Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance DramaBy examining representations of women on stage and in the many printed materials aimed at them, Karen Newman shows how female subjectivity—both the construction of the gendered subject and the ideology of women's subjection to men—was fashioned in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Her emphasis is not on "women" so much as on the category of "femininity" as deployed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through the critical lens of poststructuralism, Newman reads anatomies, conduct and domesticity handbooks, sermons, homilies, ballads, and court cases to delineate the ideologies of femininity they represented and produced. Arguing that drama, as spectacle, provides a peculiarly useful locus for analyzing the management of femininity, Newman considers the culture of early modern London to reveal how female subjectivity was fashioned and staged in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and others. |
Contents
Marriage in Early Modern England | 13 |
THREE Renaissance Family Politics and Shakespeares Taming of the Shrew | 33 |
Sorciographics | 51 |
Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello | 71 |
le tiers exclu and Shakespeares Henry V | 95 |
Sartorial Extravagance in Early Modern London | 109 |
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African Arbella Stuart audience behavior Best's Bianca binary Cambridge CHAPTER claims conduct books critical CROWN CONJUGAL cucking stool cultural David Underdown Derrida Desdemona desire discourses drama dress E. P. Thompson early modern England early seventeenth economy Elizabethan and Jacobean English witchcraft Epicoene ETHIOP WHITE exhorted fashion father female body femininity Feminism feminist figures Freud gender Greenblatt handkerchief Henry historians husband Iago Ideology Jacobean Jonathan Dollimore Jonson Kate Kate's Katherine Lady language late sixteenth linguistic literary London Louis Montrose Macbeth male marriage Methuen miscegenation monstrous mother Nancy Vickers NOTES TO PAGES Othello patriarchal Petruchio's play play's produced psychoanalysis punished quoted reading relations Renaissance repre representation represented rhetorical Rosyer's Rymer scene seventeenth century sexual difference Shakespeare Shrew skimmington social speech starch status Stephen Greenblatt Steven Mullaney Taming texts theory Thomas tion transgression Underdown University Press WASH THE ETHIOP wife witchcraft wives woman women York