The Unruly Womb in Early Modern English Drama by Ursula A. Potter

Author:Ursula A. Potter [Potter, Ursula A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Medieval, Drama, Renaissance, Literary Criticism, General, Medical, Religion, Christianity, Protestant, Ancient & Classical, Shakespeare
ISBN: 9783110662016
Google: i9G1DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2019-04-01T01:08:02+00:00

Chapter 7

The Maid’s Tragedy (1611–1613) and Parasitaster, or The Fawne (1604–1606)

IN THE SAME YEAR The Two Noble Kinsmen was staged, another play on the theme of precarious virginity was performed. This was The Maid’s Tragedy, written by John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, and presented at the court of James I as part of the wedding celebrations of two royal teenagers—James’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V, Count Palatine of the Rhine.1 The bride and groom were each only sixteen years old. The play opens by discussing a “great match” about to take place and a masque to celebrate it, so it must have appeared self-referential at the time of its performance, whether or not it had been written earlier as has been conjectured.2 It was one of several plays performed during the course of the lengthy marriage celebrations (February to April 1613), but given the themes of broken betrothals, bridal night failure, sexual exploitation, and betrayal, it seems an extraordinary choice of play, particularly if it was performed on the wedding day: February 14, Valentine’s Day. Yet this play is possibly only exceptional in that it is a tragedy. By tradition, plays and masques written for weddings focused on the wedding bed and consummation. They usually praised the bride’s beauty, her virtues, and her bashfulness, whereas the groom was fair game and was expected to “endure the short scorne of a Bridegroomes play,” as Donne claims in Love’s Alchymie. Furthermore, Donne claims that,

That loving wretch that sweares,

’Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,

Which he in her Angelique finds,

Would sweare as justly, that he heares,

In that dayes rude hoarse minstralsey, the spheares.3

In alerting us to a tradition of “rude hoarse minstralsey” (the forerunner of today’s “stag night” bachelor parties) the poet appears to be refuting “that loving wretch” Shakespeare, who wrote of the marriage of true minds in Sonnet 116. Donne’s own contribution to this particular royal wedding, “An Epithalamion, or Marriage Song on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine Being Married on St. Valentine’s Day,” is an exercise in comic titillation drawn out over eight stanzas. The poem dwells first on the frustratingly slow progress of the bride to the bedchamber, then the negotiation of the unclothing, and finally to her lying on the bed awaiting the groom who, in stanza 6, has his own impediments to surmount:

But now she is laid; what though shee bee?

Yet there are more delayes, for, where is he?

He comes and passes through Spheare after Spheare,4

First her sheetes, then her Armes, then any where.

Stanza 7 completes the act, as “very quickly they pay their debt” again and again, and so moves to the court onlookers who “neare you whispering speake, / and wagers lay” on which of the newlyweds will first open the curtains at break of day.5 Evidently, wedding poems and plays were written explicitly to celebrate the sexual initiation of the bride and the loss of her maidenhead, while the groom had to endure some scorn. A key component of The Maid’s

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