opened (United Kingdom): 15 October 1991

Main production team: Director Producer Director of Photography Editing Production Design Costume Design

Derek Jarman Steve Clark-Hall Ian Wilson George Ankers Christopher Hobbs Sandy Powell

Main cast (in alphabetical order): Lightborn Prince Edward/Edward III Spencer Queen Isabella Mortimer Piers Gaveston King Edward II

Kevin Collins Jody Garber John Lynch Tilda Swinton Nigel Terry Andrew Tiernan Steven Waddington

IV. The Broken Heart, by John Ford. Royal Shakespeare Company. Opening performance: Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 19 October 1994


Michael Boyd Tom Piper




204 Appendix

Ithocles Crotolon Philema Penthea Orgilus Prophilus Euphrania Christalla Bassanes Calantha

Robert Bowman Tony Britton Julia Crane Emma Fielding Iain Glen William Houston Elaine Pyke Fiona Tong Philip Voss Olivia Williams

V. A Woman Killed with Kindness, by Thomas Heywood. Royal Shakespeare Company. Opening performance: The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, 29 October 1991


Katie Mitchell Vicki Mortimer

Main cast (in alphabetical order): Sir Charles Mountford Susan Mountford Wendoll John Frankford Nick Sir Francis Acton Anne Frankford Jenkin

Jonathan Cullen Sylvestra le Touzel Barry Lynch Michael Maloney Sean Murray Valentine Pelka Saskia Reeves Kenn Sabberton

VI. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Young Vic Theatre in Association with the Theatre Royal, Plymouth. Opening performance: Young Vic Theatre, London, 7 April 1999


Laurence Boswell Es Devlin




Appendix

205

Gertrude Laertes Ophelia Horatio Hamlet Polonius Claudius/The Ghost

Suzanne Bertish Christopher Bowen Megan Dodds Richard Lintern Paul Rhys Robin Soans Donald Sumpter




Introduction: The Destined Livery? Tragedy, Performance, Subject and Spectator 1. Although these two terms can convey distinct and historically specific meanings (Escolme 12), I use them interchangeably in this study, for, as Patrice Pavis notes, both indicate ‘a shared desire to represent and imitate reality onstage as faithfully as possible,’ and in both ‘acting makes the text appear natural, downplaying literary and rhetorical effects, by stressing its spontaneous and psychological aspects’ (Dictionary 302).

1 What we are, but not what we may be: the feminist Ophelia and the (Re)production of gender 1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. T.J.B. Spencer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980): Act 3, Scene 1, line 89. All further references to the playtext will be to this edition.

2 An actor in the main of all: individual and relational selves in The Duchess of Malfi 1. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown (London: Methuen, 1964): Act IV, Scene ii, line 264. All further references to the playtext will be to this edition. 2. The other productions in question are: Adrian Noble’s celebrated 1980 production at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, with Helen Mirren as the Duchess, Bob Hoskins as Bosola and Mike Gwilym as Ferdinand; Philip Prowse’s 1985 staging for the National Theatre, in which Eleanor Bron played the Duchess, Ian McKellen played Bosola and Jonathan Hyde played Ferdinand; and the 1995 Greenwich Theatre production later seen at Wyndham’s Theatre, directed by Philip Franks and starring Juliet Stevenson as the Duchess, Robert Glenister as Bosola and Simon Russell Beale as Ferdinand. None of these productions are easily viewable on archive video; in order to keep an equal methodological relationship to all the productions I discuss, I have focused on Alexander’s and Donnellan’s productions, which are available in this format. 3. In the performance recorded by the archival video in the Theatre Museum, London, she retained her long evening gloves and a pair of French knickers. 206



Notes

Notes 207

1. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (Arden Shakespeare; London and New York: Routledge, 1995): Act 1, Scene 1, Line 116. All further references to the playtext will be to this edition.

4 ‘Let Me Forget Myself’: what a queen is good for in Edward II 1. Referred to in the notes hereafter as QEII, while Marlowe’s Edward II is referred to as EII. I use this citation format in order to make the relationship between the two texts as clear as possible. 2. The lines, somewhat modified, are taken from Marlowe’s Edward II, Scene xvii, lines 10–14: ‘And Edward, thou art one among them all, / Whose looseness hath betrayed thy land to spoil / And made the channels overflow with blood. / Of thine own people patron shouldst thou be, / But thou –.’ All citations from Marlowe’s Edward II in this chapter are taken from the edition by Martin Wiggins and Robert Lindsey (London: A & C Black, 1997).

