Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood

D. Williams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137024756
• eBook ISBN: 9781137024763
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first scholarly study devoted to Shakespeare's girl characters and conceptions of girlhood. It charts the development of Shakespeare's treatment of the girl as a dramatic and literary figure, and explores the impact of Shakespeare's girl characters on the history of early modern girls as performers, patrons, and authors.

Part I

Shakespeare’s Girls

1

Peevish and Perverse

The distinctive and dynamic concept of girlhood in Shakespeare’s early plays reflects the multiple definitions of the word “girl” available in the early modern period. According to the Middle English Dictionary, the term “girl” had a history of being used for boys as well as girls. But equivalents for “girl” in John Florio’s A World of Words (1598) and Randle Cotgrave’s A Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (1611) associate it with sexual license as well as service: “wench,” “harlot,” “wanton,” “minx,” “strumpet,” and “trull.” And Samuel Johnson’s definition of “girl” as “female child, or young woman” conveys the sense that girlhood occupies a liminal space between childhood and adulthood.¹

In Henry VI, Part One (circa 1591), the contradictory representations of Joan of Arc, otherwise known as Joan La Pucelle, illustrate the range of meanings and connotations ascribed to “girl” in early modern England. The character’s very name, La Pucelle, announces her status as a girl: John Palsgrave’s definition of the French word “pucelle,” in Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (1530), is “mayde of the woman kynde” and Cotgrave’s is “a maid, virgine, girle, damsel.”² However, like the term “girl,” “pucelle” (or “puzzel”) also carried with it meanings such as “trull” or “harlot.”³ Dubbed by Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin the “most vividly conceived and memorable character” in Henry VI, Part One, Joan La Pucelle vacillates between these conflicting identities, while her soldier’s attire looks back to the medieval use of “girl” as a term for boys as well as girls.⁴

Joan La Pucelle is called a “girl” twice in the play, after being captured by the English. In the first instance, La Pucelle’s father, a Shepherd, begs for his daughter’s attention, “Kneel down, and take my blessing, good my girl” (5.6.25), although she refuses to acknowledge him: “Peasant, avaunt!” (5.6.21). The Shepherd’s use of “girl,” here, recalls La Pucelle’s youth and humble status earlier in the play, “I am by birth a shepherd’s daughter,/ My wit untrained in any kind of art” (1.3.51–2), at the moment when she lays claim to a more noble birth. La Pucelle angers her father by refusing to kneel before him, anticipating subsequent Shakespearean fathers such as Capulet and King Lear, who are enraged when their daughters do not do what they are told:

Wilt thou not stoop? Now cursèd be the time

Of thy nativity. I would the milk

Thy mother gave thee when thou sucked’st her breast

Had been a little ratsbane for thy sake.

Or else, when thou didst keep my lambs afield,

I wish some ravenous wolf had eaten thee.

Dost thou deny thy father, cursèd drab?

To the English

O, burn her, burn her! Hanging is too good.

(5.6.26–33)

Denied the performance of demure daughterly contrition that he expects (“good my girl”), the Shepherd calls his daughter, instead, a “drab:” a synonym for “wench” or “strumpet” as well as “girl.” At the same time, however, he imagines her as a helpless little mammal, like a nursing lamb. The Shepherd’s words thus mark the shift in the play’s representation of La Pucelle from the demure French shepherdess, a “sweet virgin” (3.7.17) and “humble handmaid” (42), to the sexually transgressive and devious Pucelle: from lamb, in other words, to tigress.

Although her French comrades hail La Pucelle as an idealized maiden, the Shepherd’s characterization of his daughter as a “drab” echoes the English perspective on La Pucelle that is voiced throughout the play. Talbot, her greatest detractor, consistently paints her as a “strumpet” (1.7.12), “witch” (3.4.3), “shameless courtesan” (3.5.5), and “railing Hecate” (24). Talbot’s insults seem at first no more than typical anti-French stereotypes, but as England’s fortunes in the war improve, the play’s perspective on La Pucelle shifts to side with the English. By Act Five, the French “maid of Orleans” is represented communing with spirits, and living up to her reputation as a femme fatale by claiming to be with child and naming a series of potential fathers to avoid execution.⁵ She announces her pregnancy, perversely, immediately after vehemently insisting upon her chastity: “A virgin from her tender infancy/ Chaste and immaculate in very thought” (5.6.50–1).

