Abstract
Rape and other forms of sexual violence are frequent motifs in early modern English drama and poetry, but despite many studies of the topic, there appears to be little or no work on the class dynamics of sexual violence as represented on the English stage.
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Notes
- 1.
See Karen Bamford, Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage (St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Suzanne Gossett, “Best Men are Molded Out of Faults: Marrying the Rapist in Jacobean Drama,” ELR 14.3 (1984), 305–27; Amy Greenstadt, Rape and the Rise of the Author: Gendering Intention in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2009); Leah S. Marcus, “The Milieu of Milton’s Comus: Judicial Reform at Ludlow and the Problem of Sexual Assault,” Criticism 25.4 (1983), 293–327; Carolyn D. Williams, “Silence like a Lucrece Knife: Shakespeare and the Meanings of Rape,” The Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993), 93–110; the essays in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (Palgrave, 2001); and Women, Violence, and English Renaissance Literature, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Sharon Beehler (ACMR, 2003).
- 2.
Against Our Will (Bantam, 1976).
- 3.
“Rape—Does It Have a Historical Meaning?” in Rape, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter (Basil Blackwell, 1986), 230.
- 4.
223.
- 5.
220.
- 6.
Garthine Walker, “Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England,” Gender & History 10.1 (1998), 5. Bamford, 3.
- 7.
Bamford, 7, original italics.
- 8.
See Nazife Bashar on the “law’s concern with the protection of male property, rather than... with the welfare of women” (29–30). “Rape in England between 1550 and 1700,” in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance, ed. London Feminist History Group (Pluto Press, 1983). For earlier history, see also James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (U of Chicago P, 1987).
- 9.
Shakespeare, Henry V. The Norton Shakespeare Volume 1: Early Plays and Poems, 3rd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (W.W. Norton, 2016), 3.4.11.
- 10.
3.4.32.
- 11.
Shakespeare, The First Part of the Contention (Henry VI Part 2), The Norton Shakespeare Volume 1: Early Plays and Poems, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (W.W. Norton, 2008), 4.6.2–3.
- 12.
4.2.60–1.
- 13.
Heywood, 2.68–71.
- 14.
Greenblatt, “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,” Representations 1(1983), 23; Bristol, Carnival and Theatre: Plebian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (Methuen, 1985), 88.
- 15.
The First Part of the Contention, 4.7.123–4.
- 16.
4.7.124.
- 17.
4.7.110–14.
- 18.
4.7.168–73.
- 19.
Thomas Heywood, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Richard Rowland (Manchester UP, 2005), 4.95.
- 20.
2.68–71.
- 21.
5.70–1.
- 22.
4.46–7.
- 23.
4.41.
- 24.
See Laura Levine, “Rape, Repetition, and the Politics of Closure in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callahan, 210–28 (Cambridge UP, 1996).
- 25.
“I Believe We Must Leave the Killing Out: Deference and Accommodation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Critical Essays, ed. Dorothea Kehler, 145–64 (Garland, 1998).
- 26.
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks. The Arden Shakespeare (Methuen, 1979), 3.1.11; 3.1.15. See also Ronda Arab, “What Kind of Man is Bottom?” in Manly Mechanicals on the Early Modern English Stage (Susquehanna UP, 2011) for a discussion of how the mechanicals undo the violence of elite men, such as Theseus, who “woo’d [Hyppolyta] with [his] sword.”
- 27.
See R.C. Richardson, “A Maidservant’s Lot,” History Today 60.2 (2010), 25–31.
- 28.
Dr. Faustus, ed. Roma Gill (New Mermaids, 1989), 6.16–18.
- 29.
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia UP, 1985), 49, 50, original italics.
- 30.
Dr. Faustus, 1.62, 4.105.
- 31.
The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Anthony Parr (W.W. Norton, 1990), 7.31–2.
- 32.
Gordon Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language (Athlone Press, 1997).
- 33.
The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 1.219.
- 34.
In early modern England, it was becoming increasingly difficult for journeymen to achieve the status and relative autonomy of an independent master craftsmen as the traditional guild structure weakened. See George Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Frank and Cass, 1963), and Susan Cahn, Industry of Devotion (Columbia UP, 1987).
- 35.
See David Scott Kastan, “Workshop and/as Playhouse: The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599)” in Staging the Renaissance, ed. Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (Routledge, 1991).
- 36.
See Ronda Arab, “Work, Bodies, and Gender in The Shoemaker’s Holiday,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 13 (2001), 182–212.
- 37.
51.
- 38.
The Tempest, ed. J.F. Bernard and Paul Yachnin (Broadview Press, 2021), 1.2.355–6; 1.2.361–5.
- 39.
1.2.356–8.
- 40.
1.2.334–5.
- 41.
Given that Caliban’s mother, Sycorax, was from Algiers, Prospero’s assignment of Caliban to a lower-class position is also, arguably, influenced by his non-European ethnicity.
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Arab, R. (2023). Sexual Violence as Class Conflict: Seizing Patriarchal Privilege in Early Modern English Drama. In: Arab, R., Ellinghausen, L. (eds) Intersectionalities of Class in Early Modern English Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35564-6_15
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