5 Death and the married maiden: gender reproduction as destruction in The Broken Heart 1. John Ford, The Broken Heart, ed. T.J.B. Spencer (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1980): Act 3, Scene 5, lines 74–79. All further references to the playtext will be to this edition.

6 Tricked like a bride: a new traffic in A Woman Killed with Kindness 1. Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, ed. Brian Scobie (London: New Mermaids, 1985): Prologue, lines 3–4. All further references to the playtext will be to this edition. 2. I would like to thank Dr Martin Wiggins and the late Doreen Brockbank for having brought this sensory aspect of the experience of Mitchell’s production to my attention. 3. This is Q1 (1607); the 1617 quarto reads, ‘my mistress is a ——’ 4. The badge is dimly visible on Frankford’s (Michael Maloney’s) breast in Figure 8; other production photos, which could not be reproduced here for copyright reasons, display it more clearly.



3 The natural father and the imaginary daughter: patriarchy as realism and representation in Titus

I. Archival materials consulted by production Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Ron Daniels, RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1984. Archival video recording, prompt-book, production photographs held by the Shakespeare Centre, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon. The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster. Directed by Bill Alexander, RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1989. Archival video recording, prompt-book, production photographs held by the Shakespeare Centre, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon. The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster. Directed by Declan Donnellan, Cheek By Jowl, Touring and Wyndham’s Theatre, London, 1995–96. Archival video recording held by the Theatre Museum (Covent Garden), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Edward II, by Christopher Marlowe. Motion Picture. Directed by Derek Jarman, Miramax, 1991. Video recording, publicity material, costume and set designs, shooting script and film stills held by the British Film Institute, London. The Broken Heart, by John Ford. Directed by Michael Boyd, RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1994. Archival video recording, prompt-book, production photographs held by the Shakespeare Centre, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon. A Woman Killed with Kindness, by Thomas Heywood. Directed by Katie Mitchell, RSC, The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1991. Archival video recording, prompt-book, production photographs held by the Shakespeare Centre, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon.

II. Reviews cited by production Hamlet, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Ron Daniels, RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 1984. Barber, John. ‘A Complex Hamlet.’ Daily Telegraph, 7 September 1984. Billington, Michael. ‘A Prince to Watch.’ Guardian, 7 September 1984. Lloyd Evans, Gareth. ‘Exciting Familiar Expectations.’ Stratford 14 September 1984. Peter, John. ‘Prince in Torment.’ Sunday Times, 9 September 1984. Ratcliffe, Michael. ‘Itching with Wit.’ Observer, 9 September 1984.

Herald,

208



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230



Index

Brooks, Louise, 103 Brown, Georgina, 194 Burbage, Richard, 57 Butler, Judith, 6, 17–20, 26, 47–8, 103, 106, 120, 122, 130–2, 141–3, 174, 191–2, 200 Buzzacott, Martin, 4 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 155 Cabaret, M.C. in, 76, 88 Callaghan, Dympna, 10, 12, 21, 115, 118 camp, 89, 126, 128–9 Caravaggio, Virgin of Loreto (painting), 76 Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 87 Cartelli, Thomas, 116, 123, 134 Case, Sue-Ellen, 2, 10 Chaplin, Charlie, 71 Charnes, Linda, 131 chastity, 3, 36, 58–9, 113, 141, 158, 172, 180, 197 Chedgzoy, Kate, 112–3, 116 Cheek by Jowl, 14, 25, 56, 60, 69 Christianity, 75–6, 78, 104, 166, 168, 195 Clapp, Susannah, 193 Clark, Avril, 71 class, 6, 15, 22, 24, 57, 67–70, 72–3, 75, 78, 82, 114, 121, 123–4, 132, 143, 150, 151, 163–4, 165, 167, 169, 174 Cleaver, Robert, A Godly Form of Household, 10 Cleto, Fabio, 126 Collins, Kevin, 127 Collins, Wilkie, The Woman in White, 121 Comensoli, Viviana, 166, 182–4, 186, 188 compulsory heterosexuality, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 112, 122, 192 conduct manuals, 10–12, 22, 62, 65, 80–1, 114, 139, 146, 155, 169–70, 182 Corman, Roger, The Tomb of Ligeia, 121 Coryate, Thomas, 9

