TOWN/GOWN RELATIONS:
THE FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF FEMALE GOSSIP COMMUNITIES AND NETWORKS
IN EARLY MODERN COMEDY
By
Megan Marie Inbody

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
English
2012

ABSTRACT
TOWN/GOWN RELATIONS: THE FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF FEMALE GOSSIP
COMMUNITIES AND NETWORKS IN EARLY MODERN COMEDY
By
Megan Marie Inbody
This dissertation traces the formation and representation of female gossip communities in
early modern literature. It has become conventional wisdom within scholarship to claim a
negative teleology for gossip, positing that the gossip was originally a figure with a purely
spiritual function (that of a godparent of either sex), but that by the eighteenth century, the office
of gossip was associated with the “idle talk” and unruly behavior, a result of unregulated female
friendship. This dissertation challenges that developmental model, offering evidence of a
both/and dynamic in the representation of gossips, revealing how, from the earliest literary
representations through the Restoration, there are recognizable tensions between their socially
positive contributory role in reproductive safety and the securing of legitimacy, on the one hand,
and the threat posed by women operating autonomously, beyond male control or oversight. I
posit that gossip communities actually operated in a number of ways and in a range of venues in
the late medieval and early modern eras, and that negative representations of the “good gossip”
(the drunken, disorderly woman) are indicative of unease surrounding women’s various social
roles and unacknowledged importance of female labor to the medieval and early modern culture
and economy.
Chapter 1 traces the relationship between medieval and early modern representations of
gossip communities, demonstrating through the Noah plays from the York, Wakefield, and
Chester mystery cycles that gossips were a central and legitimate element of communities,had
real, viable social functions beyond the birth chamber, and represented a much more complex

identity than has generally been identified. Building on this medieval acknowledgment of the
complexity of women’s gossip functions and interactions, I turn to the Tudor comedy Gammer
Gurton’s Needle, which focuses on the gossip community’s relationship to the community at
large. To ground the issues of female social participation featured in the play, I trace the shift in
the sites and the production of potables in the early modern period, which gradually deprived
women of both the social function of ale brewing and the social locus of the alehouse as a viable
site for female community.
Chapter 2 explores the traditional social roles of the gossip community – its functions in
assisting and celebrating birth and in privately effecting justice for transgressions that disrupt
domestic function – and its concomitant spaces, the birth room, alehouse, and tavern. Focusing
on Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
the chapter explores how these plays are part of the larger conversation surrounding gossips’
private functions and the tensions between public spaces and interventions, and unease about
gossips’ larger circles of influence.
Chapter 3 explores public roles not traditionally associated with the gossip community,
and uses two comedies – Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women and The Staple of
News – to track a change in the representation of gossip communities as groups less invested in
private function and more devoted to presenting a public intellectual presence in society. Each
dramatically stages the competing conceptions of women as gossips and social mediators with an
explicitly intellectual, interpretative, interventive function. The Coda examines this continuing
trend into the Restoration and examines two female-authored texts, Cavendish’s The Convent of
Pleasure and Manley’s The New Atalantis to demonstrate how the separation of the intellectual
and the physical functions of the gossip community led to its eventual demise.

2

Copyright by
MEGAN MARIE INBODY
2012

For Lois Hogston, with love

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I extend my deepest thanks and warmest gratitude to my dissertation advisor, Sandra
Logan, who was a tireless midwife to a project whose birth was no less difficult for its extremely
speedy conclusion. Equally generous with praise and guidance, her patience and enthusiasm for
my project never wavered despite its numerous permutations, and her steadiness kept me going
through bouts of anxiety and self-doubt. My committee members – Stephen Deng, Ellen Pollak,
and Scott J. Juengel – were equally unstinting with valuable insights and patient direction.
I also extend many thanks to Marc Robinson of St. Olaf College, who not only taught me
the importance of conclusions in analytical papers, but whose classroom presence is the model
for my own teaching persona. Though I can’t hope to reproduce his warmth, humor, or level of
engagement with his students, it remains the ideal by which I measure my own pedagogical
performance. Although he has passed on, I wish to acknowledge Richard J. DuRocher, who,
though he wasn’t able to instill a love of Milton in me, did manage to inspire a passion for
metaphysical poetry. Our independent study on Donne and Herbert was the catalyst for my
decision to pursue graduate studies in English. At the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, I
wish to thank Arthur Kinney, Joseph Black, and Adam Zucker for introducing me to the
complexities of the world of early modern England beyond metaphysical poetry.
Finally, to my family and friends: Lois Hogston, Florence Hogston, Nate Inbody,
Geoffrey A. Johns, Mari Wise, and Christie J. Harris. Though I don’t have the space or the words
to do justice for all that they have given me, their unconditional love and support (even when I
haven’t been able to reciprocate) is the real reason I was able to see this project through.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ..................................................................................................................... viii
INTRODUCTION
Town/Gown Relations ...............................................................................................................1
CHAPTER 1
A Flood of Gossip: The Birth of Stage Representations of
Female Community..................................................................................................................21
CHAPTER 2
The Creation of Gossip Networks and the Appropriation of the
Gossip Function .......................................................................................................................72
CHAPTER 3
The Intellectualizing of the Gossip ........................................................................................138
CODA
A Parting of Ways..................................................................................................................178
APPENDIX
Figures & Illustrations ...........................................................................................................201
WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................206

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1
“The Severall Places Where you May hear News,” c. 1600.
Courtesy of the Pepys Library and used with permission. ....................................................202
FIGURE 2
“At the Childbed.” Detail from “The Severall Places Where you
May hear News.” .........................................................................................................................203
FIGURE 3
“At the Hottehovse.” Detail from “The Severall Places Where you
May hear News.” ........................................................................................................................203
FIGURE 4
1615 title page of Swetnam’s “The Araignment of Lewd, Idle,
Froward and Vnconstant Women.” Reproduced in Swetnam the
Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women (1620), ed. Rev. Alexander B.
Grosart ........................................................................................................................................204
FIGURE 5
Title Page to 1620 play Swetnam the Woman Hater Arraigned by
Women.“ Reproduced in Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by
Women (1620), ed. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart ..........................................................................205

viii

INTRODUCTION
Town/Gown Relations
“He [is] … the nastiest word in the language: pronoun of the nonperson, it annuls and mortifies
its referent; saying ‘he’ about someone, I always envision a kind of murder by language, whose
entire scene, sometimes sumptuous, even ceremonial, is gossip.”
– Roland Barthes

1

Barthes’ extreme reaction to gossip – that it is “murder by language” – is at its core a
reiteration of the pre-modern perception that gossip, in having the potential to undermine social
order, inevitably does so. What Barthes describes as a form of murder is actually a kind of
castration – the fear that gossip has the power to emasculate (and thus dehumanize) its subject in
a situation to which he has no access, a situation that, according to Barthes, can border on the
ceremonious. Gossip, for Barthes, reduces a man to a “nonperson.”
Barthes’ description of gossip’s function reproduces nearly three centuries of cultural
perception and academic scholarship. Even in scholarship that examines gossip’s positive social
effects (in promoting group cooperation), gossip is still defined as “communicating negatively
about an absent third party in an evaluative manner” (Feinburg et al. 1015). In this particular
study, the three psychologists and one sociologist explain that “gossip is typically viewed as
trivial or antisocial, and it often is. Even so, we contend that a specific type of gossip helps to
solve the problem of cooperation” (1015). This contemporary definition of gossip (the article
was published January 2012) effectively illustrates the modern biases toward gossip – the
assumption that the activity is “trivial” and “antisocial,” without interrogating the meaning of
1

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Tr. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
(169).
1

those terms in context. The result of the general negative perception of gossip results in attempts
to create artificial divisions in the practice of gossip. The study cited above is but one example of
this – the researchers very specifically state that it is their intent to explore the social effects of “a
specific type” of gossip, when gossip is by its very nature amorphous and highly resistant to
social classification. Moreover, this line of inquiry contains gossip’s possibilities to a form of
speech. Further, the recognition that gossip only exists as means to constitute community
through speech is actually an unknowing revival of gossip in its nominal form, which is to say,
gossips were originally members of a community whose communality produced the idea of
trivial speech as a distinct and vilified form.
In the mid-1990s, social scientists, ignorant of the historical irony involved, introduced
2

the term “good gossip” to refer to any act of gossip which does not serve the self-interest of the
gossiper. In medieval and early modern England, however, the “good gossip” was an ironic term
denoting a woman whose behavior (incontinent speech and a marked preference for ale) not only
disrupted the domestic but threatened the stability of the neighborhood in which she lived. With
the propensity in the early modern era to treat the domestic as a microcosm of the nation, the
gossip’s behavior was thought to have the potential to undermine the social stability of the state.
That “good gossip” has come to signal a vindication of the practice of gossiping, rather than a
term indicating a person negotiating the complex relationship between individuals, community,
and knowledge-sharing demonstrates the need for an intervention to provide some historical
context for gossips and gossip. If we are ever to truly understand how gossip works, it is vitally
important to examine its historical roots.

2

The term is first introduced by Aaron Ben-Ze’ev in the 1994 essay collection Good Gossip,
which utilized several methods of social analysis (sociology, anthropology, ethnography,
psychology) in order to “vindicate” gossip.
2

In this dissertation I modify the accepted notion that gossip suffered a negative historical
trajectory by positing that “gossip” was a term with multiple concurrent meanings relating to
both social functions and modes of speech. Patricia Meyer Spacks’ Gossip (1985) is the most
frequently cited text that posits a negative historical trajectory for gossip; the theory is frequently
reproduced by literary scholars and heavily informs their analysis. She writes, “But the word
[gossip] undergoes a process of degradation. Dr. Johnson, in the middle of the eighteenth
century, offered a second meaning of ‘tippling companion’ and a third definition for the first
time connecting gossip unambiguously and officially with women: ‘One who runs about tattling
like women at a lying-in.’ Not until 1811, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, did the
noun designate a mode of conversation rather than a kind of person” (25-6). The history she
creates for gossip contains at least two crucially important errors, which in turn create two
pervasive myths concerning historical gossip. One is that the term “gossip” has undergone a
negative transformation over the course of centuries, which assumes that the term was a static
identity category in the medieval period – medieval gossips were essentially spiritually
authorized birth attendants. The other is that gossip did not designate a form of speech until right
before the Industrial Revolution. While Spacks does not officially locate the beginning of the
“degradation” in the eighteenth century, her use of Johnson’s dictionary strongly suggests that
timeline. This timeline compresses the medieval and early modern gossip roles into one neat
social category, which creates a gap in historical knowledge. How did medieval birth
companions become eighteenth century tippling (and tattling) companions? To marginalize the
figure of the early modern gossip not only ignores one of the fundamental ways through which
women constituted their social identities, but also perpetuates the system which reduced their

3

complex ideological stance (simultaneously inside and outside patriarchy) to a simplistic model
of stereotypical female excess.
In actuality, an examination of the history of the term shows that if there was such a thing
as a “purely spiritual” gossip, it was an extremely short-lived institution. Even from its earliest
incarnations in Middle English, “gossip” indicates a complex social structure, one that exists in
the intersections of private and public, spiritual and secular, one that simultaneously challenges
and reifies social hierarchies. While Spacks is cognizant of gossip’s complicated relationship to
the larger culture – she describes it as “a phenomenon [that] raises questions about boundaries,
authority, distance, the nature of knowledge; it demands answers quite at odds with what we
assume as our culture’s dominant values” (12) – her province does not extend to the earliest
examples of gossip, because “the perception of derogatory talk as mortally destructive continued
unchanged from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance …” (27). Her work examines gossip as an
action, as a species of “idle talk,” that functioned as a mode of resistance, a political action taken
by the marginalized and disempowered (usually women). A few recent medieval scholars have
3

nuanced Spacks’ arguments about medieval gossip, but gossip in the early modern period is a
field largely unexplored, especially in regards to gossip as a marker of identity, rather than to
gossip as a verbal action with negative social consequences.
In order to explicate early modern gossips, however, one must begin by orienting the
model through a reexamination of the medieval perception of gossip, which is the purpose of
Chapter One. The term entered the English language as part of the linguistic inheritance from

3

Susan E. Phillips with Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England
and Karma Lochrie with Covert Operations: The Medieval Foundations of Secrecy.
4

4

Old English. “Gossip” is a contraction of the Old English “god sib,” meaning “related to God,”

and originally referred to a godparent of either sex. The Oxford English Dictionary shows the
first occurrence to be in a sermon in 1014, though given the word’s Anglo-Saxon roots, it is safe
to assume an earlier common usage. A second definition of the term is given by the Middle
5

English Dictionary as “a close friend, companion, pal.” It is generally assumed that the former
definition is the “first” one, and that the latter one signals the secularization, and the subsequent
feminization of the term. Though many scholars point out that both men and women were called
“gossips” at this juncture, the term was associated much more with women than with men. Gail
McMurray Gibson locates the conclusion of the feminization of gossip in the fifteenth century:
“because one primary purpose of those god-siblings was to witness the birth for the purpose of
authenticating the parentage of the child, and since social custom usually permitted only women
to witness the actual process of birth, the word – originally ungendered – came by the fifteenth
century to mean the close female friends and relatives invited to help with a childbirth” (14). The
official social role of gossip was joined to a more definitely female, negative stereotype.
Consequently, these two definitions coexisted (rather uneasily) in the late medieval and early
modern eras. The uneasiness derived from the fact that gossips were acknowledged as having a
tremendous amount of social clout – they were a crucial component of the process by which a
woman delivered her child, and because of their close relationships they were also privy to
domestic wrongs perpetuated by men (usually husbands) under the authority invested in them
through patriarchy to maintain the functionality of the domestic. Gossips additionally acted as a
localized system of justice, righting domestic dysfunction for those women who met their criteria

4

Spacks 25, Kartzow 35.

5

Middle English Dictionary, s.v. “god-sib(be).”
5

as virtuous women deserving of assistance, as we see in Harman’s tale of the walking mort,
discussed in Chapter Two. Thus, there was a great deal of male anxiety surrounding the gossips’
6

activities, functioning as they did in what one scholar refers to as “gynocentric spaces,” which
were those private, female-controlled sites – such as the birth chamber – situated outside of male
surveillance yet deeply implicated in patriarchal social structures, such as assisting in childbirth
or working to reintegrate domestic functionality. Fundamentally, then, gossips enjoyed a degree
of autonomy that men found troubling, and which probably led to the intensification of negative
stereotypes about excesses such as idle talk and drinking that would of course be said to occur
among women unsupervised by male authority in such sites. However, the fear was that gossip
networks permeated civic spaces, beginning in localized sites such as the birth chamber and
alehouse (where gossips would congregate to plan how to right various domestic wrongs) and
spreading throughout the topography of England.
Various literary materials reveal a concern with the ubiquity and reach of gossips and
gossiping. In 1607, for example, Richard West published a poem entitled “The Court of
7

8

9

Conscience, or Dick Whippers Sessions.” Among the impressive list of social malefactors to

6

see Fiona MacNeill’s article, “Gynocentric London Spaces: (Re)Locating Masterless Women
in Early Stuart Drama.”
7
“Dick Whipper,” West explains, is “mans conscience” (sig. A4r).
8

The full title of the work is: “The Court of Conscience or Dick VVhippers Sessions. VVith the
order of his arraigning and punishing of many notorious, dissembling, wicked, and vitious liuers
in this age.”
9
He addresses his poem to twenty-seven distinct groups, although within the poem itself he
occasionally adds additional bad characters. For example, he adds “Anabaptists” to the “Atheist
and Unbeliever” category. But in the preface, he addresses “all and singullar Backbyters,
Slothful teachers, Graceles Truants, Cokring Parents, Cheating theeues and Cutpurses, Drunken
Scoundrells, Highway haunters, Shifting Gaimsters, Whoremongers, Gluttenous Epicures,
Tiraunts, and merceles Villaines, Couetous Parsons, Proud Knaues, Extortioners, Idle
Caterpillers, Profaine Swearers, Athiests, and Vnbeleeuers, Punkes, Baudes, Makebates and
6

come under scrutiny in West’s fantasy court are “make bates & tatling Gossips,” who are
twentieth on the list, after “Punkes, and shameless Whores” (eighteenth) and “Bawdes”
(nineteenth). Gossips are, in West’s conception, women who meet in public and, through idle
talk, transform public spaces associated with female labor into sites that foment domestic
dysfunction:
You that at Conduicts, and such other places,
The ale-house, bake-house, or the washing block
Meet daily, talking with your brazen faces,
Of peoples matters which concerne you not.
You sowe such discord twixt the man and wife,
You set a thousand at debate and strife. (sig. F1r)
In venting his concern that gossips’ undermining of public space ultimately destabilizes the
domestic and threatens the institution of marriage, West demonstrates the belief that gossips
behaved roughly the same throughout England. In city, town, and village, gossips met their
friends and acquaintances and exchanged tidbits of news. West advises gossips to narrow their
interests to only matters pertaining to the maintenance of their households: “Your minde should
onely be about your worke: / To earne your liuing should be all your care, / And not by th'alehouse fire still to lurke” (sig. F1r). Although the premise of the poem is that a jury of twelve
virtuous figures arraigns different groups of societal disruptors, the pretense to justice vanishes
by the conclusion of the poem. Instead, the poetic speaker engages in a fantasy of violent
punishment for the gossip, where he inserts himself into the proceedings and administers the

Tatling Gossips, Liers, and Applesquiers, Witches, Coniurers, and Enchaunters, Beggers, Idle
Roges, and Counterfeit Madmen, Fooles, Flattring Maplefaces, Cruell Maisters and Dames, and
Vn-Godly Seruants” (sig. C2v).
7

punishment of stripping and whipping her: “Ile make your back, your sides and shoulders sweat,
/ And ierke you till you shed your Gossips fethers. / Turne vp your tippet, Ile teach you to prate, /
Your shoulders and my whip are falne at bate” (sig. F1r). The tippet he refers to is a kind of scarf
or short cape that covered the shoulders, but the Oxford English Dictionary explains that to “turn
10

tippet” was a slang phrase for a turncoat.

West’s disturbing scenario of whipping a gossip until

she renounces her gossiping ways (shedding her “Gossips fethers”) aligns the gossip’s
11

punishment with the sentence typically doled out to prostitutes.

This punishment also places

West on the same ideological trajectory as Barthes regarding the threat gossip poses to
masculinity. Whereas Barthes imagines gossip as a process that mortifies and annuls men into
nonpersons, West creates a response that mortifies the mortifier. However, in doing so, he
creates the type of scenario that authorizes the gossip community’s intervention. In abjuring
juried justice, West inadvertently demonstrates the continued need for gossip communities, who
frequently served to enact justice, especially for domestic transgressions that passed beneath the
attention of the courts.
West’s poem, while memorable for its depiction of gossips, is most useful for the list of
sites frequented by gossips. It corroborates the information illustrated in a broadsheet titled “The
Severall Places Where You May Hear News”

10

12

(c. 1603; see figure 1), based on a continental

“Tippet,” 1e.

11

For more on the punishments specified for sexual crimes, see Wanton Wenches and Wayward
Wives, especially Chapter 8, “The Consequences of Illicit Sex.”
12
The print is based on a French broadsheet published sometime around 1560. Entitled “Le
Caquet des Femmes” (“The Cackling of Women”), the print was apparently quite popular. In
addition to its appearance in England, Wenceslas Hollar etched a version to accompany a
broadside entitled “Schaw Platz” c. 1628, further proof that the image was circulating throughout
Europe well before the middle of the seventeenth century. The English version of the print,
though informed by the French original, differs in two crucial ways. One is that there is no devil
8

13

original.

The print shows groups of women chatting with each other in various spaces of

differing levels of publicness, ranging from the private space of the birth room to the very public
conduit, where the women would draw their water. It is, in effect, a “gossip map,” illustrating the
makeup and distribution of a gossip community in specific locales that were at the same time
general to population centers (great and small) throughout England. The simultaneity of the
images in the “gossip map” alters the terrain of gossip studies by helping to nuance the social
function of gossip. The print depicts parallel gossip communities thriving in a single civic space,
indicating that in any civic space there exists a gossip community underpinning social,
commercial, and religious activities. The marked lack of a devil in the English print (as there was
in the French original) indicates the complicated function of early modern English gossips.
Though the print depicts these gossips engaging in idle talk while in public spaces of labor (a
standard misogynistic complaint leveled at gossips in the period), it also shows women actively
engaging with each other and with public spaces, and the sheer ubiquity of the gossip
communities, especially in comparison with the few men scattered throughout the print who are
engaged in industrious labor, suggests that without the gossips, the town/city would effectively
cease to exist. This notion is bolstered by the habit of metaphorically identifying cities and towns
as female. My dissertation title, “Town/Gown Relations,” gestures toward this tension. The town

sitting next to the women gossiping in church. The devil, Tutivillus, recorded idle talk on a
parchment with the purpose of providing evidence against gossipers on Judgment Day. He was
an extremely popular figure throughout medieval Europe, but especially in England, where the
naves of several English churches featured busts of women with parchment-wielding devils
sitting on or by their heads. Tutivillus’ popularity waned in the late medieval period in England,
however, and English gossips, instead of being associated with Tutivillus, were increasingly
associated with alehouses, which is the second difference between the English and French
versions. French gossips are depicted drinking, but in an outdoor garden, not an alehouse.
13

Natalie Zemon Davis includes a reproduction of the French original, “Le Cacvet Des
Femmes” (90-91) in Fiction in the Archives.
9

is undeniably female, structured around female labor and female sociability, but the satirical
elements of the print demonstrate just how complicated was the representation of gossips in the
period.
Critical consensus is divided on this point. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford
interpret the print as a satire wholly aimed at women: “the tableaux are manifestly satirical and
moralistic in intent: rather than heeding their housewifely duties or higher concerns such as the
preacher’s sermon, women are shown idling, eating and drinking, gossiping and arguing, or even
assaulting each other” (207). However, Pamela Allen Brown finds a gap in meaning between the
visual and the textual. She notes that, “The title above and satiric verse below direct the viewer
to condemn every branch of gossiping, but the image does not fully comply. […] When this
image is considered without the satiric stanzas at the bottom, it loses much of the point of its
lecture, offering a far different set of signs to the curious interpreter” (57). She poses a series of
questions: “To anyone who does not read the caption, could the image paradoxically privilege
female labor through its detailed representation? Could it engage women by showing them
scenes of female leisure?” She concludes that “whatever the woodcut means, certainly that
meaning is hermeneutically diffuse and cannot be restricted entirely to the normative masculinist
satire of its frame” (60).
I argue that we can extend Brown’s questions even further. The tension between the text
and the visuals does allow for the possibility that female labor and sociability are privileged (or
at least not wholly condemned). But more than that, the ubiquity of the women, combined with
the marginalization of the text, which is confined to the very top and bottom of the woodcut,
effectively turns the readers (with the era’s low female literacy rate, this would be mostly men)
into a gossip community – a group of individuals with privileged knowledge inaccessible to

10

others. This raises the question: who exactly is being satirized? If a readership of men can so
easily be made into a community whose constitutive elements closely resemble those of a gossip
community, this suggests that gossip communities are not inherently antisocial threats to
patriarchal order. Moreover, it raises the possibility that gossip might be the method through
which humans constitute their communities at the local level.
Even more important, the print’s depictions of multiple gossip communities opens up a
new way of conceptualizing historical gossip communities by creating a snapshot of multiplicity.
It is unclear whether the print is depicting one gossip group moving through time, or many
gossip communities at once. This ambiguity evokes the possibility of concomitant gossip
communities, which in turn suggests the possibility of an extended gossip network. With the high
rate of mobility in the era, it is logical to assume that gossip communities would regularly add
and lose members, and that this fluidity in membership would contribute to a widely distributed
network of gossips. Moreover, the print does not specify whether it is a representation of an
urban, town, or village scene. Since it could be anywhere in England, it can be read, in effect, as
all of England. The representation of gossips utilizing individuated public spaces such as the
street, the market, the alehouse, etc. as a kind of community hub suggests a larger gossip network
connecting individual gossip communities, because as public sites accessible to all, they provide
individual gossip communities not only with meeting spaces, but also with the ability to keep
abreast of what was happening in other places.
The simultaneity of gossip communities in the print also emphasizes two important
points: gossip communities were ubiquitous, and they had multiple functions. The print shows us
that the linear model of community does not apply to gossips – most communities have one
reason for why they come together, or have one function to justify their existence, but formations

11

and functions of gossip communities are more complex. While gossips were sometimes
neighbors and friends, the print demonstrates an entire constellation of factors at work in the
nature of these communities. Gossip communities had many functions, such as assisting with
childbirth, performing social regulation (organizing times of mirth, exchanging news, dispensing
local justice), performing social subversion, and giving women the opportunity to express
friendship. These functions are typically interpreted as discrete functions, but that leads to the
binarization of competing models of gossip communities as either drunk, belligerent women who
neglect their responsibilities, or as a group of local activists – vigilantes, in essence. The problem
with this construction is that it references the same women for both functions, as suggested by
the print and other sources. This suggests that gossip communities were much more important to
the makeup of society than has previously been acknowledged. Gossip communities existed in
and exploited the tensions not only over ownership of knowledge and dissemination of
information, but also over where women owed their loyalties – to their families and private
domestic concerns, or to public harmony. Recognizing the complex dynamics and multiple
functions of gossip communities shows that such distinctions were, and continue to be,
nonviable.
The print represents a variety of situations, and nearly all of them illustrate the complex
representation of the gossip. Figure 2 shows the gossip in her role as birth assistant. While
talking is foregrounded (even the newly-delivered mother is sitting up in bed, talking to
someone), the infant is being well cared for by five women, albeit far in the background. Figure
3 is a disturbingly voyeuristic tableau of women bathing at the hothouse. Though the text tells us
that the naked gossips are there “their skins to purify,” we see that they have become objects of
sexual gratification for the man watching them through a window. They do not seem to be aware

12

of his presence, but the connection between loose tongues and loose morals is made plain with
his presence. Additionally, though the gossips are clearly utilizing the hothouse for bathing
purposes, a hot bath was also considered a cure for venereal disease. The print shows the gossip
as a vexed figure, both a necessary participant in the perpetuation of society and a constant threat
to that same society through her propensity for excesses (in drink, in speech, in sexuality, and in
temper). This figure of feminine excess was ironically referred to as a “good gossip,” but the
term is an unstable one, also applied to women who were actively operating to uphold the social
status quo.
We can see this instability existing even in the writings of one of the era’s most stringent
and puritanical figures. A generation before West’s total abjuration of gossip communities as the
reason for female idleness, Stephen Gosson wrestles with the benefits and dangers of gossip
communities. In the letter to “the Gentlewomen Citizens of London,” located in The School of
Abuse, Gosson advises city wives to avoid the theater as a source of emotional consolation:
“Being pensive at home, if you go to Theaters to drive away fancies, it is as good Physic, as for
the ache of your head to knock out your brains; or when you are stung with a Wasp, to rub the
sore with a Nettle.” Instead, he cautiously recommends that “when you are grieved, pass the time
with your neighbors in sober conference, or, if you can read, let Books be your Comfort.” As if
realizing that his readership could rightly accuse him of advocating gossip, he immediately
stresses that “the best council I can give you, is to stay home & shun all occasion of ill speech”
(31). Gosson’s council, while not effective as advice – what constitutes “ill speech”? – is quite
effective at illustrating the conflicting opinions surrounding gossip communities. Even Gosson, a
master at parsing moral matters, finds himself unable to wholly condemn female community, and
instead equivocates on the matter by emphasizing that really the best solution for female

13

pensiveness is reading, while he simultaneously acknowledges that the solution is an imperfect
one, as most women are illiterate. Gosson’s reluctance to denigrate the sociability foundational
to gossip communities demonstrates how women’s relationships and social functions were
largely predicated on verbal knowledge.
My dissertation traces the complex formation and vexed representations of female gossip
communities in early modern literature and seeks to modify the competing notion that gossip was
perceived either wholly negatively (drunk boisterous women) or entirely positively (spiritual
birth attendants) in the early modern period. I posit that gossip communities actually operated in
a number of ways, and that representations of the “good gossip” (the drunken, disorderly
woman) are indicative of unease surrounding women’s various social roles and female labor, and
exist side-by-side with more positive representations or hints at a more positive function.
Chapter One traces the relationship between medieval and early modern representations
of gossip communities. It is conventional wisdom to claim a negative teleology for gossip that
begins with gossip as a purely spiritual function (that of a godparent of either sex) and then, by
the eighteenth century, associates gossip with female friendship and the “idle talk” that is its
result. But the Noah plays from the York, Wakefield, and Chester mystery cycles provide
compelling evidence that resists that kind of periodization and demonstrate that gossips were a
key element of communities and had real, viable social importance beyond the birth chamber. In
each of these plays, the importance of domestic labor of all sorts is made evident, and the
devotion of the women to their domestic roles and to their gossip communities, as well as the
extent of those communities, suggests a much more complex understanding of the gossip than
has generally been identified.

14

Building on this medieval acknowledgment of the complexity of women’s gossip
functions and interactions, I turn to the Tudor comedy Gammer Gurton’s Needle, considered to
be the first “English” comedy, which focuses on the gossip community’s relationship to the
community at large. To ground the issues of female social participation featured in the play, I
trace the shift in the sites and the production of potables in the early modern period, which
gradually deprived women of both the social function of ale brewing and the social locus of the
alehouse as a viable site for female community. The play stages the conflict between the “good”
gossip, Gammer Gurton, who is industrious and who, until the loss of her needle, was a
competent domestic manager, and the “good gossip” Dame Chat, who runs an alehouse out of
her home, though the alehouse has no customers and there are hints throughout the play that she
drinks much of her product. These two women, who should be friends, are pitted against each
other through a trick involving Gammer Gurton’s needle, and the lack of an easy resolution to
the dispute (representatives of the law and the church intercede for peace) indicates that if the
gossip community is destabilized, the organizations structured to guarantee social function are
rendered impotent. Though the needle is eventually recovered and its restoration celebrated at a
feast, the reconciliation of Gammer Gurton and Dame Chat is not part of the celebration. This
irresolute resolution is symptomatic of the problem in the play’s gossip community and serves as
a bridge between the late medieval and early modern representations of gossip communities.
Where the medieval cycle plays stage tensions between patriarchy and female labor by
displaying unease with the superficially “simple solution” of drowning gossip communities,
Gammer Gurton’s Needle shows a gossip community trying to reconcile competing ideologies of
female labor and female idleness.

15

Chapter Two explores the traditional social roles of the gossip community – its functions
in assisting and celebrating birth and in privately effecting justice for transgressions that disrupt
domestic function – and its concomitant spaces; the birth room, alehouse, and tavern. The
chapter begins with Harman’s story of the “Walking Mort,” which illustrates a transition in the
representation of gossip communities in fiction, demonstrating the connection between the
seemingly disparate functions of gossips as both birth attendants and private advocates for local
justice. To bolster this notion, the chapter examines 16

th

century gossip carols to provide a

grounding of women in their domestic roles in various social spaces. Using the good gossip and
the festive side of gossip activities as depicted in these carols to foreground a discussion of the
social anxieties surrounding the publicking of domestic roles demonstrates the complex cultural
perception of the gossip’s multiple social roles.
This introductory analysis frames a more in-depth engagement with the more obvious
social tensions inherent in the purpose of gossips’ role in the mirth function (the gossips’ feast
celebrating a successful delivery), as staged in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. The play takes place
in London during Lent. The abstemious atmosphere creates a subversive environment throughout
the city, with butchers selling illegal meat, and, more importantly, with a gossip community
celebrating a birth. While serving a (semi) legitimate social function, holding a gossips’ feast
during Lent raises questions about tensions between gossips’ necessary and accepted social
functions and the strictures of patriarchal order.
The chapter concludes with an analysis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play that also
stages how gossip communities blur the dichotomy between public and private roles for women,
especially in situating the importance of the oath of a gossip (Titania’s pledge to care for the
Indian boy) in direct tension with a wife’s obligation to defer to her husband. The play’s

16

restoration of Oberon’s dominance in the final scenes comes at the expense of Titania’s gossip
obligation and her autonomy as a gossip. Though it frames the tension supernaturally, as a
conflict within the fairy community, we can see the play is very much concerned with the human
– the fairy conflict also destabilizes the human realm, demonstrating that the play is part of the
larger conversation surrounding gossips’ private functions and the tensions between public
spaces and interventions, and unease about gossips’ larger circles of influence.
Chapter Three explores public roles not traditionally associated with the gossip
community, and tracks a change in the representation of gossip communities as groups less
invested in private or domestic function and more devoted to presenting a public intellectual
presence in society. The chapter begins with an examination of the anonymous 1620 Swetnam
the Woman-hater, Arraigned by Women. The comedy’s subplot stages Joseph Swetnam being
brought to trial by a group of women for his offences against women. The women find him
guilty and he is made to recant. The play serves as a useful bridge between the earlier emphasis
on female physicality (associated with the birthing function of gossips and their putative
excesses) and the later move towards larger issues of social justice and women’s ability to
arraign situations, thus exercising the capacity to balance reason and emotion. The women in
Swetnam Arraigned advocate for gender equality with a high degree of articulation and
sophistication, but the punishment they devise for Swetnam is to stab him offstage with needles
until he recants, an apparent return to the low physical comedic representation of gossips.
The intellectual public function of gossips is more explicitly staged in Jonson’s The
Staple of News, where four gossips sit onstage on provide social commentary before and after the
first four acts. Since the play’s central concern is the production and distribution of knowledge,
and exploring the seemingly false distinction between news and gossip, the inclusion of the

17

gossips’ dialogue, I argue, demonstrates the expanding public role of the female community.
Whereas the tension between female physicality and intellectuality is resolved in Swetnam
Arraigned through coming together of women of all classes to form a gossip community that
abolishes the rampantly misogynist social system introduced by Swetnam’s presence, the gossips
in The Staple of News are depicted as unable to maintain the wide-ranging focus Jonson deems
necessary to intellectualism. The plays dramatically stage the competing conceptions of women
as gossips and social mediators with an explicitly intellectual, interpretative, interventive
function.
The Coda builds on this sense of the intellectual intervention of gossips. In this closing
section, I explore how Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure seeks to refigure a gossip
community by completely divorcing it from patriarchal strictures of heteronormative marriage.
Cavendish’s main character, Lady Happy, neatly eschews the tensions between the town and the
gossip by creating a walled convent located in an amorphous rural setting. The experiment
initially seems successful – the men are held at bay by the convent’s thick walls, and the women
are free to pursue intellectual and sensual pleasures. However, in scripting a series of ten
vignettes – a play-within-a-play – that portray the horrors marriage and childbirth hold for
women, I argue, Cavendish attempts to preserve the best aspects of the gossip community
(female solidarity, a community that fosters the creation and dissemination of knowledge) while
simultaneously purging the aspects that hinder it from reaching its full potential (reliance on
patriarchy). The attempt ultimately fails, however. The play ends with a return to patriarchy for
all the convent’s inmates – marriage for Lady Happy, and an unknown future for the rest of the
ladies. Though the idealized community did exist, it was only for a brief period, suggesting that
gossip communities cannot survive without the patriarchy upon which they depend for identity.

18

A scene in Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis endorses this. When three women are
presented with the opportunity to create a traditional gossip community to assist in the birth of a
child, they do not, and instead privilege the private knowledge that is the province of the
traditional birth room. Manley’s project echoes Cavendish’s, insofar as both try to intellectualize
the gossip community and thus divide it off from its physical function. Print culture seems to
offer an emergent alternative to oral exchange and knowledge circulation that had marked the
main roles of the gossip community for centuries. Women’s voices themselves become the
focus, condemned for their idleness and refigured as politically serviceable when properly
deployed, while the necessary support of women in childbirth and of domestic order that ensures
the security of the household and the family, as well as the reproductive functions of the family,
are negated and critiqued.
By the end of the eighteenth century the multivalent figure of the gossip and the multiple
functions of the gossip community had largely disappeared from the public consciousness, the
victims of numerous factors, the most obvious of which is the increased preferment of male
doctors with university training in medical science over female midwives with centuries of
practical knowledge passed down through oral tradition. Another contributing factor, women’s
public entrance into print culture, meant that non-aristocratic women had unprecedented ability
to distribute their thoughts and ideas on the political issues that affected them, such as the notion
of women’s rights. Women’s increased public and political presence is due in large part to the
early modern gossip community, though it was most likely the increasing association of gossips
with female intellectual capacity that caused the dissolution of the structure of the traditional
gossip community. The traditional gossip community was inextricably tied to associations with
female physicality, frequently considered a liability in women’s goals of achieving intellectual

19

respect. In a fine bit of historical irony, the traditional gossip is experiencing a comeback. The
last twenty years have seen a resurgent interest in female birth attendants to assist a laboring
mother. Doulas, as they are called, are certified to provide emotional, physical, and informational
support for a woman during the delivery process. And with the rise of social media such as
Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest with all of its attendant anxieties about privacy and control of
personal knowledge comes an increased nostalgia for the “traditional” mode of exchanging
personal and private information – gossip, which assures a human and personal interaction. That
these modes of gossip still exist as disparate cultural threads suggests not only the social and
cultural need for gossips but also the extreme necessity to reconstruct their historical importance.

20

CHAPTER 1
A Flood of Gossip: The Birth of Stage Representations of Female Community
When trying to reconstruct the form and function of early modern gossip communities, it
is immensely tempting to imbue them with a negative teleology – that the term “gossip” went
from being a respected spiritual duty performed by persons of either sex to signaling a type of
communal female speech that perpetuated “idle talk” detrimental to the community at large. As a
way to reexamine historical gossip communities, many early modern scholars have taken their
views of female gossip communities from Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford’s magisterial
Women in Early Modern England, which paints a picture of an organized yet classless female
utopia that existed in concert with, and served an ancillary function for, the larger social order.
For Mendelson and Crawford, gossip communities “had a respected function in the community
as a means of enforcing canons of morality and neighbourliness,” and moreover, a gossip
community was the primary policing force at the local level: “In a pre-industrial society of
honour and shame, gossip rather than the judiciary was one of the most effective agencies for
policing the community” (215). These communities incorporated wives, servants, and laborers in
overlapping networks. These networks linked women in the household, between households, and
extended outward to the community at large. The function of these communities was to
“expos[e] the gulf between society’s ideals and the individual’s violation of those ideals”
through a process Mendelson and Crawford describe as a “modification” – essentially, they
argue gossips existed to provide social critique of male-perpetrated breakdowns of the domestic
by providing social correction through public exposure, with the intent of shaming the men into
compliance: “One way women modified male behaviour was by broadcasting men’s covert acts.
In so doing, they also established a context of excessive male violence or immorality that might

21

persuade the judiciary to act. Thus female discourse constructed a collective view whereby
accusations became a ‘public’ concern of which formal authorities were compelled to take
notice” (215-16).
But within Mendelson and Crawford’s description of the gossip community is a paradox
that goes unaddressed: if the policing function of the gossip community was so respected by the
authorities, then why did they have to work so hard to persuade the judiciary to act? Mendelson
and Crawford elide some crucial details, including the fact that only a limited number of women
1

even appeared in court, and those who testified had to produce evidence of good character. Also
of concern is the lack of acknowledgment of the negative representations of gossip communities,
which greatly outnumber the positive representations. Further, the depiction of gossip
communities related above does nothing to challenge the assumption that gossip communities
existed as a function of patriarchy that existed to police men, and the legal system vindicated
their occasionally disruptive and unorthodox methods by successfully convicting some of the
men brought to trial through the efforts of the gossip community.
How, then, are we to think historically about gossip communities? The only available
models have been at opposite ends of the social spectrum: either as a clutch of talkative unruly
women, and therefore antisocial, or as a group of neighborhood vigilantes, and therefore hypersocial. Remarkably, both of these models share the same negative teleological trajectory: that the
gossip, in its prelapsarian form, performed a positive social function as a spiritual sponsor at a
baptism, but through an unexplained change, the gossip eroded into a woman who drank too
much and engaged in idle talk. I argue there was no golden age of gossip, and that from the
beginning, gossip was consistently both/and throughout the medieval and early modern periods.
1

See Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London, 4854.
22

It is in the both/and model that the gossip community derived its viability. By creating or
exploiting situations where it was unclear whether they were serving or undermining patriarchal
social order, gossip communities exploited the slippage between theory and practice regarding
the social status quo. For instance, in the traditional gossip space of the birth room, the women
participated in promulgating patriarchy by assisting in childbirth while simultaneously
destabilizing it by insisting on the primacy (and privacy) of “female knowledge” in effecting a
safe delivery for the mother and child. In another traditional gossip space, the alehouse, gossips
are frequently depicted as complaining about their husbands’ neglect or abuse. While this can be
construed as challenging the domestic hierarchy, the defiance inherent in the complaint is framed
as a desire for a return to the social order that dictates the wife’s lesser status and obedience to
her husband. This complex social stance can best be explored by pursuing a “both/and” reading
of gossip communities.
To answer the question of how to think about gossip communities, we have to begin at
the beginning. The earliest foremothers of Mendelson and Crawford’s early modern gossip
vigilantes were the “good gossips” of the late medieval period. It is in the late medieval period
that both versions of the gossip emerge in literature, and as this chapter will show, gossip
communities have never had just one function. Indeed, as the Corpus Christi cycles and Gammer
Gurton’s Needle demonstrate, the gossip community, in its function as policing the community
and as unruly and disruptive, occur conjointly, and underpin the social structure of the entire
village, making it a community simultaneously central and liminal.
Many theorists overlook this multivalent condition when examining historical gossip
communities, with the result that most discussions center upon how the community is constituted
through the way its members communicate – as secret, idle talk. The best-known medieval

23

example of this is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who relates that her godsib Alisoun alone “knew myn
2

herte, and eek my privetee / Bet than oure parisshe preest, so moot I thee!” For Karma Lochrie,
the Wife’s revelation of her dependence on her gossip community “allows us a brief glimpse of
the network of secrecy that she maintains under cover of her verbosity and apparent openness.
More importantly, she makes explicit the way in which gossip mimics confessional secrecy,
ultimately surpassing it to the point where her priest is left out of the loop” (59). The Wife’s
declaration typifies the “problem” of the gossip community: as an action, gossip is perceived as
ubiquitous, but as an identity category, it is perceived as simultaneously ubiquitous and secretive
– a threatening phantom. To claim that the Wife of Bath and her gossip “mimic” the action of the
confessional booth begins to get to the heart of what is so threatening about gossip communities.
What they do is “secret” insofar as the gossip acts as a kind of female confessor, thus threatening
to make the Church’s mechanics of confession and salvation obsolete by exposing how useless,
even dangerous, they are for women. A woman was supposed to confess her sins to a man, be
absolved by that same man, who was authorized by a man, who was also God, who died for the
sins of all mankind. There’s not much there for women to identify with, especially when the
penances for women were typically more stringent than they were for men. This is in part why
Lochrie’s use of the term “mimicking” is so problematic. Mimicking implies that the gossips are
using the social framework of the confessional as a model, which is not the case. In order to
curtail gossip’s function, it was frequently cast as a subversive mimicry of masculine discourse,
thus making it eligible for suppression. Alisoun knows more about the Wife of Bath than the
parish priest does in part because of their commonality – there is a much greater social divide
between the Wife and the priest than between her and Alisoun. Moreover, the gossip model
2

“knew my heart, and also my secret / Better than our parish priest, so might I thrive!” III 530531.
24

explicated by the Wife is not predicated on absolution. In this way, it can be seen as subversive:
she is refusing to participate in the processes of the Church. But subversion is not necessarily
predicated on inversion. The Wife is discussing the understanding between the two women that
arises from shared non-public information (secrets) that society dictates should be the province
of the parish priest and which should come under the formal structure of disclosure leading to
absolution.

