Unruly bodies: Performing femininity in early modern England (William Shakespeare, John Ford, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson)

This dissertation examines the cultural discourses constructing the feminine body in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England, as represented in widely circulating pamphlets, broadsides, ballads, conduct books, domestic guides, marriage manuals, sermons, and as seen on stage in popular plays. Materialist in its methodology and feminist in its larger implications, the project analyzes the controversies surrounding disruptive speaking, fasting, cross-dressing, and cosmetics use as they appeared in the urban pulp press and as they were performed on the London stage in the dramas of Shakespeare, Ford, Heywood, and Jonson, focusing specifically on the relationship and differences between the page and stage. I observe that the popular urban print culture of the period generated a wide variety of texts that pay particular attention to the production of continent female bodies and to the disapproving display of transgressive ones. Disobedient, "anti-feminine" women repeatedly appear in print and on stage in recognizable types including scolds, starvers, whores, painted women, and roaring girls. The bodily behavior of all these types violates or actively disregards established ideals. In prescriptive literature, the unruly body is the subject of curiosity, fear, and scorn and these loaded cultural representations both create and are created by disproportionate public interest in defining and policing the feminine body. In the theatre, the display and performance of the unruly feminine body is uniquely powerful. I argue that the drama, like the popular press, attempts to define femininity and to insist upon gender difference, but it also just as frequently dismantles the definitions and complicates notions of difference. It exhibits a persistent tension between reinforcing and destabilizing entrenched notions of the representation of bodily femininity as it performs, critiques, and even reforms cultural ideas about feminine subjectivity.