231

costume, 3, 11, 30–1, 33–4, 38, 41–2, 50, 52–4, 60, 63, 64, 71–72, 76, 84, 87, 88, 90, 93, 101, 103, 104, 111, 116, 117, 120, 121–3, 124–5, 127, 134, 136, 144, 145–6, 147, 153, 159, 163, 167, 172, 177, 193–200 see also modern dress Coursen, H.R., 72 Crawford, Joan, 128–9 Crouch, Kristin, 137 Cullen, Jonathan, 163, 171, 172, 174, 180, 189 cultural drag, 192–200 Cumming, Alan, 88–91, 126 curtsey, 35, 52, 170, 173 Cusack, Sinead, 14, 44 Cutler, Anna, 160 Cymbeline, see Shakespeare, W. dance, 143–4, 148, 156, 157– 9 Daniels, Ron, 35, 30–54, 57, 69, 81, 93, 113, 170, 193, 198 Danson, Lawrence, 118 Dante Alighieri, 76 d’Aragon, Giovanna, Duchess of Amalfi, 58–9 daughters, 22, 34–5, 95, 101–8 Davies, Howard, 44 Davis, Bette, 60–1 Davril, R., 153 Dawson, Anthony B, 12, 16, 32 death, 1–2, 16, 22, 24, 66, 69, 73–80, 82, 101, 105, 125, 132, 136– 8, 152, 157–162, 163, 165, 183–7, 196 Deats, Sarah Munson, 115, 120, 123–4, 130 de Jongh, Nicholas, 61, 154, 195, 197 de Lauretis, Teresa, 191 Denford, Antonia , 172–3 desire, 12, 24, 33, 37, 45, 59, 68–9, 114, 116, 130, 140, 142, 143, 174–5 Dessen, Alan C., 102 Detmer-Goebel, Emily, 86 Devlin, Es, 193, 196 Diamond, Elin, 20 DiGangi, Mario, 114



Index

direct address, 16, 94–5, 98, 189–90 Dixon, Russell, 60 Doane, Mary Ann, 103–4, 128 Dodds, Megan, 193–8 Dolan, Jill, 2, 4, 45 Donnellan, Declan, 14, 25, 56–7, 60–2, 67–82, 93, 198, 206 drag, 18, 88, 191–200 Dreher, Diane, 33 dress, 3, 6, 47, 78, 88–9, 92, 121–3, 156, 169 see also costume; drag Duchess of Malfi, The, see Webster, John Duffy, Eamon, 155 Dumas, Alexander, fils, Camille, 44 Edward II, see Jarman, Derek; Marlowe, Christopher Edward VIII, 61 Edwardes, Jane, 56, 78 Edwards, Sally, 64 Escolme, Bridget, 16, 21, 189, 206 Farr, Dorothy M., 150 Farrell, Nicholas, 43 fascism, 61, 88–9, 111 fasting, see anorexia; self-starvation feminism, 2, 4–5, 5–6, 15, 17, 22, 25, 30–1, 49, 105–6, 116, 128–9, 130, 160, 170, 173, 199 Feore, Colm, 104 Fetterly, Judith, 32 Fielding, Emma, 136, 137, 144–62, 186–7 Fiennes, Joseph, 5 film vs stage, 45–6, 84, 94–5, 99–100, 102–8, 116, 117–8, 121, 122–6, 127–9, 132, 133–5 Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha, 85 Finley, Karen, 15 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 20 Fletcher, Dexter, 51–4 Flynn, Jerome, 121 Ford, John, 25, 81, 164 The Broken Heart, 1–2, 25, 136–62, 164, 165, 170–1, 174, 183, 186, 190, 198, 200, 207 Ford, Mick, 60, 63–5, 69, 71, 82