La Pucelle’s words at her successful conversion of Burgundy to the French cause, “Done like a Frenchman – (Aside) turn and turn again” (3.7.85) speak to the play’s ongoing revision and redefinition of this central character. Identified with the “fickle wavering nation” (4.1.138) of France, La Pucelle’s combination of humble innocence, exalted duty, and defiant sexuality serves as a vehicle for the play’s anti-French propaganda. As Talbot puts it, “Pucelle or pucelle, dolphin or dogfish” (1.6.85), connecting her transformative girlhood to stereotypes of French mutability, and linking her virginity, as La Pucelle, to the slang word, “puzzel” for prostitute, as well as to another slang word, “pizzle,” penis, and, finally, to the idea of the character, herself, as quite a puzzle.

For much of Henry VI, Part One, La Pucelle is wearing a soldier’s armor, recalling the origins of “girl” as a term for male as well as female children, and serving as a reminder that the character was originally performed by a boy actor. Although La Pucelle proves herself to be a capable soldier, there is no sense that she is disguising herself as a boy, unlike the historical Joan: as Talbot observes, “a woman clad in armour chaseth men” (1.7.3). Her effect on him is clearly devastating: “my thoughts are whirlèd like a potter’s wheel” (1.7.19). The French, similarly, address La Pucelle in feminine terms: after her military success at Orléans, Charles the Dauphin praises her as “Divinest creature, Astraea’s daughter” (1.8.4). But he acknowledges her masculine qualities when he describes her as “Adonis’ garden” (6), locating in her, as well, the young hunter’s boyish beauty. Boyishness seems to be a constitutive feature of La Pucelle’s girlhood. When she is charged with being a “sorceress” and “condemned to burn” (5.6.1), her claim to pregnancy is given the following gloss by Richard Duke of York: “she and the dauphin have been ingling” (5.6.68). The word “ingle” brings the connotation of a boy lover, as in “Jove’s own ingle, Ganymede.”⁶ Bedford’s incredulous question, “A maid? And be so martial?” (2.1.22), conveys the combination of qualities that define La Pucelle, pairing boyhood and girlhood, and military with maidenly powers.

Along with competing gendered identifications, La Pucelle is defined by her tremendous rhetorical prowess, evinced by the enchanting speeches she performs to convince Burgundy to join the French (3.7.40), and culminating in the scene in which La Pucelle summons fiends, offering them her soul in exchange for a French victory. La Pucelle ultimately fails as a witch, but this scene suggests how the early modern girl, like the witch, is not gendered in a straightforward way, as Banquo muses to the witches in Macbeth: “You should be women/ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/ That you are so” (1.3.45–7). Perhaps, like the witches in Macbeth, Pucelle should be a woman, but her magical speech, military involvement, and masculine appearance make her, instead, a girl. As Gabriele Bernhard Jackson argues, the characterization of La Pucelle “draws heavily on the current controversy about the nature of women and on the interrelated types of the Amazon, the warrior woman, the cross-dressing woman, and the witch.”⁷ And, as Leah Marcus has shown, these characteristics speak, as well, to the “topical” Queen Elizabeth I, who also violates gendered norms.⁸ Yet this constellation of interrelated and theatrically compelling types (or what Marcus calls “an impossible pastiche of laudable and despicable traits” 52), which Katherine Eggert connects to contemporary anxieties about the stage, also informs La Pucelle’s status as a girl, distinguishing it, in all its wildness, from the ideal of tamed and domesticated adult femininity.⁹

The play presents another dangerous French maiden immediately following La Pucelle’s encounter with the demons: Margaret of Anjou (1430–82), who married Henry VI in 1445, just after her fifteenth birthday, is as bewitching to Suffolk, romantically, as La Pucelle is bewildering to Talbot. As Suffolk puts it, she “confounds the tongue and makes the senses rough” (5.5.27). Margaret goes on to become Suffolk’s lover in Henry VI, Part Two, and in Henry VI, Part Three, she even stabs York on the battlefield. Richard III is structured around the fulfillment of Margaret’s curses, as an old lady, against the English, just as Henry VI, Part One centres on the enchanting Pucelle, and ends with her own curse against the English, as she is led off to her martyrdom: “May … darkness and the gloomy shade of death/ Environ you till mischief and despair,/ Drive you to break your necks or hang yourselves” (5.6.87–91).

