‘I’ll Want My Will Else’: The Changeling and Women’s Complicity with their Rapists

Abstract

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English dramatists linked women’s sexual continence and their submission to the authority of their fathers and husbands not only to the well-ordering of family life, but to the preservation of social order.¹ The ideal woman could be relied upon absolutely to protect these boundaries, and the age did have a model of such feminine purity, however unrealistic she must have seemed. Lucrece, wife of Collatine, victim of Tarquin’s lustful covetousness, was the English Renaissance’s archetypal pattern of the violated, yet virtuous woman. Her rape, available in Ovid and Livy (and in translations of their works), was versified by Shakespeare and Middleton, dramatised by Heywood, and echoed in plays throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, including Titus Andronicus, Valentinian, and Appius and Virginia.² Lucrece was the model wife who took her own life rather than allow any doubt that her loyalty and her children belonged solely to her husband.