Impregnable Towers and Pregnable Maidens in Early Modern English Drama

Abstract

Impregnable Towers and Pregnable Maidens in Early Modern English Drama Lindsay Ann Reid (bio) In William Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1589–93), the foolhardy Duke of Milan boasts that he has devised a fool-proof method for preserving the chastity of his daughter. “Knowing” all too well, as he puts it, “that tender youth is soon suggested,” her overprotective father “nightly lodge[s]” Silvia “in an upper tower, / The key whereof ” he keeps in his own personal possession.1 On the one hand, the Milanese duke’s confidence that this treatment will prevent his scion from being unlawfully “conveyed away” by an amorous intruder is not entirely false (3.1.37). Tipped off by Proteus, he catches the lovestruck Valentine—who had boldly planned to access the duke’s daughter using a “ladder made of cords”—and thwarts any such attempt (2.4.175).2 And yet, on the other hand, Silvia’s paternally imposed enclosure proves ultimately feeble. Its locked door does not preclude the plucky Shakespearean maiden from herself leaving: accordingly, she escapes the confines of her immured nocturnal existence and sets forth in search of her banished paramour in the comedy’s final act. A young, marriageable, and problematically sexualized woman’s imprisonment in (and liberation from) a locked tower à la Shakespeare’s Silvia is a recurrent motif in early modern English drama, roughly constituting what Louise George Clubb might call a theatergram, or transposable dramatic unit.3 As this article details, analogous plotlines— typically set, like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in Italy—can be found in The Golden Age (c. 1611) by Thomas Heywood, Women Pleas’d (c. 1619–23) by John Fletcher, The Bird in a Cage (1633) by James Shirley, and The Cunning Lovers (c. 1638) by Alexander Brome (an authorial figure not to be confused with his better-known contemporary Richard Brome). Taking my initial cue from William N. West’s provocative suggestion that [End Page 85] the play itself might not be “the basic unit of early modern theatricality,” I approach this group of dramatic works as something of “a horizontally organized repertoire” that simultaneously “looks forward and sideways,” as well as (contra West) backward at earlier, non-dramatic literary traditions.4 Central to my argument is the fact that this corpus of dramatic works featuring implicitly pregnable women housed in purportedly impregnable towers collectively activates what Jean-Marie Kauth has described as a “metonymy, pervasive in European literature . . . between a woman’s body and the castle, tower, or anchorhold that encloses her.” Kauth elaborates that the “women in these architectural strongholds are seen as both contained and containing, as fragile vessels easily broken, as both closed off from the world and inviting it in by the attractiveness of the obstacles placed in the way.”5 My subsequent analysis of this interrelated group of early modern works arrives at complementary conclusions, for one peculiarity of towers in these plays is that they always come to symbolize inefficacy. To build a tower—any tower—would seem a conspicuously phallic display of power, yet the grand purpose for which such a stronghold is constructed (that is, to magisterially keep the outside world at bay) is consistently undermined in early modern theatrical representations of forcible gendered seclusion. The superficially enclosed space in which a woman has been embowered to restrict her access to the wider sexual economy is never simply a microcosmic world unto itself, hermetically sealed from commerce with beyond. Rather, from the moment of its on-stage introduction, we are primed to recognize the maiden-containing tower as a permeable space that can accommodate or even generate interaction with the outer, macrocosmic sphere. It is thus that, in the early modern English theater, both people and objects were habitually depicted slipping in and out of such imperfectly sealed towers. The inherently penetrable towers in the plays here under consideration share other key qualities, as well: they are decidedly intertheatrical, as well as metaliterary and, indeed, hypertextual.6 Meditating upon the concept of early modern English intertheatricality, West has suggested this concept as a novel “model for understanding plays: as networks of traceable elements of action, the form and...