- 245 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
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Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
About This Book
Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much has been written on male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, very little attention has been paid to the issues of what makes Roman women 'Roman' and what their role in those plays is beyond their supposed function as supporting characters for the male protagonists. Through the exploration of a broad array of works produced by such diverse playwrights as Samuel Brandon, William Shakespeare, Matthew Gwynne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathaniel Richards under three such different monarchs as Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries contributes to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were discussed in literature in the specific context of Roman drama and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which accounts of Roman women were appropriated, manipulated and recreated in early modern England.
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Ben Jonson’s and Thomas May’s “Political Ladies”: Forms of Female Political Agency
Table of contents
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Introduction: Roman Women in Early Modern English Drama
- “Rome’s Rich Ornament”: Lavinia, Commoditization, and the Senses in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
- Blending Motherhoods: Volumnia and the Representation of Maternity in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
- “Silent, Not as a Foole”: William Shakespeare’s Roman Women and Early Modern Tropes of Feminine Silence
- “Timidae obsequantur”: Mothers and Wives in Matthew Gwinne’s Nero
- “Let Me Use All My Pleasures”: The Ovidian Courtship of the Emperor’s Daughter in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster
- “Few Wise Women’s Honesties”: Dialoguing with Roman Women in Ben Jonson’s Roman Plays
- Ben Jonson’s and Thomas May’s “Political Ladies”: Forms of Female Political Agency
- Bawds, Wives, and Foreigners: The Question of Female Agency in the Roman Plays of the Fletcher Canon
- “The Beauties of the Time”: Roman Women in Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor
- “Poison on, Monsters”: Female Poisoners in Early Modern Roman Tragedies
- Notes on Contributors
- Index