“Lady, Shall I Lie in Your Lap?”

Abstract

This chapter shows how depictions of a male character laying his head in a female character’s lap are used to explore the possibility of equality between agents, despite structural differences in power. Often, as in Robert Wilson’s The Coblers Prophesie (1594), this configuration embodies a lassitude dangerous to martial manhood. Yet, laying one’s head in another’s lap may also enact masculine, spousal authority. The two evaluations intersect in 1 Henry IV (1598) and a closely related play and 1 John Oldcastle, by a group of playwrights including Michael Drayton, both of which exploit fissures in the configuration’s social and symbolic use to suggest a third possible significance: laying heads in laps as an embodiment of mutual trust and reciprocity. All three of these meanings resonate within a similar scene in Hamlet. Ophelia, within the constraints imposed on her as a court lady, attempts to activate the third of these possibilities. But Hamlet’s own language and behavior demonstrate how pervasive masculine anxieties about female agency and emasculation, centered on the head-in-lap configuration, tended to militate against such reciprocity.