Poor Women in Shakespeare (review)

Building on the pioneering work of Alice Clark and those who have followed her, such as Frances Dolan, Laura Gowing, and Natasha Korda, Fiona McNeill searches for “traces of real historical women behind their dramatic representations” (16). Through original research into conduct manuals, print ballads, and court records and by attention to linguistic detail, McNeill has given us a vital—if uneven—study into often hidden and misunderstood figures on the early modern stage: women of meager economic means. Her gripping opening chapter convinces the reader of the ubiquity of poor women in the dramas, if not in actual characters then in language. Expanding on Orsino’s request for a song “chanted” by “the spinsters and the knitters” and “the free maids that weave through their thread with bones” (2.4.43–45)¹, through representations of spinsters on “baser currency” (64) and the figure of the unemployed serving maid in Shoemaker’s Holiday, McNeill ensures that we will hear Orsino’s call for music with new ears. Almost as exciting is the second chapter’s illumination of Juliet’s status in Measure for Measure through a look at bastardy laws and witchcraft dramas. In chapter 3, McNeill gives a different (if less cogent) twist to material also recently analyzed by Korda in the figure of Mary Frith, also known as Moll Cutpurse, and with chapter 4, examines the phenomenon of “masterless women” living in London². In the final section, the study organically extends this discussion to the colonies and the deportation of vagrant women from the workhouses to planned villages such as “Maidens Adventure” (190) and provides us with a new context for understanding New World allusions in seventeenth-century plays.

McNeill begins with the premise that the stable categories “wife,” “widow,” and “maid,” especially when applied to women of lower income, were a fantasy of domestic order propagated by conduct manuals and English law. McNeill’s “poor women” belong to a category, therefore, that defies definition. At the center of her analysis is the way in which poor women “make shift” (13 et passim)—that is, redefine themselves as their circumstances require. This disruptive force, McNeill argues, is seen most clearly in early modern London in the iconic Moll Cutpurse, but it is also realized throughout the drama in the ways that language depicting a disordered household ideal involves poor women.

Following her discussion of Measure for Measure, the “Shakespeare” in the book’s purported focus falters somewhat. Although the first half of the study does much to reinvigorate our understanding of Shakespearean vocabulary— terms such as “Malkin,” “flax wench,” and “maid”—there is very little mention of Shakespeare’s works in chapters 3 through 5. Those readers expecting a work literally on poor women in Shakespeare’s plays may be disappointed by the absence of such figures as the Jailer’s Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen, who “slipped away and to the city made” (4.1.97), or Diana in All’s Well That Ends Well, whom Bertram calls a “gamester” (5.3.190), inhabiting the fringes of the military fields. In general, the plays of Shakespeare get short shrift; in an extended discussion of witchcraft dramas and illegitimate births, Thomas Heywood’s Wisewoman of Hogsdon receives five pages while Macbeth has one paragraph and no mention of the “finger of a birth-strangled babe / Ditch-delivered by a drab” (4.1.30–31). In this way, the category of “Shakespeare” may become as inconsistent as that of “poor women” and come to represent the time when “Shakespeare’s plays were in performance” (198), a vague construction indeed. Although I can see the book’s logic of moving from domestic ideals circling around The Taming of the Shrew to the shifting “New World” of The Tempest, I cannot wonder if the title has more to do with marketing than with theoretical precision.

Thus, I find myself addressing the question of cost. While I find much to admire in McNeill’s research and the study...