The gossip model as explained by the Wife promotes a discourse of

understanding/identification, not a model of private confession and forgiveness, with penance as
the public signifier of compliance.
Though social and religious structures worked tirelessly to maintain the distance between
the sexes, the existence of gossip communities, in their function as sites of disruptive idle talk,
especially secret talk, demonstrates the failure of the Church to either contain its flock or to
properly serve it. So the Church used existent discourses of female excess to extend and
foreground the increasing perception of a “problem” with idle talk. Church Fathers claimed St.
3

Paul’s famous injunction against women who talked in church and throughout the medieval
period, women increasingly became exclusively associated with idle talk. There was even a
special devil of idle talk (known alternately as Titivillus or Tutivillus) who was frequently
4

depicted either near a group of women or occasionally perched on a woman’s shoulder. As the
association between women and idle talk intensified, the “threat” it posed became exponentially

3

1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (Geneva Bible, 1587): “Let your women keepe silence in the Churches:
for it is not permitted vnto them to speake: but they ought to be subiect, as also the Lawe sayth.
And if they will learne any thing, let them aske their husbands at home: for it is a shame for
women to speake in the Church.” For more on the scriptural treatment of women and gossiping
in the New Testament, see Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, Gossip and Gender: Othering of Speech
in the Pastoral Epistles.
4
See Kathy Cawsey, “Tutivillus and the ‘Kyrkchaterars’: Strategies of Control in the Middle
Ages.”
25

greater. By the late medieval period, women were perceived as a disruptive influence regardless
of their location: in church, where they talked loudly and played cards while sitting in the pews,
at the market, at home. They even threatened to contaminate the Church’s tools for salvation: the
sermon and the confessional booth. Susan Phillips elucidates the Church’s position: “For
ecclesiastical authorities, idle talk poses both a practical problem and an institutional threat; two
of the Church’s most important tools of instruction and social control – confession and sermon –
are both contaminated by and implicated in idle talk” (8). The Church’s problem, which went
officially unacknowledged, is that in insisting simultaneously on the paradox of idle talk’s
dangerous frivolity and its gendered associations, it gave gossip communities an official identity,
as those women who talk with each other. In other words, the Church aided in making all women
members of gossip communities. As Karma Lochrie notes, “… the Middle Ages assigned gossip
its place among the Seven Deadly Sins and generally elevated it as a female vice of extraordinary
power” (60).
One of major issues at stake is the idea of a female privacy. In private – that is, away
from male surveillance – women formed communities for a number of reasons. Some were
socially sanctioned (to attend a birth), and some were not (to share experiences, to drink together,
to get advice about an abusive situation). Fundamentally, though, gossip communities exposed
how nebulous was the distinction between private and public. In this way, gossip and its
supposedly idle talk forged an interpretative community that rivaled and interrogated the social
status quo.
In terms of actual social power, however, gossip as a rival interpretative community has
limitations. In this vein, Lochrie argues, “If ‘the gossip’ and ‘gossiping’ are primary cultural
representations of women and their speech in the Middle Ages, then the adoption of these

26

positions and modes by actual women is necessarily limited” (62). While Patricia Meyer Spacks
claims that gossip has the power to “rais[e] questions about boundaries, authority, distance, the
nature of knowledge” and to “deman[d] answers quite at odds with what we assume as our
cultures dominant values” (12), Lochrie argues that, in the medieval period at least, gossip’s
power “is an oblique one – one that never directly repudiates the dominant culture or institutions
it iterates” (62-3). It is important to point out that any social power has limits, and the active,
almost anxious representation of gossip communities demonstrates that limited effect does not
necessarily indicate the impact of a community.
Indeed, the anxieties surrounding gossips stems from the fact that they did not stay
confined to the birthing chamber – they spilled out into the street, the alehouse, the market. The
problem, from the male perspective, is that these women explode closed spaces, both aurally
with their speech and physically, demonstrating in many respects the Foucauldian idea of an
inherently unstable social structure. In The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Foucault claims there is
no grand Resistance to the power inherent in social structure, but rather a series of localized
resistances that “can only exist in the strategic field of power relations” (96). These resistance
points, through their mobility and transitory nature, initiate a force that creates a network of
power relations which “ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and
institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance
traverses social stratifications and individual unities” (96). The cleavages and disunity inherent
in social relations simultaneously allows for and dictates that modes of resistance represent a
broad social spectrum, which is one of the features of the gossip community.
The Foucauldian model is also useful for introducing a way of conceptualizing gossip
communities that resists both teleologies and binaries. Through providing a model that posits the

27

idea of localized resistance that crops up with the power structure, Foucault’s theories allow us to
begin creating an alternative model for examining historical gossip communities that moves
away from the restrictive binary interpretation of gossips as either “recalcitrant” or “vigilante” by
opening up the possibility that gossip is a non-linear network, a concept much more in line with
literary and historical evidence. Adopting the theoretical approach of Foucauldian power
networks enmeshed within the dominant discourse restores mobility to the study of gossip
communities, and aids in creating the important distinction that gossip communities demonstrate
that women are viable in different spheres simultaneously. This can be seen in the earliest
representations of gossips, in the Noah plays of the York, Wakefield, and Chester mystery
cycles, where Noah’s wife is identified as a gossip in the York and Chester plays and coded as a
gossip in the Wakefield. In all the plays, Noah’s wife is forcibly brought aboard the ark and
isolated from her home, her social networks, and her labor.
Noah’s Wife and the Foundation of the Gossip Tradition
Women are key characters in the mystery play representations of Noah’s Flood, and in
light of this, it is significant that the plays display the first extensive treatment of the gossip’s
social role through a series of meditations that curtail them by the elimination of all spaces but
the domestic space of the immediate family.
Though definitive dating is impossible, it is important to note that the plays in the cycles
were not preserved in manuscript until well after the cycles began – one to two hundred years for
the York and Wakefield cycles, though for the Chester cycle, there is a difference of about three
hundred years between initial performance and preservation in manuscript. This presents
something of a dilemma. While medieval scholars can confidently date the York cycle
manuscript at around 1467, the Wakefield c. 1500, and the Chester after 1575, the initial

28

performances date much earlier, between the mid-fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This
makes tracking the origin of the gossip extremely difficult. Did she exist in the earliest
5

performances? If not, when was she inserted into the plot? If so, to what extent did her
characterization remain static? While these questions must for this time remain unanswerable
conundrums, compelling evidence suggests that the transformation or insertion (if there was one)
would have been an easy one – there exists a long tradition of negative representations of Noah’s
wife throughout Europe and in the Islamic east.
In his edition of Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, A.C. Cawley claims that “the
comic tradition of the perverse and cantankerous Noah’s wife, although it does not appear in
medieval drama outside of England, is widespread in European art and folklore. Further, it is an
old tradition, as least as old as the picture of Noah’s ark in the Junius manuscript (c. 1000),
which shows the wife standing at the foot of the gangway, and one of her sons trying to persuade
her to go on board” (33). Some scholars urge caution in assuming the solitary woman standing
by the ladder to the ark to be Noah’s wife, claiming that to do so may be “reading the medieval
6

cycle Uxor into the illustration”(Mill 614), but literary evidence indicates that Noah’s shrewish
7

wife was a familiar character to English audiences before the Norman Conquest. Alfred David
traces out representations of Noah’s wife in what he calls “a matrix of apocryphal stories about
the flood”: the Gnostic gospels, where she aids the devil in his attempt to sink the ark and foil
God’s plan, in the Qur’an, where she, along with Lot’s wife, is held up as an example of an
unbeliever, and in early fourteenth century manuscripts, which depict the devil perched on the
5

Gossip figures were inserted into a number of translated texts at the beginning of the sixteenth
century.
6
Mill’s article provides a number of useful if somewhat dated sources on this subject.
7

ibid. 614
29

Uxor’s shoulder before the flood and after the flood, the devil leaving the ark and swimming
away (99-104). It is not such a logical leap to go from a devil on the Uxor’s shoulder to the
mystery cycles’ representations of a wife reluctant to enter the ark. Indeed, one of the illuminated
panels in the Ramsey Abbey Psalter (c. 1286-1316) depicts Noah’s wife, devil perched on her
back, standing waist-deep in water filled with drowned corpses, Noah’s right hand firmly
8

clamped to her left wrist. Noah’s wife is clearly recalcitrant, but for her to act so while standing
in the flood represents a departure from earlier iconography, as does the effort to represent
distinctly male and female corpses. Although Diane Wolfthal claims that the illustration
“make[s] clear her reluctance to leave her friends” (129), the drowned corpses are both male and
female, which problematizes Wolfthal’s claim. While some of the female corpses could
ostensibly have been Uxor’s gossips, the presence of male corpses complicates her reading,
suggesting instead that the corpses are meant to represent humanity, and that the gossip
community is part of the community at large. The reason for her reluctance, though, has received
little attention, and is worth exploring. The playwrights expanded Uxor Noah’s role from its
biblical antecedent to make a point, but the nature of the gossip community makes a monolithic,
static interpretation impossible to produce. In the depiction of the gossip as the synecdoche of
humanity, the playwrights create the gossip, not as a stable signifier, but as a figure filled with
potential meanings.
This is especially true in the York and Chester Noah plays. Although the figure of the
gossip is used to represent humanity so lost to sin so as to merit total destruction, her deserved
death seems to be undercut by the staging, in both plays, of the Uxor’s lament. The destruction of
the gossips can be understood to represent to the audience the destruction of the community; of a

8

The illustration is located in Appendix A of Wolfthal’s article.
30

way of life; of humanity itself. By framing the destruction of most of the human population as
the death of Uxor’s gossips, the plays underscore the spiritual seriousness of the flood for the
audience, but there is an unintended consequence: by specifically singling out the gossips for
destruction, it shows the power of the gossip community. And in a nice bit of irony, the plays
end up having the opposite effect of what appears to be their authors’ didactic aims: if depicting
the destruction of the gossips is intended to purge them from the social order as symbolic of
human perversity and unruliness, it actually preserves them for posterity. So although, as Kathy
Cawsey claims, the death of the gossips shows the audience that “their sympathy for the drowned
women is wrong and that such sympathies testify to their own fallen natures” (444), the pathos of
the depiction also gives us a small space in which to doubt that.
Though V.A. Kolve’s sweeping claim for the cycle plays, that they “staged the largest
action ever attempted by any drama in the West … though some fifteen hours were required to
play the story out, its audiences came to watch it again and again. It held the stage for more than
two hundred years, the most truly popular drama England has ever known” (1) is somewhat
problematic insofar as it tacitly assumes that medieval England had a professional stage (by
proclaiming that the plays “held the stage”), his assertion of the cycles’ popularity is borne out
by both civic and literary records. As they are a key component of medieval popular culture, they
are key to understanding the roots of the good gossip tradition.
This understanding goes further than the fact that several of the cycles contain the earliest
representations of gossips. The mystery cycles were to the Latin mass what the gossip
communities were to the practice of confession in church. “If,” Sarah Beckwith speculates, “the
mass was a clerically controlled Latin theophany, the mystery plays were produced and
performed by lay people in the vernacular at a time when translation of the Vulgate into Latin

31

was a controversial undertaking. But the plays are not so much translations of the Vulgate as
engagements with the very modes of presencing of the divine. […] It is a form of theater that
explores theology through the very logic of performance” (85). Both the mystery cycles and
gossip communities operated through an appropriation of language deemed by the Church to be
part of its theological province, but the difference comes with intent. The mystery cycles coopted Christian teachings and translated them into the vernacular and into performance in order
to edify audiences through the performances of important Biblical events while gossips resisted
pastoral oversight by compartmentalizing language and information that the Church designated
for the confessional booth only. Still, the depiction of the gossip within the mystery play serves
to highlight the similarities between the two. Just as the Wife of Bath’s claim that her gossip is a
better repository for her heart than the parish priest serves as a tacit commentary of the Church’s
particular brand of paternalism, so too does Noah’s wife in her role as a gossip lamenting the
destruction of her fellows draw attention to the wanton quality of the nearly total destruction of
humanity. Through the gossip’s plight, each example subtly underscores the failure of social
institutions to care for those they are ostensibly supposed to foster, and the cruelty that results
from that failure.
The fact that these plays were performed for hundreds of years, well into the early
modern period (the York and Wakefield cycles were performed until the 1550s, the Chester
plays until the early seventeenth century) certainly demonstrates that they had a crucial role in
codifying the traditional representation of the gossip as a vexed site of competing ideologies: a
subversive figure who simultaneously upholds and undercuts patriarchal social structures.
An examination of the three Noah plays illustrates the formation of the gossip. All three
plays follow the same broad structure: God comes to Noah and tells him that He’s going to

32

destroy humanity because of its sinfulness, but that because of his piety, Noah and his family are
to be spared. Noah rejoices and then begins building the ark. The family pitches in, but when the
time comes to board the ark, Uxor resists. Fisticuffs ensue, but ultimately she is forcibly made to
enter. The ark comes to rest on land after forty days afloat, God promises never to do that again,
and symbolizes his covenant with Noah with a rainbow.
The York and Wakefield Uxors are introduced as combative, existing in nearly complete
isolation from Noah. In the Wakefield play of Noah and his Sons, Noah indicates this with his
rueful admission to the audience that “… she is full tethee, / For litill oft anger; / If any thyng
9

wrang be, / Soyne is she wroth” (ll. 270-74). After he greets her and asks after her, she begins a
litany of complaints centering on the fact that Noah is absent and thus not fulfilling his
husbandly duty to provide for his household: “Where has thou thus long be? / To dede may we
dryfe, / Or lif, for the, / For want. / When we swete or swynk, / Thou dos what thou thynk; / Yit
of mete and of drynk / Haue we veray skant” (ll. 279-86). The York Noah has also been an
absent husband, and as in the Wakefield play, it has had negative consequences. After Noah
reveals God’s plan to her, the York Uxor chides him, saying, “Noah, thou might have let me wit.
/ Early and late thou went thereout, / And ay at home thou let me sit / To look that nowhere were
well about” (ll. 113-16).

10

Noah’s absence has forced his wife into idleness and suspicion, two

markers of a shrewish wife. Noah tacitly validates her accusation by deflecting responsibility for
his actions onto God: “Dame, thou hold me excused of it, / It was God’s will without doubt” (ll.
117-18). This not only demonstrates Noah’s lack of care for domestic duties, but also highlights
9

All quotes from the Wakefield play are from The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A.C.
Cawley
10
All quotes from the York play are from York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling,
ed. Richard Beadle and Pamela King. Line 16 roughly translates to “wasting time.” Noah’s
unexplained absences caused her to sit at home with nothing to do.
33

the disturbing idea that God, not Noah, is primarily responsible for creating the domestic
dysfunction. Both plays show Noah’s divine duty in direct conflict with the necessities of daily
existence, transforming him into a prototype of the transgressive husband and an ideal target of
gossip “retraining.” While Noah’s obedience to God cannot be constructed as transgression, his
single-minded devotion to fulfilling God’s command comes at the expense of his domestic
duties.
These wifely complaints – that Noah is a terrible husband responsible for the dysfunction
11

of the domestic – are often read as justifications for labeling Uxor Noah a shrewish wife.

This

leads to more problematic justifications, such as the comic portrayal of domestic violence that
figures in all three of these play cycles. There are two problems with the staging of violence
between Noah and his wife. The first is that the conflict between the couple stands in stark
contrast to Noah’s relationship with God. Noah is chosen by God as the most righteous man
alive, and thus merits exclusion from God’s punishment. In this construction, Uxor’s
rebelliousness is symptomatic of humankind’s sinfulness, and so just as God has declared that he
needs to regain control over humankind, so must Noah master his wife. Humanity’s sin is a
disregard for social order, as both V.A. Kolve and Phillip Zarrilli argue. Kolve says, “Just as
fallen man is rebellious to his master, God, so too is the wife rebellious to her husband, and only
when the proper human relationship is re-established does the universal order begin to construct
itself” (150). Zarrilli echoes Kolve’s sentiment, emphasizing that Uxor’s disobedience is the
result of a breakdown in order: “… the fray between Noah and his wife plays out in human

11

V.A. Kolve calls her “the root-form of the shrewish wife” (144) and Jeffrey Helterman in
Symbolic Action in the Plays of the Wakefield Master believes her contrariness to be deliberately
“malicious” (64).
34

dramatic terms the misplaced obedience of the social order. Noah’s wife’s disobedience to her
12

husband parallels the disobedience of the human world to God’s sovereignty” (207).

But to interpret the discord between Noah and Mrs. Noah in this way, Katie Normington
argues, is to set up a troubling connotation for God’s actions. She claims, “This hierarchical
model provides difficulty in interpreting Noah and God. The violence that Noah shows towards
his wife … forces uneasy implications onto God’s treatment of humankind.” She concludes with
an understatement: “The inconsistency between Noah’s treatment of his wife and his behaviour
towards God is problematic” (123-4).
Though it is an understatement, drawing attention to the problem at least serves to
provide a possible explanation for why the N-Town Uxor is so conformable when none of the
other representations of Noah’s wife are – it makes the social and theological rationale of
obedience to divine and secular authority much less awkward. Though Kolve and Zarrilli posit a
teleological reading that restores universal order by the end of the play, Normington’s suggestion
that the relationships between God, Noah, and Uxor fit no kind of linear model of sin,
punishment, and forgiveness refuses to elide over the disturbing possibility that comes of
paralleling Noah and God. If Noah is an absentee husband, then to read a deliberate parallel
between Noah and God is to suggest that the sins of humankind are the result of inadequate
divine husbandry. And exacerbating the negligence that has resulted in human sin, Noah, like
God, resorts to violence against the transgressor when the transgression is arguably his own fault.
The second problem with staging violence between Noah and his wife is the fact that
Uxor’s accusations towards Noah seem to her perfectly reasonable, and indeed, without the
comic distraction of violence, they are. All three plays note that Noah has been building the ark
12

Though Zarrilli’s comment is in the context of the Chester cycle, it is equally applicable to the
figure of Mrs. Noah in all the cycle plays.
35

for a hundred years, and during this century, Uxor, by her admission, had no idea what he was
doing. This has created a distance between the spouses, and so the Uxor’s recalcitrance, Jane
Tolmie notes, “hints at some painful exclusions – of wives from the inner lives of husbands, of
persons from life itself and from salvation as well” (12). The Uxor’s resistance to Noah in this
way calls into question a system of sin, confession, and forgiveness by demonstrating its origins
in domestic dysfunction and a refusal to admit the possibility of rational objection.
The other versions of this dramatic enactment also emphasize the distance between Noah
and his wife. In the York play The Flood,

13

the emotional distance between spouses is physically

indicated by the fact that Noah designates one of his sons as a go-between. When the ark is
ready, Noah sends a message to Uxor, telling her to “hasten with all your main / Unto him, that
nothing you mar” (ll. 59-60). The second line is somewhat ambiguous, further indicating the
fraught quality of the marital relationship. It can be interpreted as either “so that nothing harms
you,” or as “so that you don’t ruin anything,” but as we see, either interpretation is irritating to
Mrs. Noah. She goes to the ark to confront him and though initially resistant to Noah’s claim that
14

“All that has bone or blood / Shall be over flowed with the flood”

(ll. 95-6), she is ultimately

convinced of the existence of impending catastrophe through the unified assertions of all three of
her sons and her husband. This isn’t the typical behavior of a shrewish wife and indicates an
open-minded woman capable of making logical decisions.
The Wakefield play takes the depiction of a good but besieged woman a step further.
Whereas the York play has the audience watching an estranged couple operating independently

13

The York cycle divides the Noah story into two distinct plays, The Building of the Ark and
The Flood. Since Uxor doesn’t make an appearance until The Flood, I do not discuss the first
play.
14
She tells him he is “near wood,” a euphemism for insanity.
36

of each other, the Wakefield Uxor is in an extremely physically abusive relationship, and calls on
the female audience members to witness the severity of her situation. Before Noah can reveal
that a flood is coming, Uxor turns to address the female members of the audience:
We women may wary
All ill husbandys;
I have oone, bi Mary,
That lowsyd me of my bandys!
If he teyn, I must tary,
Howsoeuer it standys,
With seymland full sory,
Wryngand both my handys
For drede;
Bot yit otherwhile,
What with gam and with gyle,
I shall smyte and smyle,
And qwite hym his mede. (ll. 300-12)
With this monologue, the Wakefield Uxor indoctrinates the female audience members into her
gossip group by giving them privileged information usually depicted as being the preserve of
gossips: she reveals that she is the subject of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband, but that
she does not meekly accept Noah’s blows as punishment, and in fact casts the action of returning
blow for blow as a kind of justice. The conclusion of her monologue paints a grim picture; she
will strike Noah and smile as she requites him “his mede” or what is justly due him. With this
direct address to the women, she is also attempting to create a feeling of compassion, both for

37

her immediate situation and also for those other unnamed women (perhaps in the audience) for
whom the onstage depiction of a dysfunctional marriage is all too real. In this way, Uxor’s
addresses subvert the notion that dissatisfaction with one’s husband is never justifiable by
allowing the wife to speak out against her victimization, not once, but twice, and further, to
return blow for blow.
The Wakefield Uxor sees her domestic situation as a binary where she can either be
passive or assertive; she can either “wryngand bothe my handys / For drede” or can attempt to
“qwite him his mede.” She chooses the latter and pays dearly for it. There are two places in the
text where blows are exchanged and, following them, a brawl so violent that Noah claims his
“bak is nere in two” and Uxor says she is “bet so blo / That I may not thryfe” (ll. 596-98). But
this violence is rooted in a contest centered on female labor: the reason for Uxor’s refusal to
enter the ark until the rains begin is because she has not finished her spinning. All of her
daughters-in-law call to her to enter the ark, but Uxor is firm: “In fayth, yit will I spyn/ All in
vayn ye carp” (ll. 519-20). In this light, she mobilizes domestic integrity and huswifery as a
means of thwarting her husband’s authority and privileging her own responsibilities over his
demands. Laura F. Hodges argues that the Wakefield Uxor’s emphasis on the importance of her
spinning allies her with sympathetic remembrance of the human cost of the flood: “Here the
distaff represents Uxor’s way of life and in this signification it serves the same function as that
served by her chatting with her ‘gossips’ and drinking in the Chester play, of providing a
sociological context. In the refusal to stop spinning, the Wakefield Master indicates Uxor’s
human concern with leaving a familiar environment and activities and her desire to perpetuate
her former life as long as possible” (33). The comic violence directed toward her is an attempt to
denigrate female labor, a fact made even more obvious when the second round of beatings occur

38

while Uxor is spinning. The play puts female labor in tension with female obedience, and that
tension instigates Noah’s attempts to discipline her, attempts that ultimately fail, as the play
concludes with tensions still high between the pair.
The denigration of female labor is pervasive throughout the Noah plays and even in some
criticism. Josie P. Campbell writes of the Wakefield Uxor, “Uxor is a materialist although we are
not quite sure how valid her complaint is that Noah is a poor provider … Like the Wife of Bath,
Uxor delights in asserting herself over Noah … Uxor, like her sister, the Wife of Bath, is
interested in material comfort, and Noah’s tale of an ark is bothersome if it means she has to
leave what she knows for what is unknown” (80). While it is extremely problematic to equate a
fear/skepticism of the unknown or a display of dominance over one’s husband with a
materialistic nature, these comments on the Wakefield Uxor’s motivations further cement her
tacit connection to the gossip tradition. The same accusations and assumptions about gossips’
behaviors (that they are lazy, even while depicting them at work) are frequent. Further, the desire
for material comfort is not inherently immoral, especially when the desire stems from an
expressed fear of starvation and destitution. For Campbell to equate a gossip in conflict with her
husband over the function of the domestic with the Wife of Bath’s excessive love of luxury is not
only a fundamental misreading of both texts, but also a denigration of female labor.
The Wakefield Uxor is not the only wife of Noah’s who labors, or whose labor is held in
some contempt. Part of the York Uxor’s defiance of Noah’s orders to immediately board the ark
is because she wants to go home to get her tools. When Noah and his sons convince Uxor that a
flood is coming, she still resists going on the ark: “Nay, needlings home me bus, / For I have
tools to truss” (ll. 109-10). Noah remonstrates with her, accusing her of acting in such a way as
to imperil the entire family. As with the Wakefield Uxor, the York Uxor accuses her husband of

39

being the lacking spouse in their unequal domestic partnership; of deliberately leaving her in the
dark about his whereabouts while building the ark, of leaving early in the morning and coming
home late at night, giving her the impression that he wasted the entire day. In other words, that
she had been laboring while he was not. This of course is untrue; the ark is evidence of Noah’s
labor in providing for his family, standing in comic contrast to the Uxor’s complaints of
domestic abandonment. Andreea Boboc explains, “Noah’s tools are instrumental in fulfilling
God’s plan. In contrast, when Noah’s wife wishes to go home to gather her tools … her intention
is rebuked as plain mischief. The problem does not lie in the gendering of tools (men’s versus
women’s) but in their service in the divine scheme. The dramatic tension arises from the
discrepancy between acting according to God’s will, and acting against it. Only the tools
employed for a spiritual purpose are deemed valuable” (251). Although I disagree with the
notion that the gendering of tools is not at the heart of the distance between Uxor and Noah (and
by extension, God), Andreea Boboc still raises a valuable point about the “spiritual purpose” that
Uxor serves. The Flood is dramatized as a second creation, with Noah as Adam and Uxor as Eve,
the mother of the renewed humanity. The problem with this typology is that the Flood is a very
different event from the expulsion from Paradise. With Adam and Eve, the theological message
is clear, but not so for the Flood. This unease with the theological and moral consequences gets
played out in Uxor’s recalcitrance and in her devotion to her gossip community. For Alfred
David, the pat endings of the plays, which all feature enforced harmony (of a sort) between Uxor
and Noah, ring false:
To be sure, in all the plays she has to be dragged aboard the ark, after which she
has little to say in York and Chester, and in [Wakefield] she becomes an active
collaborator with the scheme of salvation. But the questions her rebellion raises

40

never receive a satisfactory answer, certainly not in the Flood plays, nor perhaps
even in the Corpus Christi cycle as a whole. […] If God, as he freely admits in the
Bible and in the plays, repents of having created humankind, why did he botch the
job so badly, especially if his providence told him all along how it was bound to
turn out? The Great Flood is the event posing the most severe test of the doctrine
of the felix culpa. (98)
Uxor and her gossip community then do more than merely represent human vulnerability – they
symbolize the uneasy idea that the Flood was a mistake, that even the most sinful humans
(gossips) were unjustly punished. It is in the Flood plays that the gossip becomes a social
category in its own right, able to interrogate social hierarchies. The staging of their deaths allows
for the ultimate social critique: calling into question God’s perfection. What is the audience to
make of the fact that God and Noah essentially co-opt the function of gossip by having the
revelation of the coming Flood as a secret shared only by two, and moreover, a secret that, like
gossip, is an immediate threat to the domestic? It is possible, of course, to make the argument
that in building the ark, Noah is fulfilling his function as the head of the household because he
not only preserves his family but allows for the continuance of animal life on Earth by preserving
a male and a female of each species. But at what cost? He preserves the outward show of the
domestic at God’s explicit command, but the depiction of family dysfunction (the matriarch at
odds with the patriarch) coupled with Noah’s apparent disregard for the destruction of humanity
leaves the audience with a troubling question: what is the value and place of blind faith and
obedience? The plays finally reconcile the domestic discord, but the resolution is unsatisfactory;
their inability to tame rebellion in any meaningful way seems to insist on an inevitable tension
between doctrine and action, faith and lived experience.

41

This tension is present in the York play, where Uxor’s lament for the dead is a requiem
for her kin and her gossips, but it is most directly addressed in the Chester cycle. The Chester
Uxor seems initially conformable to Noah’s commands and even promotes an uneven division of
labor in building the ark. After Noah relates to his family that God has told him to build an ark,
everyone declares their support, even Uxor, who outlines the wives’ role in the construction of
the ship: “And wee shall bringe tymber to, / for wee mon nothinge ells doe – / women bynne
15

weake to underfoe / any great travell” (ll. 65-68).

She and her sons’ wives all obediently do

their parts to aid in the building of the ark, but thirty lines later Uxor resists the notion of
boarding the ark. When Noah tells her that their family will live aboard the vessel, she tells him,
“In fayth, Noe, I had as leeve thou slepte. / For all thy Frenyshe fare, / I will not doe after thy
reade” (ll. 99-101). Richard J. Daniels claims that her refusal “is apparently unmotivated, and
preceding and following it she has freely helped Noah construct the ark and then load it with
animals” (25). But as R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills point out, “The Wife’s rebellion may
seem ill-motivated in view of her co-operation … and her awareness of God’s injunction. But
Noah’s words … suggest that he does not know when the rains will come; he therefore suggests
that they all enter the Ark before the rain begins. The Wife responds that she will enter only
when need arises.”

16

In the Chester cycle, as in the York and Wakefield cycles, Uxor

demonstrates, if not dispassionate logical behavior, at least a rational interpretation of the little
information that she is able to glean from Noah.
The introduction of the gossips into the Flood narrative gives the audience a sense of the
stakes, turning the story from a typology of the fall and redemption into a concrete human story
15

All quotes from the Chester Noah play come from The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R.M.
Lumiansky and David Mills.
16
The Chester Mystery Cycle vol II: Commentary and Glossary, p.37 n. 97-8
42

of destruction and loss. In the York play, Boboc says, “Noah’s wife is the only character in the
play who thinks about the fate of her community … her version of domesticity stretches beyond
the limitations of her own family” (252). The representation of gossip community, along with
their explicit destruction, challenges hierarchies. Her primary concern, in both the York and
Chester plays, is for her gossips. In the York Uxor expresses concern for her gossips first and
then for extended family:
WIFE: Nowe certes, and we should escape from scathe
And so be saved as ye say here,
My co-mothers and my cousins both,
Them would I went with us in fere.
NOAH: To wend in the water it were wothe,
Look in and look without were.
WIFE: Alas, my life me is full loath;
I live over-long this lore to lere.
1 DAU: Dear mother, mend your mood,
for we shall wend you with.
WIFE: My friends that I from yode
Are over flowed with flood.
2 DAU: Now thank we God all good
that us has granted grith (ll. 141-154).
Uxor’s concern stands in stark contrast to that of her family, whose unconcern for those who
perished in the flood borders on the chilling. When Uxor says that she has lived too long
(implying that to outlive her gossips is to live too long), the first daughter is at least marginally

43

comforting, offering the company of herself and the other wives as a substitute. The second
daughter, however, ignores the substance of the conversation to what amounts to a whitewashing
of the situation, telling both women that they should be grateful for God’s protection.
But Uxor remains troubled. After the Flood, Noah and his sons sing a song of praise and
thanksgiving for their safe delivery, but she asks, “But Noah, where are now all our kin / And
company we knew before?” To which an irritated Noah tersely replies, “Dame, all are drowned,
let be thy din, / And soon they bought their sins sore. / Good living let us begin, / So that we
grieve our God no more …”(ll. 269-72). Kathy Cawsey observes that, “Uxor’s lament is an
implicit criticism of an unmerciful God – an unorthodox, female commentary on the Flood
story” (444), and her compassion is in stark contrast to the marked absence of pity on the part of
Noah.
The Chester play is even more explicit in Uxor’s relationship with her gossips. She
refuses to board the ark after the animals are all loaded, telling Noah to leave without her: “Yea,
syr, sett up your seale / and rowe for the with evell hayle; / for withowten any fayle / I will not
owt of this towne.” After a suitable pause, she reveals that this is less an ultimatum than it is the
opening gambit for a negotiation. She demands the safe passage of her gossips: “But I have my
gossips everyechone, / One foote further I will not gone. / They shall not drowne, by sayncte
John, and I may save there life. // The loved me full well, by Christe. / But thou wilte lett them
into thy chiste, / elles rowe for the, Noe, when thy liste / and gett thee a newe wyfe” (ll. 197208). This passage suggests a number of qualities of late medieval gossip communities. Most
obviously, it reaffirms the strong bond between gossips, echoing the intimacy that Chaucer’s
Wife of Bath declared when she claimed that her gossip knew her secrets better than their parish
priest. Here, Uxor makes clear that her loyalties lie primarily with her gossips, not her family.

44

She even declares that the duty she owes to her gossips supersedes the duty she owes to Noah as
his wife when, in the last two lines of her speech, she delivers the ultimatum that either Noah
allow the gossips to board the ark, or he will be without a wife. Mary Wack notes,
Noah’s wife repudiates his authority, and marriage itself, unless he accepts her
gossips into the ark – that is, incorporates her community of women into the
larger social body. In other words, in a salvific act she will form a new
community, a women’s community, outside the control of this aged patriarch, and
she makes explicit that the formation of such a community involves the denial of
the hierarchical bond of marriage. It is a challenge to religious and civic authority,
a challenge that expresses both a longing for community and a sense of
community divided. (44)
This passage also suggests something about the size and importance of the gossip community.
Mrs. Noah declares “I will not owt of this towne,” which not only implies that the network of
gossips is spread throughout the settlement, but also establishes the gossip community as a
public, civic entity that supersedes the notion of the town as a civic structure: the gossip
community is the town. In this tension between family and community, the family is made to
look like a poor substitution.
While the family bickers, a group of gossips

17

enters with information that the flood is

coming:
The fludd comes fleetinge in full faste,
one everye syde that spredeth full farre.
For fere of drowninge I am agaste;
17

Lumiansky and Mills posit that line 224, “The Good Gossips,” is the title of a drinking song
and indicates that several gossips would be onstage (39).
45

good gossippe, lett us drawe nere.

And lett us drinke or wee departe,
for oftetymes wee have done soe.
For at one draught thou drinke a quarte,
and soe will I doe or I goe.

Here is a pottel full of malnesaye good and stronge;
yt will rejoyse both harte and tonge.
Though Noe thinke us never so longe,
Yet wee wyll drinke atyte (ll. 224-235).
One of the most remarkable aspects of this scene is the fact that the gossips acknowledge their
“fere of drowning,” but still insist on fulfilling the communal ritual of drinking upon departure.
That it is communal and ritualistic is signaled by the frequency with which they meet and the
assertion that drinking malmsey (malnesaye) is a restorative act that will strengthen and
invigorate both the spiritual and physical (the heart and tongue).
One of Uxor’s sons, Japhett, recognizes the communal ritual before him, and so he
frames his appeal to his mother not just as an abstract familial obligation, but more importantly,
as an appeal from the entire family community. He calls out from the ark, “Mother, wee praye
you all together – / for we are here, your own childer – / come into the shippe for feare of the
wedder, / for his love that [you] bought” (ll. 236-39). She refuses to acknowledge the primacy of
the family obligation over that of her gossips’, and repurposes Japhett’s use of “all” as
representative of the entire family unit to emphasize that the gossip community, not her family,

46

must remain whole: “That will I not for all your call / but I have my gosseppes all” (ll. 240-41).
The standoff is only resolved when Sem (Shem) physically drags her aboard the ark, telling her
curtly, “In fayth, mother, yett thow shall, / whether thou will or nought” (ll. 242-44). That it is
one of her sons and not her husband who brings her aboard is telling. It indicates that Japhett’s
appeal to join a unified family is a fantasy. In reality, the family is extremely fractured, so much
so that the son must do the father’s duty, as Noah is not present in this scene. Further proof of the
family dysfunction is the fact that it is impossible to determine if Ham, the third son, is even in
18

the scene, as he has no lines during this exchange.

Presented with the alternative, Uxor’s

preference for her gossips is unsurprising.
The gossips scene is filled with quiet courage. They appear to be under no illusions of
being saved, and the gossip tells Uxor that this is a leave-taking, something that they have done
frequently in the past: “And lett us drinke or wee departe, / for oftetymes wee have done soe.”
For Mary Wack, the appearance and disappearance of the gossip community symbolizes the
polysemy of women’s social roles: “The formation and dissolution of the gossips’ community
addresses ambivalent feelings about women’s place within the social body” (45). While this is
18

There are some manuscript variations that have Noah reacting to his wife’s declaration to
remain with her gossips. David Mills, co-editor of the Chester cycle with R.M. Lumiansky for
the Early English Text Society, published a modernized edition of the cycle that includes textual
variations. This edition has Noah present in the scene, and he calls on Shem to witness Uxor’s
behavior. After her declaration that if he doesn’t bring her gossips on board, he should look for a
new wife, Shem promises Noah to “fetch her in, I trow, / withouten any fail” (ll. 211-212). He
then calls to Uxor, “Mother, my father after thee send / and bids thee into yonder ship wend. /
Look up and see the wind, / for we been ready to sail” (ll. 213-16). She refuses, and like the York
play, uses her son as a go-between: “Son, go again to him and say / I will not come therein
today” (ll. 217-18). At this sign of defiance, Noah himself calls down to her, “Come in, wife, in
twenty devils’ way! / – or else stand there without” (ll. 219-20). When Ham asks, “Shall we all
fetch her in?” Noah assents, “Yea, sons, in Christ’s blessing and mine! / I would ye hied you
betime / for of this flood I stand in doubt” (ll. 221-24). The gossips immediately have their song
after this, and the scene proceeds as related above. Though the scene portrays Noah
acknowledging that his wife’s behavior is a problem, there is still the matter of Shem bringing
Uxor on board the ark instead of Noah.
47

true, she does not address what is actually being staged: an implicit celebration marking the
rebirth of humanity. The scene dramatically shows the tension between the cyclic time associated
with women because of their reproductive capacity and the linear model that posits a divine
teleology with history as a series of traceable events from Creation to the Last Judgment. With
their song, the gossips fulfill their spiritual function by celebrating the propagation of the species.
Though it remains a deeply unsettling scene, as it requires their deaths to usher in the rebirth of
humanity, the gossips’ song evokes the model of cyclic time, thus creating positive possibility in
what is otherwise a tragedy. The song, performed as the Flood closes in, demonstrates that the
gossip community belongs to the two trajectories at once. While the majority of the gossips
perish, Uxor survives to establish a gossip community after the Flood.
The abjuration of her sons’ pleas to acknowledge “her own childer” is a dramatic
representation of a gossip’s priorities (the community requires as much maintenance as the
family) and signals her commitment to the gossip tradition. Although she is forcibly brought on
board the ark by her son Shem, and is thus, as Gail McMurry Gibson writes, “dragged into the
patriarchal order of the ark” (15), and though no more is said about gossips or female
communities, nor is there any mourning for those killed by the flood, the fact of Uxor’s survival
ensures the survival of the gossip tradition.
The song of the good gossips is provocative. It bears a remarkable resemblance to the
th

good gossip carols that appeared at the end of the 15

century. The Chester manuscript dates

from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, well after the gossip tradition was
established. It is difficult to say with any certainty if the song in the mystery play is native to the
play. Given the evidence of the York and Wakefield plays, neither of which contain speaking
roles for gossips, let alone a song, it is probable that the song is a later addition, making the

48

Chester Noah play an exemplum of the gossip-insertion craze at the beginning of the sixteenth
century. Of course, it is equally likely that the gossip song in the play is the one that started it all.
Although representations of gossips in the mystery cycles are largely confined to the
Noah pageants, the gossip appears in one play outside of the Noah plays. In the Chester cycle,
she also appears in the Harrowing of Hell. In an uncomfortable echo of a God who drowned a
group of gossips in the Flood, we discover that Christ has rescued all of humanity except for a
gossip. “Mulier” steps forward to speak:
Sometyme I was a taverner,
a gentle gossippe and a tapster,
of wyne and ale a trustie bruer,
which woe hath me wrought.
Of kannes I kept no trewe measure.
My cuppes I sould at my pleasure,
deceavinge manye a creature,
thoe my ale were nought.

And when I was a bruer longe,
with hopes I made my alle stronge;
esshes and hearbes I blend amonge
and marred so good malt.
Therfore I may my handes wringe,
shake my cuppes and kannes ringe.
Sorrowfull maye I syke and singe

49

that ever I so dalt (ll. 185-300).

19

The gossip goes on to say that she will be joined by all taverners and tapsters of the city for
“hurtinge the commonwealth” (l. 304) by brewing under-strength ale, by adulterating wine and
ale, and by under-pouring their brews. She is not completely alone though, because Satan
remains, as do two other demons, all of whom welcome her. Satan tells her, “Though Jesu be
gonne with our meanye, / yet shalt thou abyde here still with mee / in payne withowt ende” (ll.
326-28). The second demon calls her “sweete ladye” and tells her that they are to be married in a
parody of a Christian marriage because her adulterated ale caused many to be “brougt to bedd /
farre worse then anye beaste” (ll. 331-32). The third demon parodies both the wedding feast and
the gossip feast by telling her that because of “Usynge cardes, dyce, and cuppes smale, / nowe
thou shall have a feaste!”(ll. 334-36).
This scene, like the gossips’ song in the Noah play, is unique to the Chester cycle and
anachronistically link the plays to contemporary Chester. Though some scholars have contended
that both scenes are irrelevant or unnecessary (especially the gossip in Hell), a persuasive case
20

has been made

that both scenes are relevant to the plays, even if they do not date to the original

performance. Both scenes point to an issue at the heart of gossip representation: women’s place
in the public sphere.
This was an especially thorny issue in Chester, though it was popping up all over the
kingdom. In 1540, the town fathers of Chester passed a law making it illegal for women between
the ages of fourteen and forty to keep an alehouse or tavern. Although young women had

19

Though only titled “Play XVII” in the Chester manuscript, the editors have titled it
“Harrowing of Hell.”
20
R.M. Lumiansky examines this issue in “Comedy and Theme in the Chester Harrowing of
Hell.” Tulane Studies in English, 10 (1960): 5-12.
50

previously done so, the mayor and aldermen claimed that in doing so, Chester alewives and
tavernesses were going against the custom of “any other places of this realm” (Clark 79).
Marjorie Keniston McIntosh writes, “Cultural evidence suggests resistance on the part of
Chester’s unusually powerful female brewers and sellers of ale against this order” (159). In fact,
Mary Wack points out, “alewives in Chester took their place along with other crafts in the
Corpus Christi procession. Women’s participation in the ale trades was thus a long-standing part
of their identity in public life and civic ritual” (38).
Wack also demonstrates that the ban on women running alehouses and taverns was just
the culmination of a series of limitations placed on women’s public roles in the 1530s: the cap
legislation of 1533 required that singlewomen be made distinguishable from married women
through the use of regulated headgear. More troubling was the law curtailing the gossips’ feast
that was used to celebrate a woman’s successful childbirth. The law forbade all food and alcohol
to be used to celebrate either the birth or the churching, and also restricted the women in the birth
chamber to female kin only: friends were not allowed access to the birth. “The law thus
privatized a woman’s reproductive labor by excluding her friends’ presence during birth (again
dividing woman from woman). It furthermore withdrew public recognition of that labor’s
contribution to the community through restricting the money spent on ceremonial display”
(Wack 40). Given the importance of the birth ritual, these moves on the part of the Chester town
government exist only to curtail women’s public roles. They also provide vital context for
interpreting the reason for the gossips in the Chester cycle.
Given the fact that ale production was not only a woman’s domestic responsibility but
also one of the ways in which she could legitimately earn money, the move to curtail women’s
associations with alehouses was a reaction against the idea of women’s social and financial

51

mobility. The most obvious representative of this is the gossip, a woman who not only brewed
ale but also patronized alehouses with her fellow gossips, critiquing their husband’s
transgressions in a convivial atmosphere outside of masculine supervision. These “gossips’
meetings” became increasingly associated with idle, destructive talk. The attacks on the Chester
women, the feminization of idle talk, and the exclusive association of that idle talk with gossips
came just as ale was being replaced by beer as the national drink of England. The association of
women with ale was of long standing: until the late medieval period women brewed ale as part of
their domestic duties. Judith Bennett notes that “Brewster once had a clear and unequivocal
meaning: a female brewer. In the fourteenth century, when women did most of the brewing in
most places, their presence was signified in the various languages of the time: braciatrices and
pandoxatrices in Latin texts, braceresses in Anglo-Norman, and brewsters in the English that
was being used with more and more frequency. […] By 1500, however, the neat gender
distinction of brewster and brewer was fading away” (3). Women, who had until the fifteenth
century been largely responsible for the brewing and distribution of ale to the household (and
even the occasional selling to other households), gradually fell out of the trade as it became
increasingly more profitable and male-oriented. By 1615, Gervase Markham was able to delimit
the female role of brewing to a strictly domestic activity while simultaneously expounding on its
international importance as a valuable trade commodity. When discussing the importance of
malt, a component of both beer and ale, he writes,
from it is made the drink, by which the household is nourished and sustained, so
to the fruitful husbandman … it is an excellent merchandise, and a commodity of
so great trade, that not alone especial towns and counties are maintained thereby,
but also the whole kingdom, and divers others of our neighbouring nations. This

52

office or place of knowledge belongeth particularly to the housewife; and though
we have many excellent men maltsters, yet it is properly the work and care of the
woman, for it is a house work, and done altogether within doors, where generally
lieth her charge. (180)
Markham deftly provides malt with a public and domestic presence. Though it is most properly
to be found in the domestic space being produced by women, when it enters the public sphere as
a marketable commodity it becomes the substance that sustains the kingdom. Women, though
not allowed to actively engage in malt’s public presence, nevertheless are publicly acknowledged
as nurturing the nation. Markham’s construction of the proper housewifely behavior does not
allow for any action where a woman attempts to engage in a public performance of labor, even if
that labor can be directly connected to her domestic labors. The reasons behind this shift from
female brewing to male brewing are complex, but suffice it to say that historical factors that
resulted from the Black Death, such as an increased immigrant population as well as a spike in
urban population as people left the countryside for the higher wages of the cities, as well as
technological innovations (immigrants from Flanders and Germany introduced hops and beer
[Monckton 11]), and commercial/regulatory

21

factors all conspired to shift the English national

21

Because beer was brewed with hops, it had a longer shelf life, thus making it easier to
transport and distribute. This greatly added to beer’s commercial appeal over ale, and coupled
with the fact that brewed beverages were strictly regulated, and that the regulatory body was
almost exclusively male, beer gradually became the beverage of choice for most English people.
It was more popular in the south of England than the North, where it was viewed with suspicion
as a “foreign” drink. Judith Bennett relates the tensions between “native” drinkers of ale and the
“alien” brewers of beer, and declares that, “only in the eighteenth century did the distinction
between English ale and Dutch beer finally pass out of common currency” (80).
53

drink from the largely female-produced ale to the male-produced beer and male-imported sweet
wine.

