“With a paper of scurvy verses fastened to thy breast”: Female Theatricality, Stage Metaphors and Competing Textual Appropriations of the Female Body in Four Early Modern Comedies

This mémoire project investigates how the advent of the professional actress in Restoration England shaped the crafting of female characters and the staging of the female body in four early modern-century comedies: All’s Well That Ends Well, The Convent of Pleasure, Enchanted Island and The Rover. Combining stage history and feminist critical approaches, this thesis suggests that, by establishing an analogy between the theatrical space and their settings, the four plays examined expose patriarchal anxieties surrounding the empowering potential of female theatricality. Drawing from Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity, it also examines how the comedies dramatize female and male competing endeavours to reappropriate the female body/text by rewriting it as a theatrical script.

Focusing on Shakespeare’s play, Chapter 1 suggests that Helen can be read as a female itinerant player performing on several make-shift stages at a time when actresses were excluded from the commercial theatre. It also examines how the heroine subtracts herself from male characters’ linguistic constructions of the female body, gradually depriving them of any authorial agency. Chapter 2 concentrates on Margaret Cavendish’s pastoral play and the spatial analogy established between the closet drama genre and Lady Happy’s Convent; considering the alternation between the sections of the play written by Margaret and those written by William Cavendish, it also analyses how the Prince(ss)’s interference in the Convent Ladies’ theatricals reduces the protagonist into voicelessness. Chapter 3 first examines metatheatrical allusions to the sexual availability of the female bodies/characters inhabiting the theatre-like island of Davenant and Dryden’s tragicomedy; it then suggests that the dramatists’ appropriation of Shakespeare’s Tempest is reproduced on the plot level by male characters’ rewritings the female bodies on the stage. Chapter 4 suggests that in Behn’s play female characters exploit the subversive potential of masquerade to manipulate the male gaze through theatrical and visual self-advertisement. It also examines how women’s theatrical empowerment is violently repressed by male characters who rewrite female narratives by distorting the notion of consent and legitimizing rape.