Unruly forms and female desire: Transformations of early modern tragedy

My dissertation traces the emergence of complex and sympathetic representations of female tragic protagonists on the early modern stage. Drawing on the insights of recent feminist and materialist theory, I show that as late Tudor and early Stuart dramatists incorporated increasingly complicated female characters into the familiar, male-centered narratives of tragedy, new logics, conventions, and expectations for the genre gradually took shape.;Chapter One examines three English domestic tragedies: the anonymous plays Arden of Feversham and A Warning for Fair Women and Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, plays that foreground the generic difficulties of portraying unruly and non-elite women with male-centered tragic conventions. In the two earlier tragedies, crucial moments of murderous contemplation familiar from contemporary male-centered tragedy are strategically elided or obscured and replaced by narrative gaps and curious confessions of the plays' own generic insufficiencies. A Woman Killed, by contrast, turns its focus to the theatricality of the protagonist's excessively obedient suicide and subsequent shift of sympathies to the once-unruly woman, thematizing the threat of sympathetic female agency to masculine authority.;Chapter Two argues that in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare depicts Rome's powerful attraction to Cleopatra constitutes a dangerous perversion of homoerotic Roman loyalties. The play stages what Jonathan Dollimore calls the "perverse dynamic" as Cleopatra's theatrical parodies of Roman masculinity and patriarchy compel her enraptured Roman rivals to recognize both their own ideological proximity to Egypt and the contingency of their foundational fictions of gender, desire, history, and narrativity. Implicit in the shape of Shakespeare's tragedy, moreover, is the playwright's own theatrical parody of inherited Augustan assumptions about dramatic form and the values it should encode.;Chapter Three examines John Webster's Duchess of Malfi, arguing that Webster's dramatic incorporation of the Duchess's conspicuously gendered body and desires within the masculine paradigms of action and heroism highlights the representational crisis that powerful female characters pose for tragic narrative. The Duchess's clandestine marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, and relatively early demise in the play's fourth act all help to reveal the gendered representational limits of tragedy as the play struggles to depict a heroic female figure at its center.