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.
Appendices
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