
2 Ruling Women, Volume 2
of plays as what Jean Howard calls “sites of social struggle”
implicated in the maintenance of, and challenge to, societal
power relations.
4
Specifically, my interest lies in the power rela-
tions of sexual politics, and hence in the creation, propagation,
and subversion of certain paradigms of knowledge concern-
ing hierarchies of gender. Despite the considerable differences
between the institution of theatre in France and England at the
time, the questions Howard has repeatedly asked as regards
English Renaissance drama provide a particularly useful entry-
point to our corpus, namely to what extent do the plays under
examination challenge the subordinate role of women, or on
the contrary recuperate and depoliticize the threat of women
in power? To what extent can theatre therefore be perceived as
an agent of cultural change or an agent of patriarchal conserva-
tism? Above all, in whose interest is it to challenge or support
particular discourses concerning gender? A key consideration
throughout the study is the analysis of these representations
as representations, as one formulation puts it, “interested con-
structions, not mirrors of truth.”
5
As we will see, dramas of the
period strive both to contain and to challenge, to uphold tradi-
tional paradigms, and to suggest new realms of the thinkable,
in a constant jostling for power, which, in its creation of contra-
dictions and incoherences, often within the same play, makes
the idea of a “site of struggle” particularly apt. As Christian Biet
and Christophe Triau put it, it is in the very nature of theatre
not only to potentially uphold ideologically dominant codes of
values, but to simultaneously—by the same mechanisms of aes-
thetics, poetics, and spectacle—introduce a criticism of those
same values.
6
The representation in drama of female rulership, more so
than that in any other genre, hinges on a mise-en-sc è ne of an
understanding of the queen’s two bodies, as dramatists are
obliged to confront the conflict between the queen as woman
and the queen as prince, in sum between the individual and the
office. It is the varying responses to that conflict that give rise