The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy, and: The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama, and: The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy and: The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama and: The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England Elizabeth Klett The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy. By Lisa Hopkins. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; pp. 229. $62.00 cloth. The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama. Edited by Naomi Conn Liebler. New York: Palgrave, 2002; pp. 242. $59.95 cloth. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. By Valerie Traub. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; pp. 492. $80.00 cloth, $29.00 paper. Recent feminist scholarship on English Renaissance drama has dealt with a number of vexing questions about how women are represented in early modern textual and visual culture. Are the portrayals of women—as tragic characters, as sexual subjects—misogynist or celebratory? Are these portrayals circumscribed by dominant discourses, or do they transform such discourses? Three new books by leading feminist critics attempt to answer these questions through the lenses of two quite different issues. Lisa Hopkins and the authors in Naomi Conn Liebler's edited collection address the problematic construction of female heroism in tragic dramas, while Valerie Traub presents an in-depth study of lesbian representations in a variety of dramatic and nondramatic early modern texts. Each scholar seeks to counter the idea that Renaissance portrayals of women were reductive, trapped within the stereotypes of silence, passivity, and victimization. Rather, they argue as a group for recognition of the cultural power presented by women, both real and fictional, in the period. Their arguments are carefully balanced, however, with an awareness of how the texts that they examine are both produced by and productive of hegemonic discourses about gender in early modern England. Hopkins's The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy looks at plays from roughly 1610 to 1645. Unlike sixteenth-century tragedies, she argues, the plays from this later period began to present women not as passive victims but as "active agents in their own fate" (2). Although many of the characters she analyzes can be seen merely as villainesses—such as Livia in Middleton's Women Beware Women, Evadne in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, and Vittoria Corombona in Webster's The White Devil—Hopkins argues for their heroic status. Further, she claims that their stories do not "reinforce misogyny" but rather "prise it open, revealing the grounds on which it was constructed" (3). The book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, and takes a historical approach to the plays, looking at medical, legal, and religious documents from the period to contextualize the plays' representations of women as tragic heroes. Hopkins persuasively argues that the prominence of leading female characters (many of whom lent their names or titles to the plays) both reflected and transformed their historical moment. Several of her analyses of individual plays are particularly intriguing. For instance, she reads the notoriously problematic Women Beware Women as Livia's tragedy of motherhood, and provides an incisive analysis of The Duchess of Malfi as a complex negotiation between body and soul, interior and exterior. In general, however, Hopkins is stronger on careful close readings of the texts than on rigorous historical grounding of the plays. Hopkins's book makes an interesting companion piece to Liebler's collection, The Female Tragic Hero in English Renaissance Drama. Although their similar titles suggest that they cover the same ground, there are significant differences between them. As one might expect from an edited collection, Liebler's volume is more wide-ranging than Hopkins's, covering a larger period of time and offering more varied approaches to the issue of women's representation in early modern tragedy. The essays are arranged chronologically, beginning with Robert S. Miola's piece on Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh's 1566 play Jocasta, progressing through essays on Shakespeare (in particular Antony and Cleopatra), and concluding with the later tragedies of Heywood, Webster, Dekker, Ford, and Rowley. The collection finishes with Jeanne Addison Roberts's survey of the entire period, from Shakespeare to Marston, Webster, and Cary. As a whole, the essays run the gamut from illuminating (Linda Woodbridge's insistence on the importance of the Duchess of Malfi's [End...