| In "Naked in Bed: Uncovering Patriarchal Power on the Early Modern English Stage," I explore the dramatic and political import of the Jacobean theatrical bed through a comprehensive investigation of the bed's essential function on the stage and in society---as marriage bed, childbed, sickbed, and deathbed. Breaking away from the customary concentration on the so-called "bed-trick," I discuss the bed as a nexus where culture and literature merge to reinforce and interrogate patriarchal power and its concomitant institutions. I demonstrate how Jacobean "bed plays" take advantage of the bed's cultural weight, showing how supposed perversions of gender hierarchies in moments of consummation, nativity, illness, and expiration are perceived as polluting both microcosm and macrocosm. In this feminist materialist investigation, I examine not only dramatic texts such as John Marston's Sophonisba, Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, John Webster's The White Devil, and William Shakespeare's Othello, but also a variety of cultural documents and artifacts which define the bed as a central site---contemporary marriage manuals, medical treatises, sermons, the fashionable "arts of dying," as well as the beds themselves, whether represented in woodcut, on canvas, or as mammoth pieces of furniture such as the Great Bed of Ware. "Naked in Bed" explores how and why dramatists present the bed not merely as visually interesting bit of theatrical furniture, but as a stage upon the stage where a kind of double drama is enacted---one which focuses attention on the rituals associated with the bed in the culture at large and on the ways these rituals become perverted or subverted in the theatre.;The aim of "Naked in Bed" is to shed light on a heretofore unidentified subgenre---the bed play---and to offer an intensely close look at a small sampling of plays that tap into the rich possibilities that the stage bed had to offer Jacobean playwrights. It is my hope that this approach will afford critics a new way to read old plays---one which acknowledges the bed's special place in seventeenth-century drama and culture. |
