Women and Tudor Tragedy: Feminizing Counsel and Representing Gender [Paperback]

The role of women as writers, literary and dramatic characters, and real queens in early modern Europe was central to the development of Tudor ideas about gender and womens place in society. Women and Tudor Tragedy investigates the link between gender and genre, identifying the relation between cultural history and mid-Tudor drama. This book establishes a way for reading women in early modern history, drama, and poetry by fusing discussions of gender in literature with historical analysis of tyranny and martyrdom in mid-Tudor culture. It considers the disparities between the representation of women in historical, political, and religious treatises by examining the complex portrayal of women, female speeches, and the rhetoric of good counsel. The author provides a discussion of the role of women in early English tragedies and in a variety of texts by women. Throughout the book, Allyna E. Ward asks in what ways these different ways of writing the Tudor women can help scholars better understand the place of women in English culture at the end of the sixteenth century. Furthermore, Ward traces the feminization of the rhetoric of counsel that takes place with the last Tudor monarchs as a way of accommodating female rule.Allyna E. Ward is assistant professor of English at Booth University.

In Women and Tudor Tragedy, Ward looks to several Tudor tragedies to demonstrate how the role of counselors in these plays can provide a means for examining how male hierarchy attempted to maintain power when Mary and Elizabeth I were on the throne. Ward historicizes the education and role of counselors in the lives and monarchies of the Tudor queens. She then discusses the role of counsel to (and counsel from) women in Tudor tragedy, with Jane Lumley's The Tragedie of Iphigenia and George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmershe's Jocasta. Ward examines Tudor translations and adaptations of Seneca, and looks at tyrants in Cambises, Gorboduc, Horestes, and Gismond of Salerne. Finally, thel��