QUEENSHIP AND POWER
Series Editors: Carole Levin and Charles Beem
This series brings together monographs, edited volumes, and textbooks from schol-
ars specializing in gender analysis, women’s studies, literary interpretation, and
cultural, political, constitutional, and diplomatic history. It aims to broaden our
understanding of the strategies that queens—both consorts and regnants, as well as
female regents—pursued in order to wield political power within the structures of
male-dominant societies. In addition to works describing European queenship, it
also includes books on queenship as it appeared in other parts of the world, such as
East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Islamic civilization.
Editorial Board
Linda Darling, University of Arizona (Ottoman Empire)
Theresa Earenfight, Seattle University (Spain)
Dorothy Ko, Barnard College (China)
Nancy Kollman, Stanford University (Russia)
John Thornton, Boston University (Africa and the Atlantic World)
John Watkins (France and Italy)
Published by Palgrave Macmillan
The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History
By Charles Beem
Elizabeth of York
By Arlene Naylor Okerlund
Learned Queen: The Image of Elizabeth I in Politics and Poetry
By Linda Shenk
“High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations
Edited by Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves
The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe
By Sharon L. Jansen
The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I
By Anna Riehl
Elizabeth I: The Voice of a Monarch
By Ilona Bell
Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth
Edited by Alice Hunt and Anna Whitelock
The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen
By Catherine Loomis
Queenship and Voice in Medieval Northern Europe
By William Layher
The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I
Edited by Charles Beem
The French Queen’s Letters: Mary Tudor Brandon and the Politics of Marriage in
Sixteenth-Century Europe
By Erin A. Sadlack
Wicked Women of Tudor England: Queens, Aristocrats, Commoners
By Retha M. Warnicke
A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the
Reign of Elizabeth I
By Rayne Allinson
Three Medieval Queens: Queenship and the Crown in Fourteenth-Century England
By Lisa Benz St. John
Mary I: Gender, Power, and Ceremony in the Reign of Englands First Queen
By Sarah Duncan
The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography, 1440–1627
By Kavita Mudan Finn
Fairy Tale Queens: Representations of Early Modern Queenship
By Jo Eldridge Carney
Mother Queens and Princely Sons: Rogue Madonnas in the Age of Shakespeare
By Sid Ray
The Name of a Queen: William Fleetwoods Itinerarium ad Windsor
Edited by Charles Beem and Dennis Moore
The Emblematic Queen: Extra-Literary Representations of Early Modern Queenship
Edited by Debra Barrett-Graves
The Queens Regnant of Navarre: Succession, Politics, and Partnership, 1274–1512
By Elena Woodacre
Queenship in the Mediterranean: Negotiating the Role of the Queen in the Medieval and
Early Modern Eras
Edited by Elena Woodacre
The Queen’s Mercy: Gender and Judgment in Representations of Elizabeth I
By Mary Villeponteaux
Titled Elizabethans: A Directory of Elizabethan Court, State, and Church Offi cers,
1558–1603
Edited by Arthur F. Kinney and Jane A. Lawson
Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics
Edited by Carlo M. Bajetta, Guillaume Coatalen, and Jonathan Gibson
The Man behind the Queen: Male Consorts in History
Edited by Charles Beem and Miles Taylor
Berenice II Euergetis: Essays in Early Hellenistic Queenship
By Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter
Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications: Royal Women, Power, and Persuasion
By Valerie Schutte
Scholars and Poets Talk About Queens
Edited by Carole Levin and Associate Editor Christine Stewart-Nu ñ ez
Royal Mothers and their Ruling Children: Wielding Political Authority from A
ntiquity to the Early Modern Era
Edited by Elena Woodacre and Carey Fleiner
Queenship and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Henrietta Maria and
Marie Antoinette
By Carolyn Harris
Ruling Women, Volume 1: Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in
Seventeenth-Century France
By Derval Conroy
Ruling Women, Volume 2: Confi guring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century
French Drama
By Derval Conroy
R ULING WOMEN, VOLUME 2
Confi guring the Female Prince in
Seventeenth-Century French Drama
Derval Conroy
RULING WOMEN, VOLUME 2
Copyright © Derval Conroy 2016
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this
publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written
permission. In accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited
copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10
Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
The author has asserted their right to be identified as the author of this
work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of Nature America, Inc., One
New York Plaza, Suite 4500, New York, NY 10004-1562.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
ISBN 978-1-349-57167-3
ISBN: 978–1–137–56848–9 (eBook)
DOI: 10.1057/9781137568489
Distribution in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world is by Palgrave
Macmillan®, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in
England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire
RG21 6XS.
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Library of Congress.
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Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 978-1-137-56842-7
For my parents, S é amus and Veronica Conroy
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 The Power and the Fury, or the Politics of
Representation in Drama 5
2 The Drama of Gender Struggle: Androgyny
a n d F e m a l e G o v e r n m e n t 6 7
3 Dramatizing the Female Prince: Virtue, Statecraft,
and Virginal Wives 93
C o n c l u s i o n 1 3 1
Appendix: Table of Principal Plays Analyzed 137
N o t e s 141
B i b l i o g r a p h y 193
I n d e x 211
I NTRODUCTION
W
hile the principal theoretical concerns underpin-
ning this study are outlined in the Introduction
to Volume 1, it is useful nonetheless at this junc-
ture to highlight a number of issues specific to theatre.
As is clear from Volume 1, one of the central issues in this
study is a broad understanding of what constitutes a political
text. In addition to examining seventeenth-century “feminist”
literature and galleries of women as political, this study is also
wedded to an appreciation of drama as political, both in terms
of tragedy as a political genre and, more fundamentally, theatre
as a political institution. The debates concerning the political
nature of drama are well rehearsed with regard to a multiplic-
ity of historical eras and contexts, and that concerning seven-
teenth-century French tragedy is no exception. A recent and
heated polemic has focused on the genesis of tragedy, examin-
ing the extent to which politics can be seen to serve the ends
of poetics, or poetics the ends of politics.
1
Despite diverging
viewpoints, mainly concerning authorial intentionality, the
inscription of political ideologies in tragedy is undisputed. As
is the case of the tragedies under examination here, the appel-
lation political is merited to the very obvious extent that these
plays, through their representation of political figures, treat of
traditional political themes, of virtue, power, and authority, of
sovereign–subject relations, of government and tyranny.
2
T h i s
treatment does not necessarily mean that the plays express spe-
cific political ideas, although they may, but that they stage “a
thinking about the political,” and hence merit the term “a the-
ater of the political.
3
As regards the political nature of theatre
as an institution, my approach is informed by an understanding
2 Ruling Women, Volume 2
of plays as what Jean Howard callssites 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 simultaneouslyby the same mechanisms of aes-
thetics, poetics, and spectacleintroduce 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 queens 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