Pregnant Bodies from Shakespeare to Ford

A Phenomenology of Pregnancy in English Early Modern Drama

Katarzyna Burzyńska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367756239
• eBook ISBN: 9781000551914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

This book explores how the pregnant body is portrayed, perceived and enacted in Shakespeare's and his contemporaries' drama by means of a phenomenological analysis and a recourse to early modern popular medical discourse on reproduction. Phenomenology of pregnancy is a fairly new and radical body of philosophy that questions the post-Cartesian chasm of an almost autonomous reason and an enclosed and self-sufficient (male) body as foundations of identity. Early modern drama, as is argued, was written and staged at the backdrop of revolutionary changes in medicine and science where old and new theories on the embodied self-clashed. In this world where more and more men were expected to steadily grow isolated from their bodies, the pregnant body constituted an embattled contradiction. Indebted to the theories of embodiment this book offers a meticulous and detailed investigation of a plethora of pregnant characters and their "pregnant embodiment" in the pre-modern works by Shakespeare, Middleton, Webster and Ford. The analysis in each chapter argues for an indivisible link between an intensely embodied experience of pregnancy as enacted in space and identity-shaping processes resulting in a more acute sense of selfhood and agency. Despite seemingly disparate experiences of the selected heroines and the repeated attempts at containment of their "unruly" bodies, the ever transforming and "spatial" pregnant identities remain loci of embodied selfhood and agency. This book provocatively argues that fictional characters' experience reflects tangible realities of early modern women, while often deflecting the scientific consensus on reproduction in the period.

1 Conception, Quickening and Engulfing Expansion Pregnant Embodiment in Shakespeare’s Early Pregnancy Plays

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163367-2

Shakespeare’s early plays Titus Andronicus (ca. 1588–1593) and All’s Well That Ends Well (ca. 1600–1605)¹ may not seem to merit their ‘pregnant’ designation, but in fact, they prefigure a greater investment in embodied and body-dependent states such as pregnancy and maternity of the later plays. It is no coincidence that Shakespeare centralises pregnant characters in his first tragedy and one of his relatively early comedies, making a first tentative step in the investigation of pregnant embodiment. Although coming from opposing genres, both Tamora and Helena emerge as explosive challengers to the status quo. At the start they hold liminal positions and become loci of overpowering, even monstrous, desire. Although Tamora is already an experienced mother, and Helena a young virgin they are both characterised by tenacity and an indomitable will. Moreover, their pregnancies, often critically underexplored,² are the driving forces of these plays; in Tamora’s case leading to her downfall, in Helena’s to her triumph. For both, it is debatable whether their pregnancies are visibly inscribed on the body and spatially recognised within the text. Yet, these fluid, ungraspable conditions are crucial for the plays’ finales in which meaning and subjectivity are arrived at through a return to the body. Finally, the plays tentatively but unprecedentedly push open the doors to early modern birthing chambers, demonstrating both the fragility of the birthing ritual narrative and the conditional nature of female solidarity under early modern patriarchy.

1.1 “Plucked into the swallowing womb”: Monstrous Conception, Malevolent Pregnancy and Negotiable Maternity in Titus Andronicus (Titus, 2.3.239)

In Titus Andronicus (ca. 1593)³ Tamora inspires a vicious circle of grotesque butchery and so far few critics have attempted redeeming “that ravenous tiger” (Titus, 5.3.197). She confirms many insidious early modern beliefs about womanhood, such as inherent lustfulness, insatiable sexual appetite and maternal monstrosity.⁴ On the other hand, her position as the driving force for destruction is limited by her secondary role as a mother, wife and lover. I believe Tamora has been too easily dismissed as a locus of exoticism foreign to Roman patriarchy. In fact, her liminal position mirrors the conflicted female condition in early modern England. Despite her minimal development, she emerges as a visible ‘pregnant’ presence in the play. Read against Shakespearean sources, she perfectly represents an existentialist tension between immanence and transcendence, as outlined by Beauvoir in The Second Sex.⁵ Shakespeare offers an embodied lived existence, a so-called lived body that encapsulates “pregnant embodiment” (Young 2005, 15, 46). In this section, I argue that Tamora’s pregnancy has a profound impact on her motivation and other characters’ perceptions of it. Her pregnant embodiment illustrates female “comportment” and “motility”, resulting from the social and existential situation of “being-in-the-world”.⁶

