The World Upside Down: Gender and Subversion of Society in 16th and Early 17th Century England. An Analysis of Four Plays: The Taming of the Shrew, Epicoene or The Silent Woman, The Late Lancashire Witches and The Antipodes

Abstract

Early modern English society was deeply concerned with order and hierarchy. The design of a harmonic society in which individuals had allotted roles and where order was guaranteed by mutual duties and responsibilities was expressed in literary, political and religious texts. Building upon what has been defined by historians as a ‘crisis of order’ in early modern England, this thesis explores the public obsession with domineering and unfaithful wives, scolding women, witches and unfit “men of the house”. The copious representation of disorderly men and women in plays of the time suggests that some, largely women, were thought to be a threat to patriarchal authority and thus to the whole society. The Taming of the Shrew, Epicoene or The Silent Woman, The Late Lancashire Witches and The Antipodes well represent the early modern anxiety over disrupting individuals. The plays display a reversal of the traditional world, one in which women are “on top”, inferiors govern superiors, and men, with some minor exceptions, are unable to rule over their subordinates. Although the plays seem to reassure viewers that order can ultimately be restored, a critical analysis of the plays shows how the play-worlds are upside down by the end of each pièce. This phenomenon reaches its climax with The Antipodes, the Caroline play in which Brome describes Anti-London, a city that is apparently the opposite of London, but that presents well-known controversial motifs in real London, thus revealing that inversion is part of the early modern daily life.