Reviews Books: The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestant and Popular Theater in Early Modern England, Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, An Index of Characters in Early Modern Drama: Printed Plays, 1500–1660, Touring the Low Countries: Accounts of British Travellers, 1660–1720

1999 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-137
Author(s):  
Michael Davies ◽  
Ton Hoenselaars ◽  
Ton Hoenselaars ◽  
Ton Hoenselaars
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Popular Theater ◽  
English Renaissance Drama ◽  
Renaissance England

scholarly journals Narrating Pregnancy and Childbirth: Infanticide and the Dramatization of Reproductive Knowledge

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Steinway
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Pregnancy And Childbirth ◽  
Rhetorical Devices ◽  
Mother And Child ◽  
A Site ◽  
Popular Texts

In early modern England, infanticide was a crime overwhelmingly associated with women. Both popular texts and legal records depict women accused of infanticide as mothers acting against nature. These figures, however, do not often appear in the period’s drama. Instead, early modern drama includes fictionalized mothers who kill their children beyond infancy and into adulthood. By eschewing portrayals of neonaticide and the trials associated with it, the drama highlights a dependency upon female characters’ verbal narratives of the reproductive body that reinforces pregnancy’s unstable epistemology. I argue that the flexibility of this epistemology allows women, whether female characters in drama or historical women on trial, to distance themselves from the crime of infanticide by reconstructing narratives of both pregnancy and childbirth. Sharing rhetorical devices with the testimonies of women accused of infanticide, dramatic mothers such as Videna in The Tragedie of Gorboduc and Brunhalt in Thierry and Theodoret linguistically sever the biological ties between mother and child, thus disrupting conventional portrayals of reproduction. These parallel strategies position the reproductive female body as a site of resistance to the legal mechanisms designed to interpret it.

Nobody, Somebody, and King Lear

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Womack
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Positive Events ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
English Renaissance Drama ◽  
The University

The approximately contemporary Jacobean plays, King Lear and Nobody and Somebody, share an ancient British setting, a preoccupation with instability in the state, and an unsettling interest in negation. Peter Womack here suggests that by reading them together we can retrieve some of the theatrical strangeness which the more famous of the two has lost through familiarity and naturalization. The dramatic mode of existence of the character called ‘Nobody’ is paradoxical, denaturing – an early modern visual and verbal Verfremdungseffekt, at once philosophical and clownish. His negativity, which is articulated in dialogue with the companion figure of ‘Somebody’, is matched in King Lear, above all in the role of Edgar, but also by a more diffused state of being (withdrawal, effacement, folly) which the play generates in reaction to its positive events. Ultimately the negation in both plays is social in character: ‘Nobody’ is the dramatic face of the poor and oppressed. Peter Womack teaches literature at the University of East Anglia. His most recent book is English Renaissance Drama (2006), in the Blackwell Guides to Literature series.

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