1.1.1 “Now climbeth Tamora Olympus’ top”: Tamora’s Pregnant Embodiment (Titus, 2.1.1)

In her analysis of female bodily experience, grounded in Beauvoir’s reading of femininity, Young (2005, 38) argues that women’s bodies are plagued by self-referentiality as they are simultaneously subjects and objects and, thus, that their lived experiences are not as transparent as the male embodiment. Tamora is indeed first looked upon as an object. She looms on stage as a physical presence; a witness to Lucius’s demand for her firstborn son’s sacrificial dismembering and Titus’s verdict. Although Titus delivers a mourning father’s highly stylised speech, it is Tamora who envisions a poignant image of maternity. Even Titus, who denies her mercy, refers to her as “this distressed queen”, the mother of “the proudest prisoner of the Goths” (Titus, 1.1.104, 96). On her knees, Tamora projects a haunting supplicating vision, encapsulating the subject–object tension of a captive and mother. Transcending immanence, she appeals to Titus in an articulate and emotionally powerful speech. She offers “[a] mother’s tears in passion for her son” (Titus, 1.1.106) and logical argumentation:

And if thy sons were ever dear to thee,

O think my son to be as dear to me.

Sufficeth not that we are brought to Rome….

But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets

For valiant doings in their country’s cause.

(Titus, 1.1.107–113)

Tamora first attempts to draw a parallel between her love for her sons and Titus’s. That the appeal falls on deaf ears comes as no surprise, given the ease with which Titus kills his own son Mutius later. Detmer-Goebel (2015, 110) persuasively argues for a pronounced unevenness between Tamora’s maternal and Titus’s paternal rights by referring “to the Roman law, vitae nescique potestas, which is the government-sanctioned right of the father to kill his child”. Although such a law did not exist in early modern England it was praised by contemporary writers, for example, Sir Thomas Smyth’s 1583 edition of De Republica Anglorum or Robert Filmer in Patriarcha. Abraham’s story provides a Judeo-Christian precedent for the case and so Titus is convinced that his sons should follow him unwaveringly just like Isaac who blindly trusted Abraham (Detmer-Goebel 2015, 110–11). Titus’s outlook mirrors the paternal expectations of the age, where love and care are substituted for submission and obedience. If, as Tamora foresees, Rome’s glory comes before maternal or paternal devotion, then it is reasonable to refer to the valour and military prowess for which her sons would be hailed as heroes in their native lands. Tamora’s argument is a logical appeal to both common sense and compassion. As Kunat (2019, loc. 2111) argues, “[r]educed to non-personhood as an enslaved prisoner, she speaks eloquently but is nonetheless rendered mute by the deaf ears upon which her pleas fall”. If Tamora is a “wooden” character, as Pitt (1981: 71) sees her, then so is Titus, whose hubris is a pathological inability to see past his own perspective.

What brings out a fuller poignancy of Tamora’s presence is her pregnancy, which conditions not only her actions but also her character’s perception. The seeming (in)visibility of Tamora’s condition led to critics ignoring it, while in the case of Titus one is offered a unique glimpse at the contemporary perspective in The Peacham Drawing, found in the so-called Harley papers in the Marquess of Bath’s library at Longleat House. The only surviving picture of Shakespeare’s play in performance is accompanied by the text of Tamora’s supplication, though scholars point out the disparity between text and image (Schlueter 1999, 171). There seems no doubt that the central figures in the drawing are Titus and Tamora. This unique image gives one insight into the characters’ comportment, only implicit in the text. The actors portrayed by Henry Peacham demonstrate conventional ways in which men and women engage with the world; with Titus showcasing direct openness with his arms outstretched and Tamora pleading on her knees with her hands clasped in front of her. Both in the image and in her supplication Tamora engages in a performative act, which inscribes her in the expected feminine mode of submissiveness and obedience. In line with typically male motility, Titus occupies his whole lateral space, thus projecting authority.⁷ Tamora, on the other hand, shields her body with her hands. Despite the active position her plea envisions, she reacts to the situation, rather than engages in it.⁸ However, what has been acknowledged is that Tamora is visibly bigger than Titus. Kneeling, she is roughly the same height as Titus, with her gown occupying more space than him. Breira argues that Tamora’s “exaggerated body size” in the drawing is meant to illustrate a pregnant body. She aptly points out that in the picture Tamora is wearing “a loose-bodied gown”, reminiscent of the Duchess of Malfi’s dress, which lead Bosola to suspect her pregnancy. If Tamora is pregnant from the outset then her “pregnant body would plead louder than words for her son’s life” (Breira 1997, 20–21). I would contend that her visible pregnancy both makes Titus’s moral rigidity more shocking and radically changes Tamora’s psychology.

