Daughters Wives and Widows: Writings by Men About Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640.

Joan Larsen Klein, ed. 1500-1640. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. xvii + 328 pp. $37-50 cloth; $14.95 paper.

Men are accustomed to giving advice to women and women to taking advice from men (whatever they do with it), now as well as in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. The authors Joan Larsen Klein includes in Daughters Wives & Widows gave women both particular and general advice, particular advice about procedures for obstetrics and household management and general advice for becoming proper women by fulfilling their gendered obligations to fathers, husbands, children, and God. Without our uneasiness about essentializing women, they discriminated only among maids, wives, and widows. They assumed that women needed their advice, as well as their supervision and protection, which varied only with respect to their convictions about women's frailty or their recognition of women's capacities: for Juan Luis Vives (in The Office and Duty of an Husband), woman was "a ruinous house, that must be underset and upholden with many small props" (124); for Milton (in Paradise Lost), Eve, yet unfallen, "the fairest unsupported Flower, / From her best prop so far" (9-432-33).

Men also had a virtual monopoly on authorship. Klein includes eleven male authors: the pseudonymous authors of the prayer book and homilles, represented by the marriage service and the homily on marriage; one T. E., who introduced the anonymously compiled Law's Resolution of Women's Rights (1632); Erasmus' Epistle ... in Laud and Praise of Matrimony and his defense of the same; Vives' Instruction of a Christian Woman and his Office and Duty of an Husband; Stubbes' Crystal Glass for Christian Women, a hagiographic account of his wife Katherine's life and death; William Perkins' Christian Economy; Eucharius Roeslin's Birth of Mankind; Thomas Tusser's Points of Housewifery; Richard Brathwaite's English Gentlewoman (1631); and Jacques Du Bosc's Complete Woman (1632), translated into English by one N. N. in 1639. The female author Klein includes is the virtually anonymous Dorothy Leigh, whose Mother's Blessing appeared in at least twenty editions between 1616 and 1674. Leigh, ostensibly writing to her sons, posited a wider audience of "we women" as she negotiated her way through traditional strictures in order to give her own advice about family and religion.

Male authors variously included women in their audience. The marriage service and the homily on marriage, probably preached afterwards, would have been heard by a mixed audience. Erasmus wrote his epistle to an imaginary young man dedicated to celibacy; Vives addressed his Office and Duty of an Husband to men. The ostensible audience for his Instruction of a Christian Woman was the circle of Queen Catherine and Princess Mary and, through its translator Richard Hyde's connection with Sir Thomas More, More's circle as well; it would also have been read approvingly by men anxious to protect their daughters' and wives' physical chastity by keeping them at home and their mental chastity (to which Vives thought their physical chastity near allied) by severely restricting their reading. Brathwaite and Du Bosc, writing a century later, addressed their treatises to a literate, aristocratic female readership; they assumed a cultivated society in which women participated as the near-equals of men, capable of looking after their bodies and their minds.

Conduct books invariably raise questions about is and ought. On the one hand, because they are admonitory, it can be argued that reality is what they caution against; on the other hand, because they are generically admonitory, their rhetorical conventions make reality impossible to ascertain. Nevertheless, in conduct books written by men for women, rhetorical conventions coincide with social forms in that men are comfortable giving advice to women in print and in life. The advice they give represents their beliefs about and fears of woman and what they take to be her essential nature.

The texts Klein chooses, all popular in their time, represent a range of authors. Most are unavailable in modern editions. Her editing is exemplary--she bases her texts on first editions, modernizing spelling, punctuation, and paragraphing--and her glossing is both helpful and cautious. Her introductions are informative about authors and publication histories. She includes Erasmus and Tusser (and the marriage service and homily) entire and substantial portions of the rest; her excerpts from Vives' Instruction of a Christian Woman, different from George Foster Watson's, are, she observes, more representative and consequently make Vives less sympathetic.

Theodora Jankowski, in Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama, looks at women excluded from the discourses in Daughters Wives & Widows. She attempts to locate, in historical time and space, powerful women presented in the plays of Heywood, Lyly, Marlow, Shakespeare, and Webster. In a chapter on women beside the throne, she discusses Shakespeare's Joan La Pucelle, Margaret of Anjou, and Volumnia as perverse images of virgin, wife, and widow. The other characters she discusses, even as they are maids, wives, and widows, are also enthroned rulers. Male rule was extensively theorized in the early modern period, female rule not at all. Jankowski wants to see what happens when "multiple discourses" -- of male rule and female nature -- converge in individual women rulers (9). Lyly's Sappho, Marlowe's Dido, Shakespeare's Cleopatra, Webster's Duchess of Malfi, and Queen Elizabeth in propria persona and fictively, in Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, figure in her discussion.

Elizabeth, in propria persona, subordinated her personal to her political body to present herself as fierce virgin, androgynous ruler, and masculine defender. The female rulers of the drama, subject to or at least performing out their personal bodies, jeopardize their political bodies, except for Heywood's Elizabeth, who remains largely offstage. If, as Jankowski argues, all these playwrights explore "how a woman ruler integrates her private and her sexual life into her public life" (73), they uniformly show failure. Did they wish to compliment Elizabeth by showing success? Jankowski thinks they did but, confused by contradictory discourses in ways that Elizabeth was not, were incapable of imagining a successful female sovereign.

For one thing, their female rulers were quasi-historical or fictively established as passionate women who risked all for love and lost; for another, their passions made them theatrically vivid. Jankowski's argument suggests that Lyly, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Webster, had they been as clearsighted as Elizabeth, would have written several quite different plays. She obliges them to a kind of imaginative freedom they seldom claimed, as well as detachment from conventions associated with commercial success, so that they might imagine female rulers who transcended the gender discourses of the early modern period. That Shakespeare and other playwrights created women characters enmeshed in these gender discourses rather than the timeless Other of some psychoanalytic critics scarcely needs arguing. But Jankowski, arguing against psychoanalytic transcendence, seems to demand a kind of cultural and theatrical transcendence.