Forker, Charles, 55–6 Foss, Roger, 154 Foucault, Michel, 7, 67, 173 Fox-Davies, Jacqueline, 42–3 Frain, James, 88 Franklin, Aretha, 6–7 Fraser, Laura, 84–5, 95, 101, 103–8, 123, 128 Franks, Philip, 206 Frega, Donnalee, 156 Freud, Sigmund, 96, 193 Fumerton, Patricia, 174 Galen, 12 Garbo, Greta, 60 Garner, Shirley, 37 Gay, Penny, 13 gaze, see male gaze Gems, Pam, 44 gender, 1, 2–3, 4, 13, 17–20, 22, 65, 78, 107, 113, 121, 123–4, 132, 133, 137, 152, 163–5, 166, 191, 198 gender binarism, 2–3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 15, 18, 20, 24, 25, 41, 46, 47, 49, 51–4, 55, 57, 70, 72, 73, 82, 84, 85, 113, 107, 112, 125, 162, 191–2, 198, 199–200 gender essentialism, 3, 6, 17, 47, 62, 75, 81, 128–9, 134 gesture, 18, 23, 32–3, 34, 35, 36, 37–8, 39, 43, 49–50, 52–3, 54, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 69, 71, 74, 83–4, 87, 89, 91, 92, 94, 101, 106–7, 116, 117, 121, 122, 124–5, 127, 132, 133, 134, 135, 144, 148, 152, 154, 156, 159, 172, 177–8, 181–2, 183, 185, 187, 188–9, 194, 195 see also curtsey Giannechi, Gabrielle, 189 Gielgud, John, 68 Glen, Iain, 136, 140–1, 148–9, 157 Glenister, Robert, 206 Goethe, J.W. von, 48 Sorrows of Young Werther, 193 Goldberg, Jonathan, 118–9 Goodman, Lizbeth, 2, 44, 129 Gosson, Stephen, 11



232 Index

Index

Haber, Judith, 65 Haec Vir, 47, 92 Hall, Peter, 31 Hamilton, Sharon, 145, 149–50 Hancock, Brecken Rose, 100 Handy, Scott, 67–70, 82 Helms, Lorraine, 37 Henderson, Andrea, 73 Henderson, Diane E., 166, 181, 189–90 Henderson, Katherine Usher, 47 Hepburn, Audrey, 129 Heywood, Thomas, 25, 51–2 A Woman Killed with Kindness, 1–2, 25, 163–90, 198–9, 200, 207 Hille, Anastasia, 60–2, 67–80, 82 Hilliard, Nicholas, Young Man Among Roses (miniature painting), 174 Hillman, Richard, 41 Hirschorn, Clive, 154, 186–7 Hitler, Adolf, 89 Hodgdon, Barbara, 15–6, 22, 24 Holden, Stephen, 84, 88, 104–5 Holdsworth, R.V., 36 Holland, Peter, 23–4, 45–6, 159 Holmes, Jonathan, 16 homosexuality, 1, 7, 11–12, 15, 18–19, 111–17, 123–6, 131, 133 Hopkins, Anthony, 83–4, 87–99, 102, 106–8 Hopkins, Lisa, 21, 56, 155 Horsfall, Bernard, 53 Hoskins, Bob, 206 Hospitall of Incurable Fooles, The, 39–40 Housman, A.E., 193 Houston, William, 140, 145

Huebert, Ronald, 184–5 Huffer, Lynne, 130 Hughes, Arthur, 29 Hyde, Jonathan, 206 incest, 68–70 interpellation, 8, 107, 113, 120, 124, 132, 133, 199, 200 Irigaray, Luce, 29, 184 Irving, Henry, 50 Jackson, Glenda, 31 Jackson, Henry, 52, 105–6 Jackson, Russell, 30 Jacobi, Derek, 80 Jankowski, Theodora, 58 Jardine, Lisa, 10, 46, 53, 58 Jarman, Derek, Edward II (film), 25, 111–35, 137, 167, 198, 207; War Requiem (film), 117, 135 See also Marlowe, Edward II Jones, Emrys, 63 Jones, Osheen, 87 Kahn, Coppelia, 86, 93 Kathman, David, 12 Kaufmann, R.J., 137 Keeler, Christine, 128 Kehler, Dorotea, 93, 96 Kelly, Grace, 103, 106 Kerrigan, William, 41 Kidnie, Margaret Jane, 11–12 King Lear, see Shakespeare, W. King’s Men, 57 kinship, 24, 33–5, 55–7, 59, 61, 67–70, 74, 75, 84–91, 92–108, 119, 138–40, 150–1, 158, 163, 172, 179–80 Kosintsev, Grigori, 41 Kott, Jan, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 196 Kray brothers, 123 Lacan, Jacques, 31–2 Lady and the Unicorn (tapestry), 195 Lamb, Charles, 158 Lange, Jessica, 84, 88, 93–7, 105–8 Lapworth, Paul, 167



