The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

The deaths of husbands radically changed women’s lives in the early modern period. While losing male protection, widows acquired rare opportunities for social and economic independence. Placed between death and life, female submissiveness and male audacity, chastity and sexual awareness, or tragedy and comedy, widows were highly problematic in early modern patriarchal society. They were also popular figures in the theatre, arousing both male desire and anxiety. Now how did Shakespeare and his contemporaries represent them on the stage? What kind of costume, props, and gestures were employed? What influence did actors, spectators, and play-space have? This book offers a fresh and incisive examination of the theatrical representation of widows by discussing the material conditions of the early modern stage. It is also the only comprehensive study of this topic covering all three phases of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline drama.

The first book to systematically combine the two vibrant yet hitherto unconnected fields of memory and affect in Shakespeare's England.

This collection explores how situations of authority, governance, and influence were practised through both gender ideologies and affective performances in medieval and early modern England. Authority is inherently relational it must be asserted over someone who allows or is forced to accept this dominance. The capacity to exercise authority is therefore a social and cultural act, one that is shaped by social identities such as gender and by social practices that include emotions. The contributions in this volume, exploring case studies of women and men's letter-writing, political and ecclesiastical governance, household rule, exercise of law and order, and creative agency, investigate how gender and emotions shaped the ways different individuals could assert or maintain authority, or indeed disrupt or provide alternatives to conventional practices of authority.

Shakespeare s Widows moves thirty-one characters appearing in twenty plays to center stage. Through nuanced analyses, grounded in the widows material circumstances, Kehler uncovers the plays negotiations between the opposed poles of residual Catholic precept and Protestant practice - between celibacy and remarriage. Reading from a feminist materialist perspective, this book argues that Shakespeare s insights into the political and economic pressures the widows face allow them to elude mechanistic ideology. Kehler s book provides extensive historical background into the various religious and cultural attitudes towards widows in early modern England.

Each of these essays addresses not only a play, but a specific cultural or literary topic. They cover vital perspectives in cultural studies such as race, class, gender, sexuality and colonialism; as well as topics in history like humanism, science, law, and reformation theology; and in dramatic genre.

Looking especially at widows of master craftsmen in early modern Paris, this study provides analysis of the social and cultural structures that shaped widows' lives as well as the experiences these women had in their day-to-day experience. It dramatically alters our understanding of gender; it also engages the historiographical issue of women's participation in the world of work, and explicitly examines the place of the law in the lived experience of the period.

"During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, single women in England might occupy one or more categories in accordance with their life stages, lifestyles, and economic status. Under the rubric of the single woman are found widows; well-born 'spinsters' provided for by their families; entrepreneurs; wage earners, many of whom were servants or farm workers; nuns and the handicapped (the latter also often sheltered by the church); unwed mothers; cross-dressers, some of whom may have been lesbians; kept women; and prostitutes. This anthology mirrors the negotiations between the actual life circumstances of women and their ideological constructions on the page and stage. These multivalent negotiations in some ways sustain, in others contradict, the received notion of an increasingly vehement patriarchialism limiting opportunities for women's independence and offering few fictional models of women who found happiness outside marriage. The contributions here are divided between those who discuss the stifling effects of misogyny and those who uncover not only significant pockets of resistance to inequality but also a sheer disregard of misogynous traditions on the part of English institutions as well as individuals. This anthology will be of interest to graduate students and advanced scholars in English medieval and Renaissance studies, including social history and economics, the visual arts, and especially literature." --