Figuring the Female Spectator

Abstract

This dissertation uses the drama of Shakespeare and Webster to gain insight into the dialogue surrounding female spectatorship in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Female spectators as portrayed in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hamlet, and The Duchess of Malfi are silent and impassive in the face of the spectacles they witness, but for these three figures, silence does not mean marginalization, and impassivity does not mean passivity. Audiences would have witnessed the figures in this dissertation shaping the meanings of those silences to their own advantages.