“The Brute Earth Would Lend Her Nerves and Shake”:  Violent Female Speech in Early Modern Drama

Kara Kathleen Falknor

In England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, treatises on the tongue focused on speech and its negative effects. In warning of the unruly tongue, their authors argued that speech could lead to violence and infect those near and far, and thus needed to be controlled at all costs. In chapter one, I focus on tongue treatises, examining the similarities between their language and that used in works discussing women, such as antifeminist tracts and marriage manuals. These similarities, including portraying both the tongue and women as inherently bad and dangerously seductive, gendered unruly speech female, suggesting that female speech should be feared for its violent and destabilizing potential. Marriage manuals, I contend, offered marriage as a potential solution to unruly women and, thus, to the unruly tongue. In chapter two, I examine Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, in which Cary explores the male characters’ fears of female speech and what lies behind it: the female mind. The play’s male characters all, in one way or another, associate female speech with a desire to overthrow existing hierarchical structures, despite the fact that none of the female characters explicitly wish this. In chapter three, I analyze William Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, arguing that Shakespeare interrogates the idea of violent female speech by suggesting that male speech has the same potential, though he simultaneously demonstrates the far-reaching ability of men to curb female speech. In chapter four, I argue that, in John Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, Milton paints both male and female speech as seductive and as having a violent potential. Through the Lady, he offers female speech and its potential violence as a positive tool to counteract negative male speech. However, Milton seemingly recognizes the problematic potential of female speech and takes care to control it by stressing moderation and by reinforcing patriarchal values. Though each author takes a different approach, the three plays I examine all connect female speech with violence and a disruptive potential, and all end with their female characters silenced, thus demonstrating the vastness of the early modern patriarchy.

“The Brute Earth Would Lend Her Nerves and Shake”: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern Drama

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