Maternity and the origin of political power: Women's labor on Shakespeare's stage.

Abstract

My discussion of maternity focuses initially on the ways in which Renaissance writers call on mothers to produce children who are the right idea of their fathers, and for midwives to deliver these children to public view. This model of women's labor informs my reading of Shakespeare, as I examine the ways in which female characters create fictions of male identity or become instrumental in the fictional representation of official authority. Each of the plays I examine recreates a scene of origins which uses women's labor to reposition the patriarch at the center of the stage and, thereby, verify the legitimacy of his status both within the boundaries of the stage and Shakespeare's culture. Using Renaissance theories of genetic engineering in my discussion of Measure for Measure, I show how the bedtrick the Duke constructs between Angelo, Mariana and Isabella models a generative process to serve political and theatrical ends. The way in which women narrate, or contribute to the narration which facilitates the Duke's reappearance "like power divine," anticipates my discussion of women's narrative agency as I examine the way in which the witches engage Macbeth in a political gambit to reposition Banquo and, thereby, his descendant, King James, at the center of history. The three means to establish paternal identity recognized during the Renaissance, through the mother's word, through physical resemblance to the father and through the child's moral inheritance, inform the argument which takes me to Lear's dependence on daughters to reproduce the terror of his love. Bringing Lear's experience with his daughters together with Samuel Harsnett's descriptions of exorcism I assert the importance of women's voices both on Shakespeare's stage and in his culture's struggle for religious and political hegemony. The conclusion of the dissertation asserts that the way in which women narrate or contribute to the tale of man's origin, in Shakespeare, constructs a relationship between woman's biological art and political order which both shapes the patriarchal structures of his plays and calls the origin and legitimacy of those structures into question.