Women in Shakespeare

A Dictionary

Alison Findlay

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472557513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

This is a comprehensive reference guide examining the language employed by Shakespeare to represent women in the full range of his poetry and plays. Including over 350 entries, Alison Findlay shows the role of women within Shakespearean drama, their representations on the Shakespearean stage, and their place in Shakespeare's personal and professional lives.

A

abbess, (a) the name given to a Mother Superior or commander of an Abbey.

(b) Shakespeare’s one dramatic portrait of an Abbess is Aemilia in Comedy of Errors. Before she is named, she is referred to as ‘Abbess’ and ‘Lady Abbess’, a position of considerable authority. She holds Antipholus and Dromio (of Syracuse) within the Abbey with a stern determination, insisting – as a Mother Superior – on her right to give them sanctuary and nurse Antipholus with professional care, in spite of Adriana’s wifely protests:

Abbess:	It is a branch and parcel of my oath
	A charitable duty of my order,
	Therefore depart, and leave him here with me.
Adriana:	I will not hence, and leave my husband here;
	And ill it doth beseem your holiness
	To separate the husband and the wife.
Abbess:	Be quiet and depart thou shalt not have him.

(Err. 5.1.106–12)

The Abbess’s potentially scandalous determination to possess her man is rendered more comic in the light of Adriana’s aggressive wish to ‘take perforce my husband from the Abbess’ (Err. 5.1.117), and the Duke’s belief that the Abbess is ‘a virtuous and a reverend lady / It cannot be that she has done thee wrong’ (Err. 5.1.134–5). Further details of the character’s more subversive qualities are found in the entry on Emilia. In Measure for Measure, the Mother Superior of the Franciscan convent is referred to but does not appear on stage (MM 1.4.84).

(c) Claire Walker (2003) gives detailed analysis of the typical abbess’s role in religious communities on the continent after the Reformation. Dorothea Kehler (1991: 157–80) compares the Emilias in Shakespeare’s work, regarding celibacy and connections with widowhood as the most striking common characteristics. Daryl Gless (1979) discusses the importance of the convent as an all-female community.

Adriana, (a) a character in The Comedy of Errors, married to Antipholus of Ephesus. Her name may allude to the Adriatic Sea. As the feminine form of Adrian, it perhaps functions more obliquely as part of the network of the religious language with which the play is riddled. Adrian IV was name taken by the only English pope, Nicholas Brakespear (d. 1159).

(b) Adriana enters the play forcefully criticizing the double standard which allows men to be masters of their will and liberty out of doors while women are limited to domestic servitude (2.1.10–25). She does not fit into the role of femme covert easily, a problem exemplified by the exchange of the chain in the play. Her ‘headstrong liberty’ (2.1.15) rejects docile subjection to husbandly authority as foolish: ‘There’s none but asses will be bridled so’ (2.1.15), and she bears similarities with Katherina, though, importantly, she is never called ‘shrew’. Instead, like Emilia in Othello, she is a powerful spokeswoman against sexual double standards, asking how her husband would react to news of her adultery (2.2.130–33). She confesses to the Abbess that she has reprimanded him incessantly for desiring other women (5.1.63–6). The Abbess chastises her, claiming that the ‘venemous clamors of a jealous woman’ (5.1.69) have driven Antipholus mad. Nevertheless, the play encourages sympathy for Adriana by clearly endorsing her fears about her husband, and letting her express poignantly the position of the deserted wife (2.1.87–101), confined to passive suffering since ‘he’s master of my state’ (2.1.95). Adriana contributes a wifely dimension to the play’s extended trope of mirroring and twinning, claiming that she is Antipholus’s ‘better part’, indivisible from him as a drop of water from the sea (2.2.123–9). Her intelligence allows her to use the image of man and wife as one flesh as a counter-argument to his infidelity. She deftly accuses Antipholus of corrupting her honour by being unfaithful ‘I do digest the poison of thy flesh, / Being strumpeted by thy contagion’ (2.2.143–4).

