Abstracts
Abstract
This article explores youthful subjectivity in both dramatic and non-dramatic verse, considering representations of female youth in Shakespeare’s late romance Pericles alongside the work of poet and polemicist Rachel Speght. The complex, unstable category of youth contributes both to Shakespeare’s rendering of his fourteen-year-old female character in his play and to Speght’s portrayal of herself in her poetry. Shakespeare’s Marina narrates her own tale and reconstitutes narratives spun about her, creating space for youthful self-fashioning. Nineteen-year-old Speght undertakes a similar project of self-making in her prose treatises and particularly in her two published poems, “A Dreame” and Mortalities Memorandum. This article compares self-fashioning in the work of a young female writer to the construction of the young female self by a contemporary male writer, suggesting that youthful subjectivity inheres for both girls in principles of authorship and narrative authority.
Keywords:
- Rachel Speght,
- William Shakespeare,
- Youth,
- Adolescence,
- Girls,
- Subjectivity,
- Narrative
Résumé
Cet article explore la subjectivité juvénile dans les vers dramatiques et non-dramatiques, en prenant en compte les représentations de la jeunesse féminine dans la pièce tardive de Shakespeare Périclès et l’oeuvre de la poète et polémiste Rachel Speght. La catégorie complexe et instable de la jeunesse contribue à la fois à la représentation du personnage féminin de quatorze ans chez Shakespeare et au portrait que Speght fait d’elle-même dans sa poésie. La Marina de Shakespeare narre sa propre histoire et reconstitue les récits racontés sur elle, créant un espace de façonnement de soi juvénile. La jeune Speght de dix-neuf ans entreprend un projet d’auto-engendrement similaire dans ses traités en prose et en particulier dans ses deux poèmes publiés, « A Dreame » et Mortalities Memorandum. Cet article compare le façonnement de soi dans l’oeuvre d’une jeune femme écrivaine et la construction de soi d’une jeune femme par un écrivain masculin contemporain, suggérant que la subjectivité juvénile des deux jeunes filles est inhérente aux principes d’auctorialité et d’autorité narrative.
Download the article in PDF to read it.
Download
Appendices
Bibliography
- Balizet, Ariane M. Shakespeare and Girls’ Studies. New York: Routledge, 2019. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315148922.
- Bamford, Karen. “Romance, Recognition and Revenge in Marie Clements’s The Unnatural and Accidental Women.” Theatre Research in Canada 31, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 143–63. https://doi.org/10.3138/tric.31.2.143.
- Beilin, Elaine V. “Writing Public Poetry: Humanism and the Woman Writer.” Modern Language Quarterly 51, no. 2 (June 1990): 249–72. https://doi. org/10.1215/00267929-51-2-249.
- Campana, Joseph. “Shakespeare’s Children.” Literature Compass 8, no. 1 (January 2011): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00768.x.
- Chedgzoy, Kate, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy, eds. Shakespeare and Childhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511483493.
- Cohen, Walter. Introduction to “Pericles, Prince of Tyre: A Reconstructed Text,” by William Shakespeare, 2723–33. Edited by Walter Cohen. In The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
- Curtwright, Travis. “ ‘Falseness cannot come from thee’: Marina as Character and Orator in Shakespeare’s Pericles.” Literary Imagination 11, no. 1 (June 2008): 99–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imn011.
- Eliot, T. S. “Marina.” The First Gates (blog), 7 September 2012. https://thefirst-gates.com/2012/09/07/marina-a-poem-by-t-s-eliot/.
- Ewbank, Inga-Stina. “ ‘My Name Is Marina’: The Language of Recognition.” In Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir, edited by Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G. K. Hunter, 111–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
- Gieskes, Edward. “ ‘Chaucer (of All Admired) the Story Gives’: Shakespeare, Medieval Narrative, and Generic Innovation.” In Renaissance Papers 2009, edited by Christopher Cobb, 85–110. New York: Camden House, 2010. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt7zsstc.
- Helms, Lorraine. “The Saint in the Brothel: Or, Eloquence Rewarded.” Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 3 (Autumn 1990): 319–32. https://doi. org/10.2307/2870482.
- Higginbotham, Jennifer. The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00768.x.
- Immel, Andrea, and Michael Witmore, eds. Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe, 1550–1800. New York: Routledge, 2006. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9780203958582.
- Knowles, Katie. Shakespeare’s Boys: A Cultural History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137005373.
- Lamb, Edel. Reading Children in Early Modern Culture. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70359-6.
