Renaissance theatre, the Individual and Femininity

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977)

[The] cultural process must not be assumed to be merely adaptive, extensive, and incorporative. Authentic breaks within and beyond it, in specific social conditions which can vary from extreme isolation to pre-revolutionary breakdowns and actual revolutionary activity, have often in fact occurred. (p. 1114, my emphasis)

Cultural Materialism: The possibility of subversion [from A. Velissariou, Female Sexual Transgression, p. 34-37]

1. The literature of the past still active intervention in the historical process because meanings are still contested. Power relations are relevant to us now.
2. The emergence of agency [collective and individual as the locus of interrogation of the dominant ideology.

Subversiveness is potential. Jonathan Dollimore: “A radical idea not only has to be conveyed, it has also to be used to refuse authority or to be seen by authority as capable and likely to of being used” (Female Sexual Transgression, p. 35)

3. The ideologically interested character of the canon.

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England ((Berkeley: California UP, 1988)

 It is precisely because of the English form of absolutist theatricality that Shakespeare’s drama, written for a theater subject to state censorship, can be so relentlessly subversive; the form itself, as a primary expression of Renaissance power, helps to contain the radical doubts it continually provokes. Of course, what is for the state a mode of subversion contained can be for the theater a mode of containment subverted: there are moments in Shakespeare’s career … when the process of containment is strained to the breaking point. But the histories consistently pull back from such extreme pressure (Female Sexual Subversion, p. 65).

New Historicism: The containment theory

1. The early modern state: Power is consolidated by a system of representations centred in the Monarch and activated through theatrical display.
2. Treatment of history in terms of intertextuality, i.e. close reading of a great range of texts disparate in character but historically relevant.
3. No individual and collective agency

Misreading of Michel Foucault: Power is embedded in specific institutions and their discourses, power and knowledge are joined together. Yet, power [for NH} INFINITELY produces and co-opts resistance. But Foucault acknowledges the possibility of resistance (Female Sexual Transgression, p. 37)

Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980)

The place of woman in marriage is that prescribed by the Bible and moralistic literature …. She is in all things subject to the authority of her husband and (except in case of mental cruelty or impotence of the husband) cannot go to law without his consent. As well as authority over her goods, the husband has authority over her person, and may “correct” or beat her to a “reasonable degree”. In English law, the married woman is treated as a wife, not as an individuum, since she is “of one flesh” with her husband (Female Sexual Transgression p. 76).

Until the early 19^th century wife’s killing of husband was not simply homicide but treason, so it was essentially a political crime because of patriarchal ideology whereby husband-wife’s relationship [as father’s and daughter’s] reflected political hierarchy. Women’s subjection therefore was double, i.e.  to father/husband and the King. In the law women were perceived as contradictory: they were subsumed under their husbands [merging with them] and at the same time perceived as threat.

The notion of the individual: (Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, pp 72-75)

“Individual” meant ‘inseparable’ in medieval thinking, and its main use was in the context of theological argumentation about the nature of the Holy Trinity. The effort was to explain how a being could be thought as existing in his own nature yet existing by this nature as part of an indivisible whole. This extended to other fields, and ‘individual’ indicated a member of some group, kind, or species. “A person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation”.

The ‘separable’ entity is defined by a word that means the opposite, the ‘inseparable’, an identity that is conferred by the fact of common status. The crucial change in emphasis is that we understand ‘the individual’ as a kind of absolute without reference to the group of which he is a member. This change seems to have taken place in England in the late 16^th and early 17th centuries.

1. The crucial factor was the Reformation’s emphasis on the individual soul’ [from man-Church-God to man-God].
2. In a rigid society the possibility of ‘becoming something else’ was very limited. AS mobility increased [late 16^th and early 17^th centuries], the idea of being an individual in a sense separable from one’s social role gained in strength. The growth of capitalism made the individual a source of economic activity by his ‘free enterprise’. So ‘what I am’ became ‘what I want to be’ and ‘what by my efforts I have become’

Until the 80s Jacobean heroes and especially heroines were seen as faulty because incomplete because they were read as individuals.

Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992)

Woman is culturally constructed as Other to man and as the uncanny site where two opposing values collapse into one, including the ambivalent fact that she serves to articulate that which is exterior to a culture as well as the interiority which is repressed, rejected or fore closed. Furthermore, Woman functions duplicity not only owing to her contradictory semantic encoding but also because she is at once assigned to the realm of culture’s mythic image repertoire …and to the non-semiotic real, to natural materiality (pp. 70-71)

Female tragic heroines

The humanist tradition perceived tragedy as a genre in terms of the tragedy of individuality. The essence of tragedy is the hero who exhibits human nature in its universal form. But the hero is defined primarily by his rank and gender, according to which power is natural to men. Female characters, however tragic, cannot acquire tragic status, they are in the peripheries of power because of their gender. Women in power is an alarming idea [Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, the Duchess].

However, there is a frequency in the centrality of female transgression. Why?

1. The dramatists verify the gender norm aligning themselves with misogyny.
2. Female characters inscribe femininity as a radically unstable category, discontinuous [p. 46]. Motherhood: Few mothers and those are devoid of affection (The Revenger’s Tragedy). Family bonds and roles are defined by the economic conditions. Market economy affects personal relations. No idealization of mother hood and the family. Thus, the incoherence of female characters exposes the social contradictions. (The White Devil: Vittoria does nothing, we are suspicious of her role but there is no action: Discontinuous voice, both guilty and innocent.)
3. At the same time, they use female transgression as a site of interrogation of the dominant ideology in Jacobean England, and especially, of the notion of dependency as a political and ideological category.
4. Through female transgression [murder, adultery, free female sexual choice] they point out points of resistance that are necessarily extreme because of the perpetrators’ gender [social ideology more oppressive for women]. By the same token, female resistance is easily silenced and disciplined.
5. So, female resistance, as happens with the Revengers, both questions and reinforces power. However, there is nothing ‘strong’ in their opposition which is basically unauthorized action. Yet, the heroines are penalized essentially because of their gender, not of the crime they have committed.

Renaissance theatre, the Individual and Femininity

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977)

[The] cultural process must not be assumed to be merely adaptive, extensive, and incorporative. Authentic breaks within and beyond it, in specific social conditions which can vary from extreme isolation to pre-revolutionary breakdowns and actual revolutionary activity, have often in fact occurred. (p. 1114, my emphasis)

Cultural Materialism: The possibility of subversion [from A. Velissariou, Female Sexual Transgression, p. 34-37]

1. The literature of the past still active intervention in the historical process because meanings are still contested. Power relations are relevant to us now.
2. The emergence of agency [collective and individual as the locus of interrogation of the dominant ideology.

Subversiveness is potential. Jonathan Dollimore: “A radical idea not only has to be conveyed, it has also to be used to refuse authority or to be seen by authority as capable and likely to of being used” (Female Sexual Transgression, p. 35)

3. The ideologically interested character of the canon.

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England ((Berkeley: California UP, 1988)

 It is precisely because of the English form of absolutist theatricality that Shakespeare’s drama, written for a theater subject to state censorship, can be so relentlessly subversive; the form itself, as a primary expression of Renaissance power, helps to contain the radical doubts it continually provokes. Of course, what is for the state a mode of subversion contained can be for the theater a mode of containment subverted: there are moments in Shakespeare’s career … when the process of containment is strained to the breaking point. But the histories consistently pull back from such extreme pressure (Female Sexual Subversion, p. 65).

New Historicism: The containment theory

1. The early modern state: Power is consolidated by a system of representations centred in the Monarch and activated through theatrical display.
2. Treatment of history in terms of intertextuality, i.e. close reading of a great range of texts disparate in character but historically relevant.
3. No individual and collective agency

Misreading of Michel Foucault: Power is embedded in specific institutions and their discourses, power and knowledge are joined together. Yet, power [for NH} INFINITELY produces and co-opts resistance. But Foucault acknowledges the possibility of resistance (Female Sexual Transgression, p. 37)

Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980)

The place of woman in marriage is that prescribed by the Bible and moralistic literature …. She is in all things subject to the authority of her husband and (except in case of mental cruelty or impotence of the husband) cannot go to law without his consent. As well as authority over her goods, the husband has authority over her person, and may “correct” or beat her to a “reasonable degree”. In English law, the married woman is treated as a wife, not as an individuum, since she is “of one flesh” with her husband (Female Sexual Transgression p. 76).

