SOURCE: "Violence Done to Women on the Renaissance Stage," in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, Routledge, 1989, pp. 77-97.

In the following essay, Tennenhouse explores the political implications behind the portrayal of violence perpetrated against the aristocratic female body in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

1

The following essay deals with the particular form of violence directed against the aristocratic female body in Jacobean drama. I will be considering that body as well as its treatment as a discursive practice, I do not take it to be either a "real" body, or a "mere" representation of the female, but rather an actor playing the part of an aristocratic woman. That such a practice existed there can be no doubt. Around the year 1604, dramatists of all sorts suddenly felt it appropriate to torture and murder aristocratic female characters in a...