“No head eminent above the rest”: Female Authority in Othello and The Tempest

Abstract

Othello and The Tempest seem unlikely plays to illustrate queenship. They revolve around strong males tyrannizing over females—a wife and a daughter—who display few of the authoritative qualities of Shakespeare’s model woman ruler, Elizabeth I. However, the plays do present ways of thinking about female authority that were new, even revolutionary, for an early modern English audience. References in each play to sightings of difierently formed humans—men whose heads stand below their shoulders—allow for rethinking the human body as a model for political and marital hierarchies. When these references are analyzed in conjunction with the plays’ politics, Othello and The Tempest suggest that, despite early modern beliefs about the unnaturalness of woman rulers, queenship could arise organically in the known world. This suggestion is surprising in light of the plays’ bold exhibitions of male power. More significant is the radical political perspective that the differently formed body implies, given that constructions of early modern authority rest on the idea that a human head is and will always be above and thus superior to the human body.¹ This essay will examine early modern marital and political theorists’ manipulation of the body metaphor as a way of legitimizing exclusive male rulership and proceed with an analysis of the plays, ultimately demonstrating Shakespeare’s subtle undermining of early modern political and social orthodoxy.

As for the head of the naturall body, the head hath the power of directing all the members of the body to that use which the judgement in the head thinkes most convenient. It may apply sharpe cures, or cut off corrupt members, let blood in what proportion it thinkes fit, and as the body may spare, but yet is all this power ordained by God.

(King James, A Speech to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at Whitehall, 1609)

Paul, Ephesians 5 sayeth this: ye wyves, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the lorde, For the husband is the wyves heads, like as Christ also is the head of the congregation,… so let the wives also be in subjection to theyr husbands in all thynges.

(Heinrich Bullinger, The Christen state of matrimonye, 1543)

It was my hint to speak—such was my process—

And of the Cannibals that each [other] eat,

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.

(Othello, 1.3.142–44)