Until the early 19^th century wife’s killing of husband was not simply homicide but treason, so it was essentially a political crime because of patriarchal ideology whereby husband-wife’s relationship [as father’s and daughter’s] reflected political hierarchy. Women’s subjection therefore was double, i.e.  to father/husband and the King. In the law women were perceived as contradictory: they were subsumed under their husbands [merging with them] and at the same time perceived as threat.

The notion of the individual: (Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, pp 72-75)

“Individual” meant ‘inseparable’ in medieval thinking, and its main use was in the context of theological argumentation about the nature of the Holy Trinity. The effort was to explain how a being could be thought as existing in his own nature yet existing by this nature as part of an indivisible whole. This extended to other fields, and ‘individual’ indicated a member of some group, kind, or species. “A person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation”.

The ‘separable’ entity is defined by a word that means the opposite, the ‘inseparable’, an identity that is conferred by the fact of common status. The crucial change in emphasis is that we understand ‘the individual’ as a kind of absolute without reference to the group of which he is a member. This change seems to have taken place in England in the late 16^th and early 17th centuries.

1. The crucial factor was the Reformation’s emphasis on the individual soul’ [from man-Church-God to man-God].
2. In a rigid society the possibility of ‘becoming something else’ was very limited. AS mobility increased [late 16^th and early 17^th centuries], the idea of being an individual in a sense separable from one’s social role gained in strength. The growth of capitalism made the individual a source of economic activity by his ‘free enterprise’. So ‘what I am’ became ‘what I want to be’ and ‘what by my efforts I have become’

Until the 80s Jacobean heroes and especially heroines were seen as faulty because incomplete because they were read as individuals.

Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992)

Woman is culturally constructed as Other to man and as the uncanny site where two opposing values collapse into one, including the ambivalent fact that she serves to articulate that which is exterior to a culture as well as the interiority which is repressed, rejected or fore closed. Furthermore, Woman functions duplicity not only owing to her contradictory semantic encoding but also because she is at once assigned to the realm of culture’s mythic image repertoire …and to the non-semiotic real, to natural materiality (pp. 70-71)

Female tragic heroines

The humanist tradition perceived tragedy as a genre in terms of the tragedy of individuality. The essence of tragedy is the hero who exhibits human nature in its universal form. But the hero is defined primarily by his rank and gender, according to which power is natural to men. Female characters, however tragic, cannot acquire tragic status, they are in the peripheries of power because of their gender. Women in power is an alarming idea [Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, the Duchess].

However, there is a frequency in the centrality of female transgression. Why?

1. The dramatists verify the gender norm aligning themselves with misogyny.
2. Female characters inscribe femininity as a radically unstable category, discontinuous [p. 46]. Motherhood: Few mothers and those are devoid of affection (The Revenger’s Tragedy). Family bonds and roles are defined by the economic conditions. Market economy affects personal relations. No idealization of mother hood and the family. Thus, the incoherence of female characters exposes the social contradictions. (The White Devil: Vittoria does nothing, we are suspicious of her role but there is no action: Discontinuous voice, both guilty and innocent.)
3. At the same time, they use female transgression as a site of interrogation of the dominant ideology in Jacobean England, and especially, of the notion of dependency as a political and ideological category.
4. Through female transgression [murder, adultery, free female sexual choice] they point out points of resistance that are necessarily extreme because of the perpetrators’ gender [social ideology more oppressive for women]. By the same token, female resistance is easily silenced and disciplined.
5. So, female resistance, as happens with the Revengers, both questions and reinforces power. However, there is nothing ‘strong’ in their opposition which is basically unauthorized action. Yet, the heroines are penalized essentially because of their gender, not of the crime they have committed.

