MAMA DRAMA: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF MOTHERHOOD ON THE EARLY MODERN ENGLISH STAGE

Abstract

Scholarship on the representation of motherhood in early modern drama has tended to overlook its richness as a political signifier. This thesis argues that the politicisation of the family since the English Reformation imbued the maternal role with complex cultural and political meanings, and that playwrights during that time leveraged on those meanings in order to articulate political issues and questions. When discourses of maternity and the family are represented in dramatic texts, we ought to read them in terms of what they reveal about the political culture of early modern England. I will demonstrate the centrality of the maternal motif to the dramatisation of politics by analysing three representative works from the Jacobean period: William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth (1606), The Winter’s Tale (1611), and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1612). For each play, I will show how the interaction between the major female character and cultural ideas about motherhood produces the play’s political argument. I aim to show, across the three plays, that motherhood is a protean signifier that lends itself to the articulation of both conservative and radical politics.