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 England’s 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 Fleetwood’s 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

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First published 2016 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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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.

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ISBN 978-1-349-57167-3

ISBN: 978–1–137–56848–9 (eBook)

DOI: 10.1057/9781137568489

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Macmillan®, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in

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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

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.

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.

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.”

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 calls “sites of social struggle”

implicated in the maintenance of, and challenge to, societal

power relations.

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.”

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.

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