Speaking Out of Turn: Gender, Language and Transgression in Early Modern England

Abstract

This essay attempts to consider the question of transgression by examining one category of speech where there is a potential conflict between what is said, and the ethos of the speaker. I am going to argue that sexually suggestive speech (or bawdy) is a crucial part of the negotiation of relationships between the sexes, and that it also maps (onto) social and power hierarchies. Crucially, bawdy is a category of speech that places female speakers as transgressive at the same time as it makes them objects of humour, desire or ridicule. Yet in the context of the early modern stage, female speech is also se If-evidently performative, able to encode certain anxieties and fantasies about the power of female speech, and to rehearse the restrictions to which it is normally subject. Thus the figure of the woman who speaks bawdy represents a series of crises about questions of linguistic — and therefore social — regulation, figured through the spectacle of a woman uttering words that encode meanings that are normally off limits to her.KeywordsFemale CharacterFemale SpeakerEarly Modern PeriodLinguistic RegulationFemale SpeechThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.