Women Dipped in Blood: Gender, Violence and Control in Early Modern Tragedy

Abstract

This entire section, made up of two contextual studies and two case studies, considers the complex network of sexual politics in early modern revenge tragedy and contemporary violent film. A number of recent studies of early modern representations of rape and sexual violence have made connections between these cultural forms and late-twentieth-century attitudes, laws and fictional representations (most frequently in popular film): Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin describe rape as ‘the gatekeeper for the gender hierarchy’ and draw parallels between early modern representations and the systematic rape of women as a tool of ethnic oppression in Bosnia and other conflicts around the globe in the late twentieth century.¹ Jocelyn Catty discusses the courtroom drama The Accused (1988) in her conclusion to Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England (1999); Marion Wynne-Davis opens her study of rape in Titus Andronicus with a reference to the judge’s summing-up of a 1986 rape trial;² and Karen Bamford’s study of Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage (2000) begins with changing notions of rape in the 1970s informed by feminist critiques, concluding with a direct connection between the modern backlash against feminism and what she interprets as an analogous cultural reaction in the early seventeenth century.