Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare's England (review)

Reviews 183 Parergon 21.2 (2004) the creation of ‘ worthy’ images of dead women through the medium of funeral sermons or the re-configuration of political victims, such as Lady Jane Gray, as religious martyrs. As expected, some attention is given to Quaker women and their attitudes towards suffering and death. The book’s final section doubles back upon itself in its survey of female mourning and commemoration. Penitent criminals and female executions reappear . Funeral sermons are covered in ‘women and rituals’and again in the section on wills. The chapter on women and publication moves into new territory, however, and provides some interesting observations on both the inhibiting and liberating nature of print for women. A clearer direction and less jumping about through a loosely defined period of some 200 years would have been helpful; nevertheless, Death and the Early Modern Englishwoman is a useful addition to the scholarship on death and mourning and covers much unploughed ground. Dosia Reichardt Department of English James Cook University Bicks, Caroline, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003; hardback; pp. viii, 211; 12 b/w illustrations; RRP £40; ISBN 0754600383. Historians have varied in their views of the importance of the midwife in the medieval and Early Modern periods. Some dismiss her as a marginal figure holding little power and accorded little esteem by the community. Others see her influence as limited to the private feminine sphere. An alternative view is that she was a bridge between the public and private spheres. In Midwiving Subjects Caroline Bicks seeks to elucidate the participation of midwives in society, not only in the cultural codes of reproduction, but in the act of cultural production itself. According to Bicks, the midwife in this period was a historian who produced descriptions of origins that men and women often accepted as authentic. Bicks considers the role of the midwife in the Early Modern period with reference to how midwives were portrayed in Shakespearean drama and in contemporary medical, religious and popular texts. She looks at how midwives appeared in the many dramas of royal birth and absent heirs that were enacted on the stages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although Shakespeare did not use midwives as specific characters in his plays, according to Bicks, ‘the 184 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) early modern midwife is everywhere and nowhere in his plays, especially those that deal with magic, imagination and the elusive production of subjects and their histories.’ Bicks argues that in this material the midwife was acknowledged as a figure that was feared and revered for literally holding life and death in her hands, and one who had considerable power in the social context. She points out that midwives were socially empowered to handle bodies and interpret their secrets. They controlled the birth process, and were responsible for inspecting the newborn child and determining its gender when there was dispute. As a jury of matrons they determined legal issues such as disputed virginity and pregnancy in women and potency in men. Midwives interrogated women in labour about the paternity of their infants and then gave legal testimony as to the confessions so obtained. They could perform emergency baptisms. And they were popularly reputed to wield other powers: by cutting the umbilicus a midwife was thought to control the size of the newborn’s tongue and genitals and by her swaddling of the child to mould its unformed body and its fortunes. At a time when the physical signs and verbal reports of purity, sexual activity, paternity and salvation were open to many interpretations, society authorised midwives to generate and announce them. By reference primarily to Shakespeare’s plays, but also to other contemporary writers, Bicks discusses many issues relating to the various roles of midwives in society. Firstly she considers their role as the generators of tales about men’s wives and the lineage of their offspring and she refers to Early Modern plays and texts in which midwives were presented as able to obscure a wife’s sexuality and a child’s parentage. Gossips attended at a birth and told secrets of the birthing chamber and ‘The stories produced within...