Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Domenico Lovascio

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2020
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501514050
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: History

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries explores the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much has been written on male characters in the Roman plays as well as on non-Roman women in early modern English drama, very little attention has been paid to the issues of what makes Roman women 'Roman' and what their role in those plays is beyond their supposed function as supporting characters for the male protagonists. Through the exploration of a broad array of works produced by such diverse playwrights as Samuel Brandon, William Shakespeare, Matthew Gwynne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathaniel Richards under three such different monarchs as Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries contributes to a more precise assessment of the practices through which female identities were discussed in literature in the specific context of Roman drama and a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which accounts of Roman women were appropriated, manipulated and recreated in early modern England.

Ben Jonson’s and Thomas May’s “Political Ladies”: Forms of Female Political Agency

Angelica Vedelago

The political agency of early modern women has been attracting increasing scholarly attention, often intersecting with ongoing discussions on women’s forms of writing and public speaking.¹ In this chapter, I set out to contribute to this fertile field of inquiry by considering how two early modern playwrights—Ben Jonson and Thomas May—take issue with female political agency by drawing upon Roman historiography, in which women not only stand out as exempla of feminine virtue but also often emerge as unscrupulous politicians. By focusing on Jonson’s Catiline His Conspiracy (1611) and May’s Julia Agrippina, Empresse of Rome (first staged in 1628; printed in 1639), I will look at how the two playwrights depict their female characters as political stakeholders and engage with contemporary debates on women’s education and participation in public life. In so doing, as I argue, Jonson and May reflect on the forms in which influential women of their time exerted their own political agency, thereby shedding new light on the alleged exclusion of early modern women from the political arena.

In Catiline His Conspiracy, Jonson dramatizes one of the moments of highest internal political tension in the history of republican Rome. After failing to obtain the consulship in 66, 64, and 63 BCE, the patrician Catiline plotted against the republic, but Cicero, a homo novus, the first of his non-patrician family to reach the consular honors, foiled the conspiracy thanks to a disclosure. According to Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, Jonson’s main source, the responsible for the leak was the noblewoman Fulvia, who found out about the imminent coup d’état from her incautious lover Quintus Curius. In Jonson’s play, Cicero openly acknowledges Fulvia’s role: “Here is a Lady, that hath got the start, / In piety, of us all,” “the author of [Rome]’s safety,” but also one of “the first symptoms” of the malady that was rotting the state from within.² Fulvia’s crucial contribution is only one of the ways in which women exert political agency in Jonson’s Catiline. Fulvia, depicted in the play as an upper-class courtesan, wilily exploits her erotic ascendancy over men, whereas the older Sempronia, less renowned for her ageing beauty than for her impressive education and political influence, employs other weapons to carve out a space for herself in a male-dominated ruling class. In T. S. Eliot’s terms, Fulvia and Sempronia stand out as “political ladies.”³

Almost twenty years after the publication of Jonson’s Catiline, another play put in the limelight a couple of “political” Roman women, namely May’s The Tragedy of Julia Agrippina: Empresse of Rome, which telescopes events occurring in 49 – 59 CE, a decade in the waning phase of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.⁴ Agrippina, partly modelled on Jonson’s Sempronia, maneuvers a number of powerful men of the imperial court like a deft puppeteer in order to achieve two irreconcilable ambitions: getting her son Nero to the throne and maintaining a certain control over him afterwards. The other, less prominent political woman in the play is Poppaea, who, like her Jonsonian counterpart Fulvia, exploits her attractiveness but, unlike her, is a noblewoman and can conclude three advantageous marriages as part of her social climbing.

While Roman history was a far from unusual subject matter in early modern English drama, the foregrounding of women who contributed to the making of that history cannot be dismissed as a conventional choice.⁵ Upon closer examination, Jonson’s and May’s delineation of willful female characters bespeaks an interest in women’s political agency at a time in which women’s socio-political role was a highly topical issue. This chapter will accordingly explore Jonson’s and May’s characterization of “political ladies” and the means these women employ to satisfy their thirst of power to men’s dismay. Jonson’s Fulvia and Sempronia significantly extend their agency beyond the sphere of domesticity and love; May’s Agrippina and Poppaea, based on classical sources and on Jonson’s Catiline, assert themselves as political players in imperial Rome. Moreover, this chapter will attempt to trace possible connections with English contributions to the transnational, age-old querelle des femmes, particularly in May’s Agrippina. It will also try to detect similarities between these Roman female characters and powerful women in early modern England, particularly in their ability to establish themselves as political shareholders. To posit a parallelism between ancient Rome and early modern England is more than a heuristic key to a historicizing reading. Contemporary influential women ma...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Roman Women in Early Modern English Drama
• “Rome’s Rich Ornament”: Lavinia, Commoditization, and the Senses in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
• Blending Motherhoods: Volumnia and the Representation of Maternity in William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
• “Silent, Not as a Foole”: William Shakespeare’s Roman Women and Early Modern Tropes of Feminine Silence
• “Timidae obsequantur”: Mothers and Wives in Matthew Gwinne’s Nero
• “Let Me Use All My Pleasures”: The Ovidian Courtship of the Emperor’s Daughter in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster
• “Few Wise Women’s Honesties”: Dialoguing with Roman Women in Ben Jonson’s Roman Plays
• Ben Jonson’s and Thomas May’s “Political Ladies”: Forms of Female Political Agency
• Bawds, Wives, and Foreigners: The Question of Female Agency in the Roman Plays of the Fletcher Canon
• “The Beauties of the Time”: Roman Women in Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor
• “Poison on, Monsters”: Female Poisoners in Early Modern Roman Tragedies
• Notes on Contributors
• Index