Abstract
This essay suggests a method of teaching the seventeenth-century gender debates that expands our definition of literature by early modern women. My case study involves a course unit on the Swetnam controversy, taught first to undergraduates and subsequently in a graduate seminar. In both courses, students read works by male authors such as Shakespeare, Sidney, and Jonson together with women’s writings of the period, ending with the Swetnam controversy’s anonymous and pseudonymous works. The successes and pitfalls of teaching early modern women writers together with their more canonical male counterparts have begun to be explored in leading scholarly journals (the winter 1996 volume of Shakespeare Quarterly) and at a number of conferences, namely the 1996 MLA special session “Teaching Judith Shakespeare” and the 1997 Shakespeare Association of America seminar by the same name. The majority of this work considers how to teach the bard alongside aristocratic women writers. Such pedagogical approaches may help to de-center Shakespeare’s authority. But they also run the risk of merely recanonizing elite authors and genres in ways that sidestep the more radical implications of a cultural studies approach to the early modern period.
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Notes
Diane Purkiss, “Material Girls: The Seventeenth-Century Woman Debate”, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (London: Routledge, 1992), 69–101
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Nonelite persons included artisans, day laborers, and retailers; rural smallholders; and citizens and burgesses. See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 50–80.
Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1978).
Martin Ingram and Bernard Capp in Popular Culture in Seventeenth Century England, ed. Barry Reay (London: Croom Helm, 1985)
Hilda Smith, “Feminism and the Methodology of Women’s History”, in Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 368–84.
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 4.
Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Eemale Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern Germany and England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 29–30.
Hyder Rollins, “The Black-Letter Broadside Ballad”, PMLA 27 (1919), 277
Natascha Wurzbach, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Diane Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Charles Read Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929)
Keith Thomas, “The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England”, The Written Word: Literacy in Translation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 97–131
Margaret Ferguson, “Attending to Literacy”, in Attending to Women in Early Modern England, ed. Betty Travitsky and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 265–79.
Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 74–9
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Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), 73–92
Kathleen McCluskie, Renaissance Dramatists (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press International, 1989), 87–99.
Ann Jennalie Cook, in The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981)
James Stokes, “Women and Mimesis in Medieval and Renaissance Somerset (and Beyond)”, Comparative Drama 27.2 (1993), 176–96
Ann hompson, “Women/’women’ and the stage”, Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Clifford Davidson, Illustrations of the Stage and Acting in England to 1580 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991).
Marion Wynne-Davies, “The Queen’s Masque: Renaissance Women and the Seventeenth-Century Court Masque”, in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (New York: Harvester Wheat-sheaf, 1992)
Ann Rosalind Jones, “Counterattacks on ‘the Bayter of Women’: Three Pamphleteers of the Early Seventeenth Century”, in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 45–62
Travitsky, “The Lady Doth Protest: Protest in the Popular Writings of the Renaissance Englishwoman”, English Literary Renaissance 14.1 (winter 1984), 255–83
Travitsky, “The Possibilities of Prose”, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 234–66
Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), esp. 247–85
Simon Shepherd, The Women’s Sharp Revenge: Five Women’s Pamphlets from the Renaissance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985)
Anthony Low, “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance”, Studies in English Literature 37 (1997), 197.
Megan Matchinske, “Legislating Middle-Class Morality in the Marriage Market: Ester Sowernam’s Esther hath hanged Haman”, ELR 24.1 (winter 1994), 154–83
Constance Jordan, “Gender and Justice in Swetnam the Woman-Hater” Renaissance Drama 19 (1989), 149–69
Valerie Wayne, “The Dearth of the Author: Anonymity’s Allies and Swetnam the Woman-hater” in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 221–40.
S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds., Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
On female playgoers’ influence on the drama of the period, see also Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), esp. 252
Theodore Leinwand, The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603–1613 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), esp. 137–39
For a related assessment, see Coryll Crandall, “The Cultural Implications of the Swetnam Anti-Feminist Controversy in the 17th Century”, Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (summer 1968), 136–47
Ann Rosalind Jones, “From Polemical Prose to the Red Bull: the Swetnam Controversy in Women-Voiced Pamphlets and the Public Theater”, in The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World, ed. Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
See also Roxana Stuart, “Dueling en Travestie: Cross-Dressed Swordfighters in Three Jacobean Comedies”, Theatre Studies 38 (1993), 29–43.
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© 2002 Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki
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Gough, M.J. (2002). Women’s Popular Culture? Teaching the Swetnam Controversy. In: Malcolmson, C., Suzuki, M. (eds) Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107540_5
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