著者

楠 明子 Kusunoki Akiko

出版者

名古屋大学英文学会

雑誌

IVY (ISSN:09142266)

巻号頁・発行日

no.41, pp.21-42, 2008-11-30

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In contrast to Urania and her sonnet sequence,the aspects of Love's Victory, Mary Wroth's only extant play, which have hitherto attracted the most critical attention are the constraints on Wroth's expression of her views of female agency. Yet Wroth's representations of women's sense of self in this play need to be further explored in terms of her response to dramatic representations of womanhood in other English Renaissance plays, in particular to the plays of Shakespeare. Insightful comparisons of Wroth's works and Shakespeare's plays were made in pioneering studies by Josephine Roberts, Barbara Lewalski and Naomi Miller, but since then not much critical work on Wroth's play has adopted this perspective. It is almost certain that Wroth knew Shakespeare, probably even personally, through William Herbert, who was her lover/cousin and one of Shakespeare's patrons. She must have been quite familiar with Shakespeare's plays; indeed, she may have seen almost all the court productions of Shakespeare. This essay will explore the concerns expressed by Wroth in Love's Victory in relation to a number of problems left unresolved in Shakespeare's plays, as well as with reference to the representations of these concerns in Urania Part I and Part II. These issues will include the problems of male jealousy, the changeability of men's emotions, and women's awareness of gender ideologies in society, especially those related to their ageing and their powerlessness. Among Shakespeare's plays, the discussion will centre on Othello (1604) and The Winter's Tale (1611), referring also to Romeo and Juliet (1593) and Twelfth Night (1600). As Alison Findlay has demonstrated, Love's Victory was probably performed in some part of the Garden or the Great Hall of Penshurst Place. Most critics find Wroth's attitude to gender ideologies in Jacobean society in the play less challenging than is the case in the two parts of Urania and the sonnet sequence. Explanations for this are usually linked to the likelihood that the play was most probably intended or performed for the Sidney inner circle. And yet, many of the members of that circle must have known Shakespeare's plays extremely well. The essay thus argues that, for an audience who had knowledge of Shakespeare's treatments of women's issues, Love's Victory constituted a challenging response to social assumptions about gender boundaries. Through the delicate manipulation of Shakespeare's treatments of women's issues, and their revision from female points of view, Wroth in fact offered to her audience of the Sidney circle not the happy traditional pastoral comedy which Love's Victory at first sight appears to be, but a quite radical view of gender distinctions in Stuart England. Wroth's challenging attitudes even to the familial discourse of Sidney/Herberts has been discussed in Marion Wynne-Davies' recently published, ground-breaking study of Love's Victory (Familial Discourse 89-103). Though not paying much attention to the relationship of Wroth's play to Shakespeare, Wynne-Davies discusses the significance of Wroth's play for the genre of tragi-comedy, a popular literary form at the time, in the political context of 1612-1619. This essay will finally discuss Wroth's challenge to contemporary gender assumptions in the light of Wynne­-Davies' reading of the play as "the emergent politicisation of tragi-comedy (Familial Discourse 103).本論は2007年度名古屋大学英文学会サマーセミナー(2007年7月20日)における講演に基づくものである。