English I: English Literature Before 1800: "Loved Ones and Loved Once:
Lovers in Early English Literature."
Session Coordinator: John Peruggia
Dept. of English,
Peruggia@slu.edu
“Between
Shirt and Smock”: Moll Frith’s
Critique of Courtship Rituals
The Roaring Girl’s Moll Frith defies and criticizes conventions
of courtly love by being a liminal figure that courts,
is courted, and aids in bringing together other lovers. While she moves between classes and genders,
she also sets herself apart from the other characters by playing various roles
in the courtly love tradition. But
what enables her to move so freely between these roles? Is it her costuming that allows her to “play”
these characters? Does her dress enable
her to take on the characteristics of a male lover when she woos, or is there
something about Moll’s inward nature that allows her mobility? Is Moll merely acting a part, or is her inability
to be pigeon-holed an integral part of her femininity? Moll’s character is complicated in that she
acts as the serrus figure for Sebastian and Mary allowing their nuptials to be solidified by the
end of the play, yet she does not take a lover or accept a marriage proposal
herself. Instead, she challenges the
conventions of marriage and gender representations when she declares that
she will marry only when “Honesty and truth [are] unslandered,
/ Women manned but never pandered” (V.ii.219-220). Moll’s commentary could be seen as a critique
on the courtly love tradition and her actions throughout the play transgresses
these conventions. My discussion will
focus on the way Moll plays these different roles, the way her dress affects
these roles, and Moll’s ultimate critique of traditional courtship rituals.
Sheri
McCord,
The
Two Janes: City Wives and Courtly Suitors on the
Renaissance Stage
Abstract:
Readers of Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s
Holiday (1599) have often been mystified by the harshness with which Dekker
judges Hammon, a wealthy admirer who pursues the virtuous Jane Damport after her husband, Rafe,
has been presumed dead in the wars. I
shall argue that Dekker’s audience would have recognized, in the Jane / Rafe / Hammon love triangle, a deliberate
echo of Edward IV’s pursuit of
Edward IV plays. These works depict the Shores, with considerable
sympathy, as upstanding Londoners of the middling sort who cannot resist the
king’s desire for Jane because they fear the consequences of disobedience.
The Shoemaker’s Holiday restages the spectacle of a London artisan’s
wife being aggressively wooed by an interloper who uses courtly language and
offers her wealth and power, but Dekker brings about a comic resolution by
reducing the difference in social rank between Jane’s two rival suitors and
depicting the community among the shoemakers as a force strong enough to resist
pressure from outsiders.
Nora
Corrigan,
ncorri@email.unc.edu
“Pray
Bawl Soundly for Me”: Loving the Law
in The Plain Dealer
Antiquated
coquettes are an indispensable part of Restoration and eighteenth-century
British comedy. Etherege’s Lady Woodvill
rails at the “depraved appetite of this vicious age,” which “tastes nothing
but green fruit, and loathes it when ‘tis kindly ripened,” and Congreve’s
Lady Wishfort flails her time-worn body about, trying to find the
most fitting and beguiling posture in which to meet the non-existent Sir Rowland.
William Wycherley, in The Plain Dealer, also gives us an aging
woman, the Widow Blackacre. This widow, though, stands apart from her superannuated
peers, for she does not desire a lover. Instead, as a woman who has studied and obsessed
over the law for years, she has translated everything she’s learned about
the game of romance into her own set of strategies for litigation. In her instructions to her lawyers, the Widow
shows that she not only “concentrates on externals,” as Norman N. Holland
notes, but in effect re-channels the superficial stratagems and trickery practiced
by the lovers. Her amoral ethics are
artfully and consciously executed, and she takes the artifices and self-aggrandizement
of the lovers to a separate plane. As a coach and a proclaimed expert in the games
of both love and law (“I could have had any young heir in
Casey
Etheridge, The
aetherid@olemiss.edu
A Lovers' Exchange in the Jew of
Why does Christopher Marlowe put the most learned and the most conventionally
beautiful speech in Jew of Malta
in the mouth of a Moorish slave? Why
does he allow this slave, Ithamore, to quote Marlowe’s
own love poem? And why should any early
modern character, and especially a black slave, use the high language of love
poetry to court a lowly prostitute?
By momentarily elevating this couple’s love, Marlowe reveals the fluidity
of poetry as a cultural signifier. Ithamore’s ability to learn a master’s speech, an act which
exposes the instability of a language once reserved for the amorous discourses
of the courtly class, triggers early modern anxieties about the fluidity of
racial stereotypes and social hierarchies. Marlowe represents the growing
instability of social roles in the master-servant relationship in early modern
culture. And because Ithamore
is a typical early modern stage Moor, embodying the venery of black men and
the link between blackness and the devil, and because he courts
The clash between the high language of love and this particular vulgar relationship
finally comes to the brink of subverting the early modern demarcation between
high and low culture. Marlowe, a poet
writing elevated poetry for a popular audience, situates himself at the cusp
of these anxieties.
Christine Maffuccio ,
English
I: English Literature Before 1800: "Loved Ones and Loved Once: Lovers
in Early English Literature."
Session Coordinator: John Peruggia
Dept. of English,
“Wailing
Eloquence”: The Persuasive Power of Pain in
While
pain is a well-known cliché of Petrarchan poetry,
Kimberly
Huth, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sixteenth-Century Feminism?:
Isabella Whitney’s “I.W. To Her Unconstant
Lover.
Isabella Whitney was the first woman to publish secular
poetry under her own name, doing so in
Andrea Powell Jenkins,
amjenkins@bsu.edu
‘Mind
how it comes on’: Love, Hate, and Marriage in Clarissa
Samuel
Richardson’s first two novels are named after their female protagonists and
follow these virtuous women as they attempt to reform a rake into a husband. Most readings of Pamela and Clarissa
focus on the plight of the titular protagonist.
Such readings overlook a significant difference between the two novels:
Pamela concludes with the protagonist’s marriage; Clarissa concludes
with the protagonist’s funeral and the marriage of Anna Howe and Hickman.
My
essay, “‘Mind how it comes on’: Love, Hate, and Marriage in Clarissa,”
examines the juxtaposition of Clarissa and Anna (and their relationships with
Lovelace and Hickman) to suggest that Anna’s survival of the narrative depends
in part upon her strategies of alliance and her manipulation of the terms
of obligation. While Anna’s class identity is fixed by her
marriage to Hickman, her orality, strategies of
alliance, and representational mutability prevent us from fixing
Anna’s identity as we do Clarissa’s. Anna
offers readers a way out of the text: we do not have to die with Clarissa, we can live with Anna Hickman.
Jen
Camden,
jcamden@uindy.edu