'The raven doth not hatch a lark': The alien and maternal bodies of William Shakespeare's non-English mothers.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

My research will address how emerging early modern ideologies of foreign people, land and cultures and the maternal body intersect, exploring how social and bodily differences align through representations of non-English motherhood. My work will aim to bring together the distinct fields of maternity and colonialism studies, producing new ways of thinking in regard to perceptions of femininity and identity. This project will investigate the significance of these beliefs for Shakespeare's dramatic works and his presentation of foreign mothers. This project will therefore develop an entirely unique contribution to the three areas of early modern maternity, colonialism and Shakespeare studies.During the initial stages of my PhD, I have completed a literature review of scholars writing on the categorisation of other cultures (Hodgen, 1971; Deroux; 2010) and maternity studies from a range of medical and dramatic perspectives (Miller and Yavneh, 2000; Fissell, 2004 and Laoutaris, 2008). This has allowed me to identify a clear gap in existing scholarship across both maternity and colonialism studies. Whilst scholars have touched upon the female body in travel narratives (Hall, 1996; Wagner, 2019) or the development of "Other" types of womanhood (Schwarz, 2000; Wiedenbeck, 2015), a focused study of non-English maternity in these accounts has not been attempted. My work will build upon and extend this body of scholarship, arguing that it is the foreign maternal body that provides the greatest challenge to the stability of cultural and gender identity in the period. To do so, my research will involve analysing maternity texts, such as Nicholas Culpeper's 'Directory for Midwives' (1662) and John Sadler's 'The Sick Woman's Private Looking-Glasse' (1636). Culpeper's work is essential for highlighting comparisons between birth accounts of hybrid species and tales of other cultures contained in travel narratives. Sadler's text will be analysed in relation to his discussion of the female body as impacted by heat and the abnormalities he suggests would be caused within mothers living in different climates. I will be interpreting such sources in relation to exploration accounts, such as Leo Africanus' 'A Geographical History of Africa' (translated 1600) and Mairtre d' Anghiera's 'The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India' (translated 1555). These narratives are among several that characterise foreign, maternal women as over-sexualised and excessively powerful. Such analysis will be applied within my later chapters, offering new insights into female Shakespearean characters often overlooked in criticism, including Sycorax from 'The Tempest', Tamora from 'Titus Andronicus' and Thaisa and Marina from 'Pericles'. I will explore how attitudes towards non-English maternity, constructed through the circulation of materials such as the aforementioned travel narratives, is central to Shakespeare's presentation of the identity of these women. I will also argue that such sources would have influenced the audience's perception of these maternal figures, highlighting the far broader scope of connotations associated with foreign motherhood on the early modern stage than has previously been outlined.