Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

3-1982

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Norman Sanders

Committee Members

Bain T. Stewart, Jack Armistead, Sarah Blanshei

Abstract

Although the adulterous wife is a familiar character in English drama, there has been no study devoted to her nature and function. This tragic character finds full development on the English stage during the final years of the sixteenth and the first third of the seventeenth century, when she figures in approximately thirty plays written by virtually all of the major dramatists. The present study examines the use of the character in tragedies, tragi-comedies, and history plays written between 1590 and 1640.

Because the Renaissance stage adulteress has roots in the life of the era, the study begins with a chapter establishing her legal and social status and the way this position is reflected in the non-dramatic literature. The primary concern of the study follows with an examination of the dramatic functions of the adulteress--as a representation of a violation of honor in the wife falsely accused of infidelity (Chapter II), as a vehicle for homiletic or domestic tragedy in the repentant adulteress (Chapter III), as a symbol of feminine villainy in the deliberate adulteress (Chapter IV), and as the central metaphor for the vision of evil depicted in The Changeling (Chapter V).

The commanding presence of the adulterous wife in English drama written from about 1590 to 1640 is remarkable in that the tragic character is simply not to be found in plays of the previous age. There were forces emerging during this period which might have given rise to the complexity of a heroine whose tragic flaw lies in her sexuality. The years before the Renaissance saw a view of women as irrational, sexually tempting creatures of passion. With the new awareness of women in the Renaissance, however, with increased emphasis on education and the rise of humanism, women came to be considered rational beings, able, like men, to control their passion with reason. The definition of a tragic character as one that, by some flaw in his nature, creates his own downfall implies a degree of free will. And for the first time in the Renaissance, women were believed to have free will, to be able to control their passions by the exercise of reason. It is not until women are viewed as responsible for their own sexuality that the possibility could arise for a tragic heroine who brings about her own downfall by a conscious choice to commit the sin of adultery.

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