Queen Elizabeth and Annabella in "Tis Pity She's a Whore" by John Ford Annabella, the female protagonist in John Ford’s play, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ultimately dies after trying to meet the conflicting demands that her brother and father place on her. While her brother, Giovanni, commands her to be his clandestine lover, her father, Florio, expects her to marry a socially appropriate man and bear a child. These demands closely resemble the real-life demands that Queen Elizabeth I’s subjects placed on her because they simultaneously wanted her to fulfill their erotic desires, marry a politically appropriate man, and produce an heir to the throne. Ford’s play “was first published in 1633,” thirty years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I, but “nostalgia… in the late 1620’s and 1630’s… [drove] people…to measure a worsening political situation against inevitably heightened memories or impressions of what life had been like under the great queen” (Morris vii; Barton 724). While it’s not clear whether this nostalgia for the reign of Elizabeth drove Ford when he wrote his play, there are clear parallels between the demands that were placed on the factual Elizabeth and on the fictional Annabella; moreover, there are striking parallels between the responses to the two women’s deaths. Both women were expected to forever remain objects of male erotic desire, and the characteristics of Elizabeth that evoked erotic desire in her subjects parallel the characteristics of Annabella that elicit erotic desire in Giovanni. Just as “courtiers paid homage to Elizabeth as an ever-youthful yet unapproachable object of desire[,]” Giovanni confesses to Annabella, “[T]he view / Of thy immortal beauty hath untuned / All harmony both... ... middle of paper ... ...bbory, Achsah. “’Oh, Let Mee Not Serve So’: The Politics of Love in Donne's Elegies.” ELH 57.4 (1990): 811-833. King, John N. “Queen Elizabeth I: Representations of the Virgin Queen.” Renaissance Quarterly 43.1 (1990): 30-74. Morris, Brian. Introduction. ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. By John Ford. Ed. Brian Morris. London: Black, 1992. vii-xxvii. Mullaney, Steven. “Mourning and Misogyny: Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, and the Final Progress of Elizabeth I, 1600-1607.” Shakespeare Quarterly 45.2 (1994): 139-162. “Promiscuous, a.2a.” Oxford English Dictionary. 1989 Second ed. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 8 May 2005 . Rose, Mary Beth. “The Gendering of Authority in the Public Speeches of Elizabeth I.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 115.5 (2000): 1077-1082.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona deals with the debate over the relative merits of love and friendship between two young courtiers Valentine and Proteus. One of the great debates of the Renaissance was the discussion of whether the love of a woman was a sentiment more noble than the friendship that might exist between men. We also see the first instances of later female heroines in the qualities of Julia and Silvia.
Despite the gathering winter she felt relieved to see that her sixteen- year old daughter, now her only child after the early death of her son James, was acting normal again. For the past fortnight the younger Elizabeth had been carrying herself in a strange manner. While walking along normally she would sometimes cry out. Last week she had shrieked at extremely inappropriate time in Sunday dinner and that day in church she had been overcome with irreverent laughter. She was always quick to offer a reasonable excuse to spare the swift punishment usually dispensed to children at the time, but the extravagance and immodes...
In this essay we will be comparing two female characters from different texts and different time periods. We will be looking in depth at Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare's play 'Macbeth', and Sheila from J.B. Priestley's 'An Inspector Calls'. We will be looking at their roles in their respective plays, and how their characters develop over time.
Many readers feel the tendency to compare Aphra Behn's Oroonoko to William Shakespeare's Othello. Indeed they have many features in common, such as wives executed by husbands, conflicts between white and black characters, deceived heroes, the absolute vulnerability of women, etc. Both works stage male characters at both ends of their conflicts. In Othello, the tragic hero is Othello, and the villain is Iago. In Oroonoko, the hero is Oroonoko, the vice of the first part is the old king, and the second part white men in the colony. In contrast to their husbands, both heroines—Desdemona and Imoinda—seem more like "function characters" who are merely trapped in their husband's fates, occasionally becoming some motivation of their husbands (like Desdemona is Othello's motivation to rage, Imoinda's pregnancy drives Oroonoko restless to escape). While Shakespeare and Behn put much effort in moulding them, to many readers they are merely "perfect wives". This paper aims to argue that, Desdemona and Imoinda's perfect wifehood may be the product of compliance to male-dominated societies, where women are
The seventeenth century marked the beginning of modernity in social hierarchy. King Charles II had come back from the continent after ten years in exile with a new thought on how to treat women. “These women were intimately connected with the king. They would experience the most immediate and profound effects of the restoration. In order to see these effects, be a major member of the royal court, and gain a higher social standing, women became royal mistresses. The women of Charles’ court had gained celebrity, independent wealth, and influence, and this was unrecognizably modern for this age and time.” Charles had learned about how to have a successful marriage and many relationships with his mistresses from the aristocratic women of France. Women in France were not only playing a prominent role in French court but they were gaining respect for it. French aristocratic women were debating and writing about what they wanted from their relationships. These novels of allegorical love were guidebooks to help men get well on the...
From this slender evidence, along with liberal and dubious readings of the plays and sonnets, scholars have created a robust portrait of the Shakespeares' unhappy domestic life - a "marriage of evil auspices," as one scholar put it. Rather than inhibiting biographers, the lack of information seems to have freed many of them to project their own fantasies onto the relationship. The prevailing image of Ann Hathaway is that of an illiterate seductress who beguiled the young Shakespeare, conceived a child and ensnared him in a loveless union.
