“Moor, she was chaste. She loved thee, cruel moor.”: Othello as a Starting Point for Alternative Dramatic Representations of the Female Voice

Abstract

The common association between woman’s speech and wantonness which dominated cultural discourses in Renaissance England, marked the representation of female characters in most Jacobean tragedies. As will be shown in this paper, William Shakespeare’s Othello marks an important breach with this conventional depiction of women, and introduces alternative gender discourses which legitimize woman’s self expression and dissociate the female voice from sexual incontinence. The subversive views on female utterance explored in Othello reappear in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam . However, the latter two plays push the tragic generic bondaries even further by drastically reconstructing the gender discourses concerning the issue of tragic transcendence.