Bodily Regimen and Fear of the Beast: ‘Plausibility’ in Renaissance Domestic Tragedy

Abstract

Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy is much preoccupied with ‘the borders of the human’, with depicting the type of behaviour deemed excessive, horrific, and ‘in-humane’, which aligned man with the beast and the tyrant, and woman with the antithesis of the nurturing mother — the murderous, unnatural monster. Figures like Husband in A Yorkshire Tragedy, and Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi, exemplify the male type, whilst Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth and Alice Arden in Arden of Faversham are archetypal female ‘monsters’. The domestic tragedies are rendered particularly gripping through the co-mingling of the ordinary and the everyday with monstrous and demonic elements. In Arden of Faversham (1592), A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), and The Witch of Edmonton (1621),2 homely domestic settings, familiar rural gatherings and celebrations are thrown into chaos when a destructive influence enters the ‘domus’, wreaking havoc and perpetrating one ‘unnatural’ act after another. Theirs is a universe in which seeming harmony and normality give way to lust, adultery, spousal abuse, murder and even infanticide. The realistic domestic settings and the inclusion of some true details, in fact, serve to heighten the dramatic tension aroused by the spectacle of embodied evil unleashed in ‘every-man’s’ backyard: ‘Beware, this could happen to you!’, these plays simultaneously warn, and relish.