Gouge, William, Of Domesticall Duties, 11, 182 Graber, Jody, 134 Granville-Barker, Harley, 10, 13 Gray, John, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, 6 Greenwich Theatre, 206 Guazzo, Stefano, Civil Conversation, 80–1 Gutierrez, Nancy, 156, 166, 185–6 Gwilym, Mike, 206

233

laughter, 34, 36, 60, 64, 66, 67, 71, 78, 98, 124, 126, 140, 152, 180 Leggatt, Alexander, 99, 102, 106, 108 Lemmon, Jack, 125 Lennix, Harry, 84, 87, 97–9, 107–8 le Touzel, Sylvestra, 163, 172–3, 180, 183 Leverenz, David, 37, 40, 49 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 172 Levine, Laura, 11–12 Liebler, Naomi Conn, 21 Lindroth, Mary, 104 Lindsey, Robert, 207 Lintern, Richard, 193 Lloyd-Webber, Andrew, Evita, 111–2, 126, 127 Lord Admiral’s Men, 5 Lorde, Audre, 131 Lowin, John, 57 Luckhurst, Mary, 189 Luckyj, Christina, 79 Lynch, Barry, 164, 175 Lynch, John, 123 McAdam, Ian, 131 Macaulay, Alastair, 68, 77, 194 Macbeth, see Shakespeare, W. MacCabe, Colin, 111, 116, 121, 131 McCabe, Richard, 68 McCandless, David, 16, 17, 84, 92, 96, 102, 103, 104, 106 McEwan, Geraldine, 97 McFarlane, Brian, 116 Macfadyen, Matthew, 61, 71–3, 82 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 118, 121–2 McKellen, Ian, 206 McKenna, Virginia, 42 Mackie, Lindsay, 129 McLuskie, Kathleen, 12, 52, 68, 73, 165, 166, 182, 184 McManus, Barbara F., 47 MacSween, Morag, 155 madness, 1–2, 22, 24, 29–30, 31, 35–6, 39–44, 45–6, 75, 79, 91, 106, 152–7, 196 make–up, 76, 88, 90, 93, 111, 122, 125, 134, 172, 191 male gaze, 1, 2, 24, 36, 37, 40, 60, 72, 103, 105, 136, 153, 174–8, 190

Maloney, Michael, 164, 170, 171, 175, 181–2, 185, 187, 207 Marlowe, Christopher, 7 Edward II, 1–2, 25, 111–35, 137, 143, 164, 200, 206 marriage, 1, 11, 22, 24, 32, 56–66, 72, 92–3, 115, 122–4, 132, 136–62, 163–90 masculinism, 7, 8, 10, 29, 36, 38, 45–6, 53, 57, 59, 63, 65–6, 73, 75, 84, 107, 112–4, 117, 119–20, 122, 123, 130, 137, 141, 143, 152, 158, 160, 163–4, 166–70, 173, 174, 179, 182–3, 187, 192, 196, 197 Maxwell, J.C., 152 Mazer, Cary M., 23 Measure for Measure, see Shakespeare, W. Melrose, Susan, 160 Mendes, Sam, 88 Messier, Max, 88 Metz, Christian, 105 Middlemass, Frank, 34–6 Middleton, Thomas, 57 Millais, John Everett, 29 Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman, 21 Miller, Jonathan, 43 Mirren, Helen, 41, 206 misogyny, 10–11, 37, 59, 65, 67, 68, 78, 93, 111–3, 116–7, 121–2, 127–9, 131, 141, 143, 147, 149, 158–9, 195 Mitchell, Katie, 25, 163–90, 198–9, 207 modern dress, 61, 71–2, 76, 88, 90, 91, 103, 111–2, 121, 122–6, 129, 167, 193, 196–7 Monroe, Marilyn, in Seven Year Itch, 103, 106 Moore, Oscar, 116 Morris, Wesley, 84, 89 motherhood, 22, 32, 59, 62, 92, 93, 96–7, 120, 132, 141 Mulvey, Laura, 103, 174 Munday, Antony, 11



