Description

Women Who Wreak Havoc brings into sharp focus the disorderly female characters in plays by a number of English Renaissance dramatists, among them Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, Berkeley, and Shirley, and then draws back the lens to consider how the dynamics of gender are portrayed in early Stuart plays. It looks closely at such experiences for women as heightened melancholy, the trials of rape and torture, suicide, 'unnatural' female friendship, desire for revenge, and the death of the self. By observing how these women are presented in these situations and how the male characters relate to them, Women Who Wreak Havoc argues that many female characters were afforded more agency and opportunity than later critics have generally observed and that close readings of these plays demonstrate the variety of ways in which the sexes related to and perceived each other.