Deanne Williams

Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Girls Included! 1. Peevish and Perverse 2. Isabelle de France, Child Bride 3. Enter Ofelia playing on a lute 4. Lost Girls 5. A Dancing Princess 6. The Lady and Comus 7. My Lady Rachells book 8. Perpetual Girlhood in The Concealed Fancies Conclusion: Girlhood After Shakespeares Heroines

What Chaucer Did to Shakespeare: Books and Bodkins in Hamlet and The Tempest

This article is less concerned with what Shakespeare did to Chaucer than with what Chaucer did to Shakespeare: that is, how the experience of reading Chaucer, in certain cultural and bibliographical contexts, engaged Shakespeare throughout his career, not only providing sources but provoking his imagination. Like so many of his sources and inspirations, Chaucers poetry came to Shakespeare not as a performative tradition but as a published book. We take a close look at Thomas Speghts 1598 volume, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, reprinted in 1602, the only edition to appear in Shakespeares lifetime. And we examine, in particular, Chaucers treatment of the death of Julius Caesar in the Monks Tale, in order to show how Chaucers handling of this political assassination provoked Shakespeares exploration of this subject in his own Julius Caesar, as well as in Hamlet and The Tempest.

Introduction: The Afterlives of Ophelia

In the decades since Elaine Showalter’s groundbreaking essay “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism” appeared in 1985, Shakespeare’s probably most famous — or notorious — character’s representational life has witnessed even greater expansion.1 Building on what was already, by the mid-1980s, a substantial “afterlife” of the character, Ophelia’s name has been lent to countless more consumer products beyond those enumerated by Carol Solomon Kiefer in her catalogue for the 2001 exhibition The Myth and Madness of Ophelia and by Showalter herself, including the notable example of the Cannon Mills floral bedding named “Ophelia.”2 Between the sheets, since the mid-1980s Ophelia has also acquired an emancipated, Western-style sex life in films by Kenneth Branagh (1996) and Michael Almereyda (2000), her on-screen romances with Hamlet elaborated in titillating bedroom scenes that reveal her liberation from early modern patriarchal constraints on virginity. Plays and novels taking a sensationalist approach to the same topic have been written in her name (The Secret Love-Life of Ophelia); her rather more chaste and innocent girlhood story told; her French face profiled; her neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian, expressionist, surrealist, symbolist, modernist, cubist, postmodernist iterations depicted in the plastic arts; and her avatar created by online Ophelias to fit the “sim skin” of virtual reality communities.3

Incapable and Shallow Innocents: Mourning Shakespeare's Children in Richard III and The Winter's Tale

Since what I am to say must be but that Which contradicts my accusation and The testimony on my part no other But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me To say “not guilty:” mine integrity Being counted falsehood, shall, as I express it, Be so received. But thus: if powers divine Behold our human actions, as they do, I doubt not then but innocence shall make False accusation blush and tyranny Tremble at patience.

Peevish and Perverse

The distinctive and dynamic concept of girlhood in Shakespeare’s early plays reflects the multiple definitions of the word “girl” available in the early modern period. According to the Middle English Dictionary, the term “girl” had a history of being used for boys as well as girls. But equivalents for “girl” in John Florio’s A World of Words (1598) and Randle Cotgrave’s A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (1611) associate it with sexual license as well as service: “wench,” “harlot,” “wanton,” “minx,” “strumpet,” and “trull.” And Samuel Johnson’s definition of “girl” as “female child, or young woman” conveys the sense that girlhood occupies a liminal space between childhood and adulthood.1

Perpetual Girlhood in The Concealed Fancies

The Civil War years condemned the Cavendish sisters, Lady Jane Cavendish (1621–1669) and her sister, Lady Elizabeth Brackley (1626–1663), to a kind of protracted girlhood.1 Daughters of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle (1592–1676), and Elizabeth Bassett (d. 1643), they wrote their play, The Concealed Fancies, in captivity. Their home, Welbeck Abbey, had been surrendered to Parliamentary troops on 2 August 1644, and their father and brother, who had fought with the Royalist forces, were living in exile in Paris after facing defeat at the battle of Marston Moor in July, 1644. A dramatic roman a clef, with the courtship and marriage of Luceny and Tattiney representing Jane and Elizabeth, The Concealed Fancies explores the experiences of political change and personal challenge that the sisters faced.2 Through the characters of Lord Calsindow and Lady Tranquillity, they address their anxieties about their father’s courtship of Margaret Lucas, soon to be Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) (Figure 8.1), who was thirty years his junior. And they cast their brothers, Charles and Henry, as the two Stellows, heroes who liberate the three female cousins of Luceny and Tattiney from the castle of Bellamo.

