British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
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Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Panel - Women at the margins of Culture
Friday 2nd September 2005, 11.00am-12.30pm,
Herschel Lecture Theatre 2
Participants
Tripthi Pillai, Loyola University, Chicago
"Tough Times, Tough Women: Working
Women's Networks in Early Modern England."
Joanna Scott, University of California, Riverside
Confession and the ‘Damn’d
Spot:’ Exploring the Role of the Witch’s Mark in Newes from Scotland
and Macbeth
Victoria Price, University of Glasgow
“Made to write ‘whore’
upon”: Othello and the Projection of Whoredom
Abstracts
"Tough Times, Tough Women:
Working Women's Networks in Early Modern England."
Tripthi Pillai, Loyola University, Chicago
This paper attempts to study the socio-economic networks that were formed
by early modern women in response to the socially constructed spectrum of un/acceptable
women’s work ranging from the profession of prostitutes—the least
problematic of the working women—to witches and herb women—the most
troubling and economically subversive groups in the spectrum. As secret networks
that were actively prosecuted by the Church and State, workingwomen’s
communities are problematized in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Situated on the margins of a society that was at once dependent on and suspicious
of their professional capabilities, working women and their networks are positioned
in the drama within the conflicted maneuverings of their lived experiences.
In turn, even when they are ridiculed as social parasites, these women operate
as sympathetic figures that work in collaboration with each other to protect
themselves from the persecutions of a patriarchally determined socio-economic
system. Working in organized bodies, professional women invade narrative and
performative spaces within which they assert a socio-economic autonomy inextricable
from their gendered social and professional identity.
Studying the evidence relating to independent renaissance workingwomen, this
essay analyzes their varied representations in plays such as Pericles and A
Fair Quarrel. While locating the plays’ women within the socially constructed
spectrum of operational un/acceptability, the paper also considers the possible
economic and professional composition of women in the theater audiences and
argues that their presence—as paying patrons of the theater companies—directly
affected the dynamics of the “stage-women,” who are given due prominence.
Consequently, the paper asserts that the insertion of powerful workingwomen
is a critical intervention that enables contemporary society to redefine the
core of its socio-economic positions with respect to renaissance women.
Confession and the ‘Damn’d
Spot:’ Exploring the Role of the Witch’s Mark in Newes from Scotland
and Macbeth
Joanna Scott, University of California, Riverside
For Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries, distinctions between magic and
science were blurry. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of the trials
to which accused witches were subjected had to do with blood and the body. My
paper focuses on the role of the witch’s mark, which came to be the most
important piece of evidence in Scottish witchcraft trials, in two Renaissance
works: the anonymous pamphlet Newes from Scotland and Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Using the two cases set out in the pamphlet as a guide, I argue that Lady Macbeth
can, in fact, be read as a witch, and that her final scene, her “trial”
and confession, is provoked by the discovery of her own “witch’s
mark.”
Drawing from works by Christina Larner, Stephen Greenblatt, Peter Stallybrass,
and Deborah Willis, I intend to show that although the cases from Newes from
Scotland and Macbeth follow a remarkably similar pattern of discovery and confession,
they are ultimately set apart by the different classes to which their accused
witches belong. The two witches from the pamphlet, both lower class, are accused,
tried, and convicted by their social superiors. Lady Macbeth, as Queen of Scotland,
has no viable social superior. She, thus, must accuse, try, and convict herself.
The end result, however, is the same for all the women; for both the accused
in Newes from Scotland, and for Lady Macbeth, the discovery of the witch’s
mark signals the beginning of the end.
“Made to write ‘whore’ upon”:
Othello and the Projection of Whoredom
Victoria Price, University of Glasgow
Although prostitutes appear on the Shakespearean stage, the term “whore” is most often applied in the Shakespeare canon not to commercially prostituted females, but to women, and wives in particular, who are thought to sleep with men other than their husbands. Focusing on the case of Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello (1602), I discuss the unstable boundaries between “wife” and “whore,” “chastity” and “whoredom.” Unravelling the complicated strands of a discourse in which such categories are entangled, and examining the ease with which a discourse of whoredom can be applied to all women, I show that this is a verbal deployment that arises out of a masculine fear of cuckoldry. That is, the discourse emerges as a form of social control in so far as it serves to “socialise” women into tacitly constraining and limiting their own forms of behaviour and sexual activity in order to avoid the threat of whoredom. This is a textual focus which gives the play a depth of social insight unique in Renaissance drama, in that it reveals how, for men in Shakespearean England, gender identity comes to rely on both the appropriation and the denial of sexuality troped through prostitution in order to make sense of society and instill a social hierarchy.