22

Marjorie Keniston McIntosh states that in the later fourteenth and into the fifteenth
centuries, women perceived as respectable could engage in the brewing and selling of ale
without the overview of their husbands, but that this was merely a temporary situation,
“vulnerable to ongoing increases in the scale of production, the introduction of beer and sweet
wines, and growing discomfort about women’s roles as keepers of public houses” (181). While
this records the systematic exclusion of women from the brewing and distribution of ale, it leaves
unanswered the question of why ale became associated with women and beer with men. After
all, women brewed beer, and were even among the first to sell it (Bennett 95). But, as Judith
Bennett relates, the culture strongly favored men: “women more often than men encountered a
complex web of factors – legal, economic, social, political, ideological – that made them less
able than men to respond to the opportunities presented by brewing beer instead of ale. These
factors … ensured that beerbrewing as it developed in late medieval England was a trade of
men” (97). And so by the sixteenth century, the time when gender distinctions between brewster
and brewer were collapsing, ale was being brewed with the hops that had originally been
associated with beer: “some time in the sixteenth century, each of the two drinks was being
brewed with hops. After this it becomes difficult to draw a clear distinction between them”
(Monckton 71). Ale, always political in its identity as the English national beverage, became
increasingly associated in the sixteenth century with gender and class as the perception of it as
the beverage of women and the lower classes intensified. In the middle of the century, Gammer
22

Marjorie Keniston McIntosh notes that the sixteenth century saw an increase in the
consumption of sweet wines: “Served normally in taverns or inns and increasingly attractive to
men of middling as well as higher social status, sweet wine’s popularity helped to restrict the
clientele of alehouses by the Elizabethan period” (167).
54

Gurton’s Needle was staged at Cambridge University lampooning rustic gossip communities and
alehouse culture, a play that synthesizes gossips of the late medieval and the early modern
periods.
Gammer Gurton: The “Good” Gossip vs. the “Good Gossip”
Where the medieval cycle plays stage tensions between patriarchy and female labor by
staging unease with the superficially “simple solution” of drowning gossip communities,
Gammer Gurton’s Needle shows a gossip community trying to reconcile competing ideologies of
female labor and female idleness. Gammer Gurton’s Needle is in many ways an extension of the
Corpus Christi plays (and indeed, the Chester plays were not written down until after Gammer
Gurton appeared onstage, perhaps tantalizingly suggesting that the play had some influence on
the Chester cycle) and serves as a transition piece between the late medieval and early modern
representations of gossip communities. The play is most frequently cited as a contextualizing
tool for histories of the English stage – it was written sometime around 1550 for the
23

undergraduates at Cambridge, it is often called “the first English comedy”

23

because it is quite

This honor has also been awarded to Ralph Roister Doister, c. 1554. For a not too painful
discussion of the process by which Gammer Gurton’s Needle is dated, see Whitworth, Three
Sixteenth-Century Comedies, p. xxxii. In Four Tudor Comedies, William Tydeman suggests an
original date of 1552, but notes that “several references to the ‘queen’ in the present text suggest
that it was revised during the reign of Mary I or Elizabeth I” (97). Howard B. Norland contends
that “because the border on the title page is the same as that for Thomas Ingelend’s Disobedient
Child, printed by Colwell in 1560 in his first year as an independent printer, and because the
border does not appear on any extant printings by Colwell in the latter years of his career, it
appears likely that at least the title page of the play was set in print much earlier than its
publication date of 1575” (Drama in Early Tudor Britain, 1485-1558, p. 280). Douglas Duncan
refreshingly contends that the dates of the plays matter much less than the content, and since, as
he posits, Gammer “is the less indebted to Roman models, Stevenson [one of the candidates for
the play’s author “Mr. S”] is credited with having pushed English comedy a step of two closer
toward independence” (“Gammer Gurton’s Needle and the Concept of Humanist Parody,” pp.
177-8).
55

possibly the first example of a vernacular secular comedy that divided the action up by acts and
24

scenes and respected the classical unities of time and place.

Surprisingly little critical attention has been given to the play, especially considering its
position as the earliest English comedy. This gets wryly acknowledged by a number of its
critics, who describe the critical atmosphere surrounding the play as “grudgingly appreciative
criticism” (Ingram 257) and describe those who study the play as an outcast critical community:
“Even today one finds it jokingly used as a touchstone of unsophistication, and its title alone can
raise condescending smiles, as anyone who has worked on it knows” (Duncan 177). What is so
fascinating about this critical reception of the play is how much it unwittingly reproduces the
discourse surrounding gossip communities and female labor: the critical community of Gammer
Gurton’s Needle is a meta-community under siege whose work on the play is undervalued by the
scholarly community at large, and that Gammer Gurton’s Needle exists as an important but
ultimately unacknowledged comedy. United by a knowledge shared by very few (that the play is
intrinsically valuable), the critical commentators of the play have adopted a rhetorical stance
very like that of late medieval gossip communities: they begin by relating the abuses the play has
25

suffered (misunderstanding the function of the play’s scatology,

trivialization of the play’s

plot) at the hands of the rest of the academy, much as the good gossips begin their sessions
together by relating the domestic abuses perpetuated by their husbands. Then there is generally a
move toward restoring the play to the dramatic community, which ultimately fails in its
24

See R.W. Ingram, “Gammer Gurton’s Needle: Comedy Not Quite of the Lowest Order?”
(259-260), Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (especially 152-161), Duncan (177), J.W. Robinson,
(46), and Norland (280).
25
See Duncan, “Gammer Gurton’s Needle and the Concept of Humanist Parody,” R.W. Ingram,
Robinson, “The Art and Meaning of Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” William B. Toole, “Gammer
Gurton’s Needle: Comedy Not Quite of the Lowest Order?” and John. W. Veltz, “Scatology and
Moral Meaning in Two English Renaissance Plays.”
56

objective. The reason for this failure is the play, much like historical gossip communities, is a
victim of false historical teleology. Even though the play was a huge success, performed, printed,
26

and reprinted numerous times (even earning two mentions in the Martin Marprelate debate ), it
is largely treated now (with a distinct note of apology) as an example of the early Tudor taste for
farcical bawdiness, though, as one of its critics contends, at least its “crudeness” is not as bad as
that of Mankind: “Crudity can be a club with which to beat a certain frank bawdiness that is
nonetheless much less to be maligned than the distasteful smut of such Tudor pieces as
Mankynd” (Ingram 267).
This move, which smacks of scholarly anxiety, frequently leads to introductions that
27

include a declaration of the play’s triviality.

The perception of a taint in working on this play is

curious, and extremely telling. Though the plot can be pithily outlined as the loss and eventual
recovery of a needle, to judge the play’s merits thus not only demonstrates a serious misreading
of the play’s importance to women’s history and the history of the English stage, but it does so
by conflating triviality and simplicity. Simplicity of plot is one of the Aristotelian accusations
leveled at comedy when critics want to highlight tragedy’s primacy over comedy. To deploy the
Aristotelian concept of magnitude in this instance shows the level of masculine privilege at work
in this history of this play’s scholarship, and causes most scholars to overlook the point of the

26

The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition, ed. Joseph L. Black, pp.
67 and 83. The tracts allude to the author of Gammer Gurton’s Needle as John Bridges, but, as
Howard B. Norland contends, it is extremely unlikely that Bridges is the playwright because
“Bridges had no connection with Christ’s College, where the title page indicates the play was
performed, and his name does not begin with ‘S’” (281).
27
Frank Ardolino says the play’s characters are “overly concerned with the whereabouts of the
small and trivial, the physical needle” (23); R.W. Ingram states that “the humor of the play
resides in the tangle of quarrels and misunderstandings caused by such a trivial thing as the loss
of a needle” (258); Curtis Perry claims “the play is ostentatiously trivial at the level of plot (a
needle is lost, lamented, and found)” (217).
57

28

satire

– the “trivial” needle, that female instrument of the domestic, is a symbol of the gossip

community’s relationship to the rest of the village society. As one recent critic states, the needle
has an “unexpectedly primary if precarious role in stabilizing social, sexual, and gendered
relations” (Wall 68). This is also how community is constructed – trivial, insofar as it is
common, and yet precious in the maintenance of peaceful civic order.
To focus on the triviality of the plot is to miss the importance of this play to the English
gossip tradition. Wendy Wall finds it “provocative … that when a playwright chose to introduce
the very first English play to undergraduates steeped in Latin, he chose the topic of a housewife’s
mischances” (60). Like Wall, I also find this provocative, but where her agenda is to demonstrate
how the play locates emergent English nationalism in the vernacular and domestic female space,
thereby troubling the male dominated Latinate space of the university, my project takes a
different tack. Gammer Gurton’s Needle, the first English comedy, is also, crucially, a comedy
about gossips, specifically, about the symbiotic relationship of the gossip community to the
community at large. This is crystallized in the play’s title: the Gammer’s surname, Gurton, was
also an actual village located just outside Cambridge.

29

Metaphorically, then, as was evinced in

the Chester Noah play, the gossip is the town, and the chaos caused by the loss of Gammer
Gurton’s needle and the subsequent conflict that arises between Gammer Gurton and Dame Chat

28

In his recent article on the play, Frank Ardolino claims that Gammer Gurton’s joy at the
discovery of the needle is “disproportionate”: “She … has regained her most valuable
possession, which is, in fact, only a needle. The emphasis she puts on its restoration is
disproportionate to its actual value …” (26). Ardolino believes the needle’s only value is as a
religious metaphor; Protestant propaganda that equates the trivial needle with Catholicism.
29
J.W. Robinson observes, “Like Trumpington, Girton (the place-name from which the surname
‘Gurton’ – unique in English drama – comes) is a village just outside Cambridge, and the
members of Christ’s College are about to witness something taking place in their own backyard
– a fair assumption, I think, especially since the action in The Two Angry Women of Abington
takes place just outside Oxford” (50-51).
58

suggests that even in a sleepy rural area, the female community of gossips was the prop that
allowed the entire community to function. Instability in the gossip community (caused by the
fight between Gurton and Chat) threatens the stability of the community as a whole. That the
trigger for the events of the play is the gossip’s loss of a needle, the metonymic object of female
labor, demonstrates Gammer Gurton’s ties to the medieval gossip tradition. The proverbially
trivial needle, like the York Uxor’s “tools” or the Wakefield Uxor’s spinning, are rendered
comic, mitigating the importance of female labor and the unity of the gossip community to the
functioning of both the domestic and the larger village community. Much in the same way that
the gossip communities in the medieval Noah plays represent humanity as a whole, so too does
the gossip community of Gammer Gurton’s Needle. Moreover, the fact that gossips are the
subject of the first English comedy indicates the importance of the gossip community to English
social identity.
The play opens with Gammer Gurton mending her servant Hodge’s leather breeches so
that he can court the maid Kirstian Clack in style. Kirstian has apparently given him
encouragement: “She smiled on me the last Sunday, when ich put off my cap,” he relates to
Diccon “the Bedlam,” who is the source of all the mischief in the play (2.1.344).

30

While

chasing the cat away from the milk, Gammer Gurton loses her needle, which puts the household
into an uproar. Diccon enters into the scene of disorder, and as a bit of mischief, tells Gammer
Gurton that her neighbor – fellow gossip, and proprietress of the village alehouse, Dame Chat –
had found it. Chat, of course, knows nothing about this, but Diccon pays her a visit and tells her
30

All quotes from the play come from the edition reproduced in Four Tudor Comedies and
edited by William Tydeman. Tydeman’s edition retains original spelling and punctuation, but
continues line numbers throughout the play instead of resetting them with each act. This makes it
difficult to negotiate between the other modern edition of the play, located in Three SixteenthCentury Comedies, edited by Charles W. Whitworth, who chooses to modernize spelling and line
numbers.
59

that Gammer Gurton has been stealing her chickens. In the meantime, Diccon causes Hodge to
soil himself with fear when he convinces Hodge that he can call up the devil to help with the
search for the needle. In most farces, causing a character to soil himself and then taunting him
with the question, “be thine arse-strings brusten?” (2.1.387) is the height of entertainment. In
Gammer Gurton’s Needle, however, the climax of the play comes later, in a brawl between the
two gossips. The law is called, as is the curate, but no one discovers the needle’s location. The
curate, Dr. Rat, is subjected to a large share of the play’s humiliation, but his disgrace does not
aid in finding the elusive needle. It is found at the end of the play when Diccon swats Hodge’s
buttock and Hodge cries out in pain: “Chwas almost undone, ‘twas so far in my buttock!”
(5.2.1254). Presumably, Hodge changed his breeches when he soiled himself, allowing for the
discovery at the play’s dénouement.
The prologue establishes this play as a gossip comedy. Gammer Gurton’s neighbor,
Dame Chat, is introduced to us as “her deare gossyp” (l. 7). The prologue then goes on to
describe the conflict Diccon creates between the two women: “Hereof there ensued so fearfull a
fraye, / Mas Doctor was sent for these gossyps to staye, / Because he was Curate and estemed
full wyse, / Who found that he sought not, by Diccon’s device” (ll. 11-14). That the prologue
describes the gossips’ contention as being beyond the reach of the curate demonstrates the scope
of the disruption: the Church mediated most of the petty legal problems of its parishioners, and
the fact that the gossips’ fight proves to be beyond mediation by both the curate and the
magistrate reveals both the inadequacy of religious and legal institutions to mediate even a
“trivial” dispute, and the gossip community’s crucial role in the maintenance of communal order.
The gossip community is fractured because it is out of balance. Gammer Gurton, though
she is in many ways figured as ridiculous, is a “good” gossip: she is industrious, mindful of her

60

servants and invested in the proper functioning of her household. Since there is no “Gaffer”
Gurton, it is to be assumed that she is the head of the house, so the staging of the household as
functional at the beginning of the play indicates her overall competence. Dame Chat, however, is
a “good gossip”: though she runs an alehouse, her business is slow, and there are indications in
the play that she drinks a good deal of her product. Her surname is more definite proof of her
negative characterization. A perusal of The Oxford English Dictionary shows that “chat” had its
modern meaning of “idle talk” by the early sixteenth century. The pitting of these two women
against each other, and the failure of formal institutions to immediately or satisfactorily rectify
the dispute, demonstrates that if the gossip community is thrown into disorder, the organizations
structured to ensure social function lose their efficacy. There is nothing in the play that is not
affected by the gossip community, including Diccon, the supposedly placeless vagrant.
Diccon is frequently interpreted as the central figure of the play due to his obvious
theatrical heritage as a Vice figure – it is he who sets the events of the play in motion.
Interestingly, though, because of his social label of “the Bedlam,” he is also most frequently
interpreted as existing outside of any community. This is in part because “the Bedlam” is one of
31

the criminal types described by Thomas Harman.

Douglas Duncan thinks Diccon’s status as a Bedlam carries with it no class stigma, and in
fact, allows him the freedom to indulge in mischievous pranks that demonstrate the instability of
31

In “A Caveat for Common Cursitors,” Harman describes the behavior of “Abraham men,”
who are “those that feign themselves to have been mad, and have been kept either in Bedlam or
in some other prison a good time, and not one amongst twenty that ever came in prison for any
such cause; yet will they say how piteously and most extremely they have been beaten and dealt
withal. Some of these be merry and very pleasant; they will dance and sing; some others be as
cold and reasonable to talk withal. These beg money; either when they come at Farmers’ houses
they will demand Bacon, either cheese or wool, or anything that is worth money. And if they
espy small company within, they will with fierce countenance demand somewhat. Where for fear
the maids will give them largely to be rid of them. If they may conveniently come by any cheat,
they will pick and steal, as the upright man or Rogue, poultry or linen” (Kinney 127).
61

social hierarchies: “Lacking a place of his own in society, he is thereby licensed to perpetrate
mischief, as Bailly’s indulgent treatment of him shows, and to invert the hierarchies of birth and
education …” (186). Carol Thomas Neely agrees, and intensifies Duncan’s claim by positing that
Diccon “controls” the play: “Diccon’s characterization as ‘the Bedlam’ does not signify that he
has been in Bedlam or that he himself is mad; indeed he is in control of the play. It is a
metonymy for his capacity to trigger excess, folly, and loss of control in others and disrupt the
social order – which he does freely because, as a vagabond, beggar, thief, and trouble-maker
outside of social hierarchies, he has no allegiances or rules” (29). And because of this “outsider”
status, Joel Altman claims that Diccon’s “control” allows him to “[orchestrate] the search [for
the needle] into a series of confrontations between town and country that begins with a
conjuration and ends with a formal legal inquiry” (152-3). These critics, disparate though they
are in other respects, all agree that Diccon is socially without place, and that gives him a kind of
freedom to create social disruptions. To use the term “disruption” is perhaps too slight. Diccon
effects a rupture in the social fabric, but how is he, the placeless Bedlam and social outsider, able
to orchestrate these confrontations between Gammer Gurton and Dame Chat?
In fact, Diccon is not outside of social hierarchies. He enters the play and immediately
announces his relationship to the community by constructing it through gossips: “Many a myle
have I walked, divers and sundry waies, / And many a good man’s house have I bin at in my
daies; / Many a gossip’s cup in my tyme have I tasted …” (1.1.1-3). He may not be settled, but
he has the ability to enter into gossip networks and taste their cups, a reference to the alehouses
where he would presumably get his free meals. His rootlessness does not invert social hierarchies
as much as it exposes the fact that the hierarchies fail to impose any meaningful social order on
the community. Social equanimity for the community at large is only to be found when the

62

gossip community is reconciled. This is borne out by the play’s conclusion, when Bayly turns to
the curate Dr. Rat, who has previously threatened legal action on Dame Chat for her physical
assault, and tells him that he will waive his customary fee if Rat will drop the case:
Wel, Master Rat, you must both learne and teach us to forgeve:
Since Diccon hath confession made and is so cleane shreve.
If ye to me conscent to amend this heavie chaunce,
I wil injoyne him here with some open kind of penaunce:
Of this condition, where ye know my fee is twenty pence
For the bloodshed, I am agreed with you here to dispence.
Ye shall go quite, so that ye graunt the matter now to run,
To end with mirth emong us al, even as it was begun. (5.2.1201-7)
Bayly’s offer to waive the legal fee in exchange for Rat’s decision to allow communal
restoration to continue reflects the fact that the play’s conflict and its resolution happen in the
community, not within official social structures. This is further emphasized when Diccon, as part
of his penance, slaps Hodge’s buttock, thus discovering the needle, which suggests that it is not
through direct intervention of Church or State that social order is restored, but through the
restoration of the gossip community, a community based on interpersonal relations, not
economic or legal ones.
But what is Diccon’s motivation in the play? Why lie to Gurton, Chat, and Hodge? It is
possible to say, as many critics have, that it’s simply a function of his rootlessness, and that his
lack of a social place is signaled through mischievous behavior, as if a social outsider has no
choice but to disrupt a community of which he is not a member. One possible explanation lies in
the fact that the community he disrupts is largely matriarchal, which as Diccon’s disruptive lies

63

demonstrate is a precarious social arrangement. Gail Kern Paster observes that “ … the two
households organizing the social world of the play are both female headed. In both households
the symbolic reciprocity of domestic and bodily thresholds as sites of social interference,
exposure, and perilous change is evident” (116). Diccon’s deception works, not because Gammer
Gurton and Dame Chat have an inherent distrust of each other, but because he takes one of the
qualities of the gossip community, that it is an ad-hoc institution, arising as needed, and uses it
against the women of the play. Gossip communities had no centralized locus of power and
depended on unverified/unverifiable information, the truth of which was seldom questioned
because the character of the gossip was considered to be verification enough. (This might
account for Joel Altman’s otherwise puzzling assertion that the play has a “morally neutral
atmosphere”[154].)
That this play is about the relationship between the gossip community and the village
community at large is also evident in the characterization of Gurton and Chat, or more precisely,
in the lack of character depth. Howard B. Norland describes Gammer Gurton as “little more than
a foolish housewife who places a ridiculously high value on a tiny household tool” and Chat as
“an alehouse keeper quick to protect her name and her property.” He then goes on to claim,
“Both are gullible victims of Diccon’s manipulation because of their basic mistrust of each
other” (286). Certainly there is very little psychological complexity in the play, but that is both
beside the point and beyond the scope of the play. The comedy is a commentary on the fragility
of community, not the individual psyche. Furthermore, there is no evidence within the play text
to suggest that the women have an inherent mistrust of each other, other than perhaps the alacrity
with which they believe Diccon’s lies, which can be attributed just as easily to the comic form of
the play.

64

Carol Neely has a slightly different take on the women’s hostility toward each other,
asserting that Diccon’s actions “[bring] to the surface the rivalry, anger, and fear that underlie the
village community’s fragile status hierarchies” (29). Her proof of this is a list of insults the
women fling at each other during their fight, which “reveal how each’s authority can be
dangerously threatened by bodily and economic vulnerability” (29). Gammer’s vulnerability is
more obvious: she is the elder of the women, and it is her household that collapses during the
needle’s absence. But Dame Chat, though the proprietress of an alehouse, is also susceptible to
economic vicissitude. After the women’s altercation, Gammer sends her boy Cocke to fetch Dr.
Rat to settle their dispute, telling the boy that the curate will be reasonably easy to find: “Shalt
have him at his chamber, or els at Mother Bee’s; / Els seeke him at Hob Fylcher’s shop, for as
charde it reported, / There is the best ale in al the towne, and now is most resorted” (3.3.675-79).
It is possible to read Gammer’s claim that Hob Fylcher has the best ale as another of her insults
to Chat, but the lack of clientele in Chat’s alehouse during the course of the play (Diccon is the
only person to enter the alehouse for the purpose of consuming ale) suggests that there is at least
some truth to Gammer’s declaration.
The lack of clientele in the alehouse is not because alehouses were unpopular in the early
modern period. Though ale was experiencing a decline in elite quaffers, alehouses began to
proliferate in the sixteenth century, much to the chagrin of town officials. Twenty years after the
play was first produced, Elizabeth I’s Privy Council circulated a letter to local magistrates
inquiring about the number of inns, taverns, and alehouses in every shire with an eye to raising
revenue for the repair of Dover harbor, used extensively in the war against Spain (Clark 41). 30

65

counties reported, and the results are as startling now as they were to officials in 1577: England,
32

with a population around 4 million, had over 15,000 alehouses, a 1:267 ratio.

Given the proliferation of alehouses in the period, the lack of clientele in Dame Chat’s
alehouse suggests that the gossip-as-alewife is an untenable model, signaling a shift in the
popular representation of gossip communities as discretely female and solely associated with the
alehouse. The play’s events seem to suggest that in order for the gossip community to survive, it
has to reintegrate with the community at large. Chat’s alehouse is located at the sleepy end of
town, as indicated by Chat herself when she castigates Dr. Rat for trying to enter her alehouse
through a hole in the wall: “… ye have other minions, in the other end of the towne, / Where ye
were liker to catch such a blow, / Than anywhere els, as farre as I know” (5.2.958-60). Those
minions are presumably located in and around Hob Fylcher’s alehouse, since Chat, Gammer, and
Hodge each independently claim in separate conversations through the course of the play that
Rat frequents Fylcher’s. In locating Fylcher’s alehouse at the other end of town, the play implies
that Chat and Gammer are a gossip community largely out of touch with the village community,
making them vulnerable to threats from within and without, an implication made obvious with
the sprawling battle between Chat and Gurton in 3.3.
That the brawl occurs on the steps of Dame Chat’s alehouse is highly symbolic – between
33

the alehouse and the street, both traditional sites of the gossip community,

32

the

Peter Clark provides a table breaking down the information by county. The actual number of
alehouses was 15,095, but such specificity is problematic given the fact that three counties
(Suffolk, Worcestershire, and Northumberland) did not make distinctions between alehouses,
inns, and taverns. Suffolk reported 480 “inns and alehouses,” Worcestershire reported a total of
447, and Northumberland reported 354. These numbers were not qualified in any other way (42).
33
Numerous “good gossip” ballads of the late medieval/early Tudor period take place in the
street, where the gossips meet, and then the alehouse where they go to get drunk. The most
famous instance of this is John Skelton’s “The Tunning of Elinor Rumming.”
66

misunderstanding between the two leading gossips comes to a head. This misunderstanding is
predicated upon the keeping of secrets, a practice at odds with the custom of gossip
communities. When Diccon arrives at Chat’s alehouse, she confirms a previous acquaintance by
identifying him and inviting him to a card game: “What, Diccon? Come nere, ye be no straunger;
/ We be fast set at Trumpe, man, hard by the fyre; / Thou shalt set on the king, if thou come a
little nyer” (2.2.413-15). This invitation, in addition to establishing Diccon as a de facto member
of the gossip community, also demonstrates how empty is her alehouse: Chat is interrupted
playing cards with “Sim Glover’s wife” (l. 421) rather than drawing ale or waiting on customers.
This indicates a gossip community that has lost its vitality, a point further emphasized by the
alacrity with which Chat both believes Diccon’s lies and promises to keep his tale “As secret as
mine owne thought, by God and the devil two!” (l. 428).
The state of Chat’s alehouse, like the loss of Gammer Gurton’s needle, signals a
dysfunctional gossip community.

The loss of Gammer’s needle does not just stop the

functioning of the household, it indicates a breakdown in the system by which knowledge is
produced and distributed. The loss of the needle signals the disappearance of the gossip network.
Needles, Wendy Wall explains, are “identified so clearly as a specifically female knowledge and
practice … early modern plays and poems often represent needles as the tools of aggressive or
resistant women” (65). When the needle is lost, however, Gammer’s aggression becomes
unfocused, directed at everyone with whom she comes into contact.
Like a needle, the alehouse was also an important tool of aggressive or resistant women.
Resistance is only effective, however, when in the presence of society. Chat’s alehouse exists on
the faded social fringe of the village, outside of any sites of power, a detail reinforced by the fact
that Chat is only able to get information about the state of Gammer Gurton’s household from

67

Diccon. If the prologue did not establish at the outset that the two were gossips, it would be
difficult to ascertain that from their behavior toward each other, which is diffident at best – the
two women do not meet until halfway through the play, on the steps of Chat’s alehouse, when
they engage in an impressive bout of name-calling, hitting, biting, and scratching. The animosity
between the two is not resolved until the truth is revealed, not by the curate Dr. Rat, whom
Gammer Gurton sends for, but by Master Bayly.
Why is Bayly able to resolve the dispute, but not Rat? Unlike the ale-swilling, minionloving curate, Bayly represents the legitimate, respectable part of village society, and thus it is he
who has the ability to reintegrate the gossip community because he, unlike Rat, does not become
embroiled in the gossips’ brawl. When trying to get to the root of the matter, Bayly states the
matter to Gammer Gurton thus: “This is the case: you lost your needle about the dores, / And she
answeres againe, she hase no cocke of your’s; / Thus in your talke and action, from that you do
intend / She is five mile wide, from that she doth defend” (5.2.1101-4). Bayly identifies the
problem in the gossip community as one of disjunction: there is a fundamental disconnect
between intention and action, centered around the privileging of information. A free flow of
information between its members is vital for a gossip community. Diccon’s lies do derail the
gossip community, but only because of its unusual vulnerability. Once Bayly discovers the
problem, the repair to the community comes swiftly. A few lines before Bayly’s revelation,
Gammer disdainfully calls Chat a “drunken gossip” (l. 1086). Soon after Bayly’s observation,
Diccon discovers the needle in Hodge’s breeches, and after Hodge gives it to a triumphant
Gammer, Chat tells her, “By my troth, Gossyp Gurton, I am even as glad / As though I mine
owne selfe as good a turne had!” (ll. 1259-60). This marks the first time that the women use the
term “gossip” without any negative qualifiers, and the play concludes with everyone going “into

68

the ale-house,” according to the stage directions, ostensibly to celebrate the restoration of
Gammer’s needle, but also to commemorate the reestablishment of the gossip community. The
needle’s recovery signals, among other things,

34

the restoration of the potential for the assertion

of female will, and the use of the alehouse as the site of the disintegration and reintegration of
the gossip community, as well as its use as a festive space to celebrate the event, demonstrates
the shifting role of the gossip community. Ultimately, though, the move to the alehouse is a sly
wink to the audience. The gossip network was restored but not repaired, which is indicated by
the celebration at the finding of the needle, but no acknowledgment made, either between the
women, or by anyone else, of the restoration of female friendship. While it is possible to attribute
the friction between the gossips as indicative of the disruption of reproductive order – the
needle’s loss means that Gammer can’t repair Hodge’s breeches, which means that he cannot go
courting, which means that no one will need the services of gossips in the birth chamber – the
fact is that the reproductive order is restored but the underlying tension between the two gossips
remains unresolved. Without a declared renewal of female friendship, the audience is left to
assume that the knowledge network that should exist in a gossip community will remain weak
and open to exploitation from those with mischievous inclinations. Gossips should know every
particular of each other’s business, otherwise the community becomes dangerously vulnerable.

34

Wall describes the events as a masculine reauthorization of female domestic authority: “When
Diccon slaps Hodge’s rear end and brings to light the lost needle, the female authority on which
the domestic economy depends is righted, and the surrogate masters – both Diccon and the
academics – playfully surrender their carnivalesque power back to the fantasized household”
(69). Paster maintains that since the needle was in Hodge’s breeches the entire time, “the needle
was never really lost, then the phallus and the sex-gender system it maintains – we are relieved to
know retrospectively – were never really in danger!” (119). Although both these analyses
provide valuable insights into the gender dynamics of the play, they each ignore the gossip
network. The phallic signifier is restored, but its return overshadows the other restoration of the
play – the reconciliation of the gossips.
69

The move to the alehouse, still absent of customers and still located on the other end of
town from the popular alehouse, suggests that this will all happen again. That Chat’s alehouse is
chosen as the site of a feast indicates that the restorative power of the feast is being denied to the
gossips. Feasts are highly ritualized events intended to formally resolve tensions, and early
modern alehouses frequently served a festive function similar to that of the pre-Reformation
church, as they were frequently the sites of wakes, bridal celebrations, and holiday gatherings.
But the alehouse, though similar to a gossip community in providing what Patricia Fumerton
describes as “an alternative community” (494), achieves this community by creating a fantasy.
Many alehouses, including that of Dame Chat, were run out of private homes. Fumerton argues
that the collapse between the distinctions of the private domestic space and the public world of
business creates “a kind of grunge Disneyland simulation of community and home … Unlike a
‘real’ house, the fantasyland ale-‘house’ made few demands on its frequenters; its community
and home experience require no obligations other than financial ones. One could thus happily
taste there of community and family without surfeit” (497). In the case of Chat’s alehouse,
however, the fantasy of community never existed. Her alehouse is devoid of patrons, and through
the course of the play, its only useful purpose is as an arena for fighting, both between Dame
Chat and Gammer Gurton, but also between Chat and Rat. This signals the extreme unsuitability
of her alehouse as a recuperative site. To have the feast there not only undermines the traditional
purpose of the feast, but also throws into question the efficacy of the community that is
represented as existing alongside it: the gossip community, a community that can barely be
called such, having only two members represented, and the younger of those, Chat,
demonstrating none of the traditional respect for the elder Gammer Gurton.

70

The play’s irresolute resolution is a symptom of the tension in the gossip community, and
serves as a bridge between the late medieval and early modern representations of gossip
communities. The play explores the tension between the “good” gossip and the “good gossip,”
and its uneasy resolution of a feast at Chat’s alehouse is the early modern equivalent of a “flood”
solution: rather than dealing with the tensions in gossip community, the play’s characters focus
on the restoration of the needle. But the needle, like the gossip community in the play, might not
exist except in name: it is entirely possible to stage the play with an imaginary needle. It is the
symbolic function of the needle that matters, and while the importance of its physical presence is
continuously emphasized by Gammer Gurton, it is actually the idea of the needle that has such
an impact on the play’s characters. The needle has the capacity to suture the social relationships
that otherwise fray, granting power and function to an otherwise disconnected gossip who has no
community in which to function. Just as the needle exists in a space both imaginary and real, so
too do gossip communities, and like the needle, their function is material and symbolic.

71

CHAPTER 2
The Creation of Gossip Networks and the Appropriation of the Gossip Function
This chapter examines representations of gossips in the literatures of the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries by exploring the gossip community’s traditional social roles – its
purposes in assisting and celebrating birth and in privately effecting justice for transgressions
that disrupt domestic function – and its concomitant spaces, the birth room, alehouse, and tavern.
Bernard Capp observes that “female social interaction within the home took many forms and had
a multiple significance. Its most important and symbolic manifestation was the gathering of
neighbors around the bedside of a woman in childbirth” (50). This chapter traces the link
between the festive function of gossip activities and the anxiety surrounding the perceived
breakdown of the boundaries between the domestic and the public. The festive function of gossip
(that is, the celebratory activities that accompanied a pregnant mother’s successful labor and
delivery) was perceived to be the avenue women used to degrade the social purpose of gossiping.
Gossips, given the duty to aid a mother in bringing a child into the world (a necessarily social
activity), use the occasion as an opportunity to indulge in all forms of idleness and gluttony. Of
course, the men who frequently perpetuated this stereotype were not allowed access to the birth
chamber during delivery, and so rarely witnessed the gossips at work. Thus gossips are often
portrayed as drunken women incontinent in bladder and speech. But the representations are not
absolute – there are depictions of gossips performing their social roles during festive moments,
and through these representations, we can discover that gossips elided boundaries between
festivity and everyday lived existence to achieve their ends. We also see that gossip communities
are networked in more and various ways than being neighbors, friends, and drinking
companions. Though this chapter examines the invocation of gossips in their festive role – how

72

they both uphold the festive function necessary to society, and how they simultaneously threaten
society through the perceived misappropriation of that festive function – it also demonstrates
how a female community organizes and deploys itself.
The chapter addresses the issues surrounding the gossips’ rights to ritual, and the social
instability those rights potentially entail, through an examination of how gossips blur the line
between what society wants and what it needs – between the socially sanctioned and the socially
necessary. I begin with Thomas Harman’s tale of the Walking Mort. The story showcases the
expansion of the gossip community beyond its supposed immediate domestic bounds, illustrating
the strength, scope, and effects of the gossip network. This depiction is countered by the
representation of a failing gossip community in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, a community
exploited and misused to affirm disruptions to patriarchal order perpetrated by men. This
exploitation simultaneously recognizes the scope, power, and implications of the gossip
network’s influence and function, a concern also vital to the final text explored in the chapter,
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which depicts the denaturing and subsequent
displacement of the gossip community, a move that ultimately raises questions about the viability
of the reproductive order.
The Walking Mort and the Gossip Network
When examining literary representations of gossip communities in early modern
England, the story of the Walking Mort featured in Thomas Harman’s 1566 pamphlet, A Caveat
for Common Cursitors is a common point of departure. Though it is an “often-cited instance of
collective action” (Brown 121), as one scholar asserts, the story is typically treated as little more

73

1

than anecdotal. However, the story is key in establishing a historical perception of gossip
communities in the period because not only because its portrayal of a gossip community is one of
the earliest in English prose, but also because it does not include any of the representative
behaviors of “good gossips” in the period, such as drunken belligerence or disruptive speech. An
examination of the story of the Walking Mort shows women throughout the country actively
engaged in their gossip communities and networked together in ways imperceptible to men.
Though previously unacknowledged by scholars, the notion of a gossip community networked
across several geographic locales is a crucial component to the success of the gossip community
in Harman’s tale. Harman tropes the figure of the Walking Mort as a woman untethered from
the domestic (as a locatable and local space organized by hierarchical kinship ties), but who in
spite of her wanderings still maintains the form and function of the domestic. Though “these
2

walking Morts be not married” (138), the Mort’s story illustrates several possibilities heretofore
unexplored in representations of previous configurations of gossip communities: 1) that married
status was not necessarily a precondition of membership in a gossip community; 2) that a gossip
community could at any time have active and inactive members; and 3) that a gossip community
could in fact be part of a larger network of gossip communities, one that spread throughout
England. The mort does not merely engage with the domestic on a superficial level; she actually
constitutes the network through her movement, providing opportunities for settled women to
1

In “New Historicism, Historical Context, and the Literature of Roguery: The Case of Thomas
Harman Reopened,” A.L. Beier calls the story an “anecdote” (103), as does Linda Woodbridge
in Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Culture (47).
2
All references from Harman’s story are taken from Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars,
ed. Arthur Kinney. The walking mort is one of two categories of mort identified by Harman, the
other being the “autem-mort,” a married woman who leaves her domestic space to wander.
Harman introduces the walking mort as “these for their unhappy years doth go as an AutemMort, and will say their husbands died either at Newhaven, Ireland, or in some service of the
Prince” (138-9).
74

connect with someone from outside their local circle, possibly exchanging news and connections
among them. Harman’s discomfort with the Walking Mort is thus twofold. Not only do the
Morts insist that their itinerant lifestyle is a kind of domesticity – they claim to be married and
they have children for whose welfare they labor (Harman tells us they “make laces upon staves
and purses that they carry in their hands, and white valances for beds” [139]) – but they also
demonstrate that legitimate social bonds transcend the male purview and the male-controlled
domestic space.
The Walking Morts’ attempts to maintain domesticity are in stark contrast to the
environment in which they live. Harman describes how they are subject to frequent predation by
“upright men,” who steal their “money or apparel.” In order to prevent this, Harman informs us,
the Walking Morts “leave their money now with one and then with another trusty householder,
either with the goodman or goodwife, sometimes in one shire, and then in another, as they
travel” (139). They thus travel on a circuit. Harman asserts that, “four or five shillings, yea, ten
shillings left in a place and the same will they come for again within one quarter of a year, or
sometimes not in half a year” (139). Walking Morts make their rounds every three to six months,
establishing and maintaining relationships throughout the country, showing that Harman’s
discomfort arises not only from their unbridled sexuality, but also because they represent
unbridled domesticity that, while operating largely outside of male surveillance, replicates the
domestic and performs a vital social function. The cyclical quality of their perambulations
replicates the cyclicality of a domestic space confined to the home: retrieving one’s money or
goods from the home of a “trusty householder” is a domestic chore, albeit written large. Instead
of retrieving money from one’s own household coffers in order to perform acts or purchase
goods that will ensure the preservation of the domestic space (such as going to the market),

75

Walking Morts create a domestic network wherein they store various amounts of money in
several different domiciles, and then periodically visit the homes as needed. The idea of domestic
space as confined to the house, the street, and the neighborhood is exploded by the story of the
Walking Mort – the domestic is potentially any home within walking distance, and a single
house can operate as multiple domestic sites (the incomes of two or more households can be
stored in one house).
Cyclicality is central to the Walking Mort’s story. In the summer of 1565, she relates that
she was pregnant the previous summer and, craving oysters and mussels (she describes herself as
having “lusted marvelously” after them), she makes her way to the Kentish seacoast. While
harvesting the mollusks, she falls into a hole up to the waist, a predicament that highlights the
symbolic nature of her condition as a woman entrapped by her own desires. A pregnant woman’s
“longings” for certain foods had to be indulged for the safety of the fetus and mother, and Gail
Paster argues that “a desired pregnancy could open up a space within the confines of patriarchal
3

marriage for the expansion or even momentary hegemony of female desire” (181-2). In the case
of the Walking Mort, however, her body is not subject to the strictures of traditional marriage,
and it is unclear if her pregnancy is desired. She is in this moment the stereotype that haunts
patriarchy: a woman free to follow her lusts. Her resultant confinement to her waist occludes
everything below the waist – she is trapped by those objects (sex organs, pregnancy) that cause
her lustful cravings. She is saved by a man who offers to free her in exchange for sex. The offer
causes a conundrum because not only is she well acquainted with the man, but he also “had a
very honest woman to his wife and was of some wealth.” She admits that those considerations
were tempered by her immediate situation, claiming that, “if I were not helped out, I should have
3

This is a common theme of the period, seen in such various plays as Bartholomew Fair and
The Duchess of Malfi.
76

perished,” which constructs the situation as a choice between compromising the female bond or
death.
The Walking Mort’s collapse of the man’s honest wife and the wealth they possess
echoes Harman’s earlier description of the mort’s type, who leaves money with trusty
householders in an attempt to foil the upright men. Harman asserts that the economic system
used by the Walking Mort is flawed because the mort does not maintain an enclosed domesticity:
“And all this is to little purpose, for all their peevish policy,” Harman informs us, “for when they
buy them linen or garments, it is taken away from them and worse given them, or none at all”
(139). Harman blames the Mort for the thefts to which she is subject, but the way the thefts are
described read more like wanton destruction of a legitimate domestic economy than the result of
ineptitude on the part of the Walking Mort. Harman rails against the futility of her actions, not
her impulse to maintain herself. The Mort’s economic resources can be protected within the
confines of the homes in which she keeps her money, but the woman and her goods cannot,
because her itinerant lifestyle leaves her vulnerable.
However much the Walking Mort’s goods are stolen, though, the networks she crafts
remain in place, as the story illustrates. The Walking Mort with whom Harman purportedly
interacts, unlike her stereotypical counterpart outlined at the beginning of the story, is not
victimized. Instead, she agrees to his terms for her release, but stalls the husband by telling him
that she must clean herself up, and they agree to meet at his barn at nine o’clock that evening.
Because of his wife’s past kindnesses to her, she seeks out the wife and discloses the story. Just
what the nature of the kindness shown by the wife goes unmentioned, but the wife does admit to
a previous relationship with the walking mort: she recognizes the mort and remembers that she
last came to the house two years earlier (141). This is a considerably longer amount of time than

77

the three-to-six-month cycle described by Harman, which suggests several possibilities: perhaps
the gossip network is more far-flung than Harman acknowledges within the specific mort’s story,
or maybe the mort spends a significant period of time with various householders. Ultimately,
these are mere suppositions, but they suggest a bond between women in which proximity is
much less of a factor than has previously been considered; a bond simultaneously more
permanent and more imperceptible than has been credited.

4

The domestic situation created by the walking mort reflects the larger social and
5

economic issues of the time. This model of intermittent domesticity could trace its origins to the
6

increased migration from rural to urban situations – with the flow of people into the City, the
separation of family members was becoming more the norm. Thus the traditional idea of
localized family of the rural regions must have been gradually transforming into the idea of a
diasporic family, and this new model was represented, at least in part, through the figure of the
unmarried itinerant woman – like the walking mort. As Amy Froide asserts, “people who did not

4

In the only book-length treatment of gossips, When Gossips Meet, Bernard Capp examines the
relationships between gossips mostly at the level of the neighborhood, though his study does
dilate to encompass various parishes, though not in tandem.
5
For social histories of the late sixteenth century, see Keith Wrightson, English Society, 15801680, Alan Macfarlane, Reconstructing Historical Communities, Ian Archer, The Pursuit of
Stability, Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century
London, and Susan Amussen, An Ordered Society. For studies of early modern vagrancy, see
Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature and Patricia
Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England.
6
In English Society, 1580-1680, Keith Wrightson writes that in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries the population of England doubled. Although cautioning that “national population
estimates are difficult to obtain, based as they are upon incomplete taxation, military and
ecclesiastical surveys,” he still posits that “it seems likely that a population of approximately 2.5
million in the 1520s had risen to one of perhaps 5 million by 1680” (122). The numbers for
London’s population explosion are even more startling. Jean Howard relates that “in 1600 the
population of London included approximately 200,000 people, up from 55,000 just fifty years
before” (1).
78

live in a nuclear household – singlewomen and men, orphans, widows and widowers, and
abandoned or separated spouses – by necessity relied upon the material and emotional support of
siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces.” Though her work does not address
non-kinship relationships such as gossip communities, instead of foreclosing the possibility, it in
fact encourages it: “Once we cease to view married adults as the norm and realize that a great
proportion of people in early modern England were unmarried we find that spouses and children
did not always form the most important connections in people’s lives” (7). Unmarried, unmoored
women like the walking mort were the subject of much negative scrutiny not only because
frequently they were poor, but, as Froide writes, they were also “young, female, and of an
anomalous marital status in a society that privileged the marital state. Singlewomen might well
have been the early modern patriarch’s worst nightmare – encompassing multiple characteristics
of disorder all at once” (22). Such anxieties emerge in connection with the walking mort, who,
despite her itinerant, unmarried status, is not without resources, as quickly becomes apparent.
Having been informed of her husband’s duplicity, the wife immediately goes to her
gossips and relates the whole of the problem, which stretches beyond the immediate situation.
She tells the women “what a naughty, lewd, lecherous husband she had, and how that she could
not have his company for harlots, and that she was in fear to take some filthy disease of him ….”
(140). She frames her appeal to her gossips in a number of ways: she calls on their “love” of her
(which carries with it the implicit threat that she will not act for her gossips in the future if they
do not act for her now), and reminds them that both her health and her husband’s spiritual
wellbeing are at stake: “as you love me and as you would have help at my hand another time,
devise some remedy to make my husband a good man, that I may live in some surety without
disease, and that he may save his soul that God so dearly bought” (140). After a brief conference,

79

they agree to help her, not only because of her “honest behavior” despite “the insatiable carnality
of [her] faithless husband” (140), but also because they learn, in a somewhat shocking
disclosure, that her husband had attempted to rape one of the other gossips, who reveals that if it
had not been for a “marvelous chance,” she would have been one of his victims (141).
The plan is swiftly drawn up after this disclosure. The five gossips instruct the wife to tell
the walking mort to meet the husband, and when his hose are down around his ankles, to shout
the watchword, “fie, for shame, fie,” whereupon the five gossips, “muffled for knowing,” will
appear and beat the husband with birch rods. This is exactly what happens. The gossips bind the
husband and tie a handkerchief over his eyes so that he will not be able to identify them later.
The gossips “laid on him until they were windless” (142), including the walking mort, who
Harman describes as crying out, “’Be good … unto my master, for the passion of god!’ and laid
on as fast as the rest, and still ceased not to cry upon them to be merciful unto him, and yet laid
on apace” (142). After the beating is administered and subsequent threats against further action
issued, the gossips make sure to get the walking mort safely out of town, and the husband seeks
no retribution. In fact, the mort relates that, “I hear a very good report of him now, that he loveth
his wife and useth himself very honestly” (142). When, at the close of her tale, she asks Harman
to agree that it was a good act, Harman allows that “it was prettily handled” (142), but provides
no further comment. Why is he not more overtly condemnatory of the walking mort or the
gossips? Why does he express no censure toward the transgressive man?
The abrupt end of Harman’s tale seems at odds with William Carroll’s assertion that the
story shows what he perceives as Harman’s typical “voyeuristic moralism” (91). Jodi Mikalachki
posits that Harman is silenced because the “prurient assumptions about his examinant’s sexuality
receive an implied reprimand in the recounted fate” of the man who attempted to take advantage

80

of the walking mort (131); nevertheless, she argues, Harman still offers a “concluding spectacle
of a naked man duped and beaten by women” which she contends “offers its own titillation”
(131-2). But A.L. Beier disagrees with the notion that the tale is about female sexuality, claiming
that it is instead “a negative example of male sexuality” (102), and that the terms used by
Harman to describe the husband – he is a “naughty, lewd and lecherous husband” who commits
acts of “insatiable carnality” – are “the same moralistic terms he used for female vagrants” (103).
Beier asserts that “the evidence does not square with an interpretation that Harman treated
vagrant women purely as sexual objects. Even when he discussed their sexuality, it was not
always in terms of sex per se or titillation. Rather his discourse was mainly moralistic and wholly
consistent with prevailing views about marriage and fidelity” (103). The problem with this is that
Harman does treat the vagrant woman as a sexual object – his interruptions to clarify her sexual
status indicate he considers her to be a sexual object, and the mort allows herself to be used by
the gossips as a sexual object to titillate the husband. Although Beier identifies a double register
in Harman’s tale – that of normative marital fidelity, and in the context of the appeal of an
apparently ‘loose’ woman, transgressive male behavior that far exceeds any transgression by the
women – he neglects to acknowledge the social disruption signaled at the conclusion of the story
when the mort asks Harman, “And was not this a good act?” (142). Any one of several incidents
would serve as an equally plausible candidate for the act referred to by the mort. One might ask
where the social upheaval occurs in this tale, and the answer is, everywhere. Yet it is not, as
Beier seems to recognize, that women’s sexual transgressiveness undermines domesticity, but
rather that disrupted domesticity (in its simple form) instigates sexual transgressiveness, even
when female sexuality itself is not the obvious cause. The gossips exploit the sexual potential of
the desirous and mobile female body to make a point, but that doesn’t seem to be the point of the

81

story. If it were, as Carroll and Mikalachiki contend, Harman, at all times vociferous in his
condemnation of sexual deviance, would hardly have been silenced at the conclusion of the
mort’s tale.
Beier seems to posit that Harman’s silence is due to the gossips’ fulfillment of Harman’s
moralistic agenda – in other words, there’s nothing left to say after the mort concludes her story
because the husband has been appropriately punished and the social status quo is restored. Beier
claims that gossip communities, “as represented in Harman’s tract … gave women a focus for
loyalty and collective actions” (104) while simultaneously avoiding threatening patriarchal
structures. While this is true, he then goes on to describe typical early modern gossips as women
who “spread rumors and hurled insults, especially of a sexual nature, engaged in the shunning of
alleged offenders, and even attacked their homes.” He generally parallels this stereotype to
Harman’s gossips, noting that, “As in Harman’s tale, they defended wives wronged by
husbands” (104). However, he distinguishes those in Harman from the usual action of gossips,
who, he argues, rectify wrongs “usually by publicly denouncing and sometimes inflicting
beatings on the women with whom the men were consorting” (104). For Beier, the important
distinction to be made is that, “By picking on the offending female parties, of course, the gossips
did not directly threaten patriarchal authority, and in this respect Harman’s story of a man being
beaten may stretch the bounds of credibility” (104). He allows that there are enough examples of
gossips targeting men from fictional and non-fictional accounts in the period, so the basis of this
incredibility is difficult to decipher, but what is most curious about the above definition is that it
is blatantly irrelevant to the gossip community within Harman’s text. It accurately describes the
gossips of Gammer Gurton’s Needle, but is ultimately an uncritical reproduction of negative
stereotypes that doesn’t satisfactorily reflect what is happening in Harman’s text.