Introduction: Girls Included!

Shakespeare’s girl characters and conceptions of girlhood. Documenting and assessing Shakespeare’s representation of girl characters and his contribution to historical and contemporary notions of girlhood, this book charts the development of Shakespeare’s treatment of the girl as a dramatic and literary figure throughout his career, from the comic heroines and tragic victims of his early plays to an idea of girlhood defined, in his late plays, by hardship, loss, and eventual recovery. Locating Shakespeare’s invention of girlhood at a pivotal moment in the history of the girl as an identity and a social condition, it places Shakespeare’s girl characters in dialogue with earlier historical discourses and representations, examining the Shakespearean characters that are described as girls, as well as the historical girls that are depicted in his plays. And it reflects, finally, upon the impact of Shakespeare’s girl characters on the history of early modern girls as performers, patrons, and playwrights, inserting girls into the influential body of scholarship that has reshaped our understanding of women’s cultural contributions in the Renaissance.

The Lady and Comus

Scholars have read the Lady’s attempted seduction in Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (1634), otherwise known as Comus, as an allusion to various sexual scandals that swirled around the Egerton household. There is, for example, the well-known Castlehaven scandal, in which the Earl of Bridgewater’s brother-in-law, Mervin Touchet, was tried for, among other things, orchestrating the rape of his twelve-year-old stepdaughter, Elizabeth, by a male servant.1 There is also the Margery Evans case, in which a fourteen-year-old girl was raped by some men she encountered as she walked down a road near Ludlow on a midsummer night.2 She later, bravely, pressed charges. A less well-known letter from Lady Egerton expresses the fear that her daughter Alice had been bewitched by the angry husband of a servant while staying with relatives.3 These historical contexts have been invoked and explored in order to explain the overarching sense that Comus alludes poetically and dramatically to an atmosphere of sexual transgression and anxiety in the Egerton household.

Conclusion: Girlhood After Shakespeare’s Heroines

Mary Cowden Clarke turned to fiction to recover the girlhood of Shakespeare’s heroines, but in this book I have turned to Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare’s plays contain characters that are distinctly presented as girls, and they present a detailed conception of girlhood. Silvia and Bianca are peevish and perverse, and the Queen in Richard II is wise beyond her years. Julia, Ophelia, and Perdita draw upon their theatrical and musical abilities as performers in order to express themselves, and Juliet uses her imagination to project herself into alternate realities. When lost and in trouble, Marina relies upon her learning and her wits, while Miranda coolly appraises the challenges that await her in adulthood. Ariel and Pericles do not actually start out as girls, but they become them, rhetorically. Together, the Shakespearean girls that I have discussed here present an image of girls as they are, not as they should be: disobedient, aggressive, prejudiced, and superior, as well as brave, expressive, accomplished, strong, and wild.

My Lady Rachells booke

Lady Rachel Fane (1613–1680) (Figure 7.1), later Countess of Bath, was born into a theatrical family. One of the fourteen children of Sir Francis Fane (1581/2–1640) and Mary Mildmay (d. 1649), Rachel’s eldest brother was the poet and playwright Mildmay Fane (1602–1666).1 Her parents were keen participants in the Jacobean culture of performance. They entertained James I at their home, Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire, numerous times during Rachel’s childhood: James I is said to have met one of his favorites, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, on one of his visits.2 The library at Apethorpe contained many dramatic volumes, including Ben Jonson’s Works (1616) and plays by Davenant, and Beaumont and Fletcher.3 The Fanes made various additions to the house to make it more suitable for dramatic entertainments, including decorating their Long Gallery with images of musical instruments.4 Lady Rachel Fane’s writings, which include dramatic scenes or sketches, some poems, and a complete entertainment known as May Masque (1627), are the product of a childhood that encouraged dramatic and literary expression, and they reflect her family’s investment in the theatrical tastes of the Jacobean court.5 Negotiating the traditions of the public theatre and the private court masque, Rachel’s May Masque transforms her own reading, knowledge, and experiences into a dramatic work that reflects and affirms her own world and its values: the bonds of family and friends, strengthened by a shared love of reading, writing, and theatre.