Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech in Early Modern England by Kirilka Stavreva (review)

In her 1991 reading of The Taming of the Shrew, Lynda E. Boose "insist[s] upon invading privileged literary fictions with the realities that defined the lives of sixteenth-century 'shrews'" (181), and Kirilka Stavreva's Words Like Daggers seeks to do just that under the broader category of "violent female speech." Spanning from the 1590s to the 1660s, Words Like Daggers draws on depictions of the vocal performances of non-aristocratic women in legal, historical, and popular texts, extrapolating three distinct but overlapping categories of contentious speech: scolding, "witch-speak," and prophetic "cries." These terms form the basis of analysis for the chapters on early modern drama. The book argues that, in both historical and dramatic texts, women's violent speech blurred the gender binary and destabilized the established order in legal, religious, social, and civil contexts. Stavreva uses "contentious speech," characterized by linguistic vividness, social subversiveness, and a threatening (and threateningly feminine) embodied performance, as a new historical lens for interpreting early modern dramas that feature outspoken female characters. Though scholars have offered in-depth studies of women's speech through such lenses as "just anger" (from Gwynne Kennedy's book by the same name), "rhetorical violence" (from Sidney L. Sondergard's Sharpening Her Pen), and "jesting literature" (from Pamela Allen Brown's Better a Shrew than a Sheep), they variously delimit their investigations of women's voices through class, genre, or rhetorical goal. While these narrowed lenses have produced important critical insights, Stavreva's notion of contentious speech complements this work by allowing for a broader conception of linguistic violence and a more complete picture of the women who engaged in it.

The first two chapters lay the foundation for the book, covering religious writings on the dangers of women's tongues and legal cases of accused scolds. The driving focus of these chapters is the capacity of contentious speech to disrupt gender norms and to claim social authority. In her first chapter, Stavreva illuminates how the diction of male-authored sermons and homilies suggests the capacity of a woman's tongue for "overpowering patriarchal efforts to regulate language" (xx). Culturally gendered female, "fiery speech" could feminize both the male authors of angry sermons and the women they accused, but it could also masculinize both genders through its tendency to reproduce itself in others. The resultant blurring of the gender binary becomes a recurring theme of the book.

Chapter two focuses more narrowly on scolds. While men as well as women could be accused of scolding (and often were), the offense was gendered feminine. Stavreva outlines the "semantic, stylistic, and vocal qualities of scolding" (22), building defining characteristics as the chapter progresses. Scolds wielded "assault words" (21) and a "vocabulary of sexual slander" (22). Their style might involve "elaborate detail" (23), "grotesque description" (25), or the "symbolism of filth and beastliness . . . [and] disease" (26). Their speech was loud and sometimes filled with "non-verbal noises" (30). Such performances gendered these women both "femininely unrestrained and masculinely authoritative" (38). Counter-intuitively, the masculine authority generated by such vocal performances translated well into local communities where, despite the scold's reputation for rancor, she often assumed the publicly commendable role of neighborhood watchdog.

Informed by the first two chapters, chapter three attempts to recover some rhetorical agency for the women of shrew-taming dramas. The speech of shrews on stage carried many of the same characteristics that gave historical scolds access to some degree of social authority, but the inevitable conciliation at the end of shrew-taming narratives seems to deny the reformed woman any potential for agency or authority. Yet Stavreva asserts that many of these plays actually suggest the comic failure of correcting shrews. To support this claim, she places the generic conciliation of the shrew in context with the ritualized performance of penance to which historical shrews were sometimes subjected. Focusing primarily on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, Stavreva contends that Kate's final...