Renaissance theatre, the Individual and Femininity

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977)

[The] cultural process must not be assumed to be merely adaptive, extensive, and incorporative. Authentic breaks within and beyond it, in specific social conditions which can vary from extreme isolation to pre-revolutionary breakdowns and actual revolutionary activity, have often in fact occurred. (p. 1114, my emphasis)

Cultural Materialism: The possibility of subversion [from A. Velissariou, Female Sexual Transgression, p. 34-37]

1. The literature of the past still active intervention in the historical process because meanings are still contested. Power relations are relevant to us now.
2. The emergence of agency [collective and individual as the locus of interrogation of the dominant ideology.

Subversiveness is potential. Jonathan Dollimore: “A radical idea not only has to be conveyed, it has also to be used to refuse authority or to be seen by authority as capable and likely to of being used” (Female Sexual Transgression, p. 35)

3. The ideologically interested character of the canon.

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England ((Berkeley: California UP, 1988)

 It is precisely because of the English form of absolutist theatricality that Shakespeare’s drama, written for a theater subject to state censorship, can be so relentlessly subversive; the form itself, as a primary expression of Renaissance power, helps to contain the radical doubts it continually provokes. Of course, what is for the state a mode of subversion contained can be for the theater a mode of containment subverted: there are moments in Shakespeare’s career … when the process of containment is strained to the breaking point. But the histories consistently pull back from such extreme pressure (Female Sexual Subversion, p. 65).

New Historicism: The containment theory

1. The early modern state: Power is consolidated by a system of representations centred in the Monarch and activated through theatrical display.
2. Treatment of history in terms of intertextuality, i.e. close reading of a great range of texts disparate in character but historically relevant.
3. No individual and collective agency

Misreading of Michel Foucault: Power is embedded in specific institutions and their discourses, power and knowledge are joined together. Yet, power [for NH} INFINITELY produces and co-opts resistance. But Foucault acknowledges the possibility of resistance (Female Sexual Transgression, p. 37)

Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980)

The place of woman in marriage is that prescribed by the Bible and moralistic literature …. She is in all things subject to the authority of her husband and (except in case of mental cruelty or impotence of the husband) cannot go to law without his consent. As well as authority over her goods, the husband has authority over her person, and may “correct” or beat her to a “reasonable degree”. In English law, the married woman is treated as a wife, not as an individuum, since she is “of one flesh” with her husband (Female Sexual Transgression p. 76).

Until the early 19^th century wife’s killing of husband was not simply homicide but treason, so it was essentially a political crime because of patriarchal ideology whereby husband-wife’s relationship [as father’s and daughter’s] reflected political hierarchy. Women’s subjection therefore was double, i.e.  to father/husband and the King. In the law women were perceived as contradictory: they were subsumed under their husbands [merging with them] and at the same time perceived as threat.

The notion of the individual: (Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, pp 72-75)

“Individual” meant ‘inseparable’ in medieval thinking, and its main use was in the context of theological argumentation about the nature of the Holy Trinity. The effort was to explain how a being could be thought as existing in his own nature yet existing by this nature as part of an indivisible whole. This extended to other fields, and ‘individual’ indicated a member of some group, kind, or species. “A person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation”.

The ‘separable’ entity is defined by a word that means the opposite, the ‘inseparable’, an identity that is conferred by the fact of common status. The crucial change in emphasis is that we understand ‘the individual’ as a kind of absolute without reference to the group of which he is a member. This change seems to have taken place in England in the late 16^th and early 17th centuries.

1. The crucial factor was the Reformation’s emphasis on the individual soul’ [from man-Church-God to man-God].
2. In a rigid society the possibility of ‘becoming something else’ was very limited. AS mobility increased [late 16^th and early 17^th centuries], the idea of being an individual in a sense separable from one’s social role gained in strength. The growth of capitalism made the individual a source of economic activity by his ‘free enterprise’. So ‘what I am’ became ‘what I want to be’ and ‘what by my efforts I have become’

Until the 80s Jacobean heroes and especially heroines were seen as faulty because incomplete because they were read as individuals.

Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992)

Woman is culturally constructed as Other to man and as the uncanny site where two opposing values collapse into one, including the ambivalent fact that she serves to articulate that which is exterior to a culture as well as the interiority which is repressed, rejected or fore closed. Furthermore, Woman functions duplicity not only owing to her contradictory semantic encoding but also because she is at once assigned to the realm of culture’s mythic image repertoire …and to the non-semiotic real, to natural materiality (pp. 70-71)

Female tragic heroines

The humanist tradition perceived tragedy as a genre in terms of the tragedy of individuality. The essence of tragedy is the hero who exhibits human nature in its universal form. But the hero is defined primarily by his rank and gender, according to which power is natural to men. Female characters, however tragic, cannot acquire tragic status, they are in the peripheries of power because of their gender. Women in power is an alarming idea [Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, the Duchess].

However, there is a frequency in the centrality of female transgression. Why?

1. The dramatists verify the gender norm aligning themselves with misogyny.
2. Female characters inscribe femininity as a radically unstable category, discontinuous [p. 46]. Motherhood: Few mothers and those are devoid of affection (The Revenger’s Tragedy). Family bonds and roles are defined by the economic conditions. Market economy affects personal relations. No idealization of mother hood and the family. Thus, the incoherence of female characters exposes the social contradictions. (The White Devil: Vittoria does nothing, we are suspicious of her role but there is no action: Discontinuous voice, both guilty and innocent.)
3. At the same time, they use female transgression as a site of interrogation of the dominant ideology in Jacobean England, and especially, of the notion of dependency as a political and ideological category.
4. Through female transgression [murder, adultery, free female sexual choice] they point out points of resistance that are necessarily extreme because of the perpetrators’ gender [social ideology more oppressive for women]. By the same token, female resistance is easily silenced and disciplined.
5. So, female resistance, as happens with the Revengers, both questions and reinforces power. However, there is nothing ‘strong’ in their opposition which is basically unauthorized action. Yet, the heroines are penalized essentially because of their gender, not of the crime they have committed.

Renaissance theatre, the Individual and Femininity

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977)

[The] cultural process must not be assumed to be merely adaptive, extensive, and incorporative. Authentic breaks within and beyond it, in specific social conditions which can vary from extreme isolation to pre-revolutionary breakdowns and actual revolutionary activity, have often in fact occurred. (p. 1114, my emphasis)

Cultural Materialism: The possibility of subversion [from A. Velissariou, Female Sexual Transgression, p. 34-37]

1. The literature of the past still active intervention in the historical process because meanings are still contested. Power relations are relevant to us now.
2. The emergence of agency [collective and individual as the locus of interrogation of the dominant ideology.

Subversiveness is potential. Jonathan Dollimore: “A radical idea not only has to be conveyed, it has also to be used to refuse authority or to be seen by authority as capable and likely to of being used” (Female Sexual Transgression, p. 35)

3. The ideologically interested character of the canon.

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England ((Berkeley: California UP, 1988)

 It is precisely because of the English form of absolutist theatricality that Shakespeare’s drama, written for a theater subject to state censorship, can be so relentlessly subversive; the form itself, as a primary expression of Renaissance power, helps to contain the radical doubts it continually provokes. Of course, what is for the state a mode of subversion contained can be for the theater a mode of containment subverted: there are moments in Shakespeare’s career … when the process of containment is strained to the breaking point. But the histories consistently pull back from such extreme pressure (Female Sexual Subversion, p. 65).

New Historicism: The containment theory

1. The early modern state: Power is consolidated by a system of representations centred in the Monarch and activated through theatrical display.
2. Treatment of history in terms of intertextuality, i.e. close reading of a great range of texts disparate in character but historically relevant.
3. No individual and collective agency

Misreading of Michel Foucault: Power is embedded in specific institutions and their discourses, power and knowledge are joined together. Yet, power [for NH} INFINITELY produces and co-opts resistance. But Foucault acknowledges the possibility of resistance (Female Sexual Transgression, p. 37)

Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980)

The place of woman in marriage is that prescribed by the Bible and moralistic literature …. She is in all things subject to the authority of her husband and (except in case of mental cruelty or impotence of the husband) cannot go to law without his consent. As well as authority over her goods, the husband has authority over her person, and may “correct” or beat her to a “reasonable degree”. In English law, the married woman is treated as a wife, not as an individuum, since she is “of one flesh” with her husband (Female Sexual Transgression p. 76).

