Breeding diseases: contagion and female sexuality on the English stage, 1590-1705

Thesis

In seventeenth-century English theatre, women were often associated with contagion. The common understanding in seventeenth-century medical texts that promiscuous women breed contagious diseases informed the presentation of women on the English stage, from the reopening of the playhouses after the plague outbreak of 1593, to the plays of the ‘reformed’ Restoration stage at the turn of the eighteenth century. But it also informed antitheatrical discourse, with writers as historically and politically disparate as Stephen Gosson and Jeremy Collier fearing that the stage breeds moral diseases. My thesis identifies a series of related theatergrams – defined by Louise George Clubb as a series of moveable ‘theatrical microstructures’ – forming a repertoire of contagious female sexuality which is shadowed by antitheatrical discourse. This repertoire remained as influential to Restoration playwrights as to their early modern counterparts: while it was not always used consistently, it was employed persistently.

The existence of this repertoire complicates the prevalent practice of bifurcating English theatre history into two periods: the early modern (ending with the closure of the theatres in 1642), and Restoration (beginning with the reopening of the theatres in 1660 and the arrival of professional actresses). In divorcing the early modern and Restoration stages, the scholarly community has largely overlooked how the similarities between them allow us to think through the evolving English theatrical culture in a more nuanced way. I contend instead that the use of theatergrams of contagious female sexuality on the seventeenth-century stage always at least implicitly facilitates theatrical self-reflection, intervening in the cultural debates about the changing nature of theatre while simultaneously attempting to maintain an identifiable theatrical tradition in an otherwise tumultuous century for English theatre history.

Authors: Taylor, C

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-jnox1y8jm
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Restoration drama; early modern drama; antitheatricality; contagion; seventeenth-century theatre
• Subjects: Drama; Literature