Abstract
English and continental literature from the late Middle Ages well into the seventeenth century includes numerous references to Amazon queens, from Christine de Pizans The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405 to Thomas Heywood’s Exemplary Lives… of the Nine Most Worthy Women in 1640 and Thomas D’Urfey’s A Commonwealth of Women in 1685.1 Amazon legends acquired particular topicality in the sixteenth century when explorers of the Americas and Africa recounted stories of alleged Amazonian tribes in the New World; Elizabethan playwrights were quick to incorporate the figure of the exotic Amazon into several of their dramatic productions.2 Though the particulars of the legends varied, the Amazons were reputed to be warrior women who burned off one breast to allow for more skillful archery;3 mated with men enthusiastically albeit for reproductive purposes only; raised their daughters but surrendered their sons, or killed them, or, even worse—forced them to perform domestic duties; and finally, lived in all-female communities. Any one of these behaviors would have challenged contemporary notions about the nature of the ideal woman; in toto, the description of the Amazon woman provided Elizabethans with a paradigm of female monstrosity. In a few cases, the Amazon myth was called up in a more positive fashion: for example, poets exploited Amazon references to emphasize Elizabeth as martial queen in connection with the Armada threat,4 but in general, even Elizabethan iconography eschewed Amazonian association. Far more frequently, the figure of the Amazon was appropriated to represent violation of the natural order.
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Notes
For an encyclopedic survey of Amazon references in sixteenth-century literature, see Celeste Turner Wright, “The Amazons in Elizabethan Literature,” Studies in Philology, 37 (July 1940): pp. 433–56.
See also Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Drama (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981). Shepherd’s book includes some discussion of the Amazon figure in early modern literature, though not as much as his title would suggest.
See also Kathryn Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Schwarz’s excellent study examines representations of Amazons in the Jacobean masque, in The Fairie Queene, and in The Arcadia, as well as in Shakespeare’s plays.
See Jean E. Gagen, The New Woman: Her Emergence in English Drama, 1600–1730 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1954), for a brief overview of the Amazon figure in seventeenth-century drama. Gabriele Bernhard Jackson discusses Shakespeare’s use of the Amazon tradition in his representation of Joan of Arc in Henry IV, Part I: “Topical Ideology: Witches, Amazons, and Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc,” English Literary Renaissance, 18 (Winter 1988): pp. 40–65.
See also Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 124–34. Montrose discusses the Amazon tradition in connection to A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Amazonian mythology seems symbolically to embody and to control a collective (masculine) anxiety about women’s power not only to dominate or to repudiate men but also to create and destroy them.”
See Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), for a fascinating discussion of the cultural implications of the Amazonian mastectomy. According to Paster, “The Amazons’ significance as ambivalently powerful figures of aggressive, self-determining desire is epitomized by their self-mutilation.”
On the irony of Oberons final blessing of the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta, see Peter Holland, “Theseus’ Shadows in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Shakespeare Survey, 47 (1995), pp. 139–51.
For example, see D’Orsay W Pearson, “‘Unkinde Theseus’: A Study in Renaissance Mythology,” English Literary Renaissance, 4 (1974): pp. 276—98.
Though Carol Thomas Neeley does not discuss The Two Noble Kinsmen, her arguments about interrupted weddings apply to this play. See Neeley, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
William Whately, A Bride-Bush; Or, A Direction for Married Persons, quoted in Lloyd Davis, ed., Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance: An Annotated Edition of Contemporary Documents (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), p. 247.
See Geraldo de Sousa, Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). De Sousa makes a similar point, arguing that Hippolyta and Emilia “momentarily project their now-repressed same-sex comradeship on the relationship between Pirithous and Theseus,” p. 33.
See also Jeanne Addison Roberts, The Shakespearean Wild: Geography, Genus, and Gender. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991). Roberts focuses on Theseus’s struggle “to come to grips with a central male dilemma, namely, the conflict between his need for the female Wild represented by Venus and his preference for the male Wild of Mars,” p. 129.
See Peter Holland, “‘Travelling hopefully’: the Dramatic Form of Journeys in English in English Renaissance Drama,” in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michele Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Holland comments briefly on The Sea Voyage: “The hungry confrontation with a hostile environment and the impossibility of suppressing heterosexual desire are the play’s main concerns…,” p. 160.
See Michael Hattaway, “‘Seeing Things’: Amazons and Cannibals,” in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Jeanne-Pierre Maquerlot and Michele Willems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 179–92.
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© 2003 Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, Debra Barrett-Graves
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Carney, J.E. (2003). “Honoured Hippolyta, Most Dreaded Amazonian”: The Amazon Queen in the Works of Shakespeare and Fletcher. In: Levin, C., Carney, J.E., Barrett-Graves, D. (eds) “High and Mighty Queens” of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10676-6_8
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