Natasha Korda

Labors Lost: Women's Work and the Early Modern English Stage

Note on Spelling and Dates Prologue Chapter 1. Labors Lost Chapter 2. Dame Usury Chapter 3. Froes and Rebatos Chapter 4. Cries and Oysterwives Chapter 5. False Wares Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

Singlewomen and the Properties of Poverty in Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure manifests a profound preoccupation with the place of singlewomen in post-Reformation society. What is at stake in this preoccupation, I shall argue, is the threat that singlewomen posed to an increasingly paternalistic state and to a patrilineal property regime pressured by demographic change.1 Recent historical demography has demonstrated that never-married singlewomen were far more numerous in northern Europe (and in England in particular) than in southern Europe and that their numbers continued to grow during the sixteenth century, reaching a peak of between 20 and 30 percent of all adult women during the seventeenth century in England (the numbers being higher in urban than in rural areas).2 If we add widows or “ever married” women to this calculation (who made up some 15 percent of the adult female population), we arrive at an astonishing aggregate figure of between 35 and 45 percent of all adult women living without husbands.3 What made singlewomen anomalous in post-Reformation society was thus not their rarity, but rather what Ruth Karras has termed their “lack of social space or social identity.”4 In a society in which marital status was a primary “category of difference,” Amy Froide has argued, singlewomen (who no longer had the option of becoming nuns) quite literally had no social place.5

Insubstantial pageants: Women's work and the (im)material culture of the early modern stage

The excavations of the sites of the Rose and Globe playhouses have uncovered thousands of small objects that early moderns wore about their persons, holding together parts of their clothing and headwear and adding lustre to them. The labour of manufacturing and applying such objects was mainly female, in contrast to that of the professional playing companies, which was exclusively male. The drama itself is recurrently concerned with the status of such female labour, which can be read in the context of wider anxieties about womens freedom, sexual behaviour, and appearance. This article explores these anxieties using the data recoverable from documentary and archaeological evidence to reflect upon the stagecraft of the commercial theatre as it was influenced by increasingly elaborate and spectacular court masques. The greater the demand for spectacularly decorated bodies, the greater the reliance upon womens labour and anxiety concerning its products and social effects.

Vicious Objects: Staging False Wares

Although we tend to think of virtue and vice as attributes of subjects, rather than objects, in the context of early modern market regulation it was often things that were deemed virtuous or branded—and punished—as vicious. Market regulation was viewed not simply as an economic, but as a moral imperative. The term virtue, from the Latin virtus (manliness, valor, worth) and vir (man), was associated with the masculine vigor and worth of “honest” work. As applied to objects, it conveyed the superiority, excellence, and potency of goods produced by such work.1 Vice, from the Latin vitium (fault, defect, failing), was conversely associated with unmanliness, imperfection, and impotency. Vicious objects were impaired or spoiled by some fault, flaw, blemish, or impurity. Evil was similarly used in the regulation of markets to stigmatize commodities produced by noncitizen laborers. Evil objects were purportedly unwholesome, inferior in quality and generally unsatisfactory and defective; used as an adverb, the term meant not only wickedly, but also badly, defectively, imperfectly, or unskillfully, as in the phrase “evil made.” Goods produced outside the masculine fellowship of the urban guilds by foreigners, aliens, and women were thus by definition not good in a moral as well as an economic sense and were variously branded as “evil,” “unworkmanly,” “unwholesome,” and “false and deceitful.”2

Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (review)

flourish only in the tension between the collective and the individualistic. Dawson and Yachnin treat the book as an opportunity to engage in what they call “skirmishes”—to “carry out strategic raids on each other’s territory” (3). And the result is that these two astute critics at times overstate the differences between them: instead of seeing the fascinating complementarity of their views, they tend to take up unnecessarily—indeed, willfully—partial positions. It would seem to me more fruitful to integrate the iconoclastic controversy with the economics of the entertainment industry, linking rather than separating religious and economic notions of the fetish.1 In effect, Dawson’s and Yachnin’s perspectives complement each other in a variety of ways, but the task of trying to reconcile them is left to the reader.

Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700.

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.