234 Index

murder, 1, 55–6, 58, 68, 73, 82, 86, 88, 90, 94–5, 97, 101, 121, 127–8, 157, 163 Murray, David, 160 Murray, Sean, 168, 177–8, 185–6 Mussolini, Benito, 89 naturalistic performance, 13–17, 19, 20–1, 25, 72–3, 75–6, 78, 83–4, 93, 99, 107, 108, 112, 165, 167–8, 188–9, 190, 193–8, 206 Nechak, Paula, 89 Newman, Karen, 173 Nicoll, Allardyce, 21 Nightingale, Benedict, 61, 67–8, 137–8, 167, 186, 193–4 Noble, Adrian, 44, 206 Normington, Katie, 187 Of the State of Matrimony, 32 O’Pray, Michael, 116, 117, 126, 129, 132 Osborne, Charles, 63, 78 Othello, see Shakespeare, William Overbury, Thomas, Characters, 81 Ovid, 101 Pabst, G.W. Pandora’s Box, 103 Painter, William, The Palace of Pleasure, 58–9 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 5, 191 Panek, Jennifer, 166, 185 patriarchy, 4, 7, 18, 34, 83–108, 112, 166, 169, 182, 185, 195 Pavis, Patrice, 198–9, 206 Pearson, Jacqueline, 78 Pelka, Valentine, 163, 180 performativity, 4, 17–21, 24, 25, 72, 73, 85, 112–3, 124, 130, 132–4, 137 vs performance, 19 Perkins, William, Christian Oeconomy, 169–70 Peter, John, 68, 72, 193 Petrarch, 101 Philip, Ranjini, 35 politically engaged spectator, 2, 4–5, 9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 20, 24, 25, 43, 49, 50, 53, 72, 76, 78,

235

81, 82, 101, 102, 113, 116, 122–3, 127, 129, 130, 131, 135, 154, 161, 173, 183, 193, 199 primogeniture, 7, 84–6, 89 props, 38, 43, 54, 64, 75, 87, 97, 98, 103–4, 129, 132, 188–9, 194 Prowse, Philip, 206 Pyke, Elaine, 140–1 Queer Edward II, 207 see also Jarman, Edward II Rackin, Phyllis, 9, 10–11 rape, 1, 86, 91, 95, 101–3, 105, 107, 147–9, 182 realism, see naturalistic performance Rees, Roger, 25, 30, 37–8, 49–54 Reeves, Saskia, 164, 170, 171, 173, 175, 177–8, 181–2, 185–7, 189 Rhys, Matthew, 91 Rhys, Paul, 193–8 Rhys-Meyers, Jonathan, 91 Rivière, Joan, 94, 128, 130 Roach, Joseph, 17 Robertson, Pamela, 126, 128 Roman Catholicism, 155, 167, 186, 195 Romeo and Juliet, see Shakespeare, W. Rose, Mary Beth, 66, 74–5, 182 Rosenberg, Marvin, 31, 33–4 Rowley, William, 57 Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), 83 Royal Exchange, Manchester, 206 Royal National Theatre, 206 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), 3, 14–15, 25, 30, 31, 41, 56, 62, 136, 163, 164, 189 RSC Women’s Project, 44 Rubin, Gayle, 49 Rutter, Carol, 12–13, 14, 16, 24, 44, 46 St. George, Andrew, 167–8 Salgado, Galmini, 52, 105 Salkeld, Duncan, 41 Sandys, George, 9 Sansom, Ian, 60–1, 71 Sato, Yumi, 62, 63 Sawicki, Jana, 7, 67, 187



Index

Schafer, Elizabeth, 67, 147, 156, 161 Scobie, Brian, 207 seduction, 1, 3, 175–8, 199–200 self-starvation, 1, 154–6 183–7 see also anorexia sexual commodity, woman as, see traffic in women Shakespeare, Mary (née Arden), 11 Shakespeare William, 24, 164 Cymbeline, 44 Hamlet, 1–2, 25, 29–54, 55, 57, 69, 81, 85, 89, 93, 113, 115, 141, 143, 153–4, 169, 170, 193–200, 206 King Lear, 69, 193 Macbeth, 14, 44, 93 Measure for Measure, 3, 14, 17, 146, 199 Othello, 21, 52, 105–6 Romeo and Juliet, 5, 8, 9, 71, 191 Titus Andronicus, 1–2, 14, 25, 83–108, 113, 120, 143, 147, 169, 200, 207 Troilus and Cressida, 44 Twelfth Night, 13, 71 Shakespeare in Love (John Madden), 5–9, 191–3 Shell, Alison, 155 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 193 Showalter, Elaine, 31 Shrimpton, Nicholas, 30, 43, 49 Sicily, women performers in, 9 Simpson, Wallis, 61 Sinfield, Alan, 166 Smith, Bruce R., 12, 91, 114 Smith, Molly, 68 Smith, Peter J., 71–2 Soans, Robin, 195 Solomon, Alisa, 4, 174 songs, 40–4, 143, 153, 160–1, 168, 187, 188 Sontag, Susan, 126 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 21 Souleymane, Bah, 97 Spencer, T.J.B., 142, 206, 207 Split Britches, 15 Stallybrass, Peter, 12, 78–9, 169