82

One possible answer for Harman’s silence lies in the idea that his story is a species of
7

joke. First proposed by Linda Woodbridge, the idea has gained momentum. Pamela Allen
Brown claims Harman “ends the disturbing story as if it were an entertaining tale of tit-for-tat”
(121), and Patricia Fumerton conjectures that “Harman gets caught up in the fun of the events,
despite his moral condemnation of the Mort, and fails to think deeply about her close ties to the
other housewives in his tale – a connection to an economy of unsettledness that his tract works
so hard throughout to suppress. Women on the move in Harman are funny, immoral, and
enticing; they are not particularly threatening” (39). Such arguments take Harman’s relationship
to his account at face value, assuming that he is capturing both unmediated tales and his own
unmediated response to those tales. While Beier recognizes that mediation, he misreads the
events and implications of the tale, particularly concerning how the tale defines gossips.
One aspect of his tale that is pertinent to the question of his “silence,” and which has so
far gone unexplored, is that the story of the walking mort occurs within a larger section of the
pamphlet that examines the women of rogues. The anecdote occurs within a discourse about
women and rogues, and its placement suggests that one of Harman’s objectives is to disrupt this
extended economy by revealing the women’s attachments to the various species of dishonest
men. These relationships constitute a domestic space untethered from the spaces of home or
community. In Harman’s presentation, the rogue world remains a male-dominated social order,
an alternate-domestic realm in which ‘upright men’ (rogues and vagabonds) abuse and take
advantage of itinerant women, victimizing them by taking their money and clothing, but dealing
with them like wives, as he describes in the section entitled “Their usage in the night.” He relates
that morts and doxies (young women and girls despoiled by the upright men) are responsible for
7

In Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Culture, she describes Harman’s text as
“a subspecies of the Tudor jest book” (39).
83

creating makeshift beds every evening they are able to do so because “the men never trouble
themselves with the thing, but take the same to be the duty of the wife” (144). He then describes
how once the women are settled, “If the upright man comes in where they lie, he hath his choice,
and creepeth in close by his Doxy; the Rogue hath his leavings” (145). If the women are
fortunate enough to secure lodgings in an edifice with a door that can be barred, they are spared
this nighttime ritual. In other words, as Harman presents it, the world of rogues replicates the
gender disparities of mainstream society, but the walking mort tale conflicts with this normative
gender order in some ways, while reinforcing it in others.
This tale aligns with the normative gender order in situating women as subject to men’s
authority and victimized by their actions, but it provides them recourse in the form of gossipcircle response and correction. This response utilizes actions and objects coded as “domestic,” or
within the accepted province of women, to correct male behavior and render the legitimate
domestic space stable and supportive for the wife. While it is impossible to definitively judge
whether it is Harman’s enjoyment of the tale that distracts him from recognizing the significance
of the mort’s connection to a group of women, it seems plausible to attribute his silence at the
end of the story to the tension between his larger aims of depicting the alternate-domestic space
of rogue culture, and the tale’s depiction of the far-flung nature of female social networks and
their efficacy in correcting the flaws of the domestic introduced by rampant male libido. His
silence would then indicate that the “economy of unsettledness” is in fact an inextricable (and to
8

men, also unrecognizable) part of the domestic economy.

8

It must also be noted that Harman is a storyteller himself, and that his persona of a countrymagistrate-turned-reporter could very well be fictional. His direct personal examples might be
actual interviews, but more likely they are the product of gossip, or invented from hearsay.
84

The purity of the wife’s motivations reinforces this interpretation. Instead of a retributive
outburst, the wife asks her gossips to “devise some remedy to make my husband a good man,
that I may live in some surety without disease,” framing her request as a medical intervention,
thus ensuring its eligibility for female action. Housewives were expected to provide basic
medical care for both her household and neighborhood, and that treatment was not merely
confined to creating and administering “simple remedies” (herbs or recipes concocted
specifically to treat a medical condition), but also could include setting bones, treating burns, and
9

occasionally, surgical intervention. Though Wendy Wall’s Staging Domesticity deals primarily
with theatrical representations that display the discourses of domesticity being intertwined with
emergent English nationalism, we can see a kernel of Wall’s theories

10

at work in Harman’s

tract, when the wife uses the rhetoric of sickness and healing to invoke her gossips’ aid, which
they justify through the emphasis on the wife’s goodness – because she has been patient,
tolerant, and morally pure, she should be helped.
The gossips locate the punishment of the husband in the realm of medicine and
domesticity, but Harman tropes it as a gossips’ feast: he describes the gossips as preparing the
husband a “banquet” (141). Through the invocation of the gossips’ banquet, a ritualized feast
initially enacted as a celebration of a successful birth, Harman links the corrective of male
transgression to the negative stereotype of the gossip community already well established by the

9

A particularly memorable occasion of a housewife performing surgery is recorded in Lady
Margaret Hoby’s diary, when in the midst of the record of prayers, conversations with her parish
vicar, playing midwife to the parish women and administering herbal remedies to her husband’s
tenants, she relates how one of the tenant families brought her their infant child, born without an
anus. She performed surgery to create one, but the child died. (From Diary of Lady Margaret
Hoby, ed. Meads, 184).
10
See especially “Tending to bodies and boys: queer physic in Knight of the Burning Pestle,”
pp. 161-88.
85

middle of the sixteenth century – the gossips’ feast as a stereotypical site of disorder, in which
gossips congregated for drinking and merriment at any time and for any occasion. What began as
a joyful ritual was eventually used as a satirical weapon against the perceived threat of the
expansion of domestic space that the gossip community represented. Though Harman’s gossips
are careful to act and deliberative in their actions, he invokes the general depiction of gossips as
women with huge appetites for food and drink who illicitly appropriated public spaces and
turned them into sites of idleness and potential rebellion against patriarchal strictures. His
oblique references to such stereotypes, and his inclusion of the walking mort as the catalyst of
the events, implicitly situates this circle of women as disruptive of lawful and appropriate norms,
even in the context of a necessary correction of social and domestic transgression by a husband.
The frequent association of alcohol, medicine, and festivity with gossip communities suggests
that gossips did not necessarily function in a carnivalesque capacity, as is frequently assumed.
The carnivalesque presupposes a discrete metaphorical space that exists in opposition to the
everyday,

11

but the ubiquity of gossip communities and their numerous functions suggests that

the social binary of a “woman on top” model doesn’t allow for the social reality of gossips as
depicted in literature.
Gossip carols serve as one widely available source that reveals the gossip community not
only creating a space that collapses the domestic and the festive in the everyday, but also, as in
Harman’s tale, negating the perceived boundaries between localized domesticity and the larger
11

Bakhtin describes the carnivalesque as a cyclical “second life” (11) that exists to critique
hierarchical rank and privileges through the celebration of the grotesque body, which is “the life
of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation,
conception, pregnancy, and birth” (21). The carnivalesque grotesque functions “to consecrate
inventive freedome, to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their
rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and
established truthes, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted” (34).
86

outside world; between town and country. Alcohol, the production and application of which had
been the province of women, became increasingly produced by and associated with men, and the
continued association of gossips with wine and with ale’s medicinal/festive properties, though
troped as a source of satire, is actually a source of political defiance, which also gets expressed in
the women’s attitudes to abusive husbands.
12

For example, a sixteenth century carol preserved in manuscript

describes a tavern scene

where the gossips are eating and drinking. Much as the gossips’ carol in the Chester Noah play,
the gossips drink because it “chereth the hart and comforteth the blod” (l. 66). The gossip Anne
calls for some muscatel because “Swet wynes kepe my body in hele” (l. 72). While this is an
assertion that the occasional drinking of wine promotes bodily health, “hele” is also a
homophone that recalls the popular conception in the late medieval period of gossips chattering
and drinking in hell, as I discuss in Chapter One. In the middle of the carol, one of the gossips
tries to excuse herself to go home and make sure her husband isn’t there, because, as she says,
“A strype or ii God myght send me / Yf my husbond myght here see me” (ll. 46-7). This is met
with contempt by the gossip Alis, who retorts, “'She that is aferde, lett her flee … I dred no man”
(ll. 48-50). After the killjoy is banished, merriment commences until someone notices the gossip
at the end of the table. When they bid her to be merry, she asks for advice on what to do with her
abusive husband: “Wold God I had don after your covnsell, / For my husband is so fell / He
betith me lyke the devill of hell, / And the more I crye, / The less mercy, / Good gossippis myn12

The carol is transcribed in The Early English Carols, edited by R.L. Greene. All quotations
th

from the text are from this edition. The collection also contains a few other carols from the 15
th

and 16 centuries, pp. 249-253. They generally feature gossips gathering in a tavern and issuing
th

various defiant statements against their husbands, though in one 15 century carol, after their
conviviality, the gossips each go home and explain the loss of the six pence spent in the tavern
by telling “her husband anone / Shee had been at the chyrche” (252).
87

a” (ll. 82-7). A chorus of derision against the husband ensues: Alis cries out “God geve him short
lyfe” (l. 92) and Margaret declares, “I know no man that is alive / That gevith me ii strokes but
he haue v!” (ll. 95-6). But before any useful advice can be delivered, everyone is distracted by
the realization that a gossip just left without paying her full portion of the bill. Elynore dismisses
her from the group: “'what dide she pay? / Not but a peny? Loo, therfor I say / She shall no more
/ Be of owr lore …” (ll. 101-4). They try to determine who brought the woman, but to no avail.
The event seemingly sours the convivial atmosphere, because the gossips swiftly reckon the bill
and depart, declaring within two stanzas, “Whatsoeuer any man thynk, / We com for nowght but
for good drynk” (ll. 124-5), a statement that on the surface reads like an abjuration of political or
social motive. In fact, it serves as a public assertion of unbounded domesticity – “good drynk”
promotes emotional balance and physical well-being, and the conviviality of sharing a drink with
gossips can also provide solace or solutions to domestic problems. The non-communal action of
the gossip who didn’t pay her share undermines these effects in this instance, but leaves their
function visible as a generalization.
The gossip community depicted in Harman’s pamphlet calls on this tradition, but
Harman’s gossips have been largely tamed – they no longer consume alcohol in public taverns,
nor do they fantasize aloud about beating their husbands. Though the propensities for
drunkenness and fantasizing are purged from Harman’s gossips, the invocation of the medical
and the festive remains, as does the community’s composition of women from disparate
domestic situations. Harman introduces to public discourse the representation of a gossip
community totally unbounded by locale that still utilizes much of traditional gossip discourse,
one that is committed to the public interest rather than pleasure-seeking behaviors and periodic
reflexes against domestic abuse.

88

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
Fifty years later, Thomas Middleton introduces an additional complication to Harman’s
vexed portrayal of the unbounded gossip community by staging a gossip community that
seemingly rejects the status quo instead of enforcing it by embracing the radical social and
religious threat of Puritanism. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) stages an infant baptism and
christening feast during the season of Lent. The abstemious atmosphere creates a subversive
response throughout the city, with butchers selling illegal meat, and, more importantly, with a
gossip community celebrating a birth. While serving a (semi) legitimate social function, holding
a gossips’ feast during Lent raises questions about tensions between gossips’ necessary and
accepted social functions and the strictures of patriarchal and monarchical order.
The last and frequently considered the best of Middleton’s city comedies, A Chaste Maid
in Cheapside displays many of Harman’s concerns (anxiety surrounding mobile [upwardly and
downwardly] women and the effect of mobility on female chastity, centered around the notion of
“honesty”) in its four plots. In the first plot, Moll Yellowhammer, the eponymous “chaste
13

maid”

of the play, is desperately in love with Touchwood Junior, a suitor of whom her parents

strongly disapprove. Their suitor of choice for Moll is Sir Walter Whorehound, whose supposed
Welsh “niece” is the Yellowhammers’ candidate to marry their son Tim, a student at Cambridge.

13

In “Consuming Mothers/Consuming Merchants: The Carnivalesque Economy of Jacobean
City Comedy,” Shannon Miller points out that it is the character of Mistress Touchstone who
most embodies chastity within the play, but that even she “re-inforces the characteristics of the
grotesque womb” (83) of the carnivalesque woman through her excessive fertility. Miller claims
that the play constructs chastity in part through a woman’s value. She points out that Mistress
Touchstone is the only woman whose “value does not vary. Women are associated with gold
throughout the play, but they are shown to be debasable commodities, objects that cannot hold
their value” (84).
89

Their wooing and marriage

14

comprises the second plot. In the third plot, we learn of another of

Whorehound’s mistresses, the married and very pregnant Mistress Allwit, who has had a decadelong relationship with Whorehound with her husband’s complicity. She gives birth during the
course of the play, and it is the christening of her daughter that provides the play’s infamous
scene in 3.2. The fourth plot is also about excessive fertility and cuckoldry. Touchwood Senior
(Touchwood Junior’s elder brother) and his wife agree to temporarily separate because of their
excessive fertility (Touchwood Senior speaks of “every year a child, and some years two”
15

[2.1.15]).

He decides to put his fertility to good use when he meets Sir Oliver and Lady Kix,

relatives of Sir Walter Whorehound, who have been married seven years and have been unable to
conceive a child. While Sir Oliver is paying Touchstone Senior to cure his infertility (cuckolding
him), Touchwood Junior and Moll attempt to elope, are foiled, and pretend to die. The Allwits
hear that Lady Kix is pregnant, and so discard Whorehound before he can be disinherited. The
play concludes with Sir Oliver’s triumphant confirmation that his wife is pregnant, and in his
delight, he offers to set up Touchwood Senior and his family for life. Touchwood Junior and
Moll resurrect themselves in the middle of their funeral in order to be married, but are
interrupted by the Yellowhammers, who are not as angry with Moll as they might normally have
been, since it was revealed that Tim’s wife isn’t Whorehound’s niece but actually his whore. Tim
attempts to use his Cambridge training to prove that a whore is an honest woman. Stymied by the
attempt, his wife has to step in, saying, “Sir, if your logic cannot prove me honest, / There’s a

14

Karen Newman observes that “the play actually ends with Tim’s marriage, not Touchwood
Junior and Moll’s” (110), which she sees as a symptom of the play’s obsession with substitution
and equivalence.
15
All references to the play come from the Revels edition, ed. R.B. Parker.
90

thing call’d marriage, and that makes me honest” (5.4.105-6). Everyone accepts this bit of chop
logic, and the play ends with the conventional comic conclusion of a feast at Goldsmiths’ Hall.
The scholarship of the play, particularly of the christening feast in 3.2, is a tangle of
contentious claims. Though declared by Ruby Chatterji to be “the best scenes [sic] of the play”
(111) and “deservedly famous” (179) by Joanne Altieri, it has also been more famously derided
by L.C. Knights, who claims that, in general, Middleton “betrays something like a positive
animus against the citizens” of London, citing as proof the christening feast from Chaste Maid,
16

which he claims is “presented with an imperfectly controlled disgust” (269).

M.C. Bradbrook

declares the scene is “the rankest in all Elizabethan drama, with the Puritan gossips and
complacent mother exchanging compliments and filching sweetmeats” (162), but paradoxically
goes on to assert the scene’s realism: “the underlying morality structure is self-evident; the
London scene is here more detailed, and the effect is far closer to an image of the times …”
(162). Alan Brissenden, an editor of the play, is more explicit than Bradbrook in his assertion
that the play’s insistence on representing historically verifiable London locales indicates a
correspondent verisimilitude regarding representation of the play’s characters: “The reality of the
setting gives greater credibility to the characters and their actions” (xxvi). Brian Gibbons
describes the dialogue of the christening feast as “vulgar and meandering” (165), but suggests
that this ultimately has a satiric, revelatory effect: “… to strip every character and reveal their
rapaciously selfish desires, masked as they are by cant about religion, family affection, the joys
of birth” (167). While he does not explicitly state that the christening feast is realistic, the violent
(and sexualized) metaphor of stripping the women to reveal the truth about their natures can be

16

For a nuanced discussion of Middleton’s attitudes towards the City, see Gail Paster’s The Idea
of the City in the Age of Shakespeare, where she posits that Middleton’s city comedies and civic
pageants respectively exemplify vituperatio (blame) and laus (praise), each equally hyperbolic.
91

understood as an extension of the “realism” argument. By uncritically reproducing the play’s
idea that the invocation of recognizable city locales has corollary moral slippages, Gibson
reproduces the play’s gender politics.
Arthur Marotti and Theodore Leinwand make similar sexualized assumptions about the
gossips. Marotti paints the scene as a display of class pretentions that decays into the
animalization of the gossips. What “begins as a display of bourgeois pseudo-politeness” ends, he
argues, as “an image of comic animality” (71). The women are not just stripped of their false
bourgeois veneer, but also of their equally false humanity, revealing their animal natures.
Theodore Leinwand makes a neo-Bradbrookian argument and extrapolates from the christening
scene that the gossips are alcoholics, hypocrites, and lechers (168). The critics are noticing the
way the play mediates the representation of the gossips through its presentation of class politics,
but they ultimately end up reproducing the play’s politics in their own analyses. Indeed, the
17

critical derision and voyeuristic tone is very much in line with early modern gossip pamphlets.

The scholarly insistence on the scene’s realism was reassessed by feminist scholars Gail Paster
and Linda Woodbridge, and today the scene is typically acknowledged as a treatment of the
stereotypical “gossips’ meeting” and recognized as an example of leaky women – females whose
moral incontinence is literalized with physical symptoms.

18

Though the christening scene’s realism has been largely debunked, there is still a critical
problem with the play, specifically, with the placement of the scene. Given that the christening
17

See Samuel Rowland’s “A Whole Crew of Gossips, All Met to be Merry” (1609), especially
the second half, where the husbands of the gossips “give their Wives the lye.” An edition of the
pamphlet is in “Custome is an Idiot”: Jacobean Pamphlet Literature on Women.
18
In her edition of the play (located in the Oxford Middleton), Woodbridge identifies the scene
as a “fine example of the ‘gossips’ meeting’ genre” (910) explicated in her Women and the
English Renaissance. Curiously, neither the christening feast nor the play is mentioned in that
particular volume.
92

scene occurs in the structural center of the plot, and given that the play is, as its editor R.B.
Parker notes, “remarkable for the number of its female roles” (xxix) – there are eighteen women
in the play, most of whom are in the scene in 3.2 – then what is the significance of enmeshing
nearly every female character in a stereotypical scene at what is arguably the Aristotelian climax
of the action? After all, it does hardly anything to advance the plot. Richard Levin goes so far as
to argue that the scene is “only tenuously connected to the plot” (14). An interesting clue lies in
Levin’s article, in a seemingly inadvertent contradiction. Levin begins his article by asserting
that the scene’s relevance to the play is ambiguous, but he returns to the christening again toward
the end of the article, where he states that the scene, which he describes as “realistic” (23),
functions “to bring the characters of the various plots together at a moment of stasis, after the
exposition has been completed and before the unraveling begins …” (23-4), which indicates both
that the scene is the climax to the action, and yet seems to exist outside of the action of the rest of
the play.
Levin does not further expound on what exactly he means by the scene existing as a
moment of dramatic stasis, nor does he address how the scene is simultaneously trivial and vital
to the plot. This apparent contradiction indicates the importance of the scene as well as the
difficulty in delineating its importance, both within the play and culturally. Middleton’s
placement of the christening scene in the center of the play, and his depiction of the event as a
site stereotypical of “women behaving badly,” indicates not only the symbolic place of gossips in
society, but also the attendant anxiety surrounding that place.
To understand the importance of the christening scene, both for the play and for early
modern culture, one must take into account the factors shaping its articulation. The first is that
Middleton stages his infamous scene in an atmosphere of Lenten austerity that echoes similar,

93

intensified austerity conditions in London at the time the play was written.

19

The main feature of

this strictness was that the usual exemptions were done away with, so that “not even the few
butchers normally allowed to sell meat to invalids and pregnant women were granted a license,
and the Privy Council (to the Lord Mayor’s annoyance) went to the length of appointing its own
‘messengers’ to spy out abuses” (xxx).

20

Allwit describes these “messengers” (listed as

“Promoters” in the cast of characters) as “these that stand so close / At the street-corner, pricking
up their ears / And snuffing up their noses, like rich men’s dogs / When the first course goes in”
(2.2.53-6). He is powerless to do anything except taunt them with: “Sheep-biting mongrels,
hand-basket freebooters! / My wife lies in – a foutra for promoters,” to which the First Promoter
replies, “That shall not serve your turn” (ll. 94-5). Allwit is able to mock them, but their
authority, superficially at least, remains intact.

19

Editors of the play use the characters of the promoters – men who wander around the city
looking for violators of the royal edict forbidding the selling of meat – to date the play to 1613.
The austerity measures depicted within the play are especially severe. R.B. Parker relates that
King James I had been increasing the stringency of Lenten regulations forbidding the sale of
meat since 1608, but that the restrictions “were made extra strict for 1613 because a bad harvest
in 1612 had left the cattle without winter feed” (xxx).
20
In “Butchers and Fishmongers: Their Historical Contribution to London’s Festivity,” Sandra
Billington describes the social processes by which Lenten abstinence became increasingly
enforced in the Jacobean period, and how butchers became associated with carnivalesque
excesses. She argues that “fishmongers were seen as leaders of order” and butchers, increasingly
marginalized in part because of the socially unpleasant side of their trade, were cast “into a more
disordered role” (98), giving historical evidence of the fishmongers’ presence in government and
their wares being preferred over the butchers’ selling of flesh. Billington claims that the
increasing demand for meat led to regulations strictly controlling the market. “By the 1580s the
week was almost halved in favor of fish. Butchers were not officially allowed to sell on
Wednesday, Friday or Saturday, or, by 1603, on Sunday between morning and evening prayers.
And though they had a market on Monday, by 1605 they were not allowed to kill or dress
carcasses on Sunday” (98). Though Billington does mention A Chaste Maid in Cheapside in
passing, she does so merely to note that the play “uses the Butchers’ quarter as the place where
Lent is defied” (101), which isn’t strictly true.

94

The original function of the Promoters was to prevent abuses of Lenten austerity, but in
the City depicted by Middleton, they are notoriously corrupt – their original purpose as a moral
policing force has been corrupted to the point where they are essentially state-licensed thieves
who seize citizens’ illegally possessed meat in order to sell it for profit. The degradation of their
original function of maintaining Lenten observance through regulation resonates with the idea of
carnality that is rampant in the play, especially the swapping of legitimate and illegitimate carnal
interaction that produces legitimated illegitimate offspring. This is exemplified by their behavior
in the scenes where they appear, as when, soon after their interaction with Allwit, they encounter
a country wench. She exploits their greed for her own personal ends by hiding her illegitimate
infant in a basket under a loin of mutton. When the Promoters take the basket from her by
reminding her of “the time of the year” (2.2.133), she cannily maneuvers them into promising to
keep the basket until her return. When she exits and they discover the child, they are predictably
infuriated, but they feel they are bound by their vow, and so they exit with the child, grumbling
about how “half our gettings / Must run in sugar-sops and nurses’ wages now …” (ll. 161-2).
By a combination of creating secret knowledge networks and exploiting established
knowledge networks, the promoters destabilize established networks of knowledge and
commerce. In fact, their secret knowledge network, their “spying,” yields an illegitimate child.
The country wench, having previously declared that her illegitimate child would no longer be
profitable (“This is the fifth; if e’er I venture more, / Where I now go for a maid, may I ride for a
whore” [2.1.104-5]), dupes the promoters into vowing to keep the contents of her basket for her.
This scene clearly parallels the events of the christening scene, which celebrates and thus
socially legitimates the birth of a daughter technically legitimate because Mistress Allwit is
married, but whom everyone – except, notably, the gossips – knows is Whorehound’s child.

95

21

The play is frequently read as staging the tensions between the carnivalesque and Lent,

with the promoters symbolizing Lenten austerity and the gossips signifying carnivalesque excess.
But given their corruption, the Promoters seem to mobilize and support the very excesses they
appear to limit and police, which parallels the gossips at the christening feast. Gail Paster,
however, sees the christening scene as “less the communal carnivalism than a demarcation of
gender even sharper than what we have seen in Bartholomew Fair, as the men band together in
vocal disgust at the women’s gluttony, drunkenness, reeking wet kisses, and finally
incontinence” (55). Because “Allwit seems to see [the gossips] in a sisterly collusion with his
prolific wife,” Paster explains, “the threat posed by a collective, hence Amazonian female
appetite and female fertility is so catastrophic that it supplants the male rivalry, virtually
normative in plays of the period, which Middleton’s city comedies, with their obsessive feuding
of merchant and gallant, usually lay bare” (56). The question of female unity in this scene is
worth addressing, however. As Jennifer Panek points out, “various admiring comments by the
Gossips in the christening scene … suggest that they – as representatives of Allwit’s neighbors –
22

know nothing of the Whorehound affair” (83).

21

This suggests that the knowledge network

See Rick Bowers, Radical Comedy in Early Modern England, chapter 7 for a carnivalesque
reading of the play, as well as a good overview of the critical discourse on carnivalesque and A
Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Shannon Miller’s article, “Consuming Mothers/Consuming
Merchants: The Carnivalesque Economy of Jacobean City Comedy” reads the play through the
lens of feminism and the carnivalesque.
22
Panek does allow for the possibility that the gossips’ comments could in performance be made
to sound ironic, as if they were in on the secret of the Allwit birth. She ultimately comes to the
conclusion that “any such equivocations, though, are tonal rather than textual, and the fact that
Yellowhammer is obviously unaware of the Allwit/Whorehound ménage until Allwit tells him
about it in 4.1 would argue for similar ignorance among the gossips” (89).
96

23

which should be in place is, in the case of this gossip community, not functioning properly.

The staging of a christening feast during Lent also signals a malfunction in the gossip
community and its ritual role, but not in the way Allwit decries in his explication of their
excesses in the consumption of food and drink. Lay christening had long been performed by
midwives in emergency situations to secure the soul of the child – a rite that would otherwise
have to wait for the next public church baptism ritual, which was historically held only twice per
year.

24

th

This practice was, however, becoming a point of increasing contention in the late 16
th

and early 17

centuries. Prior to the accession of James I, laypersons (frequently women) were

allowed to administer the rites of baptism in cases of emergency. As Cressy notes, “since
childbirth was a largely female affair, attended by gatherings of women, it might fall to one of
them, most likely the midwife, to perform some kind of baptism in extremis” (118). The
Elizabethan church harbored mixed opinions on the matter, but “the general line of the
Elizabethan church was that baptism by women was undesirable, but not absolutely intolerable”
(Cressy 119). However, the 1604 Hampton Court Conference reflected an increasing Puritan

23

A similar lapse occurs in the Walking Mort’s story, in which a wife has kept it secret that
another wife’s husband has attempted to rape or seduce her.
24
The Book of Common Prayer explains that historically, baptism was “not commonly
Ministred, but at two times in the yeare, at Easter, and Whytsontide, at which tymes it was
openly ministred in the presence of al the congregacion: which custome (now being growen out
of use) although it can not for many consideracions bee well restored agayne, yet it is thought
good to folow the same as nere as conveniently may be” (141). However, as Brian Cummings
notes, “the order for Baptism was one of the most controversial in the late Tudor and early Stuart
periods” (734). All quotes from The Book of Common Prayer are from The Book of Common
Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings. The excerpts are from the
1559 edition unless noted otherwise.
97

influence.

25

King James “gave his view that he ‘utterly disliked’ baptism by those who were not

ministers, and when the subject of women performing the act was broached, ‘his highness grew
somewhat earnest.’ An ape, he said, was as likely to be able to baptize as a woman” (Cummings
737). The result was that the 1604 edition of The Book of Common Prayer added a clause
establishing that private baptism could only be performed by a minister, not by a layperson.
The new prohibition against women fulfilling their traditional ritual responsibilities is
signaled in the play by a Lenten christening, the ambivalence of which is indicated in the
language of The Book of Common Prayer. This signals not only a breakdown in the functionality
of the church (also indicated by the presence of Puritans at the christening), but that the gossips
are not privy to the secrets of the birth room, such as the parentage of the child whom they
helped to deliver, suggesting the unsettling ease with which the regulatory bodies of society
(such as gossips) can be exploited, as well as revealing the corruption at the center of the city and
city life.
The vexed representation of gossips in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside show a play obsessed
with fertility but also seemingly critical of the rituals surrounding childbirth. At the beginning of
the play, Allwit describes his wife’s advanced pregnancy to his servant: “My wife’s as great as
she can wallow, Davy, and longs / For nothing but pickled cucumbers and his [Whorehound’s]
coming” (1.2.6-7). The “longings” experienced by a pregnant woman were to be indulged to
ensure the safety of the fetus, and it typically fell to the husband to discharge this duty, though in
the case of Harman’s walking mort, we see this was not a hard and fast rule. Although Allwit

25

Cummings states that, “Puritans usually rejected lay baptism as unnecessary and illogical”
(736.)
98

26

seems to revel

in his wittol status (a contented cuckold), he still lodges a complaint about the

elaborate nature and expense of Mistress Allwit’s lying-in, though Whorehound is paying for it,
not he:
When she lies in,
As now she’s even upon the point of grunting,
A lady lies not in like her; there’s her embossings,
Embroid’rings, spanglings, and I know not what,
As if she lay with all the gaudy-shops
In Gresham’s Burse about her; then her restoratives,
Able to set up a young pothecary,
And richly stock the foreman of a drug-shop;
Her sugar by whole loaves, her wines by runlets” (1.2.30-38).
Although Allwit’s status as wittol largely robs him of the right to complain about the expenses
accrued in creating a lying-in chamber, his tirade gives insight into the process of lying-in.
The lying-in mentioned by Allwit is not just the physical act of giving birth. It was in fact
a series of rituals, of which childbirth was only one phase. The first stage was preparing for
labor. This involved the mother-to-be gathering together her childbed linen, tapestries, and
26

He tells Davy, perhaps with some irony, that he’s grateful to Whorehound: “I thank him, ‘has
maintain’d my house this ten years, / Not only keeps my wife, but a keeps me / And all my
family: I am at his table; / He gets me all my children, and pays the nurse / Monthly or weekly;
puts me to nothing … The happiest state that ever man was born to!” (ll. 15-21). Linda
Woodbridge suggests that Allwit’s exchange with the Second Gossip, when he asks, “how dost
thou?”, and she tells him that she “wants nothing but such getting, sir, as thine,” to which he
replies, “My gettings, wench? They are poor” (2.3.28), he is “either deceptively speaking the
truth (he has begotten no children), knowing it will be taken for modesty, or (if Sir Walter was
right in suspecting him of sleeping with Allwit’s wife) lying to prevent word getting back to Sir
Walter that he is the father of his own children” (929). The possibility that at least one if not all
the children are Allwit’s would add an extra tinge of irony to the declaration and to the AllwitWhorehound ménage in general.
99

provisions (food and drink) for her midwife and gossips. Though there are indications in the play
that pregnancy is not necessarily a desired state,

27

the majority of the action is centered upon

characters attempting to enter or control a reproductive state, and the objections to pregnancy are
purely financial. In lived experience, there appears to have been a great deal of trepidation
surrounding pregnancy, in part because it was “viewed through the prism of miscarriage: as a
difficult, uncomfortable, and potentially dangerous condition which, unless tended with care,
was destined to end prematurely” (Pollack “Experience,” 59). There was in fact a substantial
amount of literature devoted to supporting the emotional and spiritual states of pregnant women.
Thomas Bentley’s The Monument of Matrones (1582), as assessed by Colin B. Atkinson and
William P. Stoneman, includes a significant component of prayers for safety in childbirth, as
well as prayers for mercy when the birth goes awry.

28

Prayer 50, which has “the ring of firsthand

experience,” according to Atkinson and Stoneman, helps to explain why at least one early
modern woman purchased extra linen for a winding shroud in case her delivery was

27

The wife of Touchwood Senior has so many children that the couple must part to preserve
something of the family finances. There’s also the Country Wench, but she profits from her
pregnancy handsomely, as she discloses after she extorts some money from Touchwood Senior
for fathering her child: “This is the fifth; if e’er I venture more, / Where I now go for a maid,
may I ride for a whore” (2.1.104-5). When she declares “this is the fifth” she is either claiming
that this infant is her fifth child out of wedlock, or that this is the fifth time she has used the child
to extort money from a man (Woodbridge, footnote to 2.1.105).
28
The book is divided into seven “lamps.” In Lamp Five, “roughly one third of the material in
the lamp (38 of the 115 prayers or 62 of the 213 pages) is devoted to the subject of childbirth”
(196). Atkinson and Stoneman quote fairly extensively from prayer 50, which has an unsettlingly
personal sense of anguish that sets it apart from other examples of early modern prayers: “The
babe is come vnto the place of the birth, and lo, it seemeth that thou for my sins hast shut vp the
dores of my wombe, and caused the babe to stand still like to be stiffled … How long Lord shall
my bowels thus sound like an harpe, my bones and sinews be racked asunder, and mine inward
parts be thus greeuouslie tormented for my sins … Shall I be the graue of my child: Shall I giue
death the fruit of my bodie, for the sins of my soule; and my first (second, or third) borne for the
transgressions of my youth? […] Has thou shut vp the doores of my wombe in thy displeasure,
and couered me with the shadowe of death, that the birth may not come out” (197).
100

29

unsuccessful.

The prayer suggests that possibility of the infant and/or mother dying during

delivery constituted a serious concern and a major preoccupation for women approaching
childbirth.
The fear of death is glossed over in Allwit’s description of the birthroom, and the sense
that it is an ostentatious, celebratory space is reinforced. The enbossings, embroid’rings, and
spanglings described by Allwit are the tapestries or drapes that were hung around the space
designated as the birth chamber. In the early modern period, childbirth occurred in an enclosed
and communal gendered space. The birth room was prepared well in advance of labor, as we see
in Allwit’s description. The space was supposed to be darkened and airless – windows and
keyholes were covered, and candles were the only means of illumination (Wilson “Making” 26)
– but there were still plenty of opportunities to display class status (or aspirations), as Allwit’s
description of his wife’s lying-in chamber suggests. Janelle Jenstad demonstrates that kinship
structures and courtly hierarchies were reflected in the social meanings created by borrowing
from friends, family, and social betters, which “conferred status … by locating them in the
community through temporary possession of an object” (392).

30

While aristocratic women

probably had a freer hand, most women were operating within budget constraints, so it is safe to
assume that borrowing was the general practice among women of all classes. For Mistress Allwit
to purchase her furniture indicates that she is “linked not to a community of friends but to the

29

In “The Approbation” of her 1624 pamphlet The Mother’s Legacy to her Unborn Child,
Elizabeth Joceline relates that “when she had not finished the 27. yeere of her age, nor was
oppressed by any disease, or danger, other than the common lot of child-birth, within some
months approaching. Accordingly when she first felt her selfe quicke with childe (as then
travelling with death it selfe) she secretly tooke order for the buying of a new winding-sheet.”
30
She argues that childbed furnishings among aristocratic women “were not customarily
purchased; rather they were shared … no woman had a complete set of hangings and linens, and
what she did own was used until it had no quantitative value” (374).
101

shop itself” (391), Jenstad declares. While it is impossible to ascertain whether or not the gossips
who populate her lying-in are understood as her friends or merely in attendance out of financial
obligation, the fact is that Mistress Allwit is attended by a gossip circle, which indicates the
cultural importance of the ritual, whatever might have been the relationships within it.
The next stage of lying-in was labor and delivery. Although the birth chamber was
enclosed, it was hardly private. During the birth and for a month afterward, the chamber would
be filled with midwives, gossips, and family. Once labor began, the women who had been
previously asked to attend the birth were summoned and began getting the lying-in chamber in
31

order, which included such tasks as putting up the hangings and brewing the caudle.
32

and wines mentioned in Allwit’s description were for the caudle,

The sugar

which was prepared only

after labor began and the gossips and midwife had been summoned by either the husband or the
servant. The mother was to drink the caudle throughout delivery and recovery to gain physical
33

and emotional sustenance, and the midwife and gossips shared in it as well.

Childbirth in the

early modern period was a social occasion for women, but it is important to note that men were
peripherally involved as well,

31

34

as is the case of the Allwit birth in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside,

Wilson, “Participant or Patient?” 134.

32

A warm drink made of gruel mixed with wine or ale, sweetened and flavored with various
spices. Sometimes an egg was added for additional nourishment. Cf. Oxford English Dictionary,
“caudle.”
33
It is likely that the “gossips’ cup” mentioned by Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a
caudle.
34
Patricia Crawford notes that men were not excluded from the processes of childbirth
(“Construction and Experience of Maternity” 21), as does Adrian Wilson (The Making of ManMidwifery 25) and Linda Pollock amplifies this claim, stating that “men could not be kept
entirely out of pregnancy and childbirth since the birth of a child, especially a son, was more
than a domestic matter” (294). Husbands were also involved in their wives’ pregnancies and
births on the Continent: see especially Ulinka Rublack’s “Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female
Body in Early Modern Germany,” Past & Present, 150 (Feb. 1996), 84-110.
102

where the audience sees Allwit on his way to invite the gossips to the christening and sees Sir
Walter stand as gossip to his own child.
That Allwit is unsure of whom to induce to serve in his wife’s birth chamber suggests a
less formal arrangement than has been suggested by some scholars. Certainly those invited
would be friends, family, and neighbors of the delivering woman, but there is some scholarly
contention as to how ritualized was their role.

35

The ad-hoc nature of the lying-in arrangements

in the play aligns with Linda Pollock’s contention that there would not necessarily have been
close ties between the mother and her gossips, and that typically “women were not invited
beforehand or individually selected by the mother, but were rounded up when the labor was
sufficiently progressed to ensure that a birth would occur” (“Female Bonding” 297). We get a
hint of this at the beginning of 3.2, when Mistress Allwit greets her gossips as “good neighbors”
(l. 6). This indicates that she doesn’t have a set group of gossips selected, and her interest in
ostentatious display is not merely class performativity but also an effort to impress those who
would be present – a materialistic perception of social relations, and birthing as a means of
defining one’s relative status.
As evidence of this ad hoc approach to gossiping Pollock cites as her example the 1624
statute against infanticide, which required that several women be present at a birth to ensure that
nothing untoward occurred. She posits, “if women were there as witnesses or to learn about
childbirth, their relationship with the woman giving birth was incidental, or even unimportant”
and hazards that “it is also possible that gatherings of women were not something desired by the
participants themselves but were imposed upon women by the community and/or authorities”

35

Adrian Wilson asserts that the decision of whom to choose as a gossip was “no mere random
selection. The mother had specifically invited each of them; to issue such an invitation was a
compliment, to neglect it was a slight …” (“Participant” 134).
103

(298). While the statute suggests that gossips should serve a policing function rather than
providing social, emotional, and physical support for the mother, it also nevertheless
retroactively legitimates gossiping by sanctioning it as a legal necessity, and endeavors to legally
reframe the purposes that gossips served. The larger implications for gossips are significant.
Perhaps in response to shifting practices, the statute takes the already-in-place practices (women
voluntarily gathering to assist in the safe delivery of mother and child), and asserts a new
function, in which the State dictates that gossips must police the midwife rather than assist her,
an attitude that potentially destabilizes the traditional function of gossips by destroying both birth
room privacy and trust. The statute aims to create internal divisions in the community of women,
and suggests legal pressure upon women to testify against the group and the mother if anything
untoward should occur, and it also recognizes that women might have strategies for reducing the
pressure of procreation by means that would be considered nefarious and illegal. One of the
concerns behind the statute is that sometimes midwives were engaged to deliver the mother from
the child. Ultimately, it endeavors to divide the community and introduces an element of
suspicion among the participants.
The play’s relationship to gossiping is a complicated one. This isn’t surprising, because
36

Middleton’s handling of gender issues is notoriously vexed.

The play doesn’t stage the birth

chamber, but while that is significant, it is hardly surprising. Gail Paster claims this is because of
a veil of cultural association of birth with other bodily excretory processes: “childbirth is
especially invisible in dramatic representation, where the act of giving birth has been an offstage

36

For an examination of women in the Middleton canon, see Caroline Lockett Cherry’s The
Most Unvaluedst Purchase: Women in the Plays of Thomas Middleton. Though Cherry declares
that “it is clear that Middleton, while not as profound as Shakespeare, had a sympathetic
understanding of the minds and emotions of women which was unusual in his time” (viii), the
book does a thorough job of contextualizing the women of Middleton’s plays.
104

event, as un-stageable as the other forms of bodily evacuation it so embarrassingly resembles”
(163). However, Janelle Jenstad argues, the reluctance to stage the events of the birth room could
be due to a lack of knowledge: “the male playwright is simply unlikely to know what transpires”
in the birthing chamber, and thus what the audience sees on stage “tends to be only what a man
would know of the event from his status as an outsider: the father’s fetching of the midwife (who
later functions to confirm or conceal paternity), the general marginalization of men from the
hustle and bustle of preparations and the apparent female solidarity in the press of women who
gather to witness the birth and celebrate the lying-in and christening” (‘Smock Secrets’ 90).
These two different interpretations have very different implications: Paster’s reading ties the
christening scene to shame, while Jenstad’s links it to modes of knowledge. It comes down to
this: the scene is filled with stereotypical misogynistic stereotypes, which makes it seem like
Middleton is engaging in a shaming strategy, but the satire of the scene is not solely directed
toward the women – Allwit, Whorehound, and Tim are all made to be as ridiculous as any of the
gossips.

