Women in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy: A study of the principal conventions and influences governing the treatment of women characters in English tragedy, 1579-1625

Abstract

Although Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as a whole has provoked more study from critics than almost any other period of literature, we find that characterisation apart from Shakespeare's has received comparatively little attention. The works of the other great dramatists of the period are, naturally, estimated at their proper value, but it would appear that the inter-relation of the habits and tendencies of one dramatist with those of another has not, in view of the total amount of Elizabethan criticism, received its just amount of interest. The tendency has always been to regard Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as a collection of plays with Shakespeare's at the head. The result is that the tragedy of the period 1579 to 1625 is not, as a rule, looked upon as a homogeneous mass of work dictated by the same dramatic formulae governing construction of plot, handling of material and methods of characterisation. This is particularly true of the last, and especially of the characterisation of women. We have been content to accept the great women of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy without seeing what relation they bear one to the other, what means the dramatist has used to make his women effective, or whether he has even troubled to distinguish them very far as an order of beings distinct from men and therefore likely to provide him with fresh dramatic opportunities, with a new range of images and tones. The dominating subject in Elizabethan dramatic criticism has been, and still is, in spite of the more critical trend of modern thought, Shakespeare. Recent study on the lines taken by Professors Stoll and Schucking has led to a change in the views held on Shakespearian tragedy and characterisation. Others abide our question; thou are free, is no longer representative of criticism. Yet, although the position from which Shakespeare is viewed has changed, and we have descended from the altitudes of the Higher Criticism of the last century, he himself and his works have not ceased to fascinate. The difference lies in the attempt now made to regard him as an "Elizabethan" and not merely as Shakespeare. Accordingly, no separate section has been devoted in this study to his women, though whenever possible or relevant they have been introduced for purposes of comparison and contrast, and discussed in some detail should the plays in which they occur fall naturally into the grouping ad-opted. A section devoted exclusively to Shakespeare's women would, if it were to add to the already considerable literature on the subject, endanger the proportion and balance of the whole, and would also run the risk of lapsing into a critical method the unsoundness of which was proved in the last century - that of detaching Shakespeare from his world and his stage, and exalting him at the expense of his fellow writers. He is a product of his age, and his women ought as far as possible to stand side by side with those of his contemporaries, Greene, Webster, Middleton, and Beaumont and Fletcher.