Horrid Spectacle: Violation in the Theater of Early Modern England

• Published in: Medieval & Renaissance drama in England 2008, Vol.21, p.266-270
• Main Author: Detmer-Goebel, Emily
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: 17th century; Drama; Imagery; Mythology; Political discourse; Politics; Rape; Reviews; Rhetoric; Sentence structure; Tragedies; Victims of crime; Women; Woodcuts
• ISSN: 0731-3403

Seeing the seventeenth century as a whole, Burks attends to violation imagery as a "key piece of the history of political discourse" in order to "recapture a sense of the seventeenth century as a continuous series of moments and movements; a sense of continuity that has been lost to students of literature because of the way we tend to break the period into isolated pieces" (24). Burks is clear that she reads the debauched cavalier rakes in Margaret Cavendish' s fictions and plays differently than what will become the all too familiar rakes of Restoration drama. Since the royalist Cavendish is writing at a time when the royalist cause is at its weakest, it is surprising for some readers that her villains are aristocratic, often royal, men. For Burks, Cavendish seeks to uphold the class privilege of which she was a member, and yet her subject position of a woman made her distrust the symbol of that cause: the aristocratic man. [...]Cavendish offers an "early and uniquely awkward version of royalist mythology" (23). In other words, Burks's point is not to note that writers use the same words to describe how rights and bodies can both be violated, but to notice how often, in the discourse of the seventeenth century, the two violations become conflated. [...]Burks usefully tracks the durability of the rhetoric by tracing its use by various political stances, often with very different political agendas.