“Why should calamity be full of words?”: The representation of women's laments for the dead in medieval English and Shakespearean drama

Katharine Goodland, Purdue University

Abstract

Most studies of the lamenting women in English medieval and Shakespearean drama view them as the product of literary invention and transmission. I argue that these representations are also rooted in an ancient cultural tradition of women's laments for the dead. I establish female lamentation as a genre prevalent in medieval England, thereby locating these representations within the cultural matrix of their historical moments, and illuminating how the first audiences of these plays might have responded to them. I also show how this once central and potent expression of grief lost its meaning. My introduction defines the conventions of female lamentation for the dead and establishes the evidence for this tradition in medieval England. In Part One, I argue that the lamenting women in medieval English drama embody the ritual resolution of Christian doctrine with the pre-Christian genre of female lamentation for the dead, a process of accommodation that acknowledges the centrality and power of female lamentation even as it participates in its attenuation. In Part Two, I argue that the loss of purgatory, suppression of grief, and “masculinization of piety” attendant upon the Reformation was a traumatic paradigm shift for English culture. Shakespeare dramatizes women's laments, not simply in recognition of the dramatic precedents of Greek and Senecan drama, but more significantly, because of the once central place of female mourning in English culture. The Tragedy of Richard the Third and The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark rehearse the cultural trauma of the Reformation in opposing ways: Richard III represents women's laments as a form of social and political protest. Hamlet foreshadows social fragmentation, when women's mourning voices lose their agency. In Hamlet, Shakespeare mourns the loss to culture of the communal voice of women's laments for the dead.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Ross, Purdue University.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature|Medieval literature|Theater|Literature

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