Abstract
When, in 1570, John Daye sought to assert the superiority of his edition of Gorboduc over the previous one, rape provided a powerful metaphor for illegitimate publication. In imaging the text as a raped woman, he was hardly radical; in fact, writers of this period pervasively trope the text as a female body and publication as an exposure and invasion of that body akin to rape.2 Yet, although he goes on to describe the woman as ready to ‘play Lucreces part, and of her self die for shame’, and although he presents himself as arguing that the ‘fraude and force’ used against her relieve her of any blame, he carries on:
the authors … were very much displeased that she so ranne abroad without leaue, whereby she caught her shame, as many wantons do. (sig. Aii)
The ambivalence of his presentation of the woman — ‘done … villanie’ yet ‘wanton’ — is characteristic of representations of rape in the early modern period, as well as of attitudes to print. (If any publication is the ‘rape’ of a text, after all, how is one to mark out an illegitimate printing from the rest?) In restoring the text to what the authors had originally written, as he claims, Daye reclothes it and sends it ‘abroad among you’. Where the image of rape figured the illegitimacy of the original printing, this legitimate publication too is a making available of the woman/text.
One W.G. getting a copie … put it forth excedingly corrupted: euen as if by meanes of a broker for hire, he should haue entised into his house a faire maide and done her villanie, and after all to bescratched her face, torne her apparell, berayed and disfigured her, and then thrust her out of dores dishonested.
(Gorboduc, The P[rinter] to the Reader)1
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Notes
See Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), chapter 3. While Daye refers to his text as a Lucrece, Baines has pointed out the similarity between the raped woman here and the biblical Dinah, especially with regards to the woman’s being outside without her parents’ permission (p. 48).
See Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1975);
Peggy Reeves Sanday, ‘Rape and the Silencing of the Feminine’ in Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter, eds Rape: An Historical and Cultural Enquiry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986; rpr. 1989); Ross Harrison, ‘Rape — a Case Study in Political Philosophy’, ibid., pp. 41–56.
Anne Edwards summarises feminist views on rape in ‘Male Violence in Feminist Theory: an Analysis of the Changing Conceptions of Sex /Gender Violence and Male Dominance’ in Women, Violence and Social Control, ed. Jalna Hammer and Mary Maynard (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 13–29. That rape has been a ‘foundation myth’ of Western culture is also the premise of Robertson and Rose’s collection (Robertson and Rose, ‘Introduction’, p. 3).
Christine Froula argues that this inscription of misogynistic violence in literature puts women readers into the position of ‘abused daughter[s]’. ‘The Daughter’s Seduction: Sexual Violence and Literary History’, Signs xi (1986), 621–44 (633). For discussions of the visual arts, see, for example, Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: a Myth and its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982);
Norman Bryson, ‘Two Narratives of Rape in the Visual Arts: Lucretia and the Sabine Women’ in Tomaselli and Porter, pp. 152–73. For an analysis of the place of rape in feminist criticism see William Beatty Warner, ‘Reading Rape: Marxist-Feminist Figurations of the Literal’, Diacritics xiii (1983), 12–32.
See Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda Silver, eds Rape and Representation (NY: Columbia University Press, 1991);
Ellen Rooney, ‘Criticism and the Subject of Sexual Violence’, MLN xcviii (1983), 1269–77; Tomaselli and Porter.
For medieval French literature, see Patricia Francis Cholakian, Rape and Writing in the Heptaméron of Marguerite de Navarre (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991);
Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). See also Donaldson;
Kathleen Wall, The Callisto Myth: Initiation and Rape in Literature (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988). Rape may, of course, be discussed in connection with individual writers. For rape in Jacobean drama, see
Suzanne Gossett, ‘“Best Men are Molded out of Faults”: Marrying the Rapist in Jacobean Drama’, ELR xiv (1984), 305–27;
Leonard Tennenhouse, ‘The Theater of Punishment: Jacobean Tragedy and the Politics of Misogyny’ in Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (NY and London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 102–46.
William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (1594), l. 822 in The Poems, ed. F.T. Prince (London and NY: Methuen, 1960; rpr. 1985).
For the Senecan controversy ‘The Man Who Raped Two Women’, see Eugene M. Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 89.
See, for example, Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1987);
Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss, eds Women, Texts & Histories 1575–1760 (London and NY: Routledge, 1992);
Margaret Patterson Hannay, ed. Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985);
Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London and NY: Routledge, 1992). For women’s reading, see
Suzanne Hull, Chaste, Silent, & Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982). For more recent thinking on this association, see Preface, above.
For the problematic implications of biographical readings of women’s texts, see Danielle E. Clarke, ‘Translation, Interpretation and Gender: Women’s Writing c. 1595–1644’ (D. Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1994), p. iv.
For a summary of the controversy, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 2–3.
I am indebted to Elizabeth D. Harvey’s Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London and NY: Routledge, 1992) for my understanding of this phenomenon.
For discussions of the assimilation of these women’s texts into the canon, and its implications, see Purkiss, Three Tragedies, Introduction, pp. xi–xiii, and Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 3–15. For introductions to the lives and works of Jane Lumley and Mary Sidney, see, respectively,
Lorraine Helms, ‘Iphigenia in Durham’ in Seneca by Candlelight & Other Stories of Renaissance Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 48–71;
Margaret Patterson Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Mary Ellen Lamb’s Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) covers both Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth. For a useful summary of material on Elizabeth Cary and Wroth, see
Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1993).
See, for example, Harvey; Rosemary Kegl, The Rhetoric of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994);
Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984). I am of course indebted to this body of criticism.
See, for example, Beilin (1987), Krontiris, Lewalski. For exceptions to this rule, see Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London and NY: Routledge, 1994); Wendy Wall. Lamb’s book reverses the usual trend by devoting all but one chapter to the writings of the female members of the Sidney circle.
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© 2011 Jocelyn Catty
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Catty, J. (2011). Introduction. In: Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230309074_1
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