Stanislavski, Konstantin, 13–18, 25, 31, 44–5, 75, 80, 93, 95, 98, 112, 167, 189, 195 starvation, see anorexia; self-starvation Stevenson, Juliet, 44, 206 stoicism, 64–5, 89–90, 137, 164 Stoker, Bram, 46 Dracula, 122 Stone, Lawrence, 139 Stoppard, Tom, 5 The Invention of Love, 193 Stubbes, Philip, 11–12, 146 Styan, J.L., 13 Sumpter, Donald, 196 Swinton, Tilda, 111–3, 116–35, 137 Tarantino, Quentin, 56 Taylor, Charles, 104–5 Taylor, Paul, 67, 75, 78, 193 Taymor, Julie, 14, 25, 128 Titus (film), 14, 83–108, 121–3, 126, 167, 170, 198 See also Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus Terry, Ellen, 50 Terry, Nigel, 76–8, 80–1, 122, 128 Thatcher, Margaret, 129 Threadgold, Terry, 6–7 Thurn, David H., 131 Tiernan, Andrew, 122–7 Tilney, Edmund, The Flower of Friendship, 10, 114 Tinker, Jack, 136 Titus Andronicus, see Shakespeare, W. Toporkov, Vasily Osipovich, 44–5 traffic in women, 24, 34, 40, 44, 86, 129, 139, 148, 163–90 tragic hero, 21, 22, 56–7, 61–2, 65, 67, 70, 75, 79, 80, 82 Troilus and Cressida, see Shakespeare, W. Twelfth Night, see Shakespeare, W. Tyson, Cathy, 42 Uglow, Jennifer, 68, 73 Venice, women performers in, 9 Vertinskaya, Anastasia, 41 Vining, Edward P., 49



236 Index

virginity, 1, 29, 34, 37, 86, 103, 138–9, 142, 148 virgin-whore dichotomy, 36–7, 41, 141, 148, 168, 180 Vives, Juan Luis, The Instruction of a Christian Woman, 155 Vogue, 195 Voss, Philip, 147 Waddington, Steven, 111, 116–17 Waith, Eugene M., 151 Walker, Greg, 144, 151 Walter, Harriet, 44, 59–67, 69, 73–6, 78–82 Wardle, Irving, 167 Warren, Roger, 33–4, 42 Webster, John, 24, 164 The Duchess of Malfi, 1–2, 25, 55–82, 85, 93, 113, 115, 143, 198, 200, 206 Weedon, Chris, 8 Weil, Judith, 118, 121 Wells, Stanley, 102 Werner, Sarah, 2–4, 15, 31, 44 Whately, William, 62, 170

237

Whigham, Frank, 55–6, 68 White, R.S., 196 widowhood, 1, 32, 58, 60 Wiggins, Martin, 80, 118–9, 207 Wilder, Billy, Some Like It Hot, 125 Williams, Olivia, 144–5, 157–9 Williams, Raymond, 21, 67 Willis, Deborah, 92, 95 Wilson, Ian, 128 Winslet, Kate, 45–6 Woman Killed with Kindness, A, see Heywood Woodbridge, Linda, 56, 65 Woodward, Sarah, 42 Worthen, W.B., 15–17, 19, 46, 47, 73, 107, 131–2 Wright, Louis B., 165 Wright, Nicholas, Cressida, 10 Wu, Empress of China, 129 Wymer, Rowland, 149 Young Vic, 25, 193, 194 Zelevinsky, Vladimir, 104–5



Index

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Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000: The Destined Livery

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From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World)

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