37

While the play skips over two of the next three stages in the childbirth process, that of
birth itself and of the lying-in, the recovery period that lasted anywhere between three to four

37

Allwit complains about the expense of the feast and the voraciousness of the gossips: “Had
this been / All my cost now, I had been beggar’d; / These women have no consciences at
sweetmeats …” (3.2.59-61) and later, when Mistress Allwit pledges the gossips’ health, Allwit
grumbles, “Now the cups troll about / To wet the gossips’ whistles. It pours down, i’faith; / They
never think of payment” (ll. 77-9). Sir Walter, who stands chief gossip to his own child because
“it prevents suspicion; / ‘Tis good to play with rumor at all weapons” (2.2.32-3), is, with Allwit,
supposedly driven out by the women’s behavior. Tim perhaps is the least ridiculous figure in this
scene, but only because he is the only man who has no agency within the play – he is a pawn
used by nearly every character with whom he interacts. I do not go so far as Ingrid Hotz-Davies
in declaring that “we see our sympathies being shifted to Tim, and this is particularly painful as
this is truly the only time were are asked to side with him in the whole play” (32), because a lack
of intelligence, within the world of city comedy, is not a pitiable state.
105

38

weeks after birth,

it does stage the phase between birth and lying-in: that of the baptism. Act 2

scene 4 is a small scene, comprising only fifteen lines. Despite its seemingly minor status, 2.4
shows the baptism party returning from the child’s christening. The astute reader will notice that
Mistress Allwit is not in the party. This was normal, according to Adrian Wilson: “the mother
could not attend the baptism of her child, which took place in church about a week after the
delivery; instead, the midwife was prominent at this ceremony” (“Participant” 138). What we get
in 2.4, however, is a midwife who enters with the child and immediately exits without speaking a
line. There is no sense within the world of the play that the midwife has any importance, or
indeed, that she can be distinguished from any other female character. Also missing are Allwit
and Whorehound. David Cressy notes that “law and custom made it the man’s responsibility to
arrange for his child’s baptism” (150), and that he was typically present at the sacrament. More
39

important, Whorehound, though the actual father of the Allwit baby, was one of the godparents

in order to deflect suspicions. He validates his decision by claiming that it throws off suspicion
by allowing him to control knowledge: “‘Tis good to play with rumor at all weapons” (2.2.33).
Essentially, he claims that by becoming a gossip, he can control any potential idle talk. His

38

Adrian Wilson describes the process in detail in “Participant or Patient?”: After birth, “for
about a week, the mother kept to her bed and could be visited only by women; and these women
drank the caudle left over from the delivery. Then she ‘made her upsitting’: the bedclothes were
changed for the first time, and she could now move freely about the room, but for a further
period of some days she could not leave the lying-in room. A third stage followed, when she
could move about the house but was not permitted to go outdoors; according to the proper form,
she could now receive male visitors provided that these men were her relatives” (138).
39
“Custom called for two godfathers and a godmother for a boy, two godmothers and a
godfather for a girl” (Cressy 150).
106

exclusion from the presentation of the christened baby in 2.4 is a mute testimonial to how little
the men of the play can manipulate gossip networks or female knowledge.

40

2.4 instead shows the gossips bickering over social precedence. It begins with Maudline
st

Yellowhammer and the 1 Gossip, each of whom offers precedence to the other. Maudline wins
st

the argument by claiming that the 1

Gossip’s obstinacy “will let the child / Go without
nd

company, and make me forsworn” (ll. 3-4). The 2

rd

and 3

Gossip have the inverse argument –

each wishes to take precedence, and so they briefly bicker over whether the 2
apothecary’s wife) or the 3
nd

The 2

rd

nd

Gossip (an

Gossip (a comfit-maker’s wife) has superior social prominence.

Gossip ultimately yields, but with bad grace. The two Puritans enter together “in unity,”

and the second Puritan humbly remarks, “I love lowliness” (l. 12) as she and her sister enter.
th

This provides fodder for the satirical comments of the 4

and 5

th

Gossips, who unite in

agreement that the Puritans are as proud as any of the other gossips: “ … though they strive
more, / There comes as proud behind as goes before” (l. 14). Though this is made to seem
ridiculous, their bickering indicates instability within the gossip community. The speech tags
indicate the women in the group are either “gossip” or “Puritan,” two culturally opposed groups.

40

That Sir Walter is unable to do this is not necessarily bad. Female knowledge is constantly
denigrated throughout the period, and gossip communities who make a point of flaunting their
knowledge are famously lampooned in Jonson’s Epicoene. But even Jonson has a complicated
relationship to gossip communities and female knowledge. Jenstad makes an interesting
argument for Jonson usurping the midwife function in The Magnetic Lady in her article “’Smock
Secrets’: Birth and Women’s Mysteries on the Early Modern Stage.”
107

Another possible source of the instability might be because they are united only through the
Allwits’ conspicuous spending, and they have no ties of friendship with Mistress Allwit.
When we see the gossips again, the midwife is not among them. The stage direction
reads: “A bed thrust out upon the stage, Allwits’s Wife in it. Enter all the Gossips.” There is no
mention of the midwife, nor does she have any speaking lines. A nurse (who has lines) ensures
that the child is onstage and present for the feast, but the midwife’s absence is noteworthy, since
early modern midwives had a central role to play in the childbirth ritual. Adrian Wilson argues
that “the popular ceremony of childbirth both reflected and helped to maintain a collective
culture of women. That culture conferred on the midwife her authority over the birth; conversely,
in exercising her office she confirmed and maintained women’s collective control over this, the
pivotal event in their lives” (“Man-Midwife” 38). But the midwife, Jenstad asserts, has a larger
role as the chief regulator of the knowledge of birth room events, a role that ensures that she is
ultimately the “agent of patriarchy,” because despite her obligation to ensure a safe delivery and
healthy baby, she also had an obligation to the Church to discover or confirm the child’s
paternity: “The midwife was a dual figure, responsible for keeping secret what actually happened
41

within the gynocentric space,

yet also given a testamentary function in ensuring the mother’s

truth about the paternity of her child” (“Smock Secrets” 89). To exclude the midwife from the
christening celebration is significant – arguably it is her absence that allows for the gossips’
42

misattribution of the child’s paternity,

but it also signals a marked absence of church/state

41

Jenstad borrows the concept of “gynocentric space” from Fiona McNeill’s article of the same
name. “McNeill’s argument concerns unmarried women, but her point that ‘gynocentric scenes
more often constitute the imaginary borders of the action’ applies well to the unseen lying-in
chamber” (90).
42
Midwives were required by law to take an oath, which was administered by a representative of
the Church of England. It is unclear when exactly the church began requiring midwives to take
108

authority or legitimation, and a banishing of the birth ritual: midwives were supposed to receive
generous gifts from the guests at a baptism feast as thanks for their services (Evenden 33; 127).
Ultimately, the problems within the gossip community are representative of the tension at
the heart of the city comedy genre, according to Leonard Tennenhouse: the friction between
43

patriarchy and paternalism.

Arguing that “the plays make clear that these exist as separate

notions and represent opposing forms of political organization,” Tennenhouse posits that this
difference is marked by representing incompetent male guardians who attempt to block
marriages of their female wards to worthy suitors, and he observes that the phenomenon of
“paternal characters unable to fill the role of patriarch when they act as the head of household”
occurs throughout Middleton’s plays, among others (168). A Chaste Maid in Cheapside certainly
features several patriarchs unable to fulfill their paternal obligations, but Tennenhouse’s analysis
of how women are used to enforce the rights of an aristocratic model of patriarchy that favors
genealogical precedence is incomplete. Although he points out that women in city comedy do
operate to right the wrongs perpetuated by incompetent patriarchs in order to restore the marriage
oaths, but Doreen Evenden suggests that it was well before Henry VIII’s 1512 legislation
regulating the practice of medicine and surgery, but she is quick to point out that “midwives
were not mentioned in the act and the date when the church first began to issue midwifery
licences, and by what authority, remains uncertain” (25). The only examples of the midwife’s
th

th

oath are from the 16 -18 centuries, but they have the same general stipulations: the midwife
vows to aid both the poor and rich, discover the name of the father of the child, not to deliver a
child in secret, not to use sorcery, not to kill the child, not unnecessarily harm the mother, to
properly bury the child if dead, and to consult with other midwives if necessary. To read
examples of oaths, see the Appendices of Doreen Evenden’s The Midwives of SeventeenthCentury London or Thomas Forbes’ The Midwife and the Witch.
43
Tennenhouse writes, “City comedies ask us to tolerate all manner of questionable sexual
practices in the name of genealogy … Aside from the seeming excesses and follies usually cited,
the satirist aims his attack in these plays at fathers, uncles, nephews, or grandsons who attempt
either to divert a patrimony or to seize it prematurely. This ideological matrix informs all the
Jacobean dramatic genres. It unites city comedy and absent monarch plays with dramatic
romance in a common strategic intention: to authorize patriarchalism over and against
paternalism” (171).
109

imperative that signals the successful conclusion of a comedy, his analysis focuses only on single
non-aristocratic women. He claims that “the women in city comedy who take on this patriarchal
prerogative are never aristocratic women … [and] because these women are not aristocratic,
they, unlike the women of romantic comedy and Jacobean tragedy, are not in fact usurping the
prerogative of the aristocratic male” (169). He uses Moll Yellowhammer as an example of this
and says that her marriage does not “present a direct challenge to patriarchal power” because it is
a correction of the inability of a bourgeois paternal figure to “properly oversee the exchange of
women in his family” (170). However, in his analysis of the play, he overlooks the gossips and
their cultural importance to the functioning of patriarchy. Part of the gossips’ function is to know
the father of the child they help to deliver, which, in this play, they do not. Their celebration
inadvertently undermines patriarchy, as does the exclamation made by one of the gossips, who
admires the extravagance of Mistress Allwit’s lying in: “See, gossip, and she lies not in like a
countess” (3.2.89). The entire scene underscores the reliance of patriarchy on the gossip
community and the midwife, so the portrayal of the failure depicted in this scene makes some
fairly explicit challenges to the overall dynamics of gossiping.
The gossip’s promotion of the boundary-blurring between aristocratic and bourgeois in
the matter of the furnishings in the lying-in chamber also tacitly promotes the subversion
Whorehound and the Allwits are practicing through their unusual domestic arrangement. Thus
the gossips’ ostensibly “normal” christening feast behavior becomes satirical through the
manipulations of Whorehound and the Allwits, who exploit the social legitimation that gossiping
rituals grant to a family by paradoxically utilizing the stereotypical “weaknesses” of the gossip
community – namely, conspicuous consumption. Thus we see a christening feast go off the
tracks.

110

The christening feast begins routinely, with the gossips admiring the baby. The First
Puritan is proud of the fact that she is “well kursen’d, i’the right way, / Without idolatry or
superstition …” (3.2.3-4), but the other gossips admire her physical characteristics. The Second
Gossip calls her “a chopping girl” who is “so like the father” (l. 9). The Third Gossip agrees: “As
if it had been spit out of his mouth! / Ey’d, nos’d, and brow’d as like as girl can be, / Only indeed
it has the mother’s mouth” (ll. 10-12). Then, continuing the tension between the women that was
introduced at the baptism in 2.4, the gossips bicker over whether she is a large or small child, and
whether Mistress Allwit had a brief labor or a long one. They all agree though that she is “a most
cheerful daughter” (l. 23), but the subjective nature of their observations undermines the validity
of their legitimating function – they read the visible signs of legitimacy ineffectually, if
agreement is a necessary tenet of acknowledging legal paternity. The communal quality of the
ritual suggests that it is supposed to be acknowledged, but without the midwife to provide an
official verdict, the gossips’ observations are reduced to inane chatter.
44

Whorehound, as chief gossip, enters with his gift of two apostle spoons

and a cup and

presents them to Mistress Allwit. The nurse, who had exited with the baby as Whorehound
entered, now returns with wine and comfits. The gossips partake heartily of both, much to
Allwit’s horror: “Had this been / All my cost now, I had been beggar’d; / These women have no
consciences at sweetmeats,” he declares, and relates a story of a citizen who complained “that his
45

wife’s belly only broke his back” (ll. 60-61; 66).

44

When his wife pledges a toast to her gossips

R.B. Parker describes them as “silver spoons with the figure of an apostle on the handle” and
states that they were “the usual christening gifts at this time” (57).
45
This was a stereotypical husbandly complain. In The Bachelor’s Banquet, in the chapter
entitled, “The humor of a woman lying in childbed,” the husband complains bitterly about
“play[ing] both the husband and housewife” (61), being made to wait upon his wife’s abusive
gossips as they consume great quantities of expensive food and wine.
111

for their efforts in the lying in chamber, Allwit becomes so enraged at the scene – “Now the cups
troll about / To wet the gossips’ whistles. It pours down, i’faith; / They never think of payment”
(ll. 77-79) – that he asks Whorehound if he would like to leave the women, a proposal to which
Sir Walter heartily assents.
What takes place after the men remove themselves is a different kind of gossip stereotype
from the boozing christening where drinks and supposed idle talk are exchanged, although that is
certainly present: as the gossips get steadily more drunk, one of them reveals that her nineteenyear-old daughter “cannot lie dry in her bed” (l. 97). It is interesting to note that after the men
leave, the scene shifts from birthing celebration to incorporate the educative function of a gossip
community, though again, the function is not completely effective. When the nurse enters to tell
Maudline Yellowhammer that her son Tim wishes to see her, she tells her, “prithee, call him up /
Among the women, ‘twill embolden him well, / For he wants nothing but audacity” (ll. 101-03).
She attempts to teach him how to act around his fiancée, and bemoans the fact that university
education is functionally useless when it comes to practical matters pertaining to relations
between men and women: “He’s so bashful, that’s the spoil of youth: / In the university they’re
kept still to men, / And ne’er train’d up to women’s company” (ll. 112-14). And though what
ensues has engendered much critical derision (the gossips are, to use the parlance of the times,
“sloppy drunk,” reeling around, falling down, and planting wet kisses on Tim), it demonstrates a
gossip community stripped of any efficacy and made totally ineffectual: they cannot distinguish
between a legitimate and an illegitimate infant, nor can they teach Tim of “women’s company,”
ensuring his inability to distinguish that Whorehound’s Welch niece is a whore. The centrality of
this episode, typically considered an anomaly within the play, actually highlights its importance:
the gossip community is the social barometer of the play. The community is supposed to have a

112

normative function, but in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, while the gossips follow the general
form of gossiping, their function is repeatedly repressed or subverted. The gossips’
ineffectiveness highlights the already problematic ending of the play, when Moll Yellowhammer
rises from her coffin to marry Touchwood Junior, and his elder brother, Touchwood Senior (who
marries them), encourages them to use her winding sheets as their wedding linen (5.4.43). This
repurposing of funeral linens for the celebratory reproductive moment of the wedding night blurs
46

the distinction between wedding, birth, and funeral, and suggests that, because the reproductive
order is misaligned and the gossip community cannot perform its corrective function, Moll’s
wedding linen will again be used funereally, perhaps after a childbed tragedy. The play’s
collapse of form and function regarding the gossip community shows the darker side of comic
interchangeability. A gossip community that can be manipulated and modified to the point of
irrelevance hints at the fact that Touchstone Senior’s joke about the economical use of linen has
more than a grain of truth to it. This is the early modern anxiety about social structure at its most
basic – without the vital services and structure provided by functional gossip communities,
young brides like Moll will be buried in their wedding linen because the community created to
ensure their safe delivery from childbed is unable to do anything to prevent it. Troubling
comedic endings thus point us toward the very serious social repercussions at the heart of the
unstable and nonfunctional gossip community.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

46

For another example of the juxtaposition of wedding sheets and winding shrouds, cf. Othello
4.3. In this scene, Emilia is preparing Desdemona for her bath, and she tells her mistress, “I have
laid those sheets you bade me on the bed.” Desdemona’s replies, “All’s one. Good faith, how
foolish are our minds! / If I do die before thee, prithee shroud me / In one of these same sheets”
(ll. 20-23).
113

Though this theme of reproduction without gossips is treated in one of the subplots of A
Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Shakespeare makes it one of the central concerns of his most beloved
comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the absence of gossips becomes a critical element
for both the human world and the fairy realm.
It has become critical commonplace to consider a discussion of gender politics in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream through the lens of female recalcitrance, and to assume that the play
treats female recalcitrance as the kind of social inversion that is a staple of the comedic genre. It
is a seductive idea – after all, the play begins with Theseus, Duke of Athens, informing the
audience of his upcoming marriage to Hippolyta, the defeated Amazon queen. (Might he also be
informing his fiancée of the event?) That Hippolyta has no reason to be pleased with this turn of
events Theseus acknowledges: “Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thy love
doing thee injuries. / But I will wed thee in another key – / With pomp, with triumph, and with
revelling” (1.1.16-19). One can observe here that Theseus speaks of marriage as an action he
does to Hippolyta, and that he tropes it in a way that makes it indistinguishable from the event
prior to the play’s beginning, of her defeat, capture, and transport to Athens.
Into this problematic atmosphere of jumbled private and public concerns comes Egeus,
an aggrieved father whose daughter has the audacity to desire to choose her husband. It is a
bizarre scene: a furious father drags his daughter and her two suitors before the duke and his
captured Amazon fiancée, demanding a resolution to the matter. It’s superficially unclear why
Egeus thinks this is an issue to be resolved by the Duke, and why the Duke concerns himself
with this seemingly minor matter. But the juxtaposition of these events suggests that for
Shakespeare, there is a connection, and a brief examination reveals the reason, which is to
reinforce the play’s obsession with the destruction of female community through the isolation of

114

its women, a tactic begun even before the events of the play with Theseus’ capture of Hippolyta,
an action that effectively destroys Amazonian society through the abduction of its head of state.
It is possible to argue that there is a legal justification for Egeus to seek out Theseus.
Because Egeus wishes to invoke archaic Athenian law (the application of the death penalty for
daughterly disobedience) to coerce his daughter into marrying his preferred suitor, Demetrius,
the Duke must sanction this unusual action. But Theseus’ response to Hermia makes it sound as
if he has less power in the situation than does Egeus, in this matter at least. He tells her, “to you
your father should be as a god” (l. 47), and he concludes, in an attempt to be conciliatory, by
telling her, “Demetrius is a worthy gentleman” (l. 52). She immediately fires back with, “So is
Lysander.” Theseus’ reply is remarkable – instead of chastising Hermia for contradicting him
and/or speaking out of turn, he tacitly agrees with her that each man is an equally good candidate
for marriage: “In himself he is; / But in this kind, wanting your father’s voice, / The other must
be held the worthier” (ll. 53-55). This exchange demonstrates Theseus’ privileging of Egeus’
rights to exercise paternal autocracy despite his agreement with Hermia – that by Egeus’
standards, the suitors are interchangeable, so that it doesn’t make sense to obstinately prefer
Demetrius to Lysander. But as Theseus cannot undermine a father’s rights (as the domestic is a
microcosm of the state), he does change Egeus’ conditions slightly, by offering her a chance at
life: if she will not marry Demetrius, her options are “either to die the death, or to abjure / For
ever the society of men” (ll. 65-6). It is unclear if Theseus makes this change, or if this is a
condition of the law that Egeus failed to mention during his attempt to wrest obedience from his
daughter. In his edition of the play, Peter Holland speculates that Theseus introduces an
alternative as a way to “[alter] the mood of the scene – Hippolyta, who belonged to a race that
had abjured ‘the society of men,’ might well respond strongly to this option” (136-7). Holland

115

positively imbues Theseus’ motivation in giving Hermia a non-fatal non-marriage option, but it
is a reading neither supported by Theseus’ treatment of Hippolyta in the play nor the language
that both he and Hermia use to represent the choice of life without men.
Louis Montrose discusses the possibility that Theseus uses Hermia’s situation to
demonstrate to Hippolyta his intentions toward her. For Montrose, Theseus’ motivation is far
from benign: “… Hermia wishes the limited privilege of giving herself. Theseus appropriates the
source of Hermia’s fragile power: her ability to deny men access to her body. He usurps the
power of virginity by imposing upon Hermia his own power to deny her the use of her body”
(67-8). Montrose sees in Theseus’ punishment of Hermia an appropriation and parody of “the
very condition Amazons sought to enjoy […] The separatism of the Amazons is a repudiation of
men’s claims to have property in women. But if the Amazonian myth figures the inversionary
claims of matriarchy, sisterhood, and the autonomy of women, it also figures the repudiation of
those claims in the act of Amazonimachy” (68). However, Montrose does not make clear the
point that the audience witnesses neither the matriarchal Amazonian society nor the repudiation
of female autonomy that accompanies Hippolyta’s defeat by Theseus, as these events occur prior
to the play. We are treated to a captured and docile Amazon queen who makes no overt
complaint against her forcible integration into patriarchy, but who is largely silent, a state that
can be construed as its own form of protest. By staging a silent figure of female autonomy and
the absolute refusal to allow women even to negotiate the terms of their own marriage, the stark
take on gender politics is evident early in the play. Hippolyta’s situation at the play’s outset
begins to frame the situation: in the social imaginary, the reproductive order is legitimated and
supported through marriage, while the play challenges the validity of that conjunction. The

116

comic resolution presupposes reproductive outcomes, but the conclusion of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream throws that assumption into question.
Scholars of early modern comedy frequently collapse conjugal order with reproductive
order. And while many comedies conclude with the reification of patriarchal order through the
creation of heteronormative reproductive couples who are integrated into society through the
ritual of marriage, A Midsummer Night’s Dream problematizes that conclusion, though it
superficially appears to uphold the idea that comedies are supposed to promote reproductive life
cycles. Montrose speaks for the general critical consensus when he describes the play as
“[focusing] upon different crucial transitions in the male and female life cycles,” and argues that
the focus of the fairy plot is to take “a little changeling boy” from “childhood into youth, from
the world of the mother into the world of the father” (66). He sees the Athenian plot as “taking a
maiden from youth into maturity, from the world of the father into the world of the husband”
(66-7), a transformation that “restores the inverted Amazonian system of gender and nurture to a
patriarchal norm” (67), initiated when Theseus captures Hippolyta and culminating in the
celebration of their marriage. But as I will argue, Midsummer is less concerned with righting an
inverted gender system to create social balance than it is with purging of anything associated
with the domestic.
Instead of reading the gender situation of the play in light of a binary centered around an
Amazonian inversion paradigm, a fruitful avenue of exploration can be found in linking
Hermia’s situation with that of the fairy queen, Titania. Hermia’s desire to broker the terms of
her marriage, her subsequent punishments from patriarchy, and the problematic “restoration” of
social order that results in what Montrose describes as “the marital couplings [that] dissolve the
bonds of sisterhood at the same time that they forge the bonds of brotherhood” (69) parallel

117

Titania’s attempts to keep the changeling boy, her subsequent punishment, and the problematic
“restoration” of social order that is the result of giving Oberon the boy. It is not so much an
inversion of gender as it is an insistence of one’s rights (or perhaps, the insistence that one has
rights) within the system that leads both women into trouble, and although the play ends with the
creation of the domestic in the Athenian plot and the restoration of the domestic in the fairy plot,
these are severely bounded domestic spheres, devoid of any outside resources for its women. A
Midsummer Night’s Dream fulfills generic expectations by restoring social order through
marriage, but it does so by abolishing any sort of female relationships, from simple friendships to
the more complex and socially important gossip community, thereby undermining the
reproductive futures of the play’s couples.
Hippolyta’s capture happens offstage, but the opening salvo in the struggle over the
control of the domestic occurs in the first interaction between Oberon and Titania. In the
interactions between the two, the domestic is literally everywhere – Titania has “foresworn his
bed and company” (2.1.62), but she avers that it is not because of their mutual interference in the
romantic pursuits of Theseus and Hippolyta, as Oberon would have it. The exchange reveals that
Oberon abandoned his duties as King of the Fairies. Titania relates,
I know
When thou hast stol’n away from fairy land,
And in the shape of Corin, sat all day
Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love
To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here,
Come from the farthest step of India,
But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,

118

Your buskin’d mistress and your warrior love,
To Theseus must be wedded, and you come
To give their bed joy and prosperity?” (2.1.64-73).
His subsequent vengeful treatment of Titania in regards to the matter of the changeling boy
suggests that his return to fairy land to perform a blessing on Hippolyta’s bridal bed might not be
motivated out of a magnanimous desire for Hippolyta’s future health and happiness. His
rejoinder to Titania’s accusations, that she has compelled Theseus to a life of womanizing
(“Didst not thou lead him through the glimmering night / From Perigouna, whom he ravished; /
And make him with fair Aegles break his faith, / With Ariadne and Antiopa?” [ll. 77-80]), is
rejected by her as “the forgeries of jealousy” (l. 81), but it does foreshadow his decision to
punish her with an uncontrollable desire for Bottom.
Oberon’s abandonment of his duties is compounded by Titania’s next accusation: that he
actively works to undermine her attempts to fulfill her duties, which include creating a fairy ring.
But she relates that she and her fairies cannot find any place where they can congregate to
perform their rituals that Oberon does not find them. She describes many attempts “to dance our
ringlets to the whistling wind, / But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport” (ll. 86-7).
Because of his usurpation of that space, the rituals that Titania and her fairies perform – rituals
with productive and reproductive capacity – remain unperformed, and everything suffers as a
consequence. Titania relates the devastating effects Oberon’s interference has wrought in the
human realm: “The fold stands empty in the drowned field, / And crows are fatted with the
murrion flock” (2.1.96-7). The disruption is totalizing – not only is the human world thrown into
disorder by the conflict in the fairy realm, but the conflict extends even to the heavenly bodies
governing the earth’s climate. She describes the moon, “pale in her anger” (l.104), causing the

119

disruption of the normal patterns of the seasons: “the spring, the summer, / The chiding autumn,
angry winter, change / Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, / By their increase, now
knows not which is which” (ll. 111-14). Titania attempts to make Oberon accept his part in the
devastation of the human world by employing a metaphor of generation, where Oberon shares
the role of progenitor with Titania in creating what she calls the “progeny of evils” (l. 115). She
concludes by reemphasizing that they each must acknowledge that although they no longer share
a bed, their relationship still has generative capacity – their conflict (or friction, as Greenblatt has
it) breeds unnatural natural activity. “We are their parents and original,” (l.117) insists Titania,
stressing Oberon’s equal responsibility.
Oberon refuses to acknowledge his destructive role, choosing instead to lay the blame all
with Titania, telling her, “Do you amend it then: it lies in you. / Why should Titania cross her
Oberon?” (ll. 118-9). He then abruptly asks for a changeling boy who has until this point not
been mentioned as the condition for her capitulation, which had also not been an issue until this
point in the exchange. Oberon’s demand of Titania for the changeling boy becomes the focus for
the most concerted attack on female community in the play. He is a child, we hear from Titania,
born to an Indian mother with the Queen of Fairies as her gossip, and raised by her in fairy land
when the mother dies after bearing him. As Puck, Oberon’s fairy minion, describes the situation,
Oberon “is passing fell and wrath” because Titania “as her attendant hath / A lovely boy, stol’n
from an Indian king” and “jealous Oberon would have the child / Knight of his train, to trace the
forests wild: / But she perforce withholds the loved boy, / Crowns him with flowers, and makes
him all her joy” (2.1.20-7). Puck frames Oberon’s right to the boy in two ways: the first is to
nullify Titania’s claim to the boy by describing him as “stol’n” from his father. This reframes the
conversation surrounding the changeling boy and makes it about restoring him to his rightful

120

place in a male-controlled environment, as Puck’s second point makes clear. He describes
Oberon’s plans for the Indian boy, which are to make him into a knight, but those plans are
foiled by Titania’s supposed infantilization, and thus the feminization of the boy (he wears a
47

flower crown and is doted upon).

Therefore, although the boy is “stol’n,” Oberon, via Puck,

frames the situation in a way that reinforces patriarchal privilege – he will foster the boy to
manhood instead of allowing him to stagnate in feminine affection. Oberon’s tacit argument is
that Titania’s affection for the boy threatens, paradoxically, to change him through her artificial
arrest of his normal social development. His title as a “changeling boy” could be an indication of
his susceptibility to the threat Titania poses to his indoctrination into the masculine sphere, and
thus a possible justification for Oberon’s intervention on his behalf.
Montrose thinks Oberon’s ultimate goal is “to gain possession, not only of the boy but of
the woman’s desire and obedience” (71), and others offer critical consensus: David Marshall
says “Oberon and Titania are divided because Titania will not part with the changeling boy”
(557) Margo Hendricks calls the boy “the source of tension between the fairy queen and king”
(51-2) and agrees with Montrose’s assessment that Oberon’s motives are rooted in marital or
patriarchal possessiveness when she concludes that “Oberon’s desire for the boy seems very
much connected to desire for dominion over Titania” (53). I shall demonstrate that while the
linchpin of the play is the changeling boy, the real source of the conflict centers upon the rights
of a gossip, a reading that problematizes the putative aims of comedy: to depict the fostering or
restoration of reproductive viability through marriage.
The play’s troubling of marital and reproductive outcomes takes its most explicit form in
Titania’s description of her relationship with the mother of the changeling boy, with whom, she
47

This as a trope of feminization is evident in the Bower of Bliss episode in Book II of
Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
121

explains, “in the spiced Indian air, by night, / Full often … gossip’d by my side” and who,
“Being mortal, of that boy did die; / And for her sake do I rear up her boy; / And for her sake I
will not part with him” (ll. 124-5; 135-37). Most critics attribute Titania’s declared intention to
raise the boy for the sake of his mother as a demonstration of affection for the dead woman. The
fostering of the boy is taken as a demonstration of the maternal role of the gossip, who functions
here like a godmother in spite of the lack of a christening. Montrose avoids paternalistic
judgment of Titania’s connection to the boy, but still posits that her attachment to the boy is a
form of mourning for his mother: “Titania’s attachment to the changeling boy embodies her
attachment to the memory of his mother” (71). Margo Hendricks goes a bit further in assigning a
deathbed promise the boy’s mother extracted from the queen: “Titania’s interest in the boy is
sentimental, linked to her relationship with his mother and the promise the fairy queen made”
(53). However, while affection is almost certainly a strong component in Titania’s attachment to
the boy, we are also given compelling evidence for a bond that goes deeper than affection when,
early in her speech, she describes her activities with the boy’s mother as “gossiping.”
Scholars and editors of the play have failed to account effectively for the use of the term
in the play. In the second Arden edition of the play, Brooks glosses “gossip’d” as “been my
gossip, woman friend” and then includes parenthetically, “(strictly, ‘gossips’ were godfathers
and godmothers, relatives as god-sibs)” (35), a definition that at least gestures toward the fuller
functions of the role. Neither Anne Barton in the second edition of The Riverside Shakespeare,
Greenblatt in The Norton Shakespeare, nor Holland in the Oxford edition of the play annotate the
word as having a specific meaning in this context, missing an opportunity to explicate the
complexities of the term beyond its modern sense of idle talk. The term appears in the play for
the first time approximately 120 lines earlier, when Puck reveals that “sometime lurk I in a

122

gossip’s bowl, / In very likeness of a roasted crab, / And when she drinks, against her lips I bob, /
And on her withered dewlap pour the ale” (2.1.47-50). In this instance, the annotations for the
term “gossip” take up other aspects of the early modern definition, focusing on negative
stereotypes rather than on the role of supporting childbirth and maternal safety. The Riverside
glosses “gossip” as “a garrulous old woman,” the Norton edition glosses it as “an old woman”
and the Arden notes, “here, a gossip has the modern sense: a tattling woman.” But Holland, in
the Oxford edition of the play, footnotes the “gossip’s cup” as “Strictly a godmother’s
christening cup, though gossip may mean simply ‘a chattering woman’ here” (155). In a play so
obsessed with change, these disjointed definitions provide commentary on the changing social
role of gossips.
In addition, once a term has been glossed in the notes, it is usually expected that the
definition stands when the term appears again. Thus, “old woman” or “idle chatterer” are
definitionally being applied to Titania, through inattention or because of a lack of understanding
of the complexity of the term. Recognizing the complexity of the social roles of gossiping opens
up not only some important elements of the play’s treatment of women, but its bleak view of
reproduction. Though Puck’s description of his activities comes before Titania’s story of
gossiping with the changeling boy’s mother, I will first examine the concept of gossiping and
Titania’s use of the term, since she self-identifies as a gossip. The implications of this reciprocal
gossip relationship not only help to shed a richer light on Puck’s supposedly random mischief,
but also reveal the depth of destruction to pleasurable and beneficial female relationships that
results from Oberon’s campaign against Titania.
Titania describes her activities with the changeling boy’s mother as mirthful and
frequent: “Full often hath she gossiped by my side” (2.1.125), she says. Though Titania describes

123

a positive and pleasurable female relationship here, she also couples that with the eventually
tragic tale of the pregnancy, birth, and consequent death of the boy’s mother. She thereby
explicates the significance of this relationship, and solidifies her superior claim to the boy. A
gossip is a female friend, but also a great deal more than that, as Shakespeare’s audience would
have known. Women who agreed to be gossips for an expectant mother had a range of social and
religious obligations to fulfill, which, as Susan Phillips points out, were not limited to birthing
chamber rituals: “Gossips accepted responsibility for the child’s spiritual and physical well-being
… At the same time, they forged a mutually beneficial alliance with the child’s mother,
establishing a ‘formal state of friendship’ that had financial, social, and political benefits” (154).
However, as she acknowledges, the obligations of protecting the child and creating new network
alliances was regarded with a great deal of anxiety. “These multiple duties were not just licensed
but often were required by both secular and religious authorities, yet they became the source of
the gossips’ ill repute” (154). David Cressy obliquely acknowledges this anxiety surrounding the
gossip’s role by gingerly positing that “godparents, if properly cultivated, could be called upon to
act the part of a kinsman” (160, emphasis added).

48

Midsummer dramatically stages this lack of

codification by creating two significant “soft spots” to Titania’s claim to the boy through her
rights as his mother’s gossip.
The first of these problems is that the boy’s age is indeterminate. If he is under the age of
seven, then Titania does appear to have some right to “rear up” the boy, because, as Phillips
points out, “the godparent’s responsibility for the child’s safety lasts until she reaches seven
years of age” (154). In the human realm, boys began the process of maturation to manhood

48

What that cultivation is, or how it was achieved, Cressy leaves to future investigations: “The
dynamics of this relationship are still in need of research, but the available evidence suggests that
baptismal ties, though weak, were susceptible to being pulled” (160).
124

starting at the age of seven.

49

The conflicting views of the boy’s provenance – stolen from the

Indian King or adopted when his mother dies, or both – foregrounds anxieties about the
intervention of women in the birth room, and raises questions about Titania’s right to raise the
child. Regardless of Titania’s right, Oberon is neither gossip nor foster-father, and he identifies
the father as the wronged party. His claims to the boy seem to rest solely in patriarchal privilege,
but the play emphasizes that such privilege hinges upon the effective support of maternity by
gossips, and offers no history of Oberon’s interaction with human kings that would indicate a
basis for his claim.
The birth-room role of the gossip, which functions to secure both patriarchal stability and
maternal survival, is transformed into a god-sib function (that of a godparent) when, as Titania
reports, the boy’s mother has died in childbirth: “she, being mortal, of that boy did die” (l.
50

135).

Though the fairy realm intersects with the human realm in certain ways, it is not parallel

to it. Titania is a god-sib but she is not able to fulfill that role in Christian terms. However, the
play does not situate any of these characters as Christian, and thus the role seems to be linked to
earlier or alternative models of fostering. Recognizing Titania’s role as gossip bolsters Mary

49

In “The Construction and Experience of Maternity in Seventeenth-Century England,” Patricia
Crawford explains that a mother was responsible for the care of children until the age of seven,
and notes that “even bastards were usually kept with their mothers until that age. The justices
preferred not to send children to the house of correction with their mothers unless they were
sucking, but in practice there was usually no choice” (12). Her next observation has a great deal
of relevance for the situation of the changeling boy in the play: “However, the law authorized
anyone to take vagrant children of about 4 or 5 years of age from their mothers, ‘whether they be
willing or not.’ Once the child had been bound before the justices or certain witnesses, neither
mother, father, nor nurse was allowed to steal the child back.” While the changeling boy is the
son of an Indian king, it is interesting that the legal obligation of the Elizabethan state mimics the
practices of the fairies.
50
Because of the boy’s indeterminate age, it is possible to read the votress’ death as a result of
Oberon’s interference with Titania’s attempts to create the fairy circles that ensure the proper
functioning of nature (i.e., mothers that don’t die in childbed).
125

Ellen Lamb’s assertion that the world of the fairies is evoked in the play as an allegory for
popular culture and a site to deploy subversive strategies. “When considered in isolation,” she
writes, “the forest episodes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream stage meanings for the fairies and
for Robin Goodfellow which are not substantially different from their meanings within a
common culture. The play literalizes the strategic use of fairy allusions as a cover for acts
regarded as illicit by the dominant culture” (303). Though she is discussing Bottom’s illicit
relationship with Titania, the idea applies equally to the roles of the gossip community within
society. Titania both assists in birth and fosters the child, but disrupts human patriarchal order in
the process, removing a male heir from the succession. Seen simultaneously as illicit and a
necessary component for the continuance of culture, the situation of the changeling boy and
Titania is an embodiment of the social ambiguities of the gossip.
In her lush and poignant narrative of her relationship with the boy’s mother, Titania is at
once a “good gossip,” focused on sensual pleasures and merriment, and a “good” gossip, one
who takes her obligations for the boy’s well-being quite seriously. Her willingness to face
Oberon’s displeasure rather than submit to his request to give up the boy is strong proof that she
believes the gossip’s vow to be privileged over the demands of patriarchy and even monarchy.
Taken from this angle, the boy’s age is immaterial, even detrimental to the stakes of the
argument. The tension the boy embodies (gossip vs. patriarchy) is not meant to have an easy
resolution. The ambiguity makes for social instability, which in turn, from a patriarchal
perspective, justifies the modification/eradication of female community in the play.
This leads to the second problem with Titania’s claim to the boy, which is that he is
nameless within the space of the play. One of the primary functions of a gossip in her capacity as
a spiritual sponsor was to name the child whom she was sponsoring. Cressy explains that, “after

126

offering to renounce the devil, the godparents’ most important ceremonial task was to supply the
child with a name,” and emphasizing that the naming ritual “was a serious business, securing
legal, social, religious, and semantic identity” (161). To be a gossip and not name the boy
suggests, at least superficially, that Titania’s assertion that she has the right to raise the boy is
disputable. However, this second problem is complicated by fairy lore, which dictates that an
unchristened baby was “particularly liable to be carried off” by fairies (Briggs 115). Ultimately,
though, both the boy’s namelessness and more importantly, the fact that he’s never embodied
onstage, suggest that Titania’s defiance, rooted as it is in male perceptions of the female body
and female excess has but one inevitable outcome: shame and eventual capitulation to patriarchal
strictures. As Paster notes, “childbirth is especially invisible in dramatic representation, where
the act of giving birth has been an offstage event, as unstageable as the other forms of bodily
evacuation it so embarrassingly resembles” (163). In the particular instance of Titania and her
votress, there is no indication in the play that the votress was married to the father of her child, a
situation which, coupled with the boy’s complete lack of embodiment, indicates that if these
circumstances were translated into the human realm, she would be made to feel the shame of the
situation. Oberon does this later in the play by punishing Titania with Bottom.
In translating this issue into the fairy realm, Shakespeare continues the tradition of
suspicion regarding the social efficacy of the gossip community’s rights to ritual. Additionally,
the rights to ritual are undermined in a variety of ways through the specific representation of
fairies in the play, representations that transform and diminish the threatening nature of these
creatures. In the medieval and early modern periods, fairies were regarded as almost entirely
negative. M. W. Latham observes that “with the exception of the fairies of Shakespeare’s
mythology, and the fairies of Spenser, the fairies as a race are never referred to as good spirits,

127

except when this adjective is applied to them as a matter of propitiation or of fear, or to single
out some particular member of the race who is pleased, for some reason or other, to show a favor
to mortals” (34-5). Shakespeare is credited by multiple scholars

51

for creating a new, more

diminutive race of fairies, one from which all signs of evil and maliciousness is purged, as
Latham explains: “No longer do they function as the mischievous and dangerous beings they
were believed to be … instead, they become, in actuality, the Good Neighbours which, in flattery
and fear, they had been dubbed by mortals trembling before the idea of their advent.”
Shakespeare’s fairies, though made tiny, embody domestic perfection: “the period of their
earthly materialization is devoted to making the world happier and more beautiful, without any
of the usual impositions of taboos and without any of the usual demand for worship or payment”
(Latham 182). Regina Buccola posits that the domestication of the fairies “were imaginative
responses to the stresses of life in a rapidly changing world” and that “the socially significant
fairy attributes most often invoked in early modern drama and popular lore are their erratic
oscillation between benevolent and malevolent treatment of humans … their penchant for
intruding into human love affairs, and their abduction of humans as brides (or paramours),
midwives, and changeling infants” (10). These descriptions of fairies, their paradoxical
unplacedness that nevertheless focused on the domestic, their unasked-for intervention in human

51

Margaret Murray in The God of the Witches and Minor Latham in The Elizabethan Fairies
both provide extensive textual evidence demonstrating that representations of the size of fairies
before Shakespeare varied from the size of human adults to human children, but it was not until
Shakespeare that fairies became excessively diminutive.

128

affairs, and their association with moments in life centered around reproduction,

52

the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are functioning as a gossip community.

all signal that

53

In aligning the gossip and fairy communities in the play, and then modifying them in
specific ways, Midsummer creates an interpretative fantasy that aligns the gossip with the social
fantasy of an idealized domestic space. Mischievous, willful entities not bounded by spatial
considerations or social conventions are restructured into “good neighbors”—obedient, eager to
serve and please without demand for compensation. Even the miniaturizing of their physical
bodies augments this fantasy.

54

52

Diane Purkiss claims that “the moments in life when a fairy encounter is most likely are
infancy, puberty, and childbirth for women” (94).
53
In her article, “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practices and the Production of Popular Culture in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Mary Ellen Lamb relates a story told by Robert Willis of his near
death experience as an infant: “if I had not cryed in that manner as I did, our gossips had a
conceit that I had been quite carried away by the Fairies they know not whither, and some elfe or
changeling (as they call it) laid in my room.” Lamb asserts that “his use of the word ‘conceit’
indicates his perception that the women or ‘gossips’ attending his mother after childbirth were
well aware that his near death had nothing at all to do with fairies. If Willis had died, the fairy
narrative would have deflected blame for a terrible accident from the mother and her attendants”
(293). While it is impossible to tell to what extent fairies were used as a way to divert blame for
birth-room accidents, the example illustrates not only the way in which gossips and fairies were
associated in the popular imagination, but also demonstrates the women uniting around their
story for mutual preservation in a way that the 1624 statute against infanticide (discussed in the
Chaste Maid section above) seems to discourage. The statute highlights the incompetence or
failures of medical practice, accident, and other factors, wherein the women might be encouraged
not to unite in their story of what has occurred, but Willis’s anecdote suggests that they do unite.
54
The elimination of the gossips’ physicality is in stark contrast to the very physical descriptions
of the pregnant body of the changeling’s mother, whom Titania compares to the merchant ships
that they watch sailing by: “… we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive / And grow big-bellied
with the wanton wind; / Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait / Following (her womb
then rich with my young squire), / Would imitate …” (2.1.128-32). The pregnant body was often
negatively compared to a merchant ship in the period. One sixteenth-century treatise about
reproduction claimed, “Mothers afford very little to the generation of the child, but onely are at
trouble to carry it, … as if the womb were hired by men, as Merchant Ships are to be striated by
them; and to discharge their burden …” (Lemnius, qtd. in Crawford, p. 7). A late seventeenthcentury French medical treatise described pregnancy thus: “Going with child is as it were a
129

In aligning the gossip and fairy communities in the play, and then modifying them in
specific ways, Midsummer creates an interpretative fantasy that aligns the gossip with the social
fantasy of an idealized domestic space. Mischievous, willful entities not bounded by spatial
considerations or social conventions are restructured into “good neighbors”—obedient, eager to
serve and please without demand for compensation. Even the miniaturizing of their physical
bodies augments this fantasy.

