Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare's England (review)

The birthroom and its attendants have been understood as establishing a closed, private, and empowered female space. To this perception Caroline Bicks adds her own observation that the early modern birthroom and the midwife functioned as an important site of cultural production. Through her actions and words, the midwife legitimized, naturalized, and at times sanctified bodies. As Bicks's examination of various types of texts—political, religious, legal, medical, and literary—reveals, the midwife had significant cultural capital when "it came to marking/revising bodies and making men, women, and children" (16). In a compelling and thoughtful exploration of the midwife as the narrator of legitimacy and paternity, tester of virginity, shaper of the "natural" physical form, and participant in the ritual of churching, Bicks aptly elucidates the central role of the midwife in the formation of subjects. Bicks shows how the midwife intersected with the institutionalized and mainly male centers of authority to disrupt categories of cultural production.

This does not mean that male authorities benignly accepted her presence. Bicks takes pains to explain how the medical establishment, church officials, and other male authorities sought to discredit the midwife. Although eager to supplant the midwife through their texts and practices, medical men could go only so far when it came to the bodies of women. The midwife's hand could go where theirs could not, except in those cases calling for a surgeon. The midwife's reach promoted much anxiety about constructions of masculinity, control of female sexuality, and the signs (verbal and physical) that naturalized legitimate authority.

Shakespeare's plays provide the primary ground for Bicks's literary analysis of the midwife. She "suspects" that Shakespeare's representations of midwives are the most nuanced among his contemporaries "because actual midwives never appear on stage in his works. . . . At the same time, the early modern midwife is everywhere and nowhere in his plays" (20-21). Nonetheless, it would have been interesting if she had commented on an actual midwife character in the drama. Despite the lack of actual midwiving characters, Shakespeare's plays are a rewarding contribution to this study. They work particularly well when Bicks discusses the midwife's role in legitimating subjects and royal dynasties, whether it be by naming the father of a baby or correcting physiological defects to create a more "natural" form.

Because the midwife was the main birth attendant, her authority extended beyond the birthroom and was registered in legal documents. Her tales produced legitimacy and fidelity, or the obverse. Bicks's analyses of Paulina in The Winter's Tale and the Old Lady in Henry VIII aptly support the power of the midwife's testimony and men's desire for that testimony even as they sought to limit the midwife's influence. Bicks explores a different type of control in midwives' role as shapers of bodies. This shaping of the newborn's head and body "potentially shaped both in ways that inextricably linked the future subject to natural or depraved (and perhaps monstrous) origins" (96). The midwife appeared in political discourses surrounding legitimate and illegitimate governance. Bicks deftly connects the dovetailing discourses of politics and obstetrics to read Richard III in Shakespeare's plays and Sir Thomas More's Latin history. She categorizes Richard as a bad midwife who must deform a number of bodies to achieve the crown. The women, whose voices he tries to suppress, represent the "loquacious birthroom community" who threaten his ascendancy and legitimacy (125). He wants to portray them as "unreliable taletellers," but it is "a status that the world of the play refuses to uphold" (125).

Bicks returns to women's speech and the Stuart dynasty when she considers infant baptism by midwives and the furor it caused in Protestant churches. The baptizing midwife becomes aligned with the witch because they both "aggravate concerns (primarily articulated by men whose power rests on marks of difference) that ordained signs can be stolen and their ritual efficacy compromised" (132). Bicks then...