Frances E. Dolan

Reading, Work, and Catholic Women's Biographies

This essay considers biographies of Catholic women written after their deaths, largely by priests who served as their confessors, and the saints’ lives which these biographies took as their models. The purpose of this essay is twofold: to draw attention to a significant body of Catholic writing, and to use this material to shed new light on the one text of this group that has gained considerable critical attention, The Lady Falkland, Her Life, a biography of Elizabeth Cary by one of her daughters, a Benedictine nun. Considering the Life as a participant in a subgenre of Catholic biography reveals the tension between the conventions and precedents available to Carys biographer, on the one hand, and her intractable subject, on the other. The Life, like other similar biographies, borrows from and verges on hagiography, but is particularly unsuccessful at transforming its subject into a saint. While criticism of Cary and her works continues to dwell on her as eccentric and exceptional, determined by the particularities of her own character and experience, she is as like other female subjects of Catholic biography and hagiography as she is unlike them. This can only be seen by attending to the kinds of texts that Cary and her daughter might well have read, and the parameters they set for writing an eminent Catholic womans life. These texts figure reading and housework as the chief means by which Catholic women define and sustain their confessional identities in the hostile environment of post‐reformation England.

Gender and the “Lost” Spaces of Catholicism

The Reformation in England was largely a contest over space and its social meanings and uses. Gender intersected with religious affiliation in struggles over the control of several particularly fruitful sites: court chapels, prisons, households, and beds. Although Catholics lost many devotional, social, and political spaces in the wake of the Reformation, they also developed a tactical and adaptive relationship to space that fostered Catholic survival.

The subordinate('s) plot: Petty Treason and the forms of domestic rebellion

household and the commonwealth, and the fluid boundaries between domestic and political life that this analogy revealed, found their most vivid manifestation in the legal definition of petty treason. Statutes of the realm, beginning in 1352 with 25 Edward III and continuing through the following centuries until this statute was repealed in 1858, constructed a wifes murder of her husband or a servants murder of his master as a kind of

Shakespeare's unruly women

While Shakespeare did not create rebellious feminists in the modern sense of the term, nevertheless it is fascinating to see the variety of ways his heroines operate in, rebel against, attempt to rule, or are crushed by a hierarchical, male-oriented social structure.Shakespeares Unruly Women examines the ways in which the Victorian period interpreted Shakespeares characters according to their own notions of what it meant to be a woman. It includes material from the late 18th and early 20th centuries but focuses primarily on the ways in which Shakespeares heroines were appropriated into the moral, literary, and theatrical cultures of the 19th century. It looks at specific heroines, and at the turn-of-the-century psychoanalytic commentary occasioned by the 300th anniversary of Shakespeares death in 1916.

The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660. By Alastair Bellany (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2002) 312 pp.

the New Historicist concern to disclose “the power of literature” in crucial Renaissance texts as a response to the crisis in literary studies in the contemporary university: “Contemporary historicist criticism has found in the sixteenth century’s anxious defense of literature’s place an echo of its own concerns, and has responded by adopting rather than historicizing that defense” (p. 17). Although Matz cannot be expected to resolve the contemporary academic crisis, he provides something of a way forward, with a historicizing treatment that defines and respects the distinctive space that literature creates and sustains for itself. He might have followed through on this insight and given greater attention to how both Sidney and Spenser privilege poetry over history as more pleasurable, profitable, and truthful. Although, as a historicist critic, Matz could easily shrug this claim off as the text’s mystification of its own powers and processes, it might nevertheless be, in ways that strict historicism cannot account for, true. There is something in many of us who read and teach these texts which is left unsatisfied by a rigorously historicist analysis of the sort he proposes. Fortunately for Matz, and his readers, he is not quite as rigorously materialist in his analysis as he intends to be; he is too lovingly invested in these books and their writers. He not only historicizes with considerable sympathy the texts of Renaissance humanism that are the subject of his book, but humanizes the New Historicism that motivates and organizes his analysis.

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In chapter 2 Keevak contrasts notions of homoeroticism linked to the author and his work with an earlier reputation, which Shakespeare gained in his own time for composing poems and plays that displayed an Ovidian eroticism. Tracing this reputation through many allusions to and echoes of the narrative poems, especially Venus and Adonis, Keevak also sees it operating in the wide circulation of anecdotes about Shakespeare’s heterosexual prowess, outwitting rivals such as Burbage or secretly fathering Davenant. The possible truth of such anecdotes is not really at issue; more so, the fact that varying conceptions of sexuality have been linked to Shakespeare and his work from quite early on and have consistently prompted animated response, whether he is regarded as “a bawdy author of erotic works” or is personally implicated in “the scandal of another kind of sodomy in the young man poems” (66). Concerns about sexuality have also insinuated themselves into the authorship controversy (discussed in the book’s third chapter), the single topic in Shakespeare studies about which most has been written. Keevak suggests that the anxiety over Shakespeare’s sexuality, like the debate over authorship, is motivated by his status as a “high-culture hero,” personifying an “impossible universal history” (68): “There is indeed something about sexual Shakespeare that readers cannot seem to abide, since even a bisexual bard isn’t enough to explain or complete his work’s perceived universality, or a Shakespeare that must be ‘for all time’ ” (85). A similar concern resounds in debates over the various portraits of Shakespeare, the subject of Keevak’s final chapter. The main line of response has been to read bardic baldness as a sign of profound wisdom, and so to safeguard his embodiment “from more undesirable sexual implications” (105). As Keevak concedes in the introduction, Sexual Shakespeare is quite short and selective. It is nonetheless analytically sensitive, and the topics and examples it covers serve as critical synecdoches that encourage readers to ponder other cases of sexualized and desexualized Shakespeares, raised by their own research and teaching, reading and viewing. As Keevak notes, all who are interested in Shakespeare participate in framing and creating cultural and personal histories of sexuality of one sort or another, from “a postmodern sexual Shakespeare that is willing to go only so far and then stop dead in its tracks” to “a sexual Shakespeare, who, in short, continues to be thoroughly desexualized” (123). The implicit call for ongoing reflective response to Shakespeare’s cultural meanings is one of Sexual Shakespeare’s most rewarding and challenging observations.

Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (review)

Looking back at images of violence in the popular culture of early modern England, we find that the specter of the murderer loomed most vividly not in the stranger, but in the familiar; and not in the master, husband, or father, but in the servant, wife, or mother. A gripping exploration of seventeenth-century accounts of domestic murder in fact and fiction, this book is the first to ask why.Frances E. Dolan examines stories ranging from the profoundly disturbing to the comically macabre: of husband murder, wife murder, infanticide, and witchcraft. She surveys trial transcripts, confessions, and scaffold speeches, as well as pamphlets, ballads, popular plays based on notorious crimes, and such well-known works as The Tempest, Othello, Macbeth, and The Winters Tale. Citing contemporary analogies between the politics of household and commonwealth, she shows how both legal and literary narratives attempt to restore the order threatened by insubordinate dependents.