55
56

In eliminating their physicality, the play simultaneously erases their gender

and every

association with the physical, making them suitable tools for advancing Titania’s plan to

rough sea, on which a big-belly’d woman and her infant floats the space of nine months: and
labour, which is the only port, is so full of dangerous rocks, that very often both the one and the
other, after they are arriv’d and disembark’d, have yet need of much help to defend them against
divers inconveniences which usually follow the pains and travail they have undergone in it” (qtd.
in Pollock, “Experience of Pregnancy,” p. 39). Titania’s comparison of the pregnant body to a
ship thus reproduces the metaphor of the period, signaling to the audience that it was not an
entirely successful delivery even before she reveals that the boy’s mother died in delivery. (It
also provides an interesting glimpse into the social attitude towards merchant ventures.)
55
The elimination of the gossips’ physicality is in stark contrast to the very physical descriptions
of the pregnant body of the changeling’s mother, whom Titania compares to the merchant ships
that they watch sailing by: “… we have laugh’d to see the sails conceive / And grow big-bellied
with the wanton wind; / Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait / Following (her womb
then rich with my young squire), / Would imitate …” (2.1.128-32). The pregnant body was often
negatively compared to a merchant ship in the period. One sixteenth-century treatise about
reproduction claimed, “Mothers afford very little to the generation of the child, but onely are at
trouble to carry it, … as if the womb were hired by men, as Merchant Ships are to be striated by
them; and to discharge their burden …” (Lemnius, qtd. in Crawford, p. 7). A late seventeenthcentury French medical treatise described pregnancy thus: “Going with child is as it were a
rough sea, on which a big-belly’d woman and her infant floats the space of nine months: and
labour, which is the only port, is so full of dangerous rocks, that very often both the one and the
other, after they are arriv’d and disembark’d, have yet need of much help to defend them against
divers inconveniences which usually follow the pains and travail they have undergone in it” (qtd.
in Pollock, “Experience of Pregnancy,” p. 39). Titania’s comparison of the pregnant body to a
ship thus reproduces the metaphor of the period, signaling to the audience that it was not an
entirely successful delivery even before she reveals that the boy’s mother died in delivery. (It
also provides an interesting glimpse into the social attitude towards merchant ventures.)
56
Though Bottom identifies Titania’s fairies as male when they present themselves to him
beginning at 3.1.168, the miniaturizing of their bodies renders them effectively androgynous
130

rehabilitate Bottom. When she declares to him her intention to “purge thy mortal grossness so, /
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go” (3.1.153-4), she calls on her fairies, indistinguishable
except for their names: Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed. It is important to note
that the androgyny of the fairies does not signal an actual degendering of gossips or of a “real”
gossip community. Rather, androgyny evacuates from Titania’s fairy community the typical
social perception of the female gossip community’s negative gender associations (as displayed in
Puck’s description of the gossip in Act 2). The fairies figure gossips innocuously in fairyland
through a lack of negative femaleness, and end up serving as a failed corrective to the perceived
threat to patriarchal order posed by Titania and her votress. That the audience only sees one selfidentified gossip – Titania – also signals a community under duress, since a community of one
hardly merits the appellation.
The play shows one gossip and a group of figures that through the metaphoric meanings
of their names superficially conform to one of the functions of a gossip community – that of
ensuring domestic regulation. The fairies’ names not only indicate their diminutive size but also
their domestic usefulness. As Lou Agnes Reynolds and Paul Sawyer observe, plants were
harvested the night of the summer solstice in the belief that their medicinal properties were at
their most potent, and so, “because each of these fairy servants represents an item used in
household remedies and would thus be affected by the superstitions of Midsummer’s Night, it
seems possible that the four fairies find their origin in folk medicine” (513). While they are
somewhat reticent in asserting their claim, Reynolds and Sawyer’s identification of the fairies’
names with medicinal herbs that would have been administered as part of the gossip’s household
(emphasized by the fact that the fairies were most likely played by boys). This androgyny would
also allow for the ease with which Oberon subsequently appropriates their services at the end of
the play. In any case, Bottom has the eyes of an ass at this juncture, so a comic misreading of
gender would not be inappropriate for the scene.
131

medical role indicates, again, that they are linked to gossips’ medicinal function, but made
diminutive and even genderless, cleansed of negative connotations. Gossips’ names were
frequently satirical (an example of this is “Dame Chat” of Gammer Gurton’s Needle),
emphasizing their domestic unsuitability. But through their names, Titania’s fairies signal the
57

opposite: they are the embodiments of domestic items

that ensure the wellbeing of the

inhabitants of the household. Their role in the play, in Titania’s service, is to aid her in purging
Bottom’s “mortal grossness,” to make him more suitable as her lover. The need to purge
Bottom’s mortal grossness stems from his embodiment of many of the stereotypical shameful
attributes of the gossip – women unable to control their tongues, bladders, or tempers. This is not
to say that Bottom is feminized here, but rather that his behavior recalls the “unsuitable” or
“unfeminine” behavior of the stereotypical gossip. The fairies’ willing participation in the
attempted purging signals their successful realignment as nonthreatening domestic helpers
instead of comprising an unruly autonomous network of women. This causes them to be no
longer in control of the realm in which they are supposed to function, and the resultant
ineffectiveness is the source of the threat to reproduction. They seek to cure the very attributes
that are normally ascribed to the circle they seem to represent.
This circle is literalized in the fairy ring. Titania’s disclosure that Oberon hunts out and
destroys the fairy rings necessary for the functionality of both the human and fairy realms is
equally a revelation that Oberon destroys communities where a female figurehead is responsible
for the performance of rituals that guarantee the continuance of life. While A Midsummer Night’s
Dream is often troped as a battle of the sexes, its message is much more insidious. It is a play

57

The medical origin of the fairies’ names also links them to the medical/festive function of the
gossips discussed earlier in the chapter, which further bolsters the theory that Titania’s fairies are
gossips.
132

where all forms of female community are destroyed for the purposes of male authority and
desire. Hippolyta, like Titania, is forcibly separated from her female community. While
Hippolyta’s separation is fairly straightforward (Theseus’ defeat of the Amazon nation),
Titania’s is more complicated and troubling. Not only does Shakespeare have Titania’s humangossip die as a result of childbirth, but also he deliberately manipulates the gender expectations
associated with gossips and renders the fairy-gossips powerless in their androgyny so that they
are no longer in control of the realm in which they are supposed to function, which is the source
of the threat to reproduction.
The representation of the gossip that is allowed to stand is the one invoked by Puck and
sanctioned by Oberon. The figure of the drunken gossip is introduced at the beginning of Act 2
when Puck reveals that one of the disruptive acts he performs for Oberon to “make him smile” (l.
44) is to come between a gossip and her ale (ll. 47-50). The gossip here is either a woman at a
gossips’ feast, celebrating the successful delivery of a child, or she is a woman gathered with the
rest of her gossip community to share some ale and stories. Ultimately it is impossible to know
what kind of gossip is depicted here, and the ambiguity is the point. Puck, like his literary forbear
Diccon in Gammer Gurton’s Needle, disrupts female community by creating situations wherein
negative stereotypes about women are “proved.” In order to amuse Oberon (therefore having his
tacit permission), he takes on the appearance of a crabapple to cause the old gossip to pour ale all
over herself. Thus, as Paster notes, Puck’s mischief “isolates the interchangeable thresholds of
female appetite and vulnerability …” (126) by exposing the gossip as a ridiculous figure of
excess. But stripping them of their excesses, Shakespeare seems to suggest, renders gossip
communities unable to fulfill their important social functions.

133

58

Puck’s

story prefigures what happens to Titania. Instead of causing her to pour ale over

herself for Oberon’s amusement, he instead fetches for Oberon the flower identified as “love in
idleness” so that Oberon can apply it to the sleeping Titania’s eyelids. Oberon’s punishment for
Titania is sexual incontinence, frequently linked in popular imagination with gossips’ excesses,
which invokes what Paster calls “the comic specter of incontinent women and the gluttonous
world of the gossips’ meeting” (127). A further connection with the idea that Oberon’s
punishment is a punishment of a gossip is the name of his chosen punishment – idleness was a
charge frequently leveled at gossip communities. His attack on the gossip community works.
That she awakens and falls in love with Bottom serves as a distraction from her duties as a gossip
towards the changeling boy, and her inattention to the boy, coupled with the demonstration of
her excesses, undermines her rights as a gossip. In Act 4, Oberon finally acquires control of the
boy through humiliation and the manipulation of Titania’s behavior, comportment, even perhaps
her identity itself, operating as so many early modern male critics of the female gossip function
did, to undercut the value of their duties and challenge their virtue and capacity for selfmanagement. Oberon’s proud description of her subjugation provides only his view of the
outcome: “I did upbraid her and fall out with her […] When I had at my pleasure taunted her, /
And she in mild terms begg’d my patience, / I then did ask of her her changeling child; / Which
straight she gave me, and her fairy sent / To bear him to my bower in fairy land. / And now I
have the boy, I will undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes” (4.1.49, 56-60). Titania’s
capitulation is not staged and is instead mediated to the audience through Oberon’s
demonstration that the rights of the gossip have been truly demolished, and with it, Titania’s

58

Puck/Robin Goodfellow was traditionally not a fairy, but rather, as Keith Thomas describes,
“a guardian spirit … who performed domestic chores for mortals” (606). His deployment by
Oberon to undermine the gossip community in the play is thus highly symbolic.
134

right to represent her opposition. This is reinforced by the fact that one of her own fairies is used
to “bear” (a highly evocative word in this context, with its connotations of labor and delivery)
the boy to Oberon’s bower. The choice to have Oberon relate Titania’s capitulation may also
function as a further means of manipulating her social image, aligning her degradation with the
censure of gossips in human society.
The play ends on an extremely uneasy note; Titania’s repudiation of the gossip
community has repercussions for the women in the human world. The “rude mechanicals” – a
troupe of city laborers who perform the story of Pyramus and Thisbe for the wedding
entertainment of the Duke and his bride, Hippolyta, choose to stage a tragic play featuring the
death of the two young lovers. Theseus grants them the opportunity to perform because they will
likely be so ridiculous as to help “wear away this long age of three hours / Between our aftersupper and bedtime” (5.1.33-34). The result is that the death of these lovers is performed during
a celebration of reproductive capacity. Even more striking, the internal play destroys
reproductive order, both onstage and off. Theseus terminates the play before the closing epilogue
can be recited, truncating the play and eliminating the closure this epilogue would offer. As
Jenstad observes, “the secrets of laboring women are comparable to the secrets of playmaking.
The tiring house is the space where the off-stage birth is imagined to have taken place, but it is
also the womb where new characters are born, a protean imaginative space that is feminine in
that it ‘bodies forth … things unknown’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.14-15)” (“Smock
Secrets,” 97). If theatrical production and reproduction are parallel, as Jenstad suggests, then
Theseus’ termination of the play before the performance of the epilogue is a highly symbolic
gesture, the significance of which is highlighted by his exordium to the couples: “The iron
tongue of midnight hath told twelve. / Lovers, to bed, ‘tis almost fairy time” (5.1.349-50).

135

Though the “iron tongue” is sometimes glossed as “the bell’s clapper,” figurative representations
of iron are not generally positive. Metaphorical invocations of iron in the Bible (an authoritative
source for meaning-making in the period) include representations of barrenness, slavery, and
tyranny. Even more problematic for this situation, folklore holds that fairies are repelled by iron,
59

as well as by bells.

For Theseus to invoke an iron bell as the signal for “fairy time” introduces

a profound disjunction at what should be a moment of union at the play’s end.
Puck’s concluding speech further signals this social rupture by utilizing images of death
and destruction, which Montrose describes as an evocation of an “uncomic world of labor, fear,
pain and death” (74). Puck begins, “Now the hungry lion roars” (5.1.57), which hardly sets the
mood for a wedding night, since the audience just saw a lion serve as the source of
misunderstanding that leads to the deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe. He continues with death
metaphors, describing how “the screech-owl, screeching loud, / Puts the wretch that lies in woe /
In remembrance of a shroud.” As the lovers come together, Puck reminds us that “Now it is the
time of night / That the graves, all gaping wide, / Every one lets forth his sprite / In the churchway paths to glide” (ll. 362-68). There is no romantic flowery language; only ill-omened owls
and gaping graves.
Equally troubling is the blessing of the bride bed, given not by Titania but by Oberon.
The blessing itself is unobjectionable, but its subject matter is explicitly domestic and normally
the province of women. Instead, the play closes with Oberon guaranteeing that “all couples three
/ Ever true in loving be, / And the blots of nature’s hand / Shall not in their issue stand” (ll. 398401), and it is he who deploys the fairies with “field-dew consecrate” (l. 406) to grant “this
59

In An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Katherine Briggs explains that iron “repels fairies. A knife, or
cross of iron, are sovereign protections against witchcraft and evil magic of all kinds” (234). In
the entry “Protection against fairies,” she claims that “bells were protective; church bells, the
bells worn by morris dancers and the bells round the necks of sheep and oxen” (335).
136

palace with sweet peace” (l. 409). Though the text is not explicit here, there is a strong
probability that the fairies used by Oberon are the same ones we’ve seen throughout the play –
Titania’s fairies. In Oberon’s appropriation of the bridal bed blessing and of Titania’s fairies lies
a dark possibility at the end of the play: generation without gossips. In a world where a gossip
cannot drink her ale without spilling it, Titania cannot keep her changeling boy, Hippolyta is
taken from the Amazons, and Hermia and Helena’s friendship is sacrificed to reproductive
imperatives, no female community survives the play. Though Oberon’s blessing extends over the
health of future offspring, it does nothing to protect or celebrate the mothers who birth them,
suggesting that even if the reproductive order is restored and births follow matrimony, the gaping
graves described by Puck will not be long vacant.
Though the chapter examines a relatively few number of texts, they are enough to suggest
a larger trend of the expansion of the role of the gossip community into public discourse. The
representations are largely negative, portraying gossips as drunken pugnacious women incapable
of calculating a tavern bill, let alone delivering a child, but the representations are not universally
disapproving, and even in the negative representations, we can see larger systemic pressures
acting to repress gossip communities. The recognition of these pressures, as well as the
recognition of the portrayal of the results of the gossips’ repression (death; the breakdown of
reproductive order), signals simultaneously the gossips’ vital contribution to society and their
precarious position within it.

137

CHAPTER 3
The Intellectualizing of the Gossip
This chapter explores public roles not traditionally associated with the gossip community
and tracks a change in the representation of gossip communities as groups less invested in
private function and more devoted to presenting a public intellectual presence in society. The
chapter begins with an examination of the anonymous 1620 Swetnam the Woman-hater,
Arraigned by Women. The comedy’s subplot stages Joseph Swetnam being brought to trial by a
group of women for his slanderous offences against women. The women find him guilty and he
is made to recant. The play serves as a useful bridge between the emphasis on female physicality
that is such a part of the earlier representation of gossip communities and the later move towards
larger issues of social justice. The women in Swetnam Arraigned advocate for gender equality
with a high degree of articulation and sophistication, but the punishment they devise for
Swetnam is to stab him offstage with needles until he recants, an apparent return to the low
physical comedic representation of gossips. The chapter then explores Ben Jonson’s 1625
comedy, The Staple of News, which features four gossips, who, by declaring their intent to
“arraign” the play by providing commentary at the beginning and end of each of the play’s acts,
police social and cultural mores in a non-physical way. The two plays stage the dramatic tension
between women’s physicality and their increasing demand for an intellectual public role, one of
the major arguments in the querelle des femmes, or “the woman question,” a genre of writing
(usually pamphlet) in which the superiority of one sex or the other is debated. Gossips, with their
ability to function both inside and outside patriarchy, and their concomitant representations as
the embodiments of physical excess and the preservers of domestic order, are uniquely suited to
explore this tension.

138

In 1615, Joseph Swetnam published the infamous pamphlet The Arraignment of Lewd,
1

Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women under the pseudonym “Thomas Tel-Troth,” reigniting
the never wholly dormant literary battle between the sexes known as the querelle des femmes. It
2

was an instant success, reprinted nine times in the first twenty years. It sparked a number of
3

rebuttals, many of them written under female pseudonyms, and in the instance of Rachel
Speght, one authenticated female author. Though there is some critical debate as to the level of
popularity of Swetnam’s pamphlet (Van Heertum speculates that the pamphlet’s “impact was
probably exaggerated by the respondents” [55]), it was popular enough to spark not only several
pamphlets, but also a stage play, Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women, produced at
the Red Bull theatre c. 1617 and published in1620. The Red Bull catered to popular tastes, and at
the end of the century was disdainfully described by James Wright in the Historica Histrionica
4

as, “mostly frequented by Citizens, and the meaner sort of people.” Andrew Gurr relates that the

1

The pseudonym was a popular one in the period. In what is surely a coincidence, given the
evidence of literary ability and wit presented in Swetnam’s tract, the character of Thomas TelTroth was frequently accompanied by Puck/Robin Goodfellow, who, as Robert Weimann relates,
“became something of a folk hero, well-known in Renaissance literature – especially in the
Elizabethan pamphlet Tell-Trothes New-Years Gift (1593), for example, was subtitled, Being
Robin Good-fellowes news out of those Countries, where inhabites neither Charity nor honesty”
(193-4). Because Robin was “well-traveled and familiar with hell” and his experiences “offered a
cure for real-life maladies,” he was, Weimann posits, “a logical companion and friend to the
soothsayer Tell-Troth” (194).
Francisca Van Heertum suggests that “the pseudonym chosen by Swetnam was probably also
intended to give The Arraignment of Women the hallmark of truth, and fits in well with his
professed moral indignation in the dedicatory epistles” (13).
2
Van Heertum makes this claim, citing a publication window of 1615-1637 (54). However, it is
important to note that Swetnam’s pamphlet was published well into the eighteenth century.
3
Most of the pamphlets – Rachel Speght’s A Muzzle for Melastomus, Ester Sowernam’s Ester
hath hang’d Haman, and Constantia Munda’s The Worming of a mad Dogge can be found (with
their spelling and punctuation modernized) in The Women’s Sharp Revenge, edited by Simon
Shepherd.
4
Quoted in Gurr 217.
139

players at the Red Bull had “developed a reputation as ‘terrible teare-throats,’ speaking and
strutting more vigorously than their rivals,” and that the general perception of the various
playhouses of the second decade of the seventeenth century were that “the Bull played the man
while the Globe and Blackfriars told tricks of love” (174). The staging of Swetnam the WomanHater represents a shift in the theater’s offerings, in that the play quite obviously (and, one must
admit, somewhat clunkily) strives to appeal to both tastes. Gurr writes that the play was
“designed in part to please the sort of ladies who wrote pamphlets challenging Joseph Swetnam’s
misogyny” (174), but that observation does not begin to capture the importance of the play for
understanding communities of women. Amidst all of its dizzying array of spectacle – two
separate trial scenes, a prince who cross-dresses as an Amazon, lovers who fake their deaths, a
sword fight, and the concluding display of Swetnam entering the stage to deliver his epilogue
while wearing a muzzle – the play also depicts a gossip community coalescing to effect social
justice with no negative consequences for the female participants or their community. While
5

there are examples of this freedom from repercussions that predate the play, they have all been

5

The female community in Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, the sequel/protofeminist response to
Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, stages an all-female charivari who protest Petruccio’s
misogyny. An even earlier example is in Robert Greene’s A Notable Discovery of Cozenage
(1591), in which he relates a “merry jest” of a suburban flaxwife who had been “cozened”
(cheated) by a collier. When she discovered that he had cheated her of two sacks of coal, she
brought in her neighbors to witness the theft, and they related to her that they had all been
cheated as well. The flaxwife “desired their aid in tormenting the collier, which they promised to
perform” (Kinney 185). The following ensued, and is worth related in full: “she conveyed [the
neighbors] into a back room (some sixteen of them), every one having a good cudgel under her
apron. Straight comes the collier and saith, ‘Mistress, here be your coals.’ ‘Welcome, good
collier,’ quoth she, ‘I pray thee, follow me into the backside, and shoot them in another room.’
The collier was content, and went with her, but as soon as he was in, the goodwife locked the
door, and the collier, seeing such a troop of wives in the room, was amazed; yet said, ‘God speed
you all, shrews.’ ‘Welcome,’ quoth one jolly dame, being appointed by them all to give sentence
against him, who, as soon as the collier had shot his sacks, said, ‘Sirrah, collier, know that we are
here all assembled as a grand Jury, to determine of thy villainies, for selling us false sacks of
coals, and know that thou are here indicted upon cozenage. Therefore, hold up thy hand at the
140

localized incidents, swiftly resolved. But in Swetnam the Woman-hater, the gossips band
together to avenge womankind, signaling an expansion of their role from the domestic to the
political. Their representation in the play troubles the patriarchal fantasy of discrete public and
private spheres.
Scholars have established that female theatergoers represented a substantial portion of
6

theater audiences, and that, as Jean Howard has observed, the presence of the women in the
audience of a public playhouse was considered ideologically unsettling, especially to one of the
era’s most adamant critics of the theater, Stephen Gosson:

bar, and either say ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty,’ and by whom thou wilt be tried, for thou must receive
condign punishment for the same ere thou depart.’ The collier, who though they had but jested,
smiled, and said, ‘Come on, which of you all shall be my Judge?’ ‘Marry, sir,’ quoth one jolly
dame, ‘that is I, and, by God, you knave, you shall find I will pronounce sentence against you
severely if you be found guilty.’ When the Collier saw they were in earnest, he said ‘Come,
come, open the door and let me go.’ With that, five or six wives started up and fell upon the
Collier, and gave untim him a half score of sound lambeaks with their cudgels, and bad him
speak more reverently to their Principal” (185-6). Greene’s collier becomes afraid at this point
and decides that “mirth and courtesy” would endear him to the irate women. He then asks to be
tried “by the verdict of the smock” (186). The women create a jury, the flaxwife gives evidence,
and the collier is found guilty. The Principal gives him her judgment: “Collier, thou art
condemned here, by proof, of flat cozenage, and I am now appointed in conscience to give
sentence against thee, being not only moved thereunto because of this poor woman, but also for
the general commodity of my country, and therefore this is my sentence. We have no pillory for
thee, nor cart to whip thee at, but here do I award that thou shalt have as many bastinados as thy
bones will bear, and then to be turned out of doors without sacks or money.’” This is what
happens, but the collier does attempt to fight back, and though the women “beat him extremely,”
he also “lent them some lusty buffets” (186). Ultimately, however, the women’s justice triumphs,
and Greene ends with a pious (and satirical) exhortation: “I pray God all such colliers be so
served …” (186).
6
Richard Levin cautions against making forceful claims about women in the theater audience,
but says that with the meager available evidence, “we are justified in concluding that during the
Renaissance women were generally regarded as a significant component of the theatre audience,
and that their interests and feelings seem to have been taken into account by at least some of the
playwrights of the period” (174). Andrew Gurr claims there were a “high proportion of women at
the playhouses” (55), and that “there are almost as many references to women playgoers as to the
artisan and apprentice class” (59), but describes feeling “a mildly despairing effort to establish
something like a statistical basis for this analysis of the social composition of playgoers” (59).
141

Even when this theater, through its fictions, invited women to take up the
subordinate positions masculine ideology defined as proper for them, the very
practice of playgoing put women in positions potentially unsettling to patriarchal
control. To be part of urban public life as spectator, consumer, and judge moved
the gentlewoman citizen outside of that domestic enclosure to which Gossen
would return her. (91)
The tacit invitation to self-subordination identified by Howard is complicated by her
reproduction of Gossen’s target group, the “gentlewoman citizen.” While women from the gentry
and aristocracy might have been in attendance at a “popular” theater such as the Red Bull, the
typical female audience was composed of “fishwives or apple-wives” (Gurr 60). Moreover,
women of the lower classes had a different relationship to patriarchy than their better-born and
wealthier sisters. While Gossen’s primary concern is for the virtue of his gentlewoman citizen,
virtue was an attribute of class distinction beyond the attainability of the prototypical fishwife,
who, with her complicated relationship between the domestic and emergent capitalism, existed as
7

a threatening liminal figure to female virtue. Furthermore, as discussed in the introduction,
Gosson problematically advocates for women to prefer their gossip communities to a visit to the
theater. He is not so much advocating for the domestic enclosure of gentlewomen citizens, as
Howard posits, as he is choosing between the lesser of two evils.
Although we ultimately cannot make any definitive claims regarding the intended
audience of Swetnam the Woman-hater, its staging and eventual publication reveal a number of
important clues about gender relations in the second decade of the seventeenth century: 1) that in

7

For more on this topic, see Natasha Korda’s article, “Gender at Work in the Cries of London,”
located in Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts, edited by Mary Ellen
Lamb and Karen Bamford.
142

having a play created to specifically appeal to “their” interests, women were considered to be a
desirable target demographic, 2) that this desirability probably had a great deal to do with the
fact that women must have had disposable income in order to attend the theater, and 3) the play
8

most likely had a male author, and there were undoubtedly men in the audience, both of which
indicate an interest in the topic that was not necessarily gender-specific. Given the copious
literary evidence of the period, the topic of putting the sexes on trial had a great deal of
widespread appeal. The genre of drama was often trial-like in its staging of social issues,
providing distinct, often conflicting views of critical issues, and condemning those with “morally
unacceptable” perspectives through correction or death. The Changeling typifies this approach,
staging male transgression in both its plot and subplot, and resolving the issues raised in
distinctive ways. The staged trial makes explicit what is frequently present in drama at a more
subliminal level.
The publication of Swetnam the Woman-hater, and more specifically, the intricate
woodcut that was produced expressly for its publication, indicates not only a literate public with
an interest in reading the play, but also the publisher’s confidence in recovering the money spent
on the outlay. The popularity and marketability of the phenomenon is most obviously seen in the
8

While the author of Swetnam the Woman-Hater is unknown, there is some evidence to suggest
Thomas Heywood. Heywood was the Red Bull’s resident author/playwright during the period in
which the play was staged (Gurr 113), but as Coryl Crandall notes, there is also evidence to
suggest Thomas Dekker or Thomas Drewe, both associated at various times with the Red Bull.
However, as Crandall admits, the Heywood hypothesis is seductive because of the playwright’s
history of engagement with women’s issues. Ultimately, as Crandall concludes, “in light of the
little evidence, about all one can do is agree with the hesitant suggestions of the Rev. Mr. Grosart
and Professor Wright: there is circumstantial evidence that Heywood had a hand in writing
Swetnam the Woman-hater. He was with the company at the time, and it is the kind of play he
could have written and the kind of play of which he most likely would have approved” (30).
Lynda Boose, however, claims the play was written by a group of women (200), and though she
provides no evidence to prove her claim, the notion of a female community producing a
concerted theatrical attack on Swetnam is an interesting one, even if it can never rise above the
point of conjecture.
143

evolution of the Swetnam pamphlet’s title page illustration and its eventual alignment with the
play that was written as a response to it. The first edition of the pamphlet, from 1615, features a
woman of the type roundly condemned by Swetnam in his pamphlet (fig. 4). She is dressed at the
height of fashion, with a ruff, elaborate hairpiece, jewelry, fan, and hoops. Swetnam warns his
audience against this type of woman, whose predilection for expensive clothing inevitably leads
to dishonor, not so much for herself as for the foolish man duped into taking responsibility for
her: “if she be deckt up in gorgeous apparell, then a thousand to one but she will love to walke
where she may get acquaintance, and acquaintance bringeth familiarity, and familiarity setteth all
follies abroch, and twenty to one that if a woman love gadding but that she will paune hir honour
to please hir fantasie” (15).
By 1634, however, the image of the ruinously expensive woman was replaced with a man
acting as judge, seated at a table, before him an open book, inkpot, and quill, calmly exhorting
one of the four women kept at bay by the court railings. The women are obviously angry – the
one in the upper-left corner is brandishing her fist, while the woman in the upper-right corner is
wielding either a quill or distaff. The woman in the lower-left corner is gesticulating, while the
woman in the lower-right corner, scowling with one fist planted on her hip, remonstrates with the
man. The woodcut clearly invokes the illustration on the title page of the 1620 play Swetnam the
Woman-hater, Arraigned by Women, which depicts Swetnam during his arraignment by the
female council (fig. 5). In that woodcut, he stands at the bar (his name is printed alongside the
figure) before a female judge – the Queen, Aurelia. Atlanta, the female prosecutor, reads his
indictment. A large group of women, all dressed as citizen wives, crowd against the bar. In spite
of their sartorial uniformity, effort was made to create facial individualization: some are smiling,
some talking, others scowling, depicting the boisterousness of the gossips in the play’s

144

arraignment scene. Coryl Crandall declares that “a more likely title for Swetnam the Womanhater would be Lisandro and Leonida, the names of the noble lovers whose story is the main
plot” (11), but the woodcut on the play’s title page, as well as the title itself, suggests that the
lovers are merely the vehicle for creating a situation in which early modern gender relations are
explored. Gerald Bentley concurs, stating, “the name of the play, the most sensational part of the
action, and no doubt its principal appeal were derived from Joseph Swetnam’s notorious
pamphlet, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, to which there are
many direct references in the play” (1417).
9

The 1634 edition of Swetnam’s pamphlet coincided with a revival of the play, and the
evolution of the woodcuts on the title pages of each text provides evidence suggesting the two –
the pamphlet and the play – became inextricably associated in the popular imagination. This in
turn suggests a certain amount of comfort (or at least interest) with the idea of publicly
retributive gossip communities avenging the ultimate domestic wrong – punishing the man
whose vociferous condemnation of women not only threatens the functionality of the domestic,
but also that of the nation. His arguments against the female sex condemn a princess to death,
threatening not only the monarchy (the princess’ two brothers are presumed dead in battles
against the Spanish, and she is the last surviving child of royal Sicilian blood), but by extension
the ability of the monarchy to deal with the encroaching Ottoman Empire. The play tropes
Swetnam’s particularly virulent brand of misogyny and its resultant destabilization of the family

9

Bentley writes, “The play was not immediately forgotten. About fifteen years after it was first
performed Thomas Nabbes referred to it in his Tottenham Court, acted at the Salisbury Court
theatre in 1633. In this play the Wife makes a clear reference in II.2 to the women’s big
arraignment scene in Swetnam the Woman-Hater: ‘Let’s get him arraign’d, as one was in a play.
Let me alone to aggravate his indictment to the Jury; which shall be twelve Midwives of my
acquaintance.’ […] This allusion, Bentley writes, “suggest[s] that in 1633 it may have been
recently performed, perhaps at the Salisbury Court” (1417-18).
145

as a global threat, and remarkably, it depicts a gossip community coming together to effectively
deal with the problem and restore social and political stability. What makes the choice of gossips
as administrators of social correction so interesting in this particular instance is that gossips
barely register in Swetnam’s pamphlet. In a text that enthusiastically, if scathingly and
injudiciously, excoriates nearly every aspect of women and their behavior, his criticism of
gossips is confined to two pages – approximately 3% of the pamphlet. Given that gossip
communities in the period were accused of every one of the epithets Swetnam deploys in the title
of his work (lewdness, idleness, frowardness, and inconstancy), this is a significant reorientation
of the argument for women’s inferiority, one which moves away from one of its usual targets.
Swetnam’s criticism of gossip is centered upon the power of the female tongue, which he
describes in terms of fear and invisibility. He writes that a woman’s tongue “is but a small thing
and seldome seene, but it is often heard, to the terror and utter confusion of many a man” (40).
This somewhat phallic description is evidence of the phenomenon noted by Lisa Jardine, who
writes that in the period, a woman’s tongue was perceptually aligned with “the ever-present
threat of female dominion in the home …” (104), particularly because it was perceived as “the
female weapon,” which, she argues, makes the tongue “the female counterpart of the penis”
(121). Lynda Boose agrees that the patriarchal discourse surrounding the female tongue “situates
female speech as a symbolic relocation of the male organ,” but she insists that patriarchy creates
its own paradox, and that “the obsession must directly acknowledge, even as it attempts to
suppress, the presence in woman of the primary signifier of an authority presumed to be
masculine” (204). It is in this paradox that gossips can negotiate the terms of the status quo, and
though Swetnam’s pamphlet does not link female sexual incontinence to women’s excessive
speech, Swetnam Arraigned by Women acknowledges the paradox of the female tongue through

146

the figure of the women’s advocate Atlanta, who, as the cross-dressed Lorenzo, figures a female
phallus.
In fact, Swetnam’s pamphlet refuses to link sexual incontinence with the tongue, instead
choosing to link sexual transgressions primarily with the female habit of draining the domestic
economy for personal aggrandizement. This is significant because the female tongue in
Swetnam’s pamphlet is allotted a great deal of power – in the two passages explored below,
Swetnam tells his readers a woman’s tongue is able to construct knowledge networks quite apart
from anything outside of men’s purview, and that assertion is neither challenged nor
undermined, as is usual in misogynistic tirades against women. Even more significantly, while he
argues that women’s tongues undermine domestic harmony by destroying the possibility of trust
between a husband and wife, he ultimately advises men to confide in their wives, because the
value of their advice outweighs the threat to the trust bond between spouses. Left unmentioned is
the possibility that a wife’s wise council might have originated in a gossips’ meeting.
He instead recites the typical complaint against gossips, that the gossip community
encourages women to undermine male primacy by sharing information outside of the male
purview. Swetnam informs his male readers that “if thou unfoldest any thing of secret to a
woman the more thou chargest her to keepe it close the more she will seeme as it were to be with
childe till she have revealed it amongst her gossips” (41). His use of trope of pregnancy as a
metaphor for secret knowledge was certainly not new (it is, in fact, one of the overwhelming
number of examples of his use of cliché), but his deployment in this particular instance is,
punning aside, quite telling. Swetnam uses a metaphor of childbirth, the cultural mode through
which gossips derived their power, to describe how women create and maintain female
relationships. He insists on the prevalence of this practice, exhorting his readership not to be

147

persuaded by women’s protestations that they do not share secrets amongst each other, because
“every woman hath one especiall gossip at the least which she doth love and affect above all the
rest, and unto her she runneth with all the secrets she knoweth” (41). This assertion is
complicated by his recommendation later in the text that a husband should, as proof of his
spousal devotion, “impart his secrets and counsell unto his wife, for many have found much
comfort and profit by taking their wives counsell” (53). This seeming contradiction is indicative
not only of Swetnam’s characteristic style, which Rachel Speght, addressing Swetnam directly,
identifies as the “excrement of your roaving cogitations” (7), but also of the form and
distribution of the gossip community. Within Swetnam’s seeming contradiction we see that the
gossip community’s strength lies in its resistance to social attacks. Swetnam does not devote
many pages to attacking gossips simply because he cannot. They were women who shared
secrets with each other, but they were also wives to whom husbands turned for advice and
counsel. It is this fact, vexing but undeniable, that gives gossip communities a social advantage,
and, to a certain extent, provides social immunity. Swetnam takes a few swipes at gossips, but
ultimately leaves them out of his condemnation of women, and this general omission sets the
stage for the play Swetnam the Woman-hater Arraigned by Women. In the play, it is his
underestimation of gossips, especially of their social function, that leads to his downfall and the
restoration of social order.
Swetnam Arraigned
Much of the critical attention of the anonymous 1620 play Swetnam the Woman Hater
Arraigned by Women exists in the footnotes of broader discussions about the gender controversy
in England. Prior to the play’s production, direct engagements with the debate had been largely
confined to pamphlets. Swetnam Arraigned is commonly presented as the culmination of the

148

early modern iteration of the ancient querelle des femmes creating a space in which the turmoil
of the pamphlet debates was enacted onstage.
Although the play’s title and woodcut are concerned with Swetnam, he appears in the
play’s subplot. The main plot begins in the devastated kingdom of Sicily, where the king,
Atticus, is grieving the death of his heir in the recently concluded war against Spain.
Additionally, his younger son Lorenzo “hath beene missing almost eighteene moneths, / And
10

none can tell whether aliue or dead” (1.1.11-12).

He becomes obsessed with the continuance of

his line, and his fixation leads, predictably, to tyranny. He locks away his only surviving child,
the princess Leonora, to prevent her from marrying Lisandro, the Prince of Naples and heir to a
rival kingdom. Atticus decrees that any unauthorized access to the princess will result in death,
and when the lovers are discovered, they are tried for treason. Using the misogynistic discourse
that bears a suspicious similarity to the sort circulating in England, the lovers each try to
implicate themselves for the crime in order to save the other (by claiming themselves to be
victims of the faults of their gender). The tactic results in a hung jury. In despair, the first judge
suggests a retrial where the sexes are called to account: “Let there be publique Proclamation
made / Throughout the Kingdome, that there may be found / Two Aduocates, to pleade this
difference / In publique disputation, Man and Woman …” (3.2.161-4). The turn to the comic
becomes apparent in the judge’s next lines, which outline the necessary qualifications to be an
advocate: “The wisest, and the best experience’d / That can be found, or heard of in the Land: /
Or any such will proffer of themselues / To vndertake the plea …” (ll. 165-8). The court
dissolves, and the scene shifts to introduce the audience to the women’s advocate, the presumeddead Lorenzo, who has up to this point been wandering around the Sicilian countryside covertly

10

All references from the play are from the edition edited by Coryl Crandall.
149

surveying the faults of the kingdom disguised as an Amazon. When Lorenzo asks Iago
(apparently the only uncorrupted nobleman at court) if “my poore Sister then withstood a triall?”
(3.2.1), Iago relates the substance of what passed in the courtroom. He admits that he was “so
vext” by the poor treatment of Leonida during the proceedings that he “could not stay for a full
conclusion” (ll. 13-14). He then quite reasonably asks Lorenzo why he is dressed as an Amazon,
to which Lorenzo replies, “To visit the sicke Court, / And free my Sister from captiuitie, / With
that good Prince Lisandro” (ll. 18-20).
Lorenzo’s choice of disguise has a great deal of allegorical significance for a play so
concerned with the issue of gendered access to justice. Not only is Atlanta the female phallus, as
has been discussed above, but Linda Woodbridge imbues the character with neo-platonic
attributes, positing that Lorenzo-as-Atlanta is “the all-sided human being, the union of male and
female” (316). That s/he becomes the female advocate during the gender trial indicates a shift in
the depiction of gossip communities. While it can be considered problematic to have a crossdressed man voicing the women’s arguments, it also signals a shift in focus from private
domestic concerns to larger social issues. The shift from a trial of two individuals to two sexes
initiates this refocus on the broader social question. Lorenzo’s presence sanctions this shift. He is
specifically troped as the only member of the royal court who both recognizes Atticus’ tyranny
and is in a position to correct the breakdown in social order signaled by the forced imprisonment
of Leonora. His disguise is crucial to granting him mobility (something impossible for a prince,
but possible for both an Amazon and a gossip), and the figure of an Amazon and choice of the
name “Atlanta” gestures to his role. It comes from the Greek for “balanced,” and so is ideal for a
character trying to achieve justice. It also, as Woodbridge notes, is a reference to his crossdressing, which she suggests is a political gesture, one made by the playwright to challenge the

150

11

common attribution of justice to men and mercy to women.

Woodbridge writes, “Lorenzo is an

intellectual hermaphrodite. He makes no false distinctions between ‘masculine’ valor and justice
and ‘feminine’ amiability and mercy” (316). Lorenzo’s disguise allows him to draw attention
not just to the overall corruption of the Sicilian system of justice, but to the form of its
corruption: it is fundamentally misogynistic.
The men’s advocate is quite literally the embodiment of misogyny: Joseph Swetnam,
who is depicted as being forced to flee England and take the alias Misogynos after the
controversial reception of his pamphlet. He enters the play in Act 1 fantasizing about the amount
of power his tract has given him over women:
I know’t will startle all our Citie Dames,
Worse then the roring Lyons, or the sound
Of a huge double Canon; Swetnams name,
Will be more terrible in womens eares,
Then euer Misogenysts hath beene. (1.2.3-9)
Given the fears raised in his pamphlet about the inability of husbands to control their wives’
tongues, the stated desire to dominate women’s aural capacity through the production of
excessive noise reveals that there is not going to be much in the way of psychological depth to
his characterization. This notion is enforced by his gloating recitation of the reception of his
pamphlet in England:
How my Bookes tooke effect! how greedily
The credulous people swallowed downe my hookes
How rife debate sprang betwixt man and wife!
11

This was not a particularly new challenge – Shakespeare had challenged the ascription years
earlier with Portia in The Merchant of Venice.
151

The little Infant that could hardly speake,
Would call his Mother Whore. O, it was rare! (1.2.45-49)
He takes credit for destabilizing the domestic situations of families across England, not only
causing schisms between wives and husbands but also breaking the bond between mothers and
their children. The comment also suggests that his pamphlet banks upon emotionally-driven
condemnations that have little or no basis in reality, and that women are being vilified for
fulfilling their normal and nearly inevitable biological roles – motherhood in particular. The
character’s description of his objectives and his glee indicate that he is himself aware that his
accusations are not legitimate or accurate. It is this last admission that implicitly authorizes the
gossip community to bring him to justice, an authorization that occurs because Swetnam’s
pamphlet imperils the maternal bond and disrupts female community.
He bumbles through the play, spewing various excerpts from his infamous pamphlet. He
is in the midst of this activity when a herald interrupts him to announce the public proclamation
on behalf of the king that the court seeks a male and a female advocate to take up the question of
“whether the Man or the Woman in loue, stand guilty of the greatest offence” (3.3.100-1).
Swetnam immediately volunteers because, as he tells the audience, “’tis a prize / Will make me
euer famous” (l. 109-10). He vows to the herald to shame womankind so greatly that it will
“make their painted cheeks looke red” (l. 114). Loretta, Leonora’s maid, reads the proclamation
on behalf of the queen to the women, and Lorenzo as Atlanta accepts, not to shame men, but
because “tis a cause so iust, / In equitie and vertue, in defence / Of wronged women, whose
distressed fames / Lye buried in contempt …” (ll. 132-5). The two sides are not trying to achieve
the same objective. The men seek to increase social injustice where it is less rationally and

152

behaviorally supportable, and the women attempt to create social justice where it is limited by
bias and misperception.
The court reconvenes, but it is obviously heavily biased toward the men. When Atlanta
addresses her preliminary remarks to the all-male judges (who refused to allow a woman to join
their ranks), s/he expresses the expected false modesty of claiming to feel “Dumbe feare and
bashfulnesse to speake before / Bold Orators of State, men graue and wise, That can at euery
breathing pause, correct / The slipp’ry passages of a womans speech” (ll. 48-51), which one
judge lecherously observes is “A quaint insinuation,” further stressing not only the extreme
deterioration of the State, but also the difficulty the women of the play face in being heard in a
fair and unbiased way. S/he is flattering the judges as well as framing herself as modest, and it is
at least a little ironic that this one judge comments in such a way as to accept the flattery but not
the modesty.
This exchange foreshadows the ultimate outcome of the gender debate. The women lose,
but the debate between Atlanta and Misogynos, and the subsequent action taken by women,
encapsulates gender relations in the period, and highlights the importance of the social role of the
gossip. Atlanta’s opening remarks are rehearsals of the standard defense of women utilized in the
querelle des femmes: that women are helpless victims of men’s predatory and corrupting natures,
and that courtship is merely pretense for lust. S/he relates that if women are not persuaded by
men’s “fained languishment” (3.3.112), they turn to more extreme measures, meant to destroy
the woman’s defenses by exploiting her tender heart:
They stalke into the presence of their Mistris,
Fold vp their armes, hang downe their wanton heads,
Cast loue-sicke glances, and as wofull Commas,

153

In this dumbe Oratorie, now and then they breathe
A passionate sigh, whereat the gentle nature
Of milde compassionate woman once relenting,
Straight they fall out into such sweet complaints
Of their sad suffrings, tuning words of Art,
Able to melt a gentle Eye in teares,
As they do speake. (3.3.119-28)
Atlanta concludes the argument by positing that although women are susceptible to these tactics,
it is through the fault of men and their exploitative methods, not any inherent defect in women.
Misogynos/Swetnam’s

counterargument,

equally

stereotypical,

is

that

women

deliberately encourage men’s advances, and that far from being men’s victims, they are in fact
men’s seducers. Though the extreme bias of the all-male court makes the outcome inevitable (the
women lose their argument), Misogynos’ rant against the female sex has an important deviation
from the original presented in the pamphlet. The stage character Misogynos philosophically
departs from his real-life counterpart in arguing that the female propensity to victimize men has
its source in the gossip community. He argues that gossip communities, which purport to fulfill
religious and social rituals, are actually sites for the clandestine teaching of illicit knowledge. He
says,
from their Cradles you shall see them take
Delight in making Babies, deuising Christnings,
Bidding of Gossips, calling to Vp-sittings,
And then to Festiuals, and solemne Churchings,
In imitation of the wanton ends

154

Their riper yeeres will ayme at. (ll. 165-70)
Much of Swetnam’s arguments about how women cultivate their beauty in order to ensnare men
is taken verbatim from the pamphlet, but his tracing the source of female corruption to gossip
rituals is unique to the play.
I propose that the reason for this shift of blame from “all women” to “gossips” is done by
the playwright in order to utilize a productive space where an actual reconciliation between the
sexes could be achieved. The gossip community, demonstrated in Greene’s “trial of the smock”
and Harman’s story of the walking mort, could, in certain unique and dire situations, convene an
unofficial court whose ruling and punishment was socially accepted. By invoking the methods
utilized by the gossip community (methods sanctioned by society, albeit uneasily) to provide an
alternative answer to the gender debates of the querelle des femmes, the playwright not only
corrects the social injustice perpetuated against women, but also demonstrates an important step
forward in the depiction of the gossip – the gossip community can capably participate in an
intellectual and theoretical debate.
Woodbridge reads Swetnam’s defeat of Atlanta as an allegory of the failure of humanistic
ideals represented by his/her hermaphroditic body. If we are to accept this interpretation, then the
implication is that when humanism fails, a different social value system asserts itself. In place of
elite and exclusionary knowledge that is the purview of men, the women coalesce in a social
formation that evades the hierarchical structures enforced even by the well-meaning Atlanta. The
social composition of the gossip community is more expansive than is usually portrayed – every
woman from the queen to the scold joins the cause. They capture Swetnam, drag him offstage to
stick him with pins, and bring him back alive to deliver the epilogue in a muzzle. The gossips’
forcible achievement of justice demonstrates that both advocates were wrong about women.

