'So troubled with the mother': Death and the performance of maternity in early modern drama

While there is a longstanding tradition of scholarship on death in Renaissance drama---and a more recent body of scholarship on maternity in the period---few studies focus extensively on the particular correlation between these two topics in theatrical literature. But in early modern English drama, images of motherhood and death intersect compellingly, revealing a profound and pervasive association between the maternal body and mortality. Informed by historical scholarship and drawing on non-dramatic representations of motherhood found in letters, sermons, diaries, and medical texts, this dissertation explores theatrical representations of maternity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama.; Although depictions of motherhood differ in these texts, they characteristically display an excessive investment in identifying good and bad mothers and distinguishing between them. Many playwrights---William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Thomas Heywood among them---frequently subvert this simple moral dichotomy, offering in its place a complicated network of meanings. Exhibiting palpable discomfort over the moral status of the mother and challenging the fundamental binary opposition between good and bad, these plays articulate a fear in misidentifying good and bad mothers. And it is through death---literal or figurative, real or imagined---that the plays attempt to rid themselves of the uncertainty regarding the mother's moral status.; From the heroic death of Zenocrate in Marlowe's Tamburlaine to the horrific murder of the Duchess of Malfi, from the redemptive death of Anne Frankford in A Woman Killed with Kindness to the feigned death of Hermione in The Winter's Tale, the plays enact various strategies for testing and purifying the contaminating mother. When mothers are represented in Renaissance drama, they reveal a significant investment---of both playwright and community---in portraying moral extremes and exploring the conflicts that arise from expecting these moral extremes to be stable.