The significance of motherhood in early modern drama resonates beyond the boundaries of any individual theatrical characterisation. Its influence is evident, for example, in a subtle reference to a wife and mother in Shakespeare’sThe Merchant of Venice:

Shylock:Out upon her! Thou torturest me Tubal, it was my turquoise, I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys. (3.1.111–113)²

The mention of the hitherto unknown Leah at a crucial moment in the play becomes a significant and complicating factor in the audience’s understanding of both Shylock...

Julian of Norwich, whose meditation is quoted above, was one of several late medieval Christian mystics who used maternity as a complicated and flexible concept, informed by a tradition of exegesis that allowed her to describe spiritual experience that was both deeply affective and intellectually sound. The aim of this chapter is to explore the operation and significance of this ‘fine and lovely’ word ‘mother’ in the dramatic expression of popular and affective piety in pre-Reformation England to show that, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, motherhood had accumulated a complex range of meanings that had already become established...

In the second half of the sixteenth century, a renewed interest in classical drama stimulated the development of new options for dramatising motherhood. Figures such as Medea, Agave and Jocasta offered novel, if alarming, models for mothers in dramatic narratives and extended the range of potential meanings that the mother figure could offer. This range was well suited to the political drama that developed as a response to anxieties about the Elizabethan succession. Classical narratives, which so often detailed the collapse of royal families and the wreck of dynasties, offered useful models for persuading the queen of the need for...

Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, who have worked so extensively on Shakespeare’s history plays, note that they contain ‘relatively few and often sketchy’ images of women and their comment is applicable to Elizabethan history plays in general.² Those who are represented in such plays, and, indeed, their sources, referred to by A. P. Rossiter as ‘that long line of women broken in the course of great events’, are mostly mothers.³ The typological link between mother and state discussed in previous chapters meant that motherhood developed importance as a trope by which the dramatisation of political conflict acquired validity and complexity....

Previous Chapters Have Focused Upon The Mother Figure As A Signifier Of Spiritual, Personal And Political Concerns That Is Often Mediated Through An Association Of The Mother’s Body With Suffering And Violence As Well As Boundless Love And Nurture. This Chapter Considers The Material Signifiers Of Maternity That Were So Thoroughly Exploited By Peele InEdward IAnd That Routinely Colour The Construction Of The Dramatised Mother Figure. The Mother’s Body Implies, And Invites Consideration Of, The Conditions Of Gestation And Lactation And In Doing So Evokes A Response Where Moral, Spiritual And Political Meanings Are Complicated By The Pleasures...

Domestic tragedies and city comedies do not adapt existing literary narratives, but emerge out of an engagement with contemporary circumstances and, in the case of domestic tragedies, often represent real events. They are not situated in some imagined other place, but in locations and spaces familiar to members of a contemporary audience with whose social world they are likely to engage. These plays emerge in the period between 1590 and the second decade of the seventeenth century at a time when the commercial theatre had, says Catherine Richardson, ‘grown immeasurably in confidence’ and embedded itself into its local environs so...

The relationship between the representation of motherhood and the construction of dramatic narrative that has been explored in this book, gained resonance from the placing of the mother in contexts that attested to her relationship to domestic and civic spaces, to the economies of society and household. Alongside this developed a dramatic interest in the complexities of the mother’s role as experienced by her children. Each of the plays discussed in the previous chapter invites its audience to consider, albeit briefly, the consequences for the child of its mother’s negotiation of her domestic, social and moral role. A consistent moral...

When Elizabeth Grymeston, feeling herself to be at the end of her life, wrote herMiscellaneafor her son Bernye, her purpose was to ensure that her maternal advice and guidance would continue to support Bernye after she died: ‘I leave thee this portableveni mecumfor thy Counsellor, in which thou mayest see the true portraiture of thy mothers minde’. She writes of herself as at a point of transition between life and death, ‘a dead woman among the living’, and she knows that this gives her words potency: ‘being my last speeches, they will be better kept in...

The critic Jean Howard has warned against the assumption ‘ that theatrical representations have an ideological significance which is fixed and unchanging or which is unaffected by the conditions in which the representations are produced and consumed’.² This book has argued for the importance of motherhood in the drama of early modern England and has attested to the mother’s value both as a signifier of unchanging values and as a figure whose representation readily responds to the demands of ideological and political change. The approach has been thematic: to discover how far genre and convention influence representation; and teleological: to...