The second time La Pucelle is called a “girl,” it is in response to her claim that she is pregnant:

YORK:	Why, here’s a girl; I think she knows not well –
	There were so many – whom she may accuse.
WARWICK:	It’s sign she hath been liberal and free.
YORK:	And yet, forsooth, she is a virgin pure!

(5.6.80–3)

Is she a “virgin pure”? Or “liberal and free”? York’s dialogue with Warwick illustrates not only the play’s conflicting attitudes towards Joan La Pucelle, from “trull” (2.2.28) and “sorceress” (3.4.3) to “virgin” (5.6.50) and “holy maid” (65), but also conflicting early modern attitudes towards girlhood. From the exalted innocence of the peasant maiden, to the jaded sophistication of the harlot, and including the boy soldier and witch, the shifting representations of and responses to La Pucelle in Henry VI, Part One reveal the complexity, potency, and flexibility of the term “girl” in the sixteenth century. While Theodora A. Jankowski views La Pucelle as “completely not what early modern English society expected a virgin to be,” I regard her, instead, as paradigmatic of the performances of girlhood that I trace in these pages, although most of the girls I discuss do not meet such a cruel and untimely fate.¹⁰ Jennifer Higginbotham’s discussion of La Pucelle emphasizes her “threat to social and political hierarchies” (80) and ultimately regards her as evidence of a failure of girlhood: “Joan attempts to claim recognition within prevailing norms, but finds no space within which to lead a livable life” (86).¹¹ For my purposes here, however, La Pucelle’s identification as “girl” through her acts of resistance highlights the enabling variety of possibilities and associations attendant upon girlhood in the early modern period. Shakespeare’s La Pucelle offers just one perspective on a character regarded, elsewhere, as a folk heroine and a martyr. Just as the term, “girl,” is prompted by La Pucelle’s display of defiance and sexual autonomy, so, too, does it reflect her compelling movements between innocence and knowledge, chastity and sexuality, even femininity and boyhood. As the word “girl” pulls us in competing directions, it offers the opportunity for multiple identifications, shedding light on girlhood, itself, as a stage of transition and flux. As La Pucelle puts it, “turn and turn again.” If Henry VI, Part One charts an English perspective on Joan of Arc, revealing that she is not a saint, it also confirms, if nothing else, that she is a girl.

“Perversely she persevers:” The Two Gentlemen of Verona

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and Romeo and Juliet, the characters that are called “girl” translate La Pucelle’s independence and rebellion, as well as the multiplicity and variety of her identifications, into the contexts of courtship and romantic love. Julia and Silvia, Kate and Bianca, and Juliet are all addressed, at different points, as “girl,” and, as they repudiate, escape, or subvert their fathers’ authority, their impetuous and dynamic rejection of masculine and patriarchal will is labeled by their fathers, husbands, and suitors as “peevish,” “perverse,” “froward,” and “wayward.” For these Shakespearean girls, however, to be peevish and perverse is not only to perform their status as girls, but also, through resistance and mutability, to become themselves.

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Duke of Milan complains that his daughter, Silvia, has rejected his plan for her to marry Thurio:

Ay, and perversely she persevers so.

What might we do to make the girl forget

The love of Valentine, and love Sir Thurio?

(3.2.28–30)

Describing his daughter as “perverse,” the Duke uses a term adapted, via the Old French pervers, or parvers, from the Latin perverto.¹² Literally “to turn around or about, to overturn, overthrow, throw down,” perverto, along with the adjective perversus, conveys subversion, destruction, corruption, or following the wrong path, and was often used to signify turning away from God. By characterizing Silvia’s independence of mind as “perverse,” the Duke suggests that Silvia is making an unusual choice by preferring Valentine to Thurio, which is how we use the term today. But “perverse” also signifies, here, in the religious sense: when Silvia refuses to accept the love object her father has chosen for her, the girl resists the patriarchal authority that is often constructed as divinely ordained.¹³ Denying her father and refusing Thurio, Silvia’s acts of negation are consistent with definitions of perverto as overturning, throwing down, casting away, and rejecting.

Shakespeare uses “perverse” to describe a girl whose desire for self-determination comes into conflict with her father’s or her suitor’s plans for her. Anticipating Freud’s account of “polymorphously perverse” girlish sexuality that must be altered to complement and accommodate male expectations, “perv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Girls Included!
• Part I Shakespeare’s Girls
• Part II Stages of Girlhood
• Part III Writing Girls
• Conclusion: Girlhood After Shakespeare’s Heroines
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index