Love, Death and Resurrection in Tragicomedies by Seventeenth-Century English Women Dramatists.

Publication: Early Modern Literary Studies

Publication Date: 01-MAY-06

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2006 Matthew Steggle

Love, Death and Resurrection in Tragicomedies by Seventeenth-Century English Women Dramatists

Marguerite Corporaal

University of Leiden, the Netherlands

M.C.M.Corporaal@LET.leidenuniv.nl

Corporaal, Marguerite. "Love, Death and Resurrection in Tragicomedies by Seventeenth-Century English Women Dramatists". Early Modern Literary Studies 12.1 (May, 2006) 3.1-24 .

In discussing the relationship between gender representation and genre in seventeenth-century English drama, most literary critics have focused on the genres of comedy and tragedy. For instance, Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely claim that in comedies "women are most often nurturing and powerful", whereas the women in tragedy "are often powerless", and "almost invariably.destroyed" (6). Similarly, Linda Bamber directs her attention solely to tragedy and comedy, making the point that comedies depict witty and active heroines, whereas tragedies mostly stage evil creatures who are "failures as women" (2). The importance of gender to the genre of tragicomedy has, however, received little critical attention.

That critics have directed their concern to the issue of gender in relation to both comic and tragic drama appears logical: most of the limited number of Renaissance and Restoration women writers who engaged with drama opted for either comedy or tragedy. However, there were also a few female playwrights who took up tragicomedy. By 1620 Lady Mary Wroth wrote a closet tragicomedy entitled Love's Victory. After 1660, when tragicomedy was popular on the London stage (Maguire 42-43), and when women could finally write for the public theatre, two pioneering women dramatists had their tragicomedies staged in London. Frances Boothby's tragicomedy Marcelia, probably the first play by a woman to hit the London stage, was performed at the Theatre Royal in August 1669. Aphra Behn's very first play, The Forced Marriage, was also a tragicomedy, staged at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1670.



It is essential to investigate the above mentioned three earliest tragicomedies by English women playwrights in light of gender representations, in particular with regard to the transition from impending tragic disaster to comic resolution that characterises the tragicomic plot. Although there is no evidence that the three women writers knew one another's work, there is a remarkable similarity between their tragicomedies in that the impending tragedy in the three plays is shown to be bound up with women's powerless social position. Dramatist Giambattista Guarini states that tragicomedy takes from tragedy " its danger but not its death"(511), and in his influential "On Pastoral Tragicomedy" (1610) John Fletcher argues: "A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy; yet, brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questioned"(503). In Love's Victory, Marcelia as well as The Forced Marriage death and resurrection, which leads to a happy resolution, play a central role, and Wroth, Boothby and Behn use the tragicomic elements of near-death and rebirth as a way of revising ideas about women and agency, power, sexuality and marriage.

At a first glance Wroth's Love's Victory appears to be a comedy. The setting is a pastoral world peopled by shepherds and shepherdesses, which is usually a sign of the comic mode (McLaren 224). Furthermore, the play reminds one of A Midsummer Night's Dream in that supernatural powers seek to direct the love life of mortals: Venus demands that her son Cupid make mortals bow to their power, so that human beings will acknowledge the power of Love again, instead of assuming that they may "uncharm Love's spell"(II, i, 73). The aim of Venus and Cupid is not primarily to display their power by bringing lovers together, but to make the mortals suffer the pangs of love. As Venus claims, Cupid should not spare the people that scorn their will: "I would have all to wail and all to weep" (I, iv, 1-3). Venus and Cupid do not initially intend a comic resolution in which all lovers can be happily united; they want to extract tragic responses of suffering and sadness rather than mirth and laughter, and this already foreshadows the tragic plot that is to develop in the play: the unhappy love of Philisses and Musella.

Initially, the play seems to head for an immediate comic resolution: Philisses and Musella confess their love to one another in Act IV, scene one of the play. Yet, Musella's remark that she "would my life, to pleasure you, forsake" (IV, i, 50) already forebodes that, like Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet the two lovers do not end up in a "wedding-bed", but in a "tomb" (V, v, 52), having taken a fatal poison. "Love's tragedy"(V, iv, 72) that has thus developed, is, however, not entirely Cupid's fault who delights in making the mortals "try/ More pain, ere they their blessings may come nigh"(IV, ii, 13-14). In...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.