(c) Ruth Nevo discuses how the play forces Adriana to confront her identity as a possessive wife (1980: 24–34). Thomas P. Hennings (1986) shows how she is a spokeswoman for affectionate marriage. Dusinberre reads this as a source of her authority (1996: 77–82, 102–5). Jardine argues that her wifely appeals to the wrong man would have had a comic effect (1983: 44–7). Adriana’s confinement to the household is the subject of Ann Christensen’s (1996) article which argues that Antipholus of Ephesus fails to see the connections between the domestic world of his wife and the wider economy.

adulteress, adultery (a) a woman who commits adultery or sexual intercourse outside marriage.

(b) In addition to the emotional, psychological and spiritual damage caused by the betrayal of marriage vows, adultery represented a significant and often invisible threat to patriarchy in early modern England so the adulteress is a dangerous character type, liable to destroy the family from within. William Gouge referred to it as ‘one of the most capitall vices’ in the estate of marriage, ‘whereby way is made for Diuorce’ (1622: 118). King Lear tells Regan that, should she not be pleased to see him, he would suspect her legitimacy: ‘I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb, / Sepulchring an adult’ress’ (KL 2.4.131–2). Gouge pointed out that although men and women were equally culpable before God, ‘more inconueniences may follow vpon the womans default then vpon the mans: as, greater infamy before men, worse disturbance of the family, more mistaking of legitimate, or illegitimate children, with the like’ (Gouge 1622: 118). In Shakespeare’s texts, it is therefore unsurprising that the majority of uses of adultery and adulterate (as adjective and verb), are in relation to female figures. In spite of the numerous accusations made against female characters’ sexual fidelity (see, for example, Desdemona, Hero, Imogen), only Hermione is openly slandered with the term ‘adultress’, although Tamora claims she has been

call’d foul adulteress,

Lascivious Goth, and all the bitterest terms

That ever ear did hear to such effect.

(Tit. 2.3.109–11)

Tamora’s adulterous relationship with Aaron the Moor is exposed by the birth of their blackamoor child in Act 4 Scene 2.

The verb adulterate, to commit adultery, is used of Fortune, who, according to Constance, ‘adulterates hourly’ with Arthur’s uncle King John (KJ 3.1.56). Constance reconstructs the political situation in marital terms, asserting that the proper marriage between Fortune and Prince Arthur has been corrupted, with John usurping Arthur’s proper position on the throne. As an adjective, adulterate usually connotes corruption. Adriana sees herself corrupted by her husband’s infidelity, carrying the stain of his sin like an ‘adulterate blot’ (Err. 2.2.140). The Dowager Queen Margaret uses the word to insult ‘th’ adulterate’ Hastings, Rivers, Vaughan, Grey’ (RIII 4.3.69), although adultery is a sin she was guilty of. In Henry VI Part II, her relationship with Suffolk is charged with passion and tenderness (3.2), but Margaret’s ruthless plotting implicitly suggests that adultery is one sin among many. Titus Andronicus fully endorses the view of Tamora as a ‘foul adulteress’ (Tit. 2.3.109), capable of murder, infanticide and revenge. Female characters suspected of adultery such as Desdemona, Hermione, or Imogen, are treated far more harshly than their male equivalents (such as Antipholus of Syracuse or even Gloucester in King Lear and Claudius in Hamlet, whose adultery is associated with sin). Hermione in The Winter’s Tale is brought to trial by the paranoid Leontes and ‘arraigned of high treason in committing adultery with Polixenes, King of Bohemia’ (WT 3.2.14–15). The ease with which adultery is associated with other crimes is clear in Leontes’s view that Hermione is ‘an adult’ress’ and ‘a traitor’ (WT 2.1.88) plotting his death. In a patriarchal culture, the crime of adultery was an abuse of husband’s immediate property, in the form of the wife’s body. In Cymbeline it is no accident that Iachimo cheats Posthumus Leonatus of his ring in the lie of ‘hers and mine adultery’ (Cym. 5.5.185–6).

