| "Women on Trial: Sexuality, Justice, and Persuasion on the Renaissance Stage" examines some of Renaissance drama's most threatening female characters in the context of the legal and criminal worlds of London, using pamphlets and trial transcripts to reconstruct the judging minds of Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. Recently, scholars have begun using such materials, but few have speculated on the limitations of these reactionary, castigating genres, often produced by officers after an arrest. This project seeks out recorded and printed stories of remarkable women and traces these tales on their journeys through reading and gossiping London. Mapping these stories onto their distinct urban landscape, I compare the women of topical pamphlets and transcripts with their more educated, persuasive, and sympathetic dramatic counterparts, and I argue that the stage was a comparatively feminist space. These characters draw on knowledge of legal systems and the urban underworld in order to forge paths independent of those prescribed by their classes and occupations (citizens' wives, whores, thieves, ladies, and queens). Their choices are most often sexually or legally criminal, but in a number of startling examples, playwrights celebrate these ambitions. At their most rebellious, these women often serve as normalizing authority figures or mirror the attitudes and actions of the playwrights themselves. While I draw on the kinds of materials most typical of new historicists, I do not separate out my readings of plays and topical materials. Instead, in keeping true to a geographic (London) and a chronological (1590--1615) focus, I strive to reconstruct the original viewing experience, integrating my readings of topical and dramatic texts. The first half of the project examines comic heroines in the landscape of London and includes readings of Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour, Epicoene, and The Alchemist, as well as a chapter on Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl. The second half of the project examines tragic defendants and the witnesses testifying for them. Plays include Shakespeare's Othello, The Winter's Tale, and Antony and Cleopatra, as well as Webster's The White Devil. |
