'Looke in the place where he was wont to sit / See see his blood it is too manifest': Domestic Space and Patriarchal Authority in The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham (1592)
The institution most evidently in crisis was the monarchy, but it is also apparent that challenges to authority and authoritarianism were delivered in a number of spheres, many of them more obviously remote from the institution of monarchy than the more explicitly analogous institution of the family...
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| Published in: | Early modern literary studies 2019-01, p.1-15 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The institution most evidently in crisis was the monarchy, but it is also apparent that challenges to authority and authoritarianism were delivered in a number of spheres, many of them more obviously remote from the institution of monarchy than the more explicitly analogous institution of the family.6 The historian of the seventeenth-century, David Edward Underdown has also examined what he calls 'the crisis of order' in the years leading up to the English Civil War.7 This crisis, he explains, had its roots in such issues as explosive population growth, inflation, land shortage, vagrancy and poverty.8 'Even the patriarchal family, the linch-pin of the whole structure of order', he observes, 'appeared to be threatened'.9 The misogynist literature pouring from pulpits and print houses, the obsession with scolds, witches, shrews and rebellious wives all suggested to Underdown that 'patriarchy could no longer be taken for granted' in the period.10 More recently, Susan D. Amussen, exploring 'unruly women' and 'failed patriarchs' in the early modern period, has observed that '[f]rom the top of society to the bottom, [...] the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-centuries are full of instances that suggest a collapsing patriarchal order'.11 In light of Belsey's, Underdown's and Amussen's historically grounded arguments for a crisis faced by early modern patriarchy, the project of The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham, I argue, gains particular relevance and potency. In investing the house (the physical entity) with the agency to challenge and frustrate its mistress's (and her accomplices') claims to its ownership and with the power to align itself with its lawful patriarchal master by revealing his murder and ensuring the punishment of its perpetrators, the play engages with the contemporary anxiety about the instability of patriarchy. The play dramatises the events that lead up to Master Arden's murder, paying close attention to the space of the house and making striking use of contemporary notions of the identity of the head of the household being tightly knit to, and constituted in part by, the space of his house. John Dod and Robert Cleaver, to cite one example, equate the very term 'housewife' with this domestication of the wife: 'wee call the wife Huswife, that is, house-wife, not a street-wife, one that gaddeth vp and downe'.16 The play stresses this sense of loss of authority over the household and the usurpation of the place of its head through the |
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| ISSN: | 1201-2459 1201-2459 |