155

Though Swetnam is more obviously wrong about the nature of women, Atlanta’s defense of
women portrays the female gender as helpless victims of masculine persecution. The gossips
demonstrate not only that women are not merely objects to be acted upon, but also that they are
agents that can act for the common good. In doing so, they fulfill their educative function by
“teaching” Atlanta/Lorenzo about the nature of women.
Simon Shepherd notes that during the period when Swetnam Arraigned by Women was
written, “there is a currency of things Elizabethan as a political reference point” (212). This is
most strongly signaled in the person of Atlanta. One of the stock figures of Elizabethan
literature, the Amazon was an antiquated character by the end of the second decade of the
seventeenth century. Shepherd posits that this is a very deliberate invocation of the nostalgia for
the Elizabethan era in the latter half of the second decade. He claims that Lorenzo’s decision to
assume the disguise of an Amazon is to demonstrate how he “becomes the embodiment of a
12

desirable political alternative” (214) through the deliberate invocation of Elizabeth I.

Atlanta’s

loss to Swetnam thus indicates a perceptual shift from “traditional” (read: Elizabethan) ideas of
justice as the province of the court, dispensed by a single, virtuous figurehead, to justice as an
action performed by a group centered in the local and domestic – justice becomes a communal
activity. It is also important to note that Atlanta has a part in the proceedings, but she is a
member of the gossip community and defers to her sisters at various points during the

12

Shepherd’s claim is that the character of Lorenzo is to be interpreted as a surrogate for Prince
Henry, son and heir to James I, and who Shepherd claims “might have been seen as a spiritual
heir to Elizabeth I.” Henry died in 1612, around five years before the play was staged, and
Shepherd argues that Lorenzo is “a Henry-surrogate [who] dresses as an Elizabethan-type
Amazon to fulfill his political role. On Lorenzo are focused the sort of hopes that were
associated with Henry, the restoration of justice and the blessing of true love, and at the same
time he wears clothes that look back to Sidney. The dead Henry returns, as it were, to oversee the
world and to do so wears attire drawn from the available tradition of classical warrior women”
(215).
156

proceedings, further cementing the idea that Lorenzo, the heir apparent, is learning how to
govern in part through the gossips’ proceedings.
However, Shepherd also posits that it was always impossible for Lorenzo/Atlanta to win
the debate: “In a male court, Lorenzo, the male spokesman for women, can do nothing to help
the case of women. What needs to happen in the interests of true justice is for the action to step
outside the court, to enter into the ‘other’ world where women are anonymous and violent”
(216). While I agree Lorenzo/Atlanta loses because justice cannot exist within the corrupted
space of the court, I find his claim that justice is delivered by violent women operating
anonymously within an “other” space existing antithetically to the court to problematically elide
several of the key issues surrounding the idea of a gendered access to justice.
Although Shepherd argues that the play emphasizes shared governance and deference to
the public, associated (he suggests) with Queen Elizabeth, rather than autonomous tyranny
associated with King James, his claim that women can only achieve justice in the play through
violent and anonymous acts not only is factually erroneous (the group includes the queen
Aurelia), but also acts to undermine the basic female claim of the querrelle des femmes, that
women are capable of rationality and thus ultimately deserving of justice.

13

In a scene that

emphasizes the women’s interest in following the accepted social forms of justice, Swetnam is
14

captured

and brought before the assembled group of women, given a trial and found guilty.

Aurelia then addresses him with the rhetorical question, “How, thou inhumane wretch, what
13

This assumption of a mob mentality among the women of the play is also problematic if one
gives any credence to Lynda Boose’s notion that the play was written by women (200). It is
hardly in a female author’s best interest to portray a mindless mob of women out for revenge.
14
Although I do not have the luxury of exploring all of the gender implications of this plot twist
at length, Swetnam is captured during his failed attempt to lure Atlanta into meeting him alone
(so that he can capture her) by pretending to be in love with her. Atlanta defeats him, proving
that Swetnam is no fencer. (A fencing manual was his other publication.)
157

punishment / Shall we inuent sufficient to inflict, / According to the height of our reuenge?”
(5.2.156-58). The women’s answers, all extremely violent, were accepted state punishments for
treason in Tudor England. One cries, “let’s teare his limmes in pieces, ioynt from ioynt” (l. 159),
another suggests, “three or foure paire of Pincers, now red hot, / Were excellent” (ll. 160-1).
While the women’s initial suggestions are extraordinarily brutal, they eventually decide
on something more ignominious. When Aurelia exclaims, “Hang him, Slave, shall he dye as
noble a death as Caesar did? No, no: pinch him, pricke him”; a “small boy,” according to the
speech tag, cries out, “I have small Pins enow to serve us all” (l. 165).
implements, along with the presence

15

of the boy,

16

These homely

indicate that justice has moved from the

impersonal chaos of the court to the more immediate structure of the domestic. This
decentralization of justice occurs because justice cannot be administered, and so revenge acts
become the only way by which social justice can be achieved. The gossips depicted in Harman’s
tale of the walking mort enact this on a very small scale; in this play, the participation of women
from all walks of life – the queen, old women, a scold – demonstrates that the gossip community

15

I do not subscribe to Crandall’s editorial decision to change the speech tag from “A boy” in
the original text to “Young Woman.” Her justification is twofold. The first is that “besides
Misogynos and Swash, only women are present according to a previous stage direction, and A
Boy might well be referring to the actual boy who would be playing a woman’s part.” The
second is that “Old Woman and Scold seem carefully differentiated from A Boy; therefore, the
latter is probably not just a redundant reference to one of the men playing those women” (152).
While this change does have some logic to it, it nevertheless elides the various domestic
configurations that are represented by the gossips all being from visibly different classes and
social situations.
16
The boy is possibly an apprentice, but his membership in the group of women indicates that he
is at the very least too young to have a permanent presence in among adult men, which aligns
him with the situation of the changeling boy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In any case, his
presence and enthusiastic contributions to the proceedings suggest the possibility that the new
generation of men will be more sympathetic to the situation of women in society.
158

has moved from private rooms and local streets to become an openly politicized body that
addresses systemic flaws.
As Gail Paster has noted, shameful acts involving women are frequently enacted offstage.
However, in this play, Swetnam is twice shamed by women: he is first tied to a post and stabbed
with pins while onstage, and then he is taken offstage, where Atlanta delivers his sentence:
First, he shall weare this Mouzell, to expresse
His barking humour against women-kind.
And he shall be led, and publike showne,
In every Street I’the Citie, and be bound
In certaine places to a Post or Stake,
And bayted by all the honest women. (5.3.328-33)
Swetnam interrupts the sentence to mockingly observe that no honest women can be found “in
all the Citie” (l. 335) … “Then he shal be whipt quite through the Land, / Till he come to the
Sea-Coast, and then be shipt, / And sent to live amongst the Infidels” (ll. 337-339). His books are
also to be confiscated and burned. The gossips’ punishments of muzzling and public humiliation
are, as Boose points out, “the standard humiliations involved in the bridling of a scold” (201).
She posits that the play “seeks poetic parity through condemning Swetnam to endure precisely
the kinds of humiliation that women were sentenced to undergo based on nothing more than the
kinds of stereotyped accusations Swetnam’s pamphlet produces” (201). The gossips, those
stereotypical promulgators of idle talk, ironically use the muzzle to halt the volubility of
Swetnam’s harmful diatribes in order to preserve domestic tranquility. He is, in effect, silenced
through this punishment, and in broader cultural terms, his critical voice is eliminated through
the destruction of his misogynistic works.

159

This two-fold punishment, staged and recited, serves to ironically legitimate the women’s
actions by staging the trial (where, it must be noted, Swetnam is allowed to defend himself) and
then administering a “fair” punishment, which, though begun onstage, can only be completed
offstage. This is because off-stage punishment provides a necessary distance for an effective
interrogation of culture and ideological practices, becoming what Steven Mullaney terms a
“place of cultural commentary” (58). The invisible punishment of Swetnam does not then occur
in an “other” space, but rather in a community intimately implicated in the everyday – in going
from town to town, the women’s justice demonstrates its egalitarian, mobile quality: it is an
accessible, reproducible space to which all wronged persons have access. In this way, the actions
of the gossip community in this play resonate with Harman’s tale of the walking mort. The mort
is able to ally herself with a gossip community in order to achieve justice in spite of the fact that
she has no fixed abode, and this gossip community has the wherewithal to display Swetnam’s
punishment throughout the kingdom. The expansion of the punishment across the realm suggests
the linkage of the gossip community beyond the local.
The play concludes with Atlanta throwing off her Amazonian costume to reassume the
identity and duties of Lorenzo. The alliance of Amazons and gossips, so vital to the plot, was not
a completely unusual one, and was in fact, as Kristen McDermott observes, utilized by Ben
Jonson in The Masque of Queens and Epicoene. In both, a “comic ‘chorus’ of androgynous
women … threaten[s] traditional values while satirically functioning as gossips, attending and
assisting a powerful female who more directly threatens the peace and stability of a male
authority figure” (63). She concludes that “both groups of ‘gossips’ are ultimately silenced and
subdued by an Amazonian figure who is nominally female, but who embodies male virtues
consistent with the world of the text” (63), a feature of Swetnam Arraigned, which concludes

160

with the disbanding of the gossips and the destruction of the character of Atlanta so that Lorenzo
can assume his rightful place as heir to the kingdom.
Whereas McDermott sees Jonson’s treatment of gossips and their Amazon leaders as an
attempt to “frustrat[e] the alliance between the gossips and their androgynous leader” in order to
“[set] a form of feminized disruptive speech against a male-directed model of productive
discourse,” (64) I argue that despite the dissolution of Atlanta’s presence and androgyny into a
more simple division between genders, the outcome supports the idea of more equitable justice
for male and female transgressors. The play also expands the scope of female influence and
justice, representing gossips not just has having heretofore unrepresented intellectual potential,
but also in having that potential be fulfilled without patriarchal reprisal. Lorenzo’s time as
Atlanta, as well as his participation in the gossips’ punishment of Misogynos/Swetnam, suggests
an expansion of the gossips’ role from locally interrogating social infractions to arraigning larger
cultural imbalances.
The Staple of News
The trend of expanding the gossip’s role of cultural arraignment is explored more directly
in Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News. Though The Masque of Queens and Epicoene portray
gossips as the producers of disruptive speech as diametrically opposed to a male-centered model
of productive discourse, Jonson’s later comedies complicate his earlier depictions of gossips’
social roles. The Staple of News, which appeared nine years after The Devil is an Ass, features
four gossips used as a framing device to provide commentary on the action of the play. The
gossips represent the knowledge network that the Staple of News (the distribution center through
which news was produced and disseminated) intends to supplant.

161

The Staple of News is not an easy play. Richard Levin calls it “the most admirable of
Jonson’s later works” (Levin, Multiple Plot, 184). Jonson, always interested in challenging his
audiences, offers a morality plot involving the adventures of Pennyboy Junior, who turns twentyone as the play begins, inheriting £60,000. His path from prodigality to virtue is the substance of
the action, as he meets various figures trying to steal his inheritance and corrupt his morals.
Jonson also satirizes emergent capitalism (specifically, the abuse of wealth) in the figure of Lady
Aurelia Clara Pecunia and her servants: her nurse, Mortgage, her waiting women, Statute and
Band (Bond), and her chambermaid, Wax. Pecunia and Pennyboy Junior’s romance is frequently
disrupted by her other suitors, all of whom are vying for her substantial wealth. Devra Rowland
Kifer ambitiously describes the play as “topical satire, morality-allegory, satirical-romantic
festive comedy,” and while she claims this extraordinary generic hybridity is “the source of the
play’s richness,” she also admits that it is “the source of its diffuseness, which is its weakness”
(329). One scholar recently described it as “a dispersed and fragmented work – rambling,
paratactic, odd” (Rockwood 135), but recognizes that the play “was bound to leave audiences
unsettled” because “its capitulation to the naïve pleasures of the conventional prodigal play is
balanced uneasily against a sophisticated attack on the corrosive effects of contemporary
political propaganda” (135-6), which is the “staple” of news referred to in the title.
Perhaps the most anomalous quality of this unusual play is the characters who frame the
play’s action in the intermeans between each act. They are four self-identified gossips, Tattle,
Expectation, Censure, and the de facto leader of the group, Mirth, who tells the Prologue that
they are “persons of quality … and women of fashion” whose purpose in attending the theater is

162

17

“to see and be seen” (Induction, ll. 8-9).

When the gossips demand to sit onstage, the Prologue

expresses some apprehension: “But what will the noblemen think, or the grave wits here, to see
you seated on the bench thus?” to which Mirth replies, “Why, what should they think, but that
they had mothers, as we had, and those mothers had gossips (if their children were christen’d) as
we are, and such as had a longing to see plays and sit upon them, as we do, and arraign both
them and their poets?” (ll. 15-21). This portrayal of gossips marks a turning point for Jonson in
his representations of autonomous women. His previous portrayals of gossips, in Epicoene and
18

The Masque of Queens,

are hardly commendatory of women’s birth room rituals or social

roles. For his next comedy, The Magnetic Lady, Jonson actually stages a lying-in chamber
(highly unusual in the period), and ultimately usurps the midwife function of conferring identity
19

onto the characters of the play.

Jonson’s gossips in Staple, then, are much more important to

understanding the representational shift in the cultural importance of the gossip than has
previously been acknowledged. Previous representations of gossips’ arraignments focus on
correcting damaging acts and attitudes toward women’s domestic roles. Even the gossip
17

All quotations from the play are taken from the Regents edition, edited by Devra Rowland
Kifer.
18
Few scholars have examined Jonson’s treatment of gossips or his portrayal of birth room
rituals. For an examination of how Jonson used gossips as the locus of female disruptive speech
that needs to be conquered by male regulation in The Masque of Queens and Epicoene, see
Kristen McDermott, “Jonson’s Gossips and the Stuart Family Drama.” In Early Theatre 9.1
(2006): 61-83. Jonson’s attack on gossips was specifically tailored to appeal to James I, who had
been extremely critical of women’s public roles and birthing rituals. See Chapter 2 for a
discussion of James’s curtailment of women’s right to perform lay baptism.
19
For an examination of Jonson’s usurpation of the midwife function in order to conceal and
reveal important birth room secrets about characters’ parentage in his comedy The Magnetic
Lady, see Janelle Jenstad, “’Smock-secrets’: Birth and Women’s Mysteries on the Early Modern
Stage,” in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Eds. Kathryn M. Moncrief and
Kathryn R. McPherson. The Magnetic Lady is one of the few early modern plays to depict the
lying-in chamber onstage, suggesting perhaps Jonson’s fascination with the female space of the
birth room was greater than most.
163

community in Swetnam Arraigned by Women has this threat as its impetus to action. The gossips
in Staple, however, have no direct stake in the play’s content, as it provides no overt denigration
of women’s social roles and perpetuates relatively few (for Jonson) female stereotypes.
According to the majority of the play’s scholarship, Jonson stages a gossip community
who provides commentary on the play in order to provide a proxy audience. Devra Rowland
Kifer describes the gossips as “the most lively characters of the play,” and suggests that their
portrayal is a form of theatrical realism, providing “a credible and vivid depiction of
unsophisticated theater-goers, speaking forever in the colloquial forms and rhythms of early
seventeenth-century Londoners” (337). Paradoxically, though, Kifer posits that the supposedlyrealistic gossips exist in a moment of “holiday license,” and that “on an ordinary day, their
behavior would be intolerable. On this occasion, though, despite their lack of knowledge,
morality, and taste, they are free to arraign both poet and play” (338). They do this, Kifer argues,
in order for Jonson to “control the audience’s responses indirectly and to forestall criticism”
(338). However, Kifer does not address the problem of asserting the realism of the theatrical
gossips when the gossip Mirth early in the Induction declares her parentage as “the daughter of
Christmas and the spirit of Shrovetide” (ll.11-12). Jonson, like Middleton in A Chaste Maid in
Cheapside, deploys the festive function of gossips, and in doing so paradoxically both undercuts
and reinforces their social efficacy. Each recognizes the social power of the gossip – Middleton
puts his gossips in the middle of the action, and Jonson uses his to frame the action.
Robert Jones suggests that Jonson’s decision to use the gossips as a framing device is part
of his attempt to revive the morality tradition. He argues the gossips are a “weapon in the
onslaught with which he attempted to jolt his audience into the proper stance toward the vices
and virtues in his play” (75). Though Jones does not directly invoke the concept of shame as the

164

“weapon” by which Jonson secures his audience’s compliance, he clearly sees the gossips as
tools created by Jonson to shame his audience: “He simply has the gossips who form the frame
audience on stage make all the wrong responses, so that if we are inclined to cavil at the play for
being dull or object to the spoilsport tone of its moral spokesman Pennyboy Canter we are
inevitably associating ourselves with the blatantly foolish and malicious gossips” (76). Though
the gossips do eventually misinterpret the play’s events (during the Third Intermean), the
assumption that the gossips exist solely to serve as a constant negative reminder to the audience
to police their internal responses to the play does not acknowledge that many of their responses
to the play are accurate and insightful. Thus, a more nuanced understanding of their function is
called for. They cannot simply be seen as a surrogate audience who are being shamed for their
ignorance.
Catherine Rockwood provides the most nuanced reading of the gossips’ role to date. She
agrees with previous scholars that the gossips are on some level a surrogate audience, but she
argues that the gossips are educative, and not in a manner intended to be wholly negative. First,
she claims, they represent “a particular type of popular entitlement; they stand for spectators who
feel it is their right to openly critique public stage drama,” (136) a claim that, although
Rockwood does not say so, highlights the appropriateness of gossips for this role. Though the
gossips sitting onstage remind scholars of Nell, The Burning Pestle’s citizen wife who
commandeers the play in order to hear her ideal play,

20

the gossips state that their purpose is to

be visible, and to be seen “arraigning” the play, a term that by 1625 (when Staple was first
staged) had very specific connotations where groups of women were concerned, thanks in large
20

Richard Levin compares the gossips to Nell insofar as they all have comments that “are
determined primarily by class rather than gender” (“Women” 169). Kifer observes that the
gossips are similar to “Beaumont’s Citizen and his Wife” because they all constitute a “credible
and vivid depiction of unsophisticated theater-goers” (337).
165

part to Swetnam Arraigned. Indeed, Staple was produced shortly after Swetnam Arraigned, and
its eventual publication five years later was preceded just a few years earlier by Swetnam’s
revival, suggesting that the two plays were tapping into a larger cultural phenomenon. In using
four gossips as his framing device, Jonson capitalizes on the multiple roles of the gossip:
educative, festive, and the creators and maintainers of a sizeable communication network.
Rockwood argues that the gossips function as “an indigenous English dramatic tradition in the
talkative vein of Thomas Nashe’s Will Summer. They exhibit an undesirable preference for
squibs and slapstick characters […] but, on the other hand, their conversation evolves into a
useful capsule history of native English morality drama up to and including the production of
The Staple of News” (136). Since dramatic representations of gossips predate Nashe’s character,
it is important to emphasize that the gossips actually form a distinct dramatic tradition, and it is
that specific tradition that Jonson utilizes. The gossips represent a knowledge distribution
network considerably older and arguably more controversial than the emergent news agencies
Jonson is satirizing in his play. From this angle, Jonson’s decision to use gossips as a framing
device is logical, because gossips would be considered the arbiters of effective news creation and
distribution (ironically, for the most part).
Jonson first uses the gossips in their traditional capacity as birth room attendants. When
they are startled by the flaming torches brought onstage by the tiremen, the Prologue soothes
them, explaining the torches are to light the stage to begin the play, not to set off fireworks. He
then discloses to them the backstage dilemma, troping it as a difficult labor: “The truth is, there
are a set of gamesters within in travail of a thing call’d a play and would fain be deliver’d of it,
and they have entreated me to be their man-midwife, the Prologue, for they are like to have a
hard labor on’t” (ll. 52-56). Though he does not explicitly call on the gossips to assist him in

166

birthing the play, the metaphor of the tiring-house as a birthing chamber was a familiar one in the
period, and additionally, the gossips do not object to the symbolism, further indicating its
familiarity. Moreover, their commentary exists to create and foster audience response, much as
the real life gossip’s role was to assist in a successful delivery and foster a child through its early
years.
Further emphasizing the role of gossips in assisting the birth of the play, Tattle responds
to the Prologue’s description of the production of the play as a difficult labor by blaming the
playwright, saying that if the production is difficult, “then the poet has abus’d himself, like an
ass, as he is” (l. 56). Mirth, the apparent leader of the gossips (it is she who brings the gossips
onstage and demands stools for their comfort), intervenes to defend the absent playwright,
placing the difficulty with the actors: “no, his actors will abuse him enough, or I am deceiv’d,”
and as evidence of the playwright’s faultlessness, she reveals she has been in the tiring-room, her
description of the playwright resembling a woman in labor:
Yonder he is within (I was i’the tiring house awhile to see the actors dressed)
rolling himself up and down like a tun i’the midst of ’em, and spurges. Never did
vessel of wort or wine work so! His sweating put me in mind of a good Shrovingdish (and I believe would be taken up for a service of state somewhere, an’t were
known), a stew’d poet! He doth sit like an unbrac’d drum with one of his heads
beaten out. For that you must note, a poet hath two heads as a drum has (one for
making, the other repeating), and his repeating head is all to pieces. They may
gather it up i’the tiring-house, for he hath torn the book in a poetical fury and put
himself to silence in dead sack, which, were there no other vexation, were
sufficient to make him the most miserable emblem of patience. (ll. 51-73)

167

Not only does Jonson portray himself as a feminized leaky vessel who profusely sweats and
spurges (froths), but he also identifies poets as parent/creators, which he had done before
21

Staple.

Ernst Robert Curtius notes that the metaphor of the poem as offspring can be traced to

Plato’s Symposium, where art (such as poetry) is considered more pure than human children
22

because it is generated in the soul rather than the body.

Curtius then traces the metaphor

through the classical and medieval periods, and makes note of the frequency of the metaphor in
the early modern (133). Shakespeare, Sidney, and Jonson all use childbearing metaphors, as do
many others. Terry Castle observes, “The English Renaissance poets are at ease with the
metaphor: they employ it in highly self-referential contexts,” but she posits that they “do not link
it with any aesthetic or epistemological theory, it remains for them an obviously natural
psychologically convenient mode for designating the act of versifying” (196). Castle reads a shift
occurring with the rise of the neoclassical movement, specifically in Dryden’s satiric poem
MacFlecknoe, which, she claims, features “a distinct transformation first of all of the values
associated with the figure and, strikingly, an imminent rejection of the image [of the pregnant
poet] as a metaphor for the poet’s own creativity” (197). In this particular instance, Castle
considers drama and poetry to be discrete genres, so her claim that “MacFlecknoe represents …
the first appearance of the childbirth metaphor in English poetry in a relentlessly satiric context”
(198), may be correct by some standards, but it does not take into account the fact that many
poets were also playwrights. While she may not find evidence of a destabilization of the birth

21

In the short lyric poem “On My First Son,” he calls his son his “best piece of poetrie” (l.10).

22

He locates it in “Plato’s doctrine of Eros,” when “Diotima sets forth that all men are governed
by a strong love of fame and immortality. Many seek to immortalize themselves by begetting
children, but others ‘beget more in soul than in the body.’” The pursuit of the beautiful creates a
spiritual begetting, and so, Curtius concludes, “the works of the poets … are their children” (1323).
168

metaphor in poetry until Dryden, I argue the metaphor was being challenged in drama much
earlier than the Restoration, and one example of that is located in the Prologue of The Staple of
News. The prologue’s use of gossips to problematize the birth metaphor not only gestures toward
the increased intellectual role of the gossip in this period, but also highlights their continuing
multiple social functions.
The multiplicity of their social functions does not guarantee their wholehearted social
acceptance or integration, however, which Jonson signals even before the play properly begins.
The play’s opening shows that the gossips’ presence onstage has created instability and dissent
throughout the playhouse. The Prologue, who had been interrupted when the gossips inserted
themselves onstage, begins again, but his opening is slightly different after the gossips come
onstage. Before the gossips situate themselves onstage, the Prologue had begun with, “For your
own sake, not ours –,” but after the gossips, the Prologue resumes, but with a difference. He
begins, “For your own sakes, not his,” and the subsequent lines reveal that not only has a schism
been created between playwright and actors, but also between the playwright and the audience,
apparently caused by the gossips’ onstage presence. This would seem to undermine the purpose
of staging gossips to assist in staging the play, but the Prologue continues, revealing that the
gossips are there to embody a new female audience member: “… he bade me say, / Would you
were come to hear, not see, a play. / Though we his actors must provide for those / Who are our
guests here in the way of shows, / The maker hath not so; he’ld have you wise / Much rather by
your ears then by your eyes” (ll. 1-6). Here, the Prologue reveals that the schism between
playwright and actor is a reiteration of the debate over where the most important content of a
play lies: in its words or in its visual interpretation.

169

It is fitting to have gossips at the center of this debate, because the perception of their
function encompasses both modes of presentation. As women, they were thought to be
particularly susceptible to spectacle, and as gossips, they were considered exceptionally attuned
to aural/oral methods of communication. Also, as I argue in Chapter Two, one of the main roles
of gossips is interpretative. Thus the acknowledgment of their capacity to listen, not just to
speak, and to learn and disseminate knowledge through listening (rather than being fooled or
influenced only by the visual, which is used as the source of the physical humor to which their
representations are susceptible) is in parallel to their role as arbiters of legitimacy in the birth
room. If Jonson is satirically representing the gossips, then his exhortation is a demand for them
to be more attentive onstage then they are typically wont to be in the birth room – a stance that
reinforces the depiction of gossips in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.
The Prologue then goes on to forestall stereotypical gossips’ behavior by stating the
playwright “prays you’ll not prejudge his play for ill” because of inattentiveness:
Because you mark it not and sit not still,
But have a longing to salute or talk
With such a female and from her to walk
With your discourse,
to what is done and where,
How, and by whom, in all the town but here. (ll. 7-12)
This rebuke is not only directed at earlier city comedies, but also at the gossips, whose names –
mirth, tattle, expectation, and censure – are characteristics condemned by the prologue in this
passage.

170

The Prologue’s answer to the threat of disruption through female inattention and
obsession with local town matters is to urge engagement with the new potential Jonson’s play
brings to the stage: “But yet the stage might stand as well / if it did neither hear these things nor
tell. / Great noble wits, be good unto yourselves / And make a difference ‘twixt poetic elves and
poets …” (ll. 17-21). The difference between the two, according to the Prologue, is that the poet
is educative, and “can instruct your youth / And keep your acme in the state of truth” (ll. 25-6).
There are several interesting points to make about this passage. Jonson’s prologue is
addressing a female audience – the gossips, yes, but also the women the prologue urges to hear
the play. Moreover, though there is a strong vein of satire in the prologue’s speech, such as
calling the women “great noble wits,” Jonson is still urging the women to exercise their capacity
for reason and judgment, which gestures towards gossips’ increasing social and legal
visibility/responsibilities. Just as women were being increasingly depicted as “arraigning”
cultural threats to womanhood, so too were they increasingly a legal presence. Tim Stretton
observes that the early modern period “was an intensely legal age” in England, and that
“litigation touched the lives of a greater proportion than ever before, whether as suitors, jurors,
witnesses or deponents, and not just in London but elsewhere as well. And despite the best
efforts of moralists it touched the lives of women as well as men …” (65). Scholars have
demonstrated that women were involved in the legal process at several levels,

23

and that

phenomenon would have helped to naturalize and legitimate the idea of women’s abilities to act
in the complex systems of justice.

23

Stretton’s text, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England, is an excellent reference point
for the topic, as is Amy Erickson’s Women and Property in Early Modern England and Women,
Property, and Letters of the Law, a collection edited by Nancy Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson,
and A.R. Buck.
171

In addition to addressing a female audience and having gossips arraigning the play, the
gossips do not enact the stereotypes described by the Prologue. They reserve their commentary
for the intermeans between the acts, and despite the opinion of some scholars, their commentary
shows they engage with the play and evaluate it on its own merits, even going so far as to judge
it against other plays. However, they are not able to maintain this judicious perspective, and by
the third intermean, they disinvest from the mode of information exchange being depicted. When
Mirth asks Censure how she likes the news exchange onstage, Censure replies, “Oh, they are
monstrous, scurvy, and stale! And too exotic, ill cook’d, and ill dish’d!” (ll. 14-15). Rockwood
believes the shift in the gossips’ capacity for perception is merely a revelation of their inherently
insular attitudes: “The parochial outlook of the four London ladies becomes increasingly evident
as the play goes on, and so in a sense it is inevitable they would be repelled by news that is not
concerned with the world they know” (138). She believes that the gossips’ rejection of foreign
news as too exotic is part of Jonson’s project to force the audience into agreeing with his
personal politics, which is that the corontos, the newssheets relating foreign news, are dangerous
because they have the potential to stir political unrest in England. Rockland argues that Jonson’s
gossips represent an opposing opinion to the corontos, but that it is the wrong one. She writes
that Jonson “has set up a depiction of the News Office that appalls the narrow imagination of the
gossips. He has, however, depicted their alienation from the Office in such a way that a genuine
audience cannot simply agree with them (as we cannot simply agree with anything that they say,
at all). Their commentary necessitates a careful look at what is being vended out of the Office,
and a precise identification of what is wrong with it” (140). While Rockwood believes the
gossips to be instrumental in Jonson’s ideological project to persuade audiences to reject foreign
corontos, it is not within her scope to take up the question of why Jonson uses gossips. The easy

172

answer is, of course, that gossips represent a form of knowledge distribution Jonson wishes to
discredit, and so he aligns them with corontos as equally meriting satiric treatment, though from
opposite ends of the spectrum. Just as the corontos are too obsessed with foreign and potentially
politically destructive news, so too is gossip overly obsessed with localized particulars that are
also potentially politically destructive.
However, that explanation does not engage with the importance of Jonson’s depiction.
Though he is using the gossips to urge the audience to take a middle ground, the gossips also
signal a nostalgia for an Anglicized knowledge network that has nothing to do with “foreign”
corontos. The gossips’ rejection of the “foreign” exoticized news is significant in part because of
its complexity. Previous representations (even within the Jonsonian canon) depict gossips as
voraciously absorbing anything newfangled and foreign.

24

Although they do show themselves to

be most concerned with “who kiss’d the butcher’s wife with the cow’s breath, and what bets won
and lost; how much grist went to the mill, and what besides” (3rd Intermean, ll. 25-28), the play
also demonstrates the gossips’ civic engagement amidst the satire. The play's representation of
gossips gestures toward an increased public, intellectual presence for gossips, but in typical
Jonsonian fashion, he undercuts that presence with satire. He allows the gossips’ heightened
presence, but ridicules the intellectual gesture of their onstage arraignment of the play by making
one of the gossips’ strengths, a wide-ranging and engaged local network, seem provincial.
However, if the gossips had been actively interested and engaged with foreign news, this too
would have been a source of ridicule and held up as an example of women extending themselves
beyond their capacities. Jonson’s complex treatment of the gossips suggests they are not just
24

The most famous example is from Epicoene, where a husband of one of the gossips describes
his wife: “A most vile face! And yet she spends me forty pound a year in mercury and hogs’
bones. All her teeth were made i’the Blackfriars, both her eyebrows i’the Strand, and her hair in
Silver Street. Every part o’ the gown owns a piece of her” (4.2.83-86).
173

being used to represent women’s behavior and public roles, but rather the behavior of the general
public toward news and information.
The English were notoriously interested in news, so much that it became a marker of
national identity. In 1591, John Florio wrote that inquiring after the news was always “the first
question of an Englishman,” and Adam Fox, citing numerous examples of early modern
pamphlets, claims that, “it was the customary greeting, the opening conversational gambit for
everyone” (341). The desire for news was so pervasive, Fox argues, that it was even lamented
from the pulpit. He quotes a Portsmouth preacher who complained that his parishioners “reherse
and tell nothing but gossips tales, and newes, that love to have their tongues to runne through the
world, and to be medling in other mans matters … but if any question shall be put as concerning
religion, they grow as mute as fishes” (341). The preacher’s complaint suggests the two terms
(gossip and news) were aligned in the English imagination (as does the woodcut “The Severall
Places You May Hear News,” which is explored in the Introduction). While the preacher
vociferously complained about the chattiness of his flock, apparently not all members of the
clergy felt that way, as evinced by the country vicar mentioned in Act 1 scene 4. In this
extremely brief scene (20 lines), a woman from the country comes to the Staple office for “a
groatsworth of any news, I care not what, / To carry down this Saturday to our vicar” (ll. 11-12).
Although it is such a short scene, it reveals an important shift in the gossip network. While the
gossip community retains the capacity to bridge town and country, the country woman goes to
the Staple to obtain her news, rather than to the traditional sites of gossiping, such as the
bakehouse, the alehouse, or the market.
Thus Jonson’s gossips embody not just the female penchant for irrelevant conversation,
but a mode of knowledge-sharing that was coded as distinctly “English.” The play sets up a shift

174

in knowledge networks from traditional gossiping to the professionalized, masculinized site of
the Staple, but it gets overwhelmed by the play’s insistent focus on the romantic resolution
between Pennyboy Junior and Pecunia. The gossips complain bitterly about this, creating a
petition to “censure” the playwright to protest what they interpret as the grave flaws in the play’s
structure. They all affix their names to the censure, which, after an exhaustive list of
recommendations for ways in which the playwright can properly punish the play’s transgressors,
concludes with the desire to have “two large sheets of paper” or “a skin of parchment” be
“dedicated to the sustaining of the Staple – / Which their poet hath let fall most abruptly!” (ll.
69-74). After they have submitted their censure, they disappear, along with the Staple. The last
act is devoted to the restoration of social equilibrium (the reformation of Pennyboy Junior and
his marriage to Pecunia).
The disappearance of the play’s framing device as well as its central set piece is a drastic
and puzzling move. Kifer explains their disappearance through their link to the social license
granted with the invocation of the festive: “the holiday license of the characters, in the play
proper and in the framing scenes, is at an end. […] For just a moment at the play’s end, Jonson’s
ideal society is realized. Having learned to shun the extremities of Shrovetide self-indulgence
and Lenten abnegation, the characters in the last scene give promise of rational, temperate lives
and decorous behavior” (343-4). While this is one possibility, I argue another: that much like ale
production and distribution a century earlier, the gossips are edged out by the
masculinizing/professionalizing of one of their primary modes of identity, and that their
representation as misunderstanding the play indicates their inability to maintain a “good”
knowledge network. Jonson walks a very fine line in this play, as fine as the line between news
and gossip. He represents the practice of gossip as not wholly bad, and the gossips as reasonably

175

intelligent, engaged individuals who do not disrupt the play with their talk. They are, however,
limited in their capacity to understand what is presented to them, and so are portrayed as
incapable of maintaining a knowledge network. While Staple’s gossips are not as incapable as
the gossips of Chaste Maid, who are portrayed as unable to even correctly identify an infant’s
paternity, Jonson refuses to show his audience anything further of the gossips or the Staple, as if
he is reluctant to play out their roles to their logical conclusions. While the gossips are able to
outline the problems plaguing the Staple of News, they are not allowed to enact their proposed
solutions. This indirectly contrasts with the agenda of the playwright of Swetnam Arraigned,
who actively promotes the view that women (specifically gossips) can effectively enact social
judgment and implement social justice, which suggests that the expanding intellectual role of the
gossip was not an enterprise wholeheartedly embraced by all. Still, their critiques serve to
modify the Staple, showing that a new knowledge network has been created, one that
appropriates their modes of exchanging information (as is seen with the country woman
preferring the Staple as a news source), providing the Staple with a new opportunity to begin
again, and properly this time, with an appropriately nationalistic, but not localized, focus.
This chapter explores two very different trajectories for intellectualization of the gossip.
Swetnam Arraigned is an overtly political piece that trusts gossips to police society. While the
physical community is symbolically disbanded at the end of the play, its efficacy as a network
and as a social corrective remains firmly in place. The Staple of News, on the other hand, is much
more reluctant to let gossips fully engage with their culture, allowing them to arraign what they
see and hear, but disappearing them before they act on their judgments. While the physical
gossip community of Staple remains intact – insofar as they vanish as a unit – they could be
thought to have failed in their effort to extend the place and pertinence of their judgments beyond

176

the local. The two plays provide a contrast between a community whose intellectual and social
roles demonstrate sweeping civic engagement and a community that remains relatively local and
insular. This might provide an answer as to why their protests against the global nature of news
fails to be enacted, despite the efforts they make to offer a corrective, and why they disappear at
the end.
Of the two models examined in this chapter, Jonson’s proves to be the one that endures.
The Coda explores how Margaret Cavendish takes up the gossip community’s potential as a site
in which women can foster their capacity for intellectual development later in the century, but it
proves to be an unsustainable model. The gossips’ movement toward the intellectual comes at
the cost of their physical community. The intellectualization of the gossip is the end of the gossip
as a cultural actor with multivalent roles.

177

CODA
A Parting of Ways
“Ladies, Gentlewomen, and other Inferiours, but not Less Worthy, I have been Industrious to
Assemble you together, and wish I were so Fortunate, as to perswade you to make a
Frequentation, Association, and Combination amongst our Sex, that we may unite in Prudent
Counsels, to make our Selves as Free, Happy, and Famous as Men, whereas now we Live and
Dye, as if we were Produced from Beast rather than from Men; for Men are Happy, and we
Women are Miserable, they Possess all the Ease, Rest, Pleasure, Wealth, Power, and Fame,
whereas Women are Restless with Labour, Easeless with Pain, Melancholy for want of
Pleasures, Helpless for want of Power, and Dye in Oblivion for want of Fame; Nevertheless,
Men are so Unconscionable and Cruel against us, as they Indeavour to Barr us of all Sorts or
Kinds of Liberty, as not to Suffer us Freely to Associate amongst our Own Sex, but would fain
Bury us in their Houses or Beds, as in a Grave; the truth is, we Live like Bats or Owls, Labour
like Beasts, and Dye like Worms.”
1

(Cavendish, Female Orations I, From Orations of Divers Sorts [1662])

Given Margaret Cavendish’s current status as proto-feminist icon, it may come as a
surprise to discover that the ardent champion of women’s pursuit of freedom and happiness – a
goal which she specifically states can be achieved through “a Frequentation, Association, and
Combination amongst our Sex” – had a strong dislike for gossips. As this dissertation has
demonstrated, gossip communities negotiated the complex and frequently contradictory social
rules dictating “proper” female behavior by maintaining multiple social roles. In so doing, they
offered women a mode of expressing friendship and solidarity, exchanging information that was
1

Reproduced in Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, edited by Sylvia Bowerbank and
Sara Mendelson (143).
178

not just of personal interest but also important to the functioning of the community, resolving
domestic injustices, and pursuing pleasure. Superficially, a gossip community has the potential to
offer nearly everything Cavendish wants for women. At the very least, the community offered
some protection to women to prevent them from what she sees as their relentlessly inescapable
condition of being “Restless with Labour, Easeless with Pain, Melancholy for want of Pleasures,
Helpless for want of Power.” Yet she has a history of depicting gossips negatively, especially in
her letters. However, her plays complicate the female condition and relationship that seem to be
so simplistically negative in her letters, and in fact, in The Convent of Pleasure, she utilizes the
communal rituals she derides in her letters in order to create a space dedicated to intellectual
autonomy and the pursuit of pleasure.
Before turning to the play, let us examine Cavendish’s representation of an “actual”
gossip community. She describes her harrowing experience in Letter 103 of the Sociable Letters
(1664). Though there is a strong vein of irony throughout the piece, one gets the sense of how
disappointing and discomfiting the situation is for her. She writes that she was invited “to Name
the Lady B.Rs. Child” and expresses some light contempt because the affair turns out to be
essentially a rehearsal of stereotypical gossiping behavior at a lying-in: “being most Married
Women, as is Usual at such Gossiping Meetings, their Discourse was most of Labours and
Child-beds, Children and Nurses, and Houshold Servants, and of Preserving, and such like
2

Discourses as Married Women and Mistresses of Families usually have” (112). Cavendish is
slightly bored with the proceedings until the women begin to relate their marital misfortunes.
One has a stupid husband; another has married an inveterate gambler. Yet another complains that
her husband is “the greatest Whoremaster in the City, and Corrupted all her Maids, for if they

2

All quotes from Cavendish’s letters are from Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice.
179

came Maids into her service, they went away none;” still another complains that her husband
begrudges the money needed to raise a family, and finally, the last gossip complains that her
husband “had so many Faults, … [they] did Surpass all Account.” Cavendish relates that she
finally could sit still no longer, and so she chides the gossips for their marital disloyalty: “I
wonder’d to hear them Rail at their Husbands, and Publickly Dispraise them, for if they had
Faults, it was the Wives Duty to Wink at them, at least not to Divulge them.” She then turns the
table on the ladies, telling them that “if their Husbands would Speak of them, and Tell their
Faults, it was likely they would Equal their Husbands Faults, if not Surpass them.” This opinion,
predictably, does not go over well with the women, and Cavendish ruefully relates, “the Ladies
being before Heated with Wine, and then at my Words, with Anger fell into such a Fury with me,
as they fell upon me, not with Blows, but with Words, and their Tongues as their Swords, did
endeavour to Wound me.” She then “became as Silent as if I had been Dead, onely I did Move to
shew I was Alive, for I took a Silent Leave, as with a Curtsie, and came away.” She concludes,
“it hath so Frighted me; as I shall not hastily go to a Gossiping meeting again” (112).
The tale of her experience as a gossip to Lady B.R. is evocative. She reveals that not only
did the practices of gossiping survive the Civil War intact, but so too did the criticism of the
practice as encouraging women’s tendencies to excess. Her criticism of the role of the gossip in
the birth room mirrors male-authored complaints circulating before the Restoration. What makes
her complaint about gossiping unique and important is that she is the first identifiably female
author to criticize the practice, and it is a crucial part of her larger cultural criticisms of marriage
and childbirth that are central to her writings. Though James Fitzmaurice, one of Cavendish’s
modern editors, implies that Cavendish wrote for her own entertainment and not to engage in
cultural criticism (he calls the Sociable Letters “an enormously readable description of life as she

180

and her audience saw it” [xxi]), her censure of the gossips in the lying-in chamber and her
disapproval of the practice of gossip as idle talk indicates that at least part of her project involved
scrutinizing female behaviors, especially as regards their public roles. Her objection to the
gossips’ behavior in the lying-in chamber centers upon the question of whether the lying-in
chamber is a public or private space. She argues that it is a public space, and that the gossips are
violating the codes of “proper” behavior that dictate that women must be supportive, or at least
not actively hostile, towards their husbands.
Cavendish’s assertion of the public nature of the birth room conflicts with both centuries
of practice and traditional representations of the area as a space representable only through the
repetition of a narrow set of stereotypes. This raises questions, not only about Cavendish’s
personal politics, but also how the gossip community is inadequate for her ideals of female
community. So while it is initially troubling to see a vocal proponent of female community
denying her fellow gossips one of the primary ways women constituted female solidarity
(through mutual experience and confidential revelation), it is important to understand why. Her
reasons for doing so also form the foundation of the female community in The Convent of
Pleasure.
Instead of celebrating the communal female experience, she undermines the community
by suggesting the possibility that it is the women’s faults, not those of their husbands, which are
responsible for their various negative domestic situations. Her perspective bears a marked
3

resemblance to the end of The Taming of the Shrew, where the newly tamed Kate champions

3

Cavendish was an unabashedly vociferous admirer of Shakespeare, and she is credited by The
Riverside Shakespeare as “the first to give a general prose assessment of Shakespeare as a
dramatist” (2nd edn. p. 1973). In Letter 123 of Sociable Letters, she writes that Shakespeare has,
“a Clear Judgment, a Quick Wit, a Spreading Fancy, a Subtil Observation, a Deep Apprehension,
and a most Eloquent Elocution,” and she concludes with a rousing validation of Shakespeare’s
181

her husband’s rights to rule her and forces the women around her to also conform to that
domestic model. Though Shakespeare’s play does not directly address the issue of gossips in the
play, Cavendish applies the logic of the conformable wife onto one of the most persistent
examples of female community in the period. Gossip communities do insist on conformity, but
usually on their own terms, which are not necessarily in line with patriarchal goals. But in this
example, Cavendish insists on adherence to patriarchal strictures even within the traditionally
“safe” space of the birth room. This initially seems inconsistent with her opinions regarding
women’s general powerlessness.
One possible explanation for Cavendish’s lecture on adherence to wifely conformity lies
in the second Female Oration, where the speaker argues that women “may Complain, and Bewail
our Condition, yet that will not Free us; we may Murmer and Rail against Men, yet they Regard
not what we say.” Cavendish’s female speaker declares that the normal methods of female
complaint, such as those on display during the gossiping, do nothing to advance the cause of
women, and in fact hinder it: “In short, our Words to Men are as Empty Sounds, our Sighs as
Puffs of Wind, and our Tears as Fruitless Showres, and our Power is so Inconsiderable, as Men
Laugh at our Weakness” (144). For Cavendish, then, wifely complaints are displays of weakness,
accomplishing nothing to advance the cause of women. It is better to fulfill one’s domestic duty
(including obedience) and find other ways to fight that do not compromise one’s personal
integrity. Of course, Cavendish was speaking from an extraordinarily (and uniquely) privileged
position. Her husband, the Duke of Newcastle, gave her a great deal of latitude to pursue her

universalism and complete originality: “so much he had above others, that those, who Writ after
him, were Forced to Borrow of him, or rather to Steal from him” (131). Cavendish had deep
feelings about Shakespeare from an early age. Valerie Traub relates that Cavendish “had
dreamed of marrying” Shakespeare when she was a girl (177).
182

4

numerous and varied interests, and he actively fostered her interest literature and science. Most
women, even in Cavendish’s own social milieu, were not so fortunate.
The actions identified by Cavendish as weakness of character – the complaining,
drunkenness, and quickness to anger – are all stereotypical attributes of gossip behavior. In
applying them to a group of women largely composed of what Cavendish identifies as “ladies
and gentlewomen” (112), she invokes the traditional depiction of gossips as women from the
lower classes as a shaming tactic in order to encourage women who consider themselves to be
“ladies” to conform to her revised model of female behavior at a gossiping. While Cavendish
came to fulfill one basic gossip function, that of naming Lady B.R.’s child, she ended up
deploying another – the educative role of the gossip – against her fellow women. Just as in A
Chaste Maid in Cheapside, the educative function spectacularly fails, and for similar reasons –
the gossip community proves to be fundamentally unable to live up to its own potential because
it has become a caricature of itself, weakening itself and opening it up to the possibility of
exploitation and attack.
She is equally condemnatory of gossiping as a practice outside of the lying-in chamber.
In letter 122, she advises a female friend that in order to avoid the practice of gossip as idle talk,
a woman must “fall to Brag of her self, and tell what Fine things she would have, or had,”
whereupon the gossips would become “Inwardly Spiteful or Angry, and then would soon take
their Leaves and be Gone.” Cavendish tells her correspondent that this is the only way to avoid
gossiping women, “or else you must learn to Gossip, and to Entertain Gossips, although I believe

4

Anne Shaver notes that Cavendish’s marriage to the Duke (who was then a Marquess) “enabled
her to become a serious writer. [He] encouraged her to write and apparently underwrote the cost
of her publications” (3). Bowerbank and Mendelson claim that her interest in science was
“encouraged by a close friendship with her brother-in-law Sir Charles Cavendish, an avid
mathematician who was conversant with the latest scientific discoveries and speculations” (10).
183

you will be but a Dull, Untoward Scholar to Learn …” (129). Here again we see Cavendish
promulgating traditional negative stereotypes about the gossip, particularly excessive/idle speech
and anger, as well as the idea that the type of female community represented by gossip is one
founded on selfish impulses that are destructive, not only to the self but also to the idea of a
viable female community.
Despite (or perhaps because of) her negative views of gossips and gossiping, Cavendish
creates a gossip community in The Convent of Pleasure that eliminates the physical excess
associated with gossips while preserving the outward structure of the gossip function as a
community simultaneously inside/outside of society. Most significantly, she preserves the
gossip’s right to arraign social practices. Judith Haber observes that while Cavendish “repeatedly
complains about women’s propensity to gossip in her Sociable Letters, she also … presents
gossip as a positive feminine tool in many of her plays, and uses it as the predominant mode of
some” (121), most notably in Convent, the last play in her second collection of drama, 1668’s
Plays, Never Before Printed. It is a comedy described by its editor Anne Shaver as “one highly
original blending of pastoral and masque that challenges even the possibility of a good marriage”
(7). Its plot revolves around the basic and revolutionary idea that marriage is unequivocally bad
for women. This is complicated, however, by the marriage of Lady Happy, the central female
character, who remains, until her marriage at the end of the play, strongly opposed to marriage.
Shaver argues that the play’s strictures against marriage are “sustained even in the face of the
conventional comic denouement: although Lady Happy does marry the Prince in the last act, she
never recants her declaration that marriage is generally bad for women” (12).
At the play’s beginning, Lady Happy inherits a fortune as a result of her father’s death.
The increased wealth brings increased visibility, especially where male suitors are concerned.