Shakespeare constructs King Richard III to perform his contextual agenda, or to perpetrate political propaganda in the light of a historical power struggle, mirroring the political concerns of his era through his adaptation and selection of source material. Shakespeare’s influences include Thomas More’s The History of King Richard the Third, both constructing a certain historical perspective of the play. The negative perspective of Richard III’s character is a perpetuation of established Tudor history, where Vergil constructed a history intermixed with Tudor history, and More’s connection to John Morton affected the villainous image of the tyrannous king. This negative image is accentuated through the antithesis of Richards treachery in juxtaposition of Richmond’s devotion, exemplified in the parallelism of ‘God and Saint George! Richmond and victory.’ The need to legitimize Elizabeth’s reign influenced Shakespeare’s portra...
I was gratified to see that this critic agreed with my interpretation of the Duchess’s demise, viz., the Duke had her murdered. The theory advanced by my brilliant and magnificent Professor had been that the Duke gave her so many orders and restrictions that she pined away. I had been looking at his famous line “And I choose/never to stoop.” He married her for her beauty but would never lower himself to tell her when she angered him.
In the 19th Century, women had different roles and treated differently compared to today’s women in American society. In the past, men expected women to carry out the duties of a homemaker, which consisted of cleaning and cooking. In earlier years, men did not allow women to have opinions or carry on a job outside of the household. As today’s societies, women leave the house to carry on jobs that allow them to speak their minds and carry on roles that men carried out in earlier years. In the 19th Century, men stereotyped women to be insignificant, not think with their minds about issues outside of the kitchen or home. In the play Trifles, written by Susan Glaspell, the writer portrays how women in earlier years have no rights and men treat women like dirt. Trifles is based on real life events of a murder that Susan Glaspell covered during her work as a newspaper reporter in Des Moines and the play is based off of Susan Glaspell’s earlier writing, “A Jury of Her Peers”. The play is about a wife of a farmer that appears to be cold and filled with silence. After many years of the husband treating the wife terrible, the farmer’s wife snaps and murders her husband. In addition, the play portrays how men and women may stick together in same sex roles in certain situations. The men in the play are busy looking for evidence of proof to show Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. As for the women in the play, they stick together by hiding evidence to prove Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. Although men felt they were smarter than women in the earlier days, the play describes how women are expected of too much in their roles, which could cause a woman to emotionally snap, but leads to women banding together to prove that women can be...
A major concern in both the film and the original text is the ‘status of women’. This is represented through the differing roles of women and their denigration within the Elizabethan society. For instance, Hero is accused of committing infidelity; consequently her image in society is tarnished, In addition to this, Claudio insults Hero publicly without even considering confirming the accusation of her being unchaste. This is illustrated through Claudio slandering Hero through the use of usage of Greek Mythological allusions “You seem to as Dian in her orb, but you are more intemperate than Venus in y...
Margaret is an intelligent, articulate, and ambitious woman who desires to rise up in social status by marrying a man of higher social rank. She attends to those above her, in hopes of elevating her status as she becomes closer to the upper-class. As a minor character, she plays a small yet crucial role in advancing Don John’s plot to slander Hero and spoil her wedding. As a lower-class character, Margaret serves as a foil to the rich girls, particularly Hero, who embodies every attitude and mindset Margaret does not. But she also offers an alternative perspective on the upper-class characters in the play. Because Margaret is victimized because of her social ambitions, punished for wanting to rise above her ...
Throughout his life... was a man self-haunted, unable to escape from his own drama, unable to find any window that would not give him back the image of himself. Even the mistress of his most passionate love-verses, who must (one supposes) have been a real person, remains for him a mere abstraction of sex: a thing given. He does not see her --does not apparently want to see her; for it is not of her that he writes, but of his relation to her; not of love, but of himself loving.
Throughout the historical literary periods, many writers underrepresented and undervalued the role of women in society, even more, they did not choose to yield the benefits of the numerous uses of the female character concerning the roles which women could accomplish as plot devices and literary tools. William Shakespeare was one playwright who found several uses for female characters in his works. Despite the fact that in Shakespeare's history play, Richard II, he did not use women in order to implement the facts regarding the historical events. Instead, he focused the use of women roles by making it clear that female characters significantly enriched the literary and theatrical facets of his work. Furthermore in Shakespeare’s history play, King Richard II, many critics have debated the role that women play, especially the queen. One of the arguments is that Shakespeare uses the queen’s role as every women’s role to show domestic life and emotion. Jo McMurtry explains the role of all women in his book, Understanding Shakespeare’s England A Companion for the American Reader, he states, “Women were seen, legally and socially, as wives. Marriage was a permanent state” (5). McMurtry argues that every woman’s role in the Elizabethan society is understood to be a legal permanent state that is socially correct as wives and mothers. Other critics believe that the role of the queen was to soften King Richard II’s personality for the nobles and commoners opinion of him. Shakespeare gives the queen only a few speaking scenes with limited lines in Acts two, four, and five through-out the play. Also, she is mentioned only a few times by several other of the characters of the play and is in multiple scenes wit...
The title page offers an immediate insight into the patriarchal constraints placed on women in early modern England. Although The Tragedy of Mariam is the first known English play to be authored by a woman, the fact that Cary is unable to give her full name is indicative of the limitations on women writers of the period. This semi-anonymous authorship...
Miranda’s character in the play represents the ideal woman of Elizabethan era. She is portrayed as a goddess among the men. “Most sure, the goddess/Oh whom these airs attend!”(1.2.425-426). Fer...