Tamora’s pronounced size in the Peacham drawing is no coincidence. Despite her suppliant posture of Mater Dolorosa, her opulent bulk prefigures her break from objectification into the agency of a subject and “a split being” inherent in pregnancy.⁹ It also encapsulates Tamora’s fluidity; a grieving mother, lustful adulteress and inciter to rape and infanticide. Kehler (1995, 326) argues that Tamora defies patriarchal categorisations, which identify women through their relations to men; as “[a] remarried lusty widow, Tamora subverts the subordination inherent in the categories of maid, widow, or wife by non-conformity”. I would add that she mocks the ‘virginal’ maternity recalled in Kristeva’s philosophy.¹⁰ In Tamora’s characterisation, maternity and sexuality, along with affection and cruelty, are fused into a disturbing unity. Saturninus is instantly besotted with her lustful allure and ready to ditch virginal Lavinia. Tamora is again “a lived body” and an object to be gazed at.¹¹ In response to Saturninus’s marriage proposal, she confirms her duality: “I swear, / If Saturnine advance the Queen of Goths / She will a handmaid be to his desires, / A loving nurse, a mother to his youth” (Titus, 1.1.336–339). Tamora offers herself to Saturninus as an accessory to his desires; a sexual object and mother. “A mother to his youth” is both an active role of a carer and a passive object of his care (Titus, 1.1.339). As pointed out by scholars, Tamora’s words and actions regarding her sons hint at incest. For instance, Tamora’s compliance in Lavinia’s rape “expresses her enjoyment of her sons’ potency, which veers toward and approaches a sublimated incest” (Stimpson 1983, 60). Willbern (1978, 179) believes that “[b]eing eaten by the mother symbolizes incestuous intercourse (entry into the mother’s body) as well as death by dismemberment and dissolution”. Tamora’s name might refer to biblical Tamar from Genesis 38:6–30 and 2 Samuel 13:1–39. The Genesis Tamar, dressed as a prostitute has an incestuous affair with Judah, her father-in-law, and gives birth to two sons. The second Tamar is raped by her brother Amnon (Kehler 1995, 321). Tamora’s double role of Saturninus’s lover and mother likewise alludes to incest.

Tamora also uses maternal imagery in her amorous conduct with Aaron;

And curtained with a counsel-keeping cave,

We may, each wreathèd in the other’s arms,

Our pastimes done, possess a golden slumber,

Whiles hounds and horns and sweet melodious birds

Be unto us as is a nurse’s song

Of lullaby to bring her babe asleep.

(Titus, 2.3.25–28)

In her seduction, Tamora combines the vision of post-climax lassitude with a mother’s lullaby to her baby, although the melody is not only birdsong but also hunting dogs’ barking and horns’ rumbling. This oxymoronic and violent combination might reflect Aaron’s and Tamora’s rash lovemaking. It also captures the elusiveness of ‘a split’ pregnant subjectivity, especially with Tamora’s reference to the cave. As Young (2005, 49) writes, “[p]regnancy challenges the integration of my body experience by rendering fluid the boundary between what is within, myself, and what is outside, separate”. Conceptualised as a safe haven, Tamora’s cave seemingly does not go hand in hand with the violence of their intercourse. The cave is a safe refuge and becomes a site of a transformative sex act and, as such, parallels the violent metamorphosis within Tamora’s body. It is a womb metaphor, especially that womb symbolism is prevalent elsewhere in the play; with the pit referred to as “the swallowing womb” (Titus, 2.3.240). Rich (2000, 150), following Levy in Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age, explains that in pre-patriarchal cultures caves were not only shelters but holy places symbolising the mother’s body. Stone-age cave walls were frequently adorned with vagin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Early Modern and Modern Discourses of Pregnancy and Maternity
• 1 Conception, Quickening and Engulfing Expansion: Pregnant Embodiment in Shakespeare’s Early Pregnancy Plays
• 2 Pregnancy, Labour and the Postpartum Period: Pregnant Embodiment in Shakespeare’s Late Pregnancy Plays
• 3 Delivery and Lying-in in Middleton’s City Comedies
• 4 Illicit and Secret Pregnancy in Post-Shakespearean Tragedies
• Conclusion
• Index