184

5

Exasperated by the “folly, vanity and falshood in Men” (218), Lady Happy declares her
intention to “live retired from their Company.” This does not appear to be one of the
unaccountable feminine whims that are a staple of male-authored and male-oriented comedy.
Rather, Lady Happy presents her plan in great detail. She proclaims that she
will take so many Noble persons of my own Sex, as my Estate will plentifully
maintain, such whose Births are greater than their Fortunes, and are resolv’d to
live a single life, and vow Virginity: with these I mean to live incloister’d with all
the delights and pleasures that are allowable and lawful; My Cloister shall not be
a Cloister of restraint, but a place for freedom, not to vex the Senses but to please
them. (220)
Lady Happy’s declaration neatly avoids the problematic aspects of the traditionally constituted
gossip community – the emphasis on virginity and nobility ensures that this community of
6

women will not be tempted by excesses, despite Lady Happy’s insistence on material comfort,

because men are barred from entry. The convent, as the play keeps insisting, has absolutely no
need of men. Madam Mediator informs Lady Happy’s frustrated suitors that the house that
contains the cloister “is so big and convenient, and so strong, as it needs no addition or repair,”

5

All quotes from the play are taken from The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays, ed. Anne
Shaver.
6
Lady Happy’s description of the convent occurs early in Act 2 scene 2. She avers that “I have
such things as are for our Ease and Conveniency; next for Pleasure, and Delight” (224). Every
woman’s chambers are changed to accommodate seasonal changes, but the emphasis is on
beauty. For instance, spring decorations include “a great Looking-Glass in each chamber, that we
may view our selves and take pleasure in our own Beauties, whilst they are fresh and young.”
The emphasis on conventionally beautiful women who are both young and noble renders
problematic Katherine R. Kellett’s argument that Lady Happy’s utopic experiment “bring[s]
those at the cultural margins – virginal women who refuse to marry – to the cultural center”
(425). For an insightful analysis of the prevalence and importance of unmarried women in early
modern society, see Amy Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England.
185

and that in addition to vast grounds (“Gardens, Orchards, Walks, Groves, Bowers, Arbours,
Ponds, Fountains, Springs, and the like”) there are “a numerous Company of Female Servants,”
which Madam Mediator explains is so “there is no occasion for Men” (223).
The emphasis on material comfort is key, Erin Lang Bonin argues, because part of the
way the play “reconfigures the relationship between women and property” is through the
elaborate fantasy of material comfort that signals “women are no longer mere appendages to
their dowries, the means through which men transfer land, goods, and cash. Instead women
manage these commodities themselves in a community that eschews marriage” (347). Most
notably, it is a community that, as Bonin notes, is “inaccessible, and even inconceivable to those
positioned within the patriarchy,” and this ban not only applies to men, but to wives as well
(348). The community thus situates itself as an idealized gossip community. As Nicole Pohl
notes, “By creating a social and economic enclave within the walls of a convent, the women of
The Convent of Pleasure create an intentional community. This community supports and
enhances the fundamental principle of female friendship” (103). Lady Happy’s insistence on the
physical innocence of the ladies renders the community impervious to any applications of
previous stereotypes. Even the insistence on material enjoyments is rendered acceptable because
of the inmates’ choice to embrace chastity, because in stereotypical depictions of women and the
desire for luxury items (an example of this phenomenon can be seen above, in Swetnam’s
pamphlet), women’s “longings” for material goods eventually lead to prostitution. It is important
to note this choice does not necessarily imply that there is no sexual tension in the convent. On
the contrary, as Valerie Traub and others have pointed out, the convent is a sexually charged
atmosphere, and not just between Lady Happy and the Princess: some of the women choose to
dress as men. When the Princess arrives at the beginning of Act 3, she observes some of the

186

ladies “accoutre Themselves in Masculine-Habits, and act Lovers-parts” (229). The play
suggests sexuality as a part of the women’s interaction, whether or not it is consummated. In
addition, the play-within-the-play emphasizes the woes of marriage, so there is an insistent
awareness of the worldly included as a part of the knowledge base of the convent. In the instance
of the convent, then, chastity is not a denial of female sexuality, but rather a denial of the
assumption that men should have uncontested access to and control over that sexuality.
This control is limited, however. Not only is the convent explicitly elitist, but remarkably,
Lady Happy seems content to allow patriarchy to abuse those women too poor to escape it.
When she first declares her intent to create the convent, she says, “those Women that are poor,
and have not means to buy delights, and maintain pleasures, are only fit for Men; for having not
means to please themselves, they must serve only to please others” (230). Her insistence on well7

bred and unmarried women (whether single or widowed) who voluntarily choose to enter the
convent signals that the convent is what Julie Sanders terms “a potentially empowering locale”
(135) because it is a site devoted to the renunciation of patriarchy. However, poor women, with
little access to money and power, have no means of escape. Lady Happy does not forget them,
though, and in Act 3 she gives those women a voice and a presence within the convent walls.
Though it is a heavily mediated experience (all the women depicted in the play-within-a-play are
played by the well-born ladies of the convent), it still represents an important milestone for the
ways in which it represents the gossip community.

7

An objection could feasibly be made to the idea that the ladies are there voluntarily, since they
are economically disadvantaged, or, as Lady Happy discreetly describes them, “such whose
Births are greater then their Fortunes” (220). However, she deflects this notion through the
revelation that she chooses for community inclusion only those who have previously “resolv’d to
live a single life, and vow Virginity.”
187

Gweno Williams describes the play-within-a-play as “a concise, episodic, female-theatreof-the-world in which a succession of female bodies of all ages” (142) is presented to the
audience in quick progression. One of the most striking features of the ten vignettes, and the
theme common to them all, is the idea of a mutually supportive and nurturing community of
women. Williams suggests that “the distinctive colloquial and contemporary tone, language and
setting of these scenes, which consistently show women conferring together and supporting each
other in misery and difficulties” demonstrates that Cavendish is staging a gossips’ meeting. She
concludes, “[I]n my view, the inner play draws very heavily and wittily on this tradition, and
may in fact be the very first staging of a gossips’ meeting by a woman dramatist” (143). Pamela
Allen Brown also associates the scenes with the gossips’ meeting, calling it “a high-toned
gossips’ feast” (67).
What is also of vital importance is the fact that this gossips’ meeting occurs at the
structural center of the play (the beginning of Act 3). Though this fact has not incurred critical
notice, it provides an important clue to Cavendish’s motives. Within the elite space of the
convent, Lady Happy stages a masque challenging the cultural pressures that encourage women
to marry. It portrays the horrors of marriage, including abusive and neglectful husbands, but the
dangers of pregnancy and childbirth are emphasized. Scene 7’s stage direction reads: “Enter a
Lady big with Child, groaning as in labour, and a Company of Women with her.” The pregnant
woman complains of back pain, but the midwife is busy delivering a different mother. Scene 9
depicts three gossips fretting over a midwife’s absence. One gossip tells another that the midwife
has “been with a Lady that hath been in strong labour these three days of a dead child, and ‘tis
thought she cannot be delivered” (232). A third gossip enters to say that the midwife has come,
but that she was unable to save her previous client. The other two gossips hush her, urging her

188

not to disturb the laboring woman, because “the very fright of not being able to bring forth a
Child will kill her” (232). It is unclear if these two separate scenes are intended to be depictions
of the same lying-in chamber, but the effect is the same in either case, because the emphasis is
upon the universality of the female experience and the universal threat posed to women by
heterosexual marriage.
Cavendish’s decision to place these vignettes at the beginning of Act 3 initially seems to
echo Middleton’s choice to stage a stereotypical gossips’ meeting at the structural center of
Chaste Maid. Both renditions of gossips offer up purportedly “true” gossip behavior. Much as
the depiction of gossips in the center of Middleton’s play indicates the centrality of the cultural
roles played by gossips and the anxiety surrounding the mysterious implementation of those
roles (mysterious to men, anyway), so too does Cavendish’s centralizing depiction of gossips
reveal the social significance of their roles and the anxiety enshrouding them. There is an
important difference between the two. Middleton creates a highly comical situation where the
absence of the midwife and their own gluttonous tendencies leads to a comic duping of the
gossips, emphasizing their inability to fulfill their duty by correctly identifying the paternity of
Mistress Allwit’s child. Cavendish, using a similar situation, produces a stark tragedy: the absent
midwife in Lady Happy’s masque leads to death for the delivering mother.
The central placement of this tragic treatment of the gossip role simultaneously highlights
the gossips’ ineffectiveness and the necessity of Lady Happy’s intervention in creating the
convent. By barring traditional gossips from entrance (the poor women who cannot afford to
refuse participation in patriarchy) while yet invoking their miserable status outside the convent
walls, Cavendish is attempting to preserve the best aspects of the gossip community (female
solidarity, a community that fosters the creation and dissemination of knowledge) while

189

simultaneously purging the aspects that hinder it from reaching its full potential (reliance on
patriarchy). Still, the overall result is remarkable: the first female-authored depiction of a
gossips’ meeting shows gossips unable to perform their social functions of bringing women
safely through childbirth or providing support for women with domestic problems.
This message is repeated throughout the vignettes. Gossips are shown as victims of
patriarchy, unable to effectively react to the dangers of marriage and childbirth. Some of the
gossips’ complaints echo those made by the women in Cavendish’s letter, complaints that date
back to Noah’s wife in the medieval mystery plays of the Flood. Scene 2 depicts “two mean
women” complaining about the damage caused by their drunken husbands. One woman
complains that her husband “lies all day drinking in an Alehouse, like a drunken Rogue as he is,
and when he comes home, he beats me all black and blew, when I and my Children are almost
starved for want” (229), and the other is in a similarly abusive situation. Scene 4 depicts “Two
Ladies” who are crying because of their husbands’ inveterate gambling. The first lady’s husband
spends all his money on whores, but worse, he has brought them home, where they “must rule as
chief Mistresses.” The second lady was threatened by her husband until she gave him her
jointure, with the result that she “must beg for [her] living” (230). The difference between the
two very different treatments of identical situations – contemptuous in the Sociable Letters,
sympathetic in The Convent of Pleasure – seems to arise because the convent itself provides a
solution to patriarchy that has the potential to improve the situation of women. Whereas the
gossips in Letter 103 aimlessly complain about their various domestic problems, the gossips in
Convent are used as examples to justify the elimination of patriarchy, which is the message that
concludes the play-within-a-play: “Marriage is a Curse we find, / Especially to Women kind: /
From the Cobler’s Wife we see, / To Ladies, they unhappie be” (233). Much as Jonson uses

190

gossips to enable his project of reframing the modes through which news is created and
distributed, Cavendish uses the plight of gossips to reframe the modes through which women
experience the world.
This experience – the heteronormative paradigm – recognizes only the physicality of the
female body (specifically, their reproductive capacity) and routinely denies women access to the
life of the mind. It is in Act 4 where we see the attempt to live the intellectual ideals of the
convent. There are surprisingly few scenes that take place within the lived space of the convent –
the first two acts all take place outside of the convent, and the third act, while it technically takes
place within the convent, is not of the convent but rather of the world outside. The community is
then largely composed of talk and privileged knowledge – gossip, in other words, but in an
idealized form. Instead of discussing local concerns, it deals with lofty political goals (the
intellectualization of women and the pursuit of pleasure through the renunciation of patriarchy).
In Act 4 we see the lived experience of the convent. It is still highly stylized – it is a pastoral
scene, and Lady Happy and the Princess enter as a shepherdess and shepherd, respectively – but
it still provides a rehearsal of Lady Happy’s ambitious intellectual project. The Princess, who is
foreign, comes to the convent after learning of its existence (presumably through gossip) and
strikes up an immediate and ardent friendship with Lady Happy. So ardent is it that Lady Happy
becomes melancholic. She relates that she had been happy until she “saw this Princess; but now I
am like to be the most unhappy Maid alive: But why may not I love a Woman with the same
affection as I could a Man?” (234). The question imperils her intellectual project by
reintroducing that which the convent’s members have rejected: sexual attraction. Specifically, it
is the kind that women are supposed to associate with men. This situation threatens to undermine
Lady Happy’s state by granting physicality primacy over intellectuality. She refuses to entertain

191

this thought for more than a moment, however, and overcomes her lapse by insisting, “No, no,
Nature is Nature, and still will be / The same she was from all Eternity” (234). Her courtship
with the Princess reinforces this. While the pair exchange kisses, the courtship itself is a series of
intellectual exchanges that border on the metaphysical, which highlights the tensions facing
women, not only between intellectuality and physicality, but also between reason and emotion.
This tension is treated in two different ways in Swetnam Arraigned and The Staple of News, with
the former showing gossips capable of balancing rationality and physicality, and the latter
casting doubt upon the idea.
Cavendish’s own contribution to this debate is to make temporary her model of
intellectualized pursuit of pleasure through resistance to patriarchy. Act 5 begins with the
knowledge that a man has entered the convent. Paranoia sets in, with the women all suspecting
each other to be the infiltrator. The stage direction reads that the women “all skip from each
other, as afraid of each other” (243). Only Lady Happy and the Princess remain at each other’s
side. An ambassador then enters and kneels at the Princess’ feet, revealing that the Princess is
actually a Prince who has been neglecting his kingdom in order to spend time at the convent. The
Prince declares that he will return, with Lady Happy as his “Soveraigness” (243). The play then
concludes with the nuptials of Lady Happy and the Prince, who declares that the convent will be
divided into two equal parts “for Virgins and Widows” (246). Mimick, the man who first asked
the Prince to divide the convent, interprets this decision rather lewdly: “That will prove a
Convent of Pleasure indeed; but they will never agree, especially if there be some disguised
Prince amongst them; but you had better bestow it on old decrepit and bed-rid Matrons, and then
it may be call’d the Convent of Charity, if it cannot possibly be named the Convent of Chastity”
(246). Lady Happy is silent about the fate of her convent, and her attempts to utilize the form of

192

the gossip community while divorcing it from its function ultimately leaves the convent’s
inmates open to the same vulgar innuendo applied to the impoverished women who had no
access to the convent in the first place. Trapped in an indeterminate state between charity and
chastity when the men appropriate the convent, Lady Happy’s gossips disappear, much as
Jonson’s gossips do at the end of Staple, which signals that they have served their purpose. Lady
Happy’s marriage has elevated her social status, but it significantly lowers that of her gossips,
who are now the objects of coarse sexual humor that directly stems from Lady Happy’s attempt
to restructure the gossip community, suggesting that the ten vignettes staged at the beginning of
Act 3 are an inevitability for everyone in the play except perhaps Lady Happy and the Prince.
Most of the scholars who study the play’s complicated gender dynamics concern
themselves with the implications of the marriage at the end, rather than with the fate of the
gossips. Theodora Jankowski argues that the revelation of the Princess as a Prince does not
stabilize or contain the gender explorations of the play, but rather that “what it really does is
destabilize the play even more” (182). While she does acknowledge that the convent is still
located within the patriarchal culture it purports to challenge, she maintains that despite the fact
that
an actual separation cannot occur, the physical isolation of the convent –
symbolized by its walls – does invoke the attempt at ideological separation its
inmates undergo. So, if patriarchal society depends upon various sorts of female
sexual slavery and pain, the queer resistance represented in these plays images a
recategorization of virgins as their own subjects within their own economics of
pleasure. (184)

193

Valerie Traub sees the play’s conclusion as the inevitable outcome of cultural pressures on
Cavendish’s play: “However far away from men her imagination can roam in pursuit of female
pleasures, Cavendish returns to men as the apparent price of formal closure” (180). Shaver
suggests Cavendish’s husband wrote the second half of Act 4 and all of Act 5, including the
scene when the Princess is revealed to be a Prince. She observes that Newcastle “is credited with
his contributions on printed strips pasted into the text of both Playes (1662) and Plays, Never
Before Printed (1668) … since no terminus is given, it seems that he is the author of the final
two scenes and the epilogue” (238). Valerie Billing sees Newcastle’s probable involvement in
authorial production not as a potential impediment to Cavendish’s artistic integrity, but rather as
critical to the central concern of the play, which is whether marriage is an inherently unjust
institution for women. Billing reads the second half of the play as “revealing a complex authorial
relationship in which two voices work both together and in tension to produce the ending,” and
the Duke of Newcastle’s “presence in the text ensures the heterosexual marriage at the end and
creates a tension that challenges the radical ideas about marriage Cavendish explores elsewhere
in the play.” Billing concludes that the marital authorial friction is actually a “literary
collaboration between a husband and a wife” which “becomes both a joint production and a
competition over the form of the marriage ending and over the definition of marriage itself”
(108).
Ultimately, the play leads us to the extraordinarily problematic conclusion that gossips
cannot exist without patriarchy. Not only do Lady Happy’s efforts to reconfigure the gossip
community eventually fail, but more troubling, the endeavor leaves the convent’s inmates more
vulnerable than they were before, with the women reliant upon men who find their situation both
titillating and humorous. The attempt’s failure may suggest the futility of the project, implying

194

that the effort to intellectualize the gossip community comes at the price of the community itself,
but the fact remains that even though the project was only temporarily sustainable, it was
conceptualized as viable, however briefly. It was, however, the last moment of brilliance in an
overall decline. By the late seventeenth century, the gossip community and midwifery had
become largely detached from any positive social associations, in spite of the fact that both were
circulating widely through the public sphere and print culture. As Paula McDowell has observed,
there was a “nexus of associations in this period between women, publishing, midwifery, and
politics” (253). She observes the same associations at work in 1688 during the “warming-pan
scandal,” which alleged that the son born to Mary of Modina, the presumptive Prince of Wales,
had actually been smuggled into the Queen’s bedchamber in a warming-pan. McDowell relates,
“Childbirth became a political even of national importance and the subject of endless rumours
and ‘gossip,’ and the oral testimony of midwives was enrolled in Chancery and published by
royal authority” (253). Consequently, the end of the seventeenth century was peppered with
accounts of murderous midwives, as the interest in sordid tales of midwives remained high. 1680
saw the publication of “A New Ballad of The Midwifes Ghost,” which relates the purportedly
true story of a dead midwife who appeared in the home she occupied while she was living and
told the housemaid that if she “took up two Tiles by the Fire-side, they should find the Bones of
Bastard-Children that the said Midwife had 15 years ago Murthered, and that she desired that her
8

Kinswoman Mary should see them decently Buried.” “The Midwife of Poplar’s Sorrowful
Lamentation in Newgate” was published after the 1693 execution of Mary Compton, who was
convicted of murdering several children through neglect and starvation. The ballad is quite
specific in its recitation of the horrors on display in the Compton house when neighbors are

8

“A New Ballad of The Midwifes Ghost,” Pepys 2.145.
195

alerted by one of the children in Compton’s care. There are “Young Infants in a basket dead, /
Upon a shelf,” two or three infants buried in the cellar, and as for the infant whose crying
initially raised neighbors’ suspicions, when it was taken and given to a nurse for care, “And as
she took the Linnen off / To dress it unto bed, / The very Ears were rotted off / From this poor
9

Infants head.” A key component of the dramatic effect of these tales is the secrecy involved –
these midwives have all violated their oaths as well as the trust placed in them by committing
their crimes and exploiting the gossip networks that traditionally granted them leeway/control.
The midwife becomes the embodiment of social corruption, the keeper of secrets and lies whose
practice runs counter to free and open public discourse.
Mrs. Nightwork, a midwife in Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis (1709) is just such
a figure. The New Atalantis is a satirical roman à clef revealing the private scandalous lives of
prominent Whig politicians. The premise of the work is that the goddess of Justice, Astrea,
returns to earth to gather information about the lives of the inhabitants of the island of Atalantis.
She is reunited with her mother, Virtue, and together they are guided around the island by Lady
Intelligence. The work shares with The Convent of Pleasure both generic hybridity and a
complicated relationship to the social function of the gossip. At the beginning of Book Two,
Astrea, Virtue, and Lady Intelligence (Manley’s avatar) are wandering through “a remote place”
by moonlight when a coach enters and a pregnant woman is deposited at the base of a tree. She is
in a great deal of pain, and she tells the Prince (the Prince of Majorca, who was driving the
coach) to “haste and fetch the midwife. I’m surrounded with horror, the rack of nature is upon
me, and no kind assisting hand to relieve me. Bury me unknown. Oh could you but annihilate

9

“The Midwife of Poplar’s Sorrowful Confession and Lamentation in Newgate,” Pepys 2.192.
196

10

me, to preserve my fame!” (136).

The pain of her labor is minimal compared to the potential

damage to her reputation. However, this does not weigh with the embodiments of virtue and
justice, both of whom advocate assisting her regardless of her morals, thereby demonstrating that
they are operating within a traditional gossip paradigm. Virtue offers, “Shall we not appeare and
offer her our assistance in her misery? Her cries and groans pierce the heart –,” and her daughter
Astrea concurs: “Oh Lucina, be propitious! Well did the unhappy fair term it the rack of nature?
Can any thing be more exquisite? Oh! how piercing are her cries!” (137). Lady Intelligence,
however, prefers to hide and gather information. The midwife then enters and Intelligence
recognizes her as Mrs. Nightwork. Astrea, Virtue, and Intelligence stand aside and Mrs.
Nightwork delivers the child.
McDowell asserts that, “it is here, in Manley’s careful differentiation between her
characters Lady Intelligence and Mrs. Nightwork, and her depiction of their testy relationship,
that her simultaneous deployment and rejection of the figure of the gossip – and, by extension,
the oral political culture to which her fictions are indebted – becomes most clear,” that
Manley recognized that strict distinctions between ‘gossip,’ ‘intelligence,’ and
‘news’ were ideological rather than objective ones, and that she made this
recognition a foundation of her political writing career. At the same time,
however, Manley took care to define herself against traditional representations of
the gossip as a mere chatterer – a retailer of stories for their own sake. By
including in The New Atalantis a dramatic face-to-face encounter between a
traditional gossip and her own politicized brand of ‘female intelligencer,’ she
attempts at once to draw on female oral political traditions and to define herself

10

All quotations from the text are taken from the edition edited by Rosalind Ballister.
197

away from those traditions deemed unrelated to or beneath the concerns of ‘high’
politics. (254-55)
Manley’s goal is similar to that of both Jonson and Cavendish in that each author endeavors to
simultaneously employ and establish distance from the defining female stereotype of the age. As
McDowell observes, “But if Mrs. Nightwork’s methods are similar to Lady Intelligence’s, the
ends to which she puts her news are different. The traditional gossip’s stories are malicious and
told merely to entertain. The female ‘intelligencer,’ by way of contrast, does not circulate
titillating stories for their own sake, but rather deploys them for worthy political ends” (256).
The problem with this, however, is that using a gossip as a kind of straw woman sets up a serious
paradox regarding female nature, as Marcie Frank notes:
Manley associates her critical authority with her female nature, which conditions
the disavowals of referentiality and precedent upon which her texts, at the same
time, openly rely. The complexity of this double stance, however, also distances
her from any straightforward evocation of femininity. She exploits her access as a
woman writer to the sexual scandals associated with female power (casting her
talents, in the figure of Mrs. Nightwork, as a form of midwifery), at the same time
as she deplores them. (131)
This privileging of the knowledge network created by the gossip community comes at the
expense of the community itself. When presented with the opportunity to coalesce into a gossip
community to assist in Harriat’s birth, Astrea, Virtue, and Lady Intelligence choose not to. Much
as Lady Happy’s attempt to intellectualize the gossip community renders the community
unviable, so too does Lady Intelligence’s privileging of information over action. Both Cavendish
and Manley’s depictions of gossip communities demonstrates that the complex ideological

198

stance – both inside and outside patriarchy – that was responsible for the gossip community’s
survival throughout the medieval and early modern eras was in decline by the eighteenth century.
However, all was not lost for gossips. As the publication of Cavendish’s plays and Manley’s
book demonstrates, the burgeoning expansion of women into the publishing industry suggests
that print became the new medium through which women could stage the same kinds of
ideological interrogations of patriarchy. Astrea, Virtue, and Intelligence’s choice not to
participate in the creation of a traditional gossip community signals both the end of a very
particular kind of female community and the beginning of a publicly political presence for
women in the traditionally male world of print.
Change is not always good, however. “Gossip” became a wholly pejorative term, thanks
in large part to women like Cavendish and Manley who separated the entwined modes of
gossiping to advance their own personal agendas. While the gossip was scapegoated in order for
individual women to exercise the right to intellectual participation in the public sphere, it also
meant that female friendship and community lost recognition, and the rituals that bound together
women, and by extension, the community, came to be thought of as provincial and antiquated.
Gossip came to exclusively mean that private information which destroys a community, instead
of that which creates it.
Throughout the early modern period gossip communities and networks were able to
maintain their complex ideological relationship to patriarchy, but after the Restoration became
increasingly associated with “antiquated” rituals and gendered stereotypes about women’s
propensity to promulgate idle talk, a tendency that was considered to be more pronounced
depending on the woman’s social status and level of education. The communities could only
exist in a society that allowed for the mobility of the average woman. This mobility refers to both

199

the physical space of the city, town, village, or countryside in which she lived and also socially –
to dictate the terms of her acquaintance, whether friends or business. The gossip communities
also relied on access to spaces in which to congregate. Those spaces became increasingly
restricted throughout the early modern period – the alehouse and the birth room gradually
became the province of men, and women’s presence in those spaces was suffered only
grudgingly. Still, as the primary mode of communal identity, the role of the gossip played a vital
role in the construction of identity for early modern Englishwomen.

200

APPENDIX
Figures & Illustrations

201

Fig 1. “The Severall Places Where you May hear News,” c. 1600. Courtesy of the Pepys Library and used with permission. For
interpretation of the references in color in this and all other figures, the reader is referred to the electronic version of this dissertation.

202

Fig 2. “At the Childbed.” Detail from “The Severall Places Where you May hear News.”

Fig 3. “At the Hottehovse.” Detail from “The Severall Places Where you May hear News.”

203

Fig 4. 1615 title page of Swetnam’s The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Vnconstant
Women. Reproduced in Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women (1620), ed. Rev.
Alexander B. Grosart.

204

Fig 5. Title Page to 1620 play Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women. Reproduced in
Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women (1620), ed. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart.

205

WORKS CITED

206

WORKS CITED

Altieri, Joanne. “Against Moralizing Jacobean Comedy: Middleton’s Chaste Maid.” Criticism
30.2 (1988): 171-187.
Altman, Joel B. The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan
Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
Anonymous. The Bachelor’s Banquet. Ed. Faith Guildenhuys. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions,
1993.
---. The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662. Ed. Brian Cummings.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
---. The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling. Ed. David Mills. East
Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992.
---. The Chester Mystery Cycle. Vol. 1. Text. Eds. R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills. EETS, SS
3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.
---. The Chester Mystery Cycle. Vol. 2. Text. Eds. R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills. EETS, SS
9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
---. Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays. Ed. A.C. Cawley. North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle
Publishing, 2003.
---. Gammer Gurton’s Needle. In Four Tudor Comedies. Ed. William Tydeman. New York:
Penguin Books, 1984.
---. The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition. Ed. Joseph L. Black.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
---. Midwife of Poplar’s Sorrowful Confession and Lamentation in Newgate, The. London: J.
Bissel, 1693. Pepys 2.192. English Broadside Ballad Archive. Web. 17 May 2012.
---. New Ballad of The Midwives Ghost, A. London: T. Vere, 1680. Pepys 2.145. English
Broadside Ballad Archive. Web. 17 May 2012.
---. Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women. In Swetnam the Woman-Hater: The
Controversy and the Play. Ed. Coryl Crandall. Purdue: Purdue University Studies, 1969.
---. The Towneley Plays. Eds. Martin Stevens and A.C. Cawley. EETS, SS 13. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994.

207

---. York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling. Eds. Richard Beadle and Pamela M.
King. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
Ardolino, Frank. “Misperception and Protestant Reading in Gammer Gurton’s Needle.” Studies
in English Literature 1500-1900 50.1 (2010): 17-34.
Atkinson, Colin B. and William P. Stoneman. “’These Griping Greefes and Pinching Pangs’:
Attitudes to Childbirth in Thomas Bentley’s The Monument of Matrones (1582).” The
Sixteenth-Century Journal 21.2 (1990): 193-203.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984.
Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Tr. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977.
Beckwith, Sarah. “Drama.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 11001500. Ed. Larry Scanlon. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Beier, A.L. “New Historicism, Historical Context, and the Literature of Roguery: The Case of
Thomas Harman Reopened.” In Rogues and Early Modern English Culture. Ed. Craig
Dionne and Steve Mentz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 98-119.
Beier, Lucinda McCray. “In sickness and in health: A seventeenth century family’s experience.”
Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society. Ed.
Roy Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 101-128.
Bennett, Judith M. Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World
1300-1600. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Billing, Valerie. “’Treble marriage’: Margaret Cavendish, William Newcastle, and Collaborative
Authorship.” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11.2 (2011): 94-122.
Billington, Sandra. “Butchers and Fishmongers: Their Historical Contribution to London’s
Festivity.” Folklore 101.1 (1990): 97-103.
Boboc, Andreea. “Lay Performances of Work and Salvation in the York Cycle.” Comparative
Drama 43.2 (2009): 247-71.
Bonin, Erin Lang. “Margaret Cavendish’s Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender.” Studies
in English Literature, 1500-1900 40.2 (2000): 339-354.
Boose, Lynda E. “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member.”
Shakespeare Quarterly 42.2 (1991): 179-213.
Bowers, Rick. Radical Comedy in Early Modern England. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.

208

Briggs, Katharine. The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs Among Shakespeare’s
Contemporaries and Successors. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1959.
---. An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural
Creatures. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.
Brown, Pamela Allen. Better a Shrew Than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in
Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Campbell, Josie P. “The Idea of Order in the Wakefield ‘Noah.’” The Chaucer Review 10.1
(1975): 76-86.
Capp, Bernard. When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern
England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Castle, Terry J. “Lab’ring Bards: Birth ‘Topoi’ and English Poetics, 1660-1820.” The Journal of
English and Germanic Philology 78.2 (1979): 193-208.
Cavendish, Margaret. The Convent of Pleasure. In The Convent of Pleasure and Other Plays. Ed.
Anne Shaver. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
---. Orations of Divers Sorts. In Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader. Ed. Sylvia
Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000.
---. Sociable Letters. Ed. James Fitzmaurice. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.
Cawsey, Kathy. “Tutivillus and the ‘Kyrkchaterars’: Strategies of Control in the Middle Ages.”
Studies in Philology 102.4: 434-51.
Chatterji, Ruby. “Theme, Imagery, and Unity in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.” Renaissance
Drama 8 (1965): 105-126.
Cherry, Caroline Lockett. The Most Undervaluedst Purchase: Women in the Plays of Thomas
Middleton. Saltzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg,
1973.
Clark, Peter. The English Alehouse: A Social History. New York: Longman, 1983.
Crawford, Patricia. “The construction and experience of maternity in seventeenth-century
England.” Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England. Ed. Valerie Fildes. New York:
Routledge, 1990. 3-38.
Cressy, David. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and
Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

209

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.
Daniels, Richard J. “’Uxor’ Noah: A Raven or a Dove?” The Chaucer Review 14.1 (1979): 2332.
David, Alfred. “Noah’s Wife’s Flood.” The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on
Chaucer and the Drama. Eds. James J. Paxton, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia
Tomasch. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998. 97-109.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in SixteenthCentury France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987.
Duncan, Douglas. “Gammer Gurton’s Needle and the Concept of Humanist Parody.” Studies in
English Literature 1500-1900 27.2 (1987): 177-96.
Evenden, Doreen. The Midwives of Seventeenth-Century London. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000.
Feinburg, Willer, et al. “The Virtues of Gossip: Reputational Information Sharing as Prosocial
Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102.5 (2012): 1015-1030.
Findlay, Alison, Gweno Williams, and Stephanie J. Hodgson-Wright. “’The Play is ready to be
Acted’: women and dramatic production, 1570-1670.” Women’s Writing 6.1 (1999): 129148.
Forbes, Thomas. The Midwife and the Witch. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Fox, Adam. Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.
Frank, Marcie. Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Froide, Amy M. Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Fumerton, Patricia. “Not Home: Alehouses, Ballads, and the Vagrant Husband in Early Modern
England.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32.3 (2002): 493-518.
Garvin, Katherine. “A Note on Noah’s Wife.” Modern Language Notes 49.2 (1934): 88-90.
Geneva Bible. 1587. studylight.org. 17 June 2011.

210

Goodman, Robert F. and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, eds. Good Gossip. Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1994.
Gibbons, Brian. Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and
Middleton. London: Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd., 1968.
Gibson, Gail McMurray. “Scene and Obscene: Seeing and Performing Late Medieval
Childbirth.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29.1 (1999): 7-24.
Gosson, Stephen. The School of Abuse. In Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook. Ed. Tanya
Pollard. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 19-33.
Gowing, Laura. Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996.
Greene, Robert. A Notable Discovery of Cozenage. In Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars.
Ed. Arthur F. Kinney. Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1973. 163-186.
Gurr, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987.
Haber, Judith. Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009.
Harman, Thomas. A Caveat for Common Cursitors. In Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars.
Ed. Arthur F. Kinney. Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1973. 109-153.
Heertum, Francisca van. A Critical Edition of Joseph Swetnam’s “The Araignment of Lewd, Idle,
Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615). Nijmegan, Netherlands: Cicero Press, 1989.
Helterman, Jeffrey. Symbolic Action in the Plays of the Wakefield Master. Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1981.
Hendricks, Margo. “’Obscured by dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. Shakespeare Quarterly 47.1 (1996): 37-60.
Hoby, Lady Margaret. Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605. Ed. Dorothy M. Meads.
London: G. Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1930.
Hodges, Laura F. “Noe’s Wife: Type of Eve and Wakefield Spinner.” Equally in God’s Image.
Eds. Julia Bolton Holloway, Joan Bechtold, and Constance S. Wright. New York: Peter
Lang, 1990. 30-39.
Hotz-Davies, Ingrid. “A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Women Beware Women: Feminism,
Anti-Feminism and the Limitations of Satire.” Cahiers Élisabéthains 39 (1991): 29-39.

211

Howard, Jean. Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Ingram, R.W. “Gammer Gurton’s Needle: Comedy Not Quite of the Lowest Order?” Studies in
English Literature 1500-1900 7.2 (1967): 257-68.
Jankowski, Theodora A. Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare.
Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983.
Jenstad, Janelle. “Lying-in Like a Countess: The Lisle Letters, the Cecil Family, and A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.2 (2004): 373403.
---. “’Smock-secrets’: Birth and Women’s Mysteries on the Early Modern Stage.” Performing
Maternity in Early Modern England. Eds. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R.
McPherson. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007. 87-99.
Jocelin, Elizabeth. The Mother’s Legacy to her Unborn Child. London, 1624. Women Writers
Online. Women Writer’s Project, Brown University. 7 March 2012.
http://www.wwp.brown.edu/texts/wwoentry.html.
Jones, Robert C. “Jonson’s Staple of News Gossips and Fulwell’s Like Will to Like: ‘The Old
Way’ in a ‘New’ Morality Play.” The Yearbook of English Studies 3 (1973): 74-77.
Jonson, Ben. Epicoene or The Silent Woman. Ed. Roger Holdsworth. New York: W.W. Norton,
2005.
---. The Staple of News. Ed. Devra Rowland Kifer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.
Kellett, Katherine R. “Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish’s The
Convent of Pleasure.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 48.2 (2008): 419-442.
Kifer, Devra Rowland. “The Staple of News: Jonson’s Festive Comedy.” Studies in English
Literature, 1500-1900 12.2 (1972): 329-344.
Korda, Natasha. “Gender at Work in the Cries of London.” In Oral Traditions and Gender in
Early Modern Literary Texts. Eds. Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford. UK: Ashgate,
2008. 117-135.
Kolve, V.A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966.
Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practices and the Production of Popular Culture
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (2000): 277-312.

212

Leinwand, Theodore B. The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603-1613. Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.
Levin, Richard. “The Four Plots of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.” The Review of English Studies
16.61 (1965): 14-24.
---. The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1971.
---. “Women in the Renaissance Theatre Audience.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40.2 (1989): 165174.
Lochrie, Karma. Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Lumiansky, R.M. “Comedy and Theme in the Chester Harrowing of Hell.” Tulane Studies in
English, 10 (1960): 5-12.
Manley, Delarivier. The New Atalantis. Ed. Rosalind Ballaster. New York: Penguin, 1991.
Markham, Gervase. The English Housewife. Ed. Michael R. Best. Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986.
Marotti, Arthur F. “Fertility and Comic Form in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.” Comparative
Drama 3.1 (1969): 65-74.
McDermott, Kristen. “Jonson’s Gossips and the Stuart Family Drama.” Early Theatre 9.1
(2006): 61-83.
McDowell, Paula. The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London
Literary Marketplace 1678-1730. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
McIntosh, Marjorie Keniston. Working Women in English Society, 1300-1620. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
McNeill, Fiona. “Gynocentric London Spaces: (Re)Locating Masterless Women in Early Stuart
Drama.” Renaissance Drama 28 (1995): 195-244.
Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Mikalachki, Jodi. “Gender, Cant, and Cross-talking in The Roaring Girl.” Renaissance Drama
25 (1994): 119-143.
Mill, Anna Jean. “Noah’s Wife Again.” PMLA 56.3 (1941): 613-626.

213

Miller, Shannon. “Consuming Mothers/Consuming Merchants: The Carnivalesque Economy of
Jacobean City Comedy.” Modern Language Studies 26.2/3 (1996): 73-97.
Monckton, H.A. A History of English Ale and Beer. London: The Bodley Head, 1966.
Montrose, Louis Adrian. “’Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan
Culture.” Representations 2 (1983): 61-94.
Mullaney, Steven. The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Neely, Carol Thomas. Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early
Modern Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
Norland, Howard B. Drama in Early Tudor Britain, 1485-1558. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1995.
Normington, Katie. Gender and Medieval Drama. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004.
Panek, Jennifer. “’A Wittall Cannot Be a Cookold’: Reading the Contented Cuckold in Early
Modern English Drama and Culture.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 1.2
(2001): 66-92.
Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early
Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.
---. The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Perry, Curtis. “Commodity and Commonwealth in ‘Gammer Gurton’s Needle.’” Studies In
English Literature 1500-1900 42.2 (2002): 217-34.
Phillips, Susan E. Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England.
University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.
Pohl, Nicole. Women, Space and Utopia, 1600-1800. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006.
Pollock, Linda A. “Childbearing and Female Bonding in Early Modern England.” Social History
22.3 (1997): 286-306.
---. “Embarking on a rough passage: the experience of pregnancy in early-modern society.”
Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England. Ed. Valerie Fildes. New York: Routledge,
1990. 39-67.
Quaife, G.R. Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early
Seventeenth Century England. London: Croom Helm, 1979.

214

Reynolds, Lou Agnes and Paul Sawyer. “Folk Medicine and the Four Fairies of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly 10.4 (1959): 513-521.
Robinson, J.W. “The Art and Meaning of ‘Gammer Gurton’s Needle.’” Renaissance Drama 14
(1983): 45-77.
Rockwood, Catherine. “’Know Thy Side’: Propaganda and Parody in Jonson’s Staple of News.”
ELH 75.1 (2008): 135-149.
Rowlands, Samuel. “A Whole Crew of Kind Gossips, All Met to be Merry.” In “Custome is an
Idiot”: Jacobean Pamphlet Literature on Women. Ed. Susan Gushee O’Malley. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2004. 67-107.
Rublack, Ulinka. “Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female Body in Early Modern Germany.” Past
& Present 150 (1996): 84-110.
Sanders, Julie. “’The Closet Opened’: A Reconstruction of Private Space in the Writings of
Margaret Cavendish.” A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish,
Duchess of Newcastle. Ed. Stephen Clucas. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. 127-42.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Harold F. Brooks. New York:
Routledge, 1979.
---. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Peter Holland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
---. Othello. Ed. E.A.J. Honigmann. London: Arden-Thomson, 2002.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Gossip. New York: Knopf, 1985.
Speght, Rachel. The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght. Ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Swetnam, Joseph. The Araignment of Lewde, idle, froward, and vnconstant women. Reprinted in
Female Replies to Swetnam the Woman-Hater. Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1995.
Tennenhouse, Leonard. Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres. New York:
Metheun, 1986.
Tolmie, Jane. “Mrs. Noah and Didactic Abuses.” Early Theatre 5.1 (2002): 11-35.
Tomlinson, Sophie. “’My Brain the Stage’: Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female
Performance.” In Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760, eds. Clare Brant and Diane
Purkiss. London: Routledge, 1992. 134-163.

215

Toole, William B. “The Aesthetics of Scatology in Gammer Gurton’s Needle.” ELN 10.4
(1973): 252-8.
Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Velz, John W. “Scatology and Moral Meaning in Two English Renaissance Plays.” South
Central Review 1.1/2 (1984): 4-21.
Wack, Mary. “Women, Work, and Plays in an English Medieval Town.” Maids and Mistresses,
Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England. Ed. Susan Frye and
Karen Robertson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 33-51.
Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern
Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Weimann, Robert. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social
Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function. Ed. Robert Schwartz. Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
West, Richard. The Court of Conscience, or, Dick Whippers Sessions. London, 1607.
Whitworth, Charles W., Jr., Ed. Three Sixteenth-Century Comedies. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, Inc., 1984.
Wilson, Adrian. “The ceremony of childbirth and its interpretation.” Women as Mothers in PreIndustrial England. Ed. Valerie Fildes. New York: Routledge, 1990. 68-107.
---. “Participant or patient? Seventeenth century childbirth from the mother’s point of view.”
Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society. Ed.
Roy Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 129-144.
Wolfthal, Diane. “Women’s Community and Male Spies: Erhard Schön’s How Seven Women
Complain about Their Worthless Husbands.” Attending to Early Modern Women. Eds.
Susan D. Amussen and Adele Seeff. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. 117154.
Woodbridge, Linda, ed. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. 907-958.
---. Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2001.
---. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

216

Wrightson, Keith. English Society, 1580-1680. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1984.
Zarrilli, Phillip. “From Destruction to Consecration: Covenant in the Chester ‘Noah’ Play.”
Theatre Journal 31.2 (1979): 198-209.

217