Adultery had much wider implications. Since there was no way of determining paternity, the offspring of adultery were legally legitimate according to English law, unless the husband was beyond the distance of the four seas for the whole time of the pregnancy (see King John 1.1.116–27). The fear of female adultery informs Leontes’s rejection of the baby Perdita as ‘the issue of Polixenes’ (WT 2.3.94). Lucrece commits suicide partly to prevent the birth of a ‘bastard graff’ or fruit which would shame her husband (Luc. 1062–4). In Henry VI Part II, the idea of noble stock polluted lies behind Suffolk and Warwick’s slanders of bastardy (2HVI 3.2.223). For sons as much as husbands, female adultery is a fundamental threat to identity. The most concise expression is Posthumus’s view that Imogen’s adultery casts doubt on his mother’s chastity and his own legitimacy

We are all bastards

And that most venerable man which I

Did call my father was I know not where

When I was stamped.

(Cym. 2.5.2–5)

The possibility of female adultery creates anxieties for male characters who sense the pressure to prove their paternity and identity. In Hamlet, Laertes fears that any calm drop of blood in his veins that does not stir to avenge his father’s death raises doubts about his paternity and brands his mother as an adulterate harlot (Ham. 4.5.118–121).

King Lear’s mocking threat that his subjects should ‘Die for adultery’ is carried out in the case of female characters (KL 4.6.111). Desdemona is killed so that she will not corrupt more men; Lucrece kills herself after being raped by Tarquin so as not to bring disgrace to her husband. The slandered Hermione disappears into a kind of death after the trial until Perdita is acknowledged as legitimate. The only case in Shakespeare where female adultery is celebrated is in King John, where Lady Faulconbridge yielded to King Richard’s droit de seigneur, and bore a son who is legally legitimate, but embraces royal bastardy instead. The bastard tells his mother

Your fault was not your folly;

Needs must you lay your heart at his dispose

Subjected tribute to commanding love

(KJ 1.1.262)

and goes on to reverse conventional morality, claiming that it would have been sin to refuse the King rather than to commit adultery (KJ 1.1.175–6). The power of the King’s right, or droit de seigneur in Edward III gives remarkable dramatic charge to the Countess of Salisbury’s refusal of Edward III’s suit. Adultery even in these circumstances is ‘bed-blotting shame’ (EIII 2.1.457), her father reminds her. She invokes the trope of man and wife as one flesh to outwit Edward (EIII 2.2.172–7), proposing a suicide pact which eventually makes him ashamed of his adulterous desires (EIII 2.2.178–192).

Only occasionally is the word ‘adultery’ a source of comedy and even here, it betrays male anxiety. In Measure for Measure, it is one of the few words Elbow does not distort with malapropism in his solemn report that his wife might have fallen into ‘fornication, adultery and all uncleanliness’ in Mistress Overdone’s tavern (MM 2.1.81). When Nym draws his sword, Mistress Quickly exclaims ‘If he be not hewn now, we shall see willful adultery and murther committed’ (HV 2.1.37–8), in a line rich with innuendo.

(c) William Gouge discussed the difference between male and female adultery (1622: 218–33). Women’s legal position is summarized by Anne Laurence (1994: 47–50). Ronald B. Bond, ‘“Dark Deeds Darkly Answered”: Thomas Becon’s Homily against Whoredome and Adultery, Its Contexts and Its Affiliations with Three Shakespeare Plays’ (1985) argues that Shakespeare’s references to adultery engaged with current concerns about the lack of rigorous punishment of the crime in early modern England. Alison Findlay (1994b) considers the dramatization of adultery and bastard offspring.

ale-wife, (a) a woman that keeps an ale-house. The brewing of ale, unlike beer, was a domestic activity rather than an industry and frequently managed by women on a small scale, especially in rural locations, although it was in decline during the time Shakespeare was writing. An ability to manage supplies, finances, customers and credit meant that ale-wives were often characte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• A– Z
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright