Michelle M. Dowd

Women's work in early modern English literature and culture

Labours of Love: Female Servants and the Marriage Plot The Spatial Syntax of Midwifery and Wetnursing Divine Drudgery: The Spiritual Logic of Housework Household Pedagogies: Female Educators and the Language of Legacy

RECENT STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LIFE WRITING

This essay surveys scholarship on English life writing from 1971 through 2008. Critical interest in life writing, a category which includes a wide range of genres that involve writing about the self and theorizing about self‐writing, has yielded feminist, historicist, social, formalist, and manuscript‐based approaches to this body of material, to name just a few of the most prominent trends. In particular, the study of life writing has been invigorated but also challenged by changing definitions of “autobiography” and an increasing willingness to recognize multiple genres and combinations of genres as life writing. Other important trends over the past few decades include a continuing study of womens self‐narratives, greater understanding of the significance of manuscript culture to life writing, and attention to the historical development of subject formation. This vibrant body of scholarship suggests rich possibilities for future studies. (M.M.D. and J.A.E.)

A Gentleman May Wander: Inheritance, Travel, and the Prodigal Son on the Jacobean Stage

the story of the prodigal son was one of the most popular comic plots on the English Renaissance stage, featured in at least forty plays of the period ranging from Tudor scholastic drama such as Thomas Ingeland’s The Disobedient Child (ca. 1559–70) to satirical city comedy such as Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News (1626). Although allegorical and exegetical interpretations of the parable were common throughout the Middle Ages, variations on the biblical story of the prodigal’s waywardness and repentance, journey and return gained in popularity throughout the late sixteenth century and, especially, in the early decades of the seventeenth century. In evaluating the significance of this literary trend, critics have tended to emphasize the malleable structural features of the prodigal archetype, the usefulness of this narrative as a didactic tool for articulating humanist pedagogical values, or the fruitful connections between the prodigal son topos and contemporary concerns about social morality, especially within the vibrant setting of the London metropolis. However, these

Dramaturgy and the Politics of Space in The Tragedy of Mariam

e lizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) has long been noted for its elusive dramatic structure: it is a play that evades any clear sense of distinction between stage and closet, public and private, theatrical and untheatrical. On the one hand, Mariam is categorized as a closet drama—a term that has itself been subject to a great deal of critical scrutiny—and, as such, it has often been understood as primarily a reading text and, thus, as untheatrical, self-consciously removed from the life of the public theaters. On the other hand, as Jonas Barish noted over two decades ago, this is not quite the entire story. Compared with contemporary closet plays by Fulke Greville, Samuel Daniel, and others, Mariam “in both its plotting and its language . . . approximates most closely the plays of the public theatre.” Barish, indeed, calls the play an “oddity” within the closet drama tradition. More recently, critics have developed and extended Barish’s insight by drawing attention to the ways in

The Devotional Writings of Dorothy Calthorpe

The recently discovered autograph volume of seventeenth-century Englishwoman Dorothy Calthorpe (1648–93), which now resides at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, offers a glimpse into the creative and spiritual musings of a devout, unmarried woman of a locally important gentry family, the Calthorpes of Ampton, County Suffolk. In particular, her work reveals the dynamic relationship between secular and spiritual genres and creatively intervenes in the construction and refashioning of familial genealogy. Calthorpe’s manuscript includes two short devotional pieces: a description of the Garden of Eden and a dream vision recounting the speaker’s journey to heaven. These devotional writings configure Protestant spiritual spaces—Eden and heaven—in decidedly aristocratic terms, figuring spiritual grace and perfection in and through praise of elite consumerism and material goods. In doing so, they also address pressing concerns about the nature of sin, the contours of Christian stewardship, and the proper path to salvation. Although new to modern readers, Dorothy Calthorpe was well-known for her contributions to the spiritual community of Ampton, where the Calthorpe family wielded great power and influence for generations.1 Calthorpe was the unmarried daughter of James and Dorothy Calthorpe. Notable family members included Dorothy’s paternal grandfather, Sir Henry Calthorpe (1586–1637), Solicitor General to Queen Henrietta Maria and Attorney General of the Court of Wards and Liveries, and her maternal uncle John Reynolds, captain in the Parliamentary forces. But Dorothy herself arguably made the greatest impact on the spiritual life of her community when, upon her death, she left a 1000-pound endowment for the construction and maintenance of an almshouse in Ampton. Indeed, the almshouse—eventually built with apartments for four poor women instead of the six delineated by Calthorpe (White 302)—continued in operation

Delinquent Pedigrees: Revision, Lineage, and Spatial Rhetoric in The Duchess of Malfi

Locating John Websters The Duchess of Malfi within a cluster of early seventeenth‐century concerns about legitimacy and hereditary succession, this essay traces the ways in which Webster strategically alters his primary narrative source, William Painters The Palace of Pleasure, so as to expose rather than to suppress the indeterminacy of patrilineality. Websters tragedy focuses specifically on a remarrying widow and her children, a particular social problem that makes visible the contradictions inherent to the early modern system of patrilineal inheritance. The action of the play thus stages the tensions between the dominant legal form of patrilineality and the material practices shaping and changing it. Drawing in part on the theories of Michel de Certeau, this essay takes a fresh critical approach to the play by placing particular emphasis on the distinctively spatialized aspects of Websters dramaturgical rendering of his source material and noting the ways in which he uses the ideological and physical spaces of the stage to highlight the inscrutability of the succession. In addition, in its focus on Websters revisions of Painter, the essay considers how drama as a genre can spatially reimagine the social relationships and possibilities for agency that are produced through patterns of hereditary succession. As such, The Duchess of Malfi serves as a useful case study for theorizing the narrative and dramaturgical methods by which patriarchy is constructed, contested, and reformulated in early modern English culture (M.M.D.).