- Lewalski, Barbara K. “Appendix: A Contemporary Response to Speght’s Mouzell: Marginalia in the Yale Copy.” In The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght: Women Writers in English 1350–1850, edited by Barbara K. Lewalski, 91–107. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Lewalski, Barbara K. Introduction to The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght: Women Writers in English 1350–1850, by Rachel Speght, xi–xxxvi. Edited by Barbara K. Lewalski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Luckyj, Christina. “A Mouzell for Melastomus in Context: Rereading the Swetnam-Speght Debate.” English Literary Renaissance 40, no. 1 (2010): 113– 31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43447683.
- Miller, Naomi J., and Diane Purkiss, eds. Literary Cultures and Medieval and Early Modern Childhoods. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14211-7.
- Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare as Collaborator. London: Routledge, 1960.
- Niles, John D. Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
- Orgel, Stephen. Introduction to Pericles: Prince of Tyre, by William Shakespeare, xxxi–xlv. Edited by Stephen Orgel. New York: Penguin, 2001.
- Preiss, Richard, and Deanne Williams, eds. Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
- Preston, Claire. “The Emblematic Structure of Pericles.” Word & Image 8, no. 1 (1992): 21–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.1992.10435824.
- Prusko, Rachel. “ ‘Who hath got the right Anne?’: Gossip, Resistance, and Anne Page in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives.” In The Merry Wives of Windsor: New Critical Essays, edited by Evelyn Gajowski and Phyllis Rackin, 51–60. London: Routledge, 2014. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315779065.
- Prusko, Rachel. “Youth and Privacy in Romeo and Juliet.” Early Theatre 19, no. 1 (June 2016): 113–36. https://doi.org/10.12745/et.19.1.2400.
- Purkis, James. “Rachel Speght as ‘Criticall Reader.’ ” English Studies in Canada 40, no. 4 (December 2014): 107–26. http://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2014.0048.
- Purkiss, Diane. “Fractious: Teenage Girls’ Tales in and out of Shakespeare.” In Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Texts, edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford, 57–72. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781351152082.
- Purkiss, Diane. “Material Girls: The Seventeenth-Century Woman Debate.” In Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, edited by Diane Purkiss and Clare Brant, 69–100. London: Routledge, 1992. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203359242.
- Roebuck, Thomas, and Laurie Macguire. “Pericles and the Language of National Origins.” In This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard, edited by Willy Maley and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, 23–48. Burlington: Ashgate, 2010.
- Rutter, Carol Chillington. Shakespeare and Child’s Play: Performing Lost Boys on Stage and Screen. New York: Routledge, 2007. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203016589.
- Shakespeare, William. “Pericles, Prince of Tyre: A Reconstructed Text.” Edited by Walter Cohen. In The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, 2734–91. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
- Speght, Rachel. “Certaine Quaeres to the Bayter of Women.” In The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght: Women Writers in English 1350–1850, edited by Barbara K. Lewalski, 29–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Speght, Rachel. “A Dreame.” In The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght: Women Writers in English 1350–1850, edited by Barbara K. Lewalski, 48–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Speght, Rachel. “In praise of the Author and her Worke.” In The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght: Women Writers in English 1350–1850, edited by Barbara K. Lewalski, 10–11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Speght, Rachel. Mortalities Memorandum. In The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght: Women Writers in English 1350–1850, edited by Barbara K. Lewalski, 45–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Speght, Rachel. A Mouzell for Melastomus. In The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght: Women Writers in English 1350–1850, edited by Barbara K. Lewalski, 3–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Speight, Helen. “Rachel Speght’s Polemical Life.” Huntington Library Quarterly 65, no. 3/4 (2002): 449–63. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3817984.
- Swetnam, Joseph. The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Vnconstant Women: Or the Vanitie of Them; Choose You Whether. With a Commendation of the Wise Vertuous, and Honest Vvoman. Pleasant for Married Men, Profitable for Young Men, and Hurtfull to None. London, 1617.
- Vecchi, Linda. “ ‘Lawfull avarice’: Rachel Speght’s Mortalities Memorandum and the Necessity of Women’s Education.” Women’s Writing 8, no. 1 (2001): 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09699080100200128.
- Williams, Deanne. “Introduction.” In Childhood, Education and the Stage in Early Modern England, edited by Richard Preiss and Deanne Williams, 1–13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. https://doi. org/10.1017/9781316145685.001.
- Williams, Deanne. “Papa Don’t Preach: The Power of Prolixity in Pericles.” University of Toronto Quarterly 71, no. 2 (April 2002): 595–622. https://doi. org/10.3138/utq.71.2.595.
- Williams, Deanne. Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
- Witmore, Michael. Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. Ithaca , NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
- Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540 to 1620. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.