Until the early 19^th century wife’s killing of husband was not simply homicide but treason, so it was essentially a political crime because of patriarchal ideology whereby husband-wife’s relationship [as father’s and daughter’s] reflected political hierarchy. Women’s subjection therefore was double, i.e.  to father/husband and the King. In the law women were perceived as contradictory: they were subsumed under their husbands [merging with them] and at the same time perceived as threat.

The notion of the individual: (Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, pp 72-75)

“Individual” meant ‘inseparable’ in medieval thinking, and its main use was in the context of theological argumentation about the nature of the Holy Trinity. The effort was to explain how a being could be thought as existing in his own nature yet existing by this nature as part of an indivisible whole. This extended to other fields, and ‘individual’ indicated a member of some group, kind, or species. “A person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation”.

The ‘separable’ entity is defined by a word that means the opposite, the ‘inseparable’, an identity that is conferred by the fact of common status. The crucial change in emphasis is that we understand ‘the individual’ as a kind of absolute without reference to the group of which he is a member. This change seems to have taken place in England in the late 16^th and early 17th centuries.

1. The crucial factor was the Reformation’s emphasis on the individual soul’ [from man-Church-God to man-God].
2. In a rigid society the possibility of ‘becoming something else’ was very limited. AS mobility increased [late 16^th and early 17^th centuries], the idea of being an individual in a sense separable from one’s social role gained in strength. The growth of capitalism made the individual a source of economic activity by his ‘free enterprise’. So ‘what I am’ became ‘what I want to be’ and ‘what by my efforts I have become’

Until the 80s Jacobean heroes and especially heroines were seen as faulty because incomplete because they were read as individuals.

Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992)

Woman is culturally constructed as Other to man and as the uncanny site where two opposing values collapse into one, including the ambivalent fact that she serves to articulate that which is exterior to a culture as well as the interiority which is repressed, rejected or fore closed. Furthermore, Woman functions duplicity not only owing to her contradictory semantic encoding but also because she is at once assigned to the realm of culture’s mythic image repertoire …and to the non-semiotic real, to natural materiality (pp. 70-71)

Female tragic heroines

The humanist tradition perceived tragedy as a genre in terms of the tragedy of individuality. The essence of tragedy is the hero who exhibits human nature in its universal form. But the hero is defined primarily by his rank and gender, according to which power is natural to men. Female characters, however tragic, cannot acquire tragic status, they are in the peripheries of power because of their gender. Women in power is an alarming idea [Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, the Duchess].

However, there is a frequency in the centrality of female transgression. Why?

1. The dramatists verify the gender norm aligning themselves with misogyny.
2. Female characters inscribe femininity as a radically unstable category, discontinuous [p. 46]. Motherhood: Few mothers and those are devoid of affection (The Revenger’s Tragedy). Family bonds and roles are defined by the economic conditions. Market economy affects personal relations. No idealization of mother hood and the family. Thus, the incoherence of female characters exposes the social contradictions. (The White Devil: Vittoria does nothing, we are suspicious of her role but there is no action: Discontinuous voice, both guilty and innocent.)
3. At the same time, they use female transgression as a site of interrogation of the dominant ideology in Jacobean England, and especially, of the notion of dependency as a political and ideological category.
4. Through female transgression [murder, adultery, free female sexual choice] they point out points of resistance that are necessarily extreme because of the perpetrators’ gender [social ideology more oppressive for women]. By the same token, female resistance is easily silenced and disciplined.
5. So, female resistance, as happens with the Revengers, both questions and reinforces power. However, there is nothing ‘strong’ in their opposition which is basically unauthorized action. Yet, the heroines are penalized essentially because of their gender, not of the crime they have committed.