The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the edges of Europe were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks. This book explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places where Christians came up against Turks, including Malta, Tunis, Hungary, and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, and Greek and Russian orthodoxy. But it also finds that the concept of Christendom was under threat in other places, some much nearer to home. Edges of Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan, such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, which once covered northern England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens, where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients challenged the concept of what was native and natural.

Narratives of Working Women in Early Modern London: Gendering the City analyzes depictions of non-elite, working women in relation to specific London neighborhoods and sites in early modern drama and culture from primarily the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. The women laborers explored in this book, who worked on the fringes of masculinized commerce, elicited anxious discursive responses to their ubiquitous public presence. This book investigates these discursive strategies, or gendered place narratives, in dramatic works such as Ben Jonson’s Epicene, the unattributed play, The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Thomas Heywood’s The Wise-woman of Hogsdon, and Shackerly Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer, as well as a variety of early modern pamphlets, poems, ballads, and prose works. By rhetorically associating working women with contested urban commercial neighborhoods and locales, these works attempt to minimize, control, or delegitimize the agency of laboring women. An examination of these narratives exposes underlying social and economic inequities in early modern London, which affected the conditions of women’s labor.

The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the edges of Europe were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks. This book explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places where Christians came up against Turks, including Malta, Tunis, Hungary, and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, and Greek and Russian orthodoxy. But it also finds that the concept of Christendom was under threat in other places, some much nearer to home. Edges of Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan, such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, which once covered northern England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens, where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients challenged the concept of what was native and natural.

Narratives of Working Women in Early Modern London: Gendering the City analyzes depictions of non-elite, working women in relation to specific London neighborhoods and sites in early modern drama and culture from primarily the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. The women laborers explored in this book, who worked on the fringes of masculinized commerce, elicited anxious discursive responses to their ubiquitous public presence. This book investigates these discursive strategies, or gendered place narratives, in dramatic works such as Ben Jonson’s Epicene, the unattributed play, The Fair Maid of the Exchange, Thomas Heywood’s The Wise-woman of Hogsdon, and Shackerly Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer, as well as a variety of early modern pamphlets, poems, ballads, and prose works. By rhetorically associating working women with contested urban commercial neighborhoods and locales, these works attempt to minimize, control, or delegitimize the agency of laboring women. An examination of these narratives exposes underlying social and economic inequities in early modern London, which affected the conditions of women’s labor.