Jennifer Panek
”My Naked Weapon”: Male Anxiety and the Violent Courtship of the Jacobean Stage Widow
Volume 34.3, Fall 2000

While scholars have typically viewed the early modern stereotype of the “lusty widow” as a dissuasive tactic of a culture which disapproved of female remarriage, this essay argues that the stereotype frequently worked instead to enable remarriage, re-circulating widows’ property back into the male-controlled economy. To an impecunious young man, marrying a prosperous widow was both attractive and threatening, as the older, wealthier, more experienced woman was feared to make an ungovernable and financially controlling wife. Male fantasies about a widow’s sexual susceptibility assuaged the anxiety aroused by the prospect of such a marriage: they did so both by focussing on the suitor’s sexual prowess, so as to bolster the masculinity the widow threatened in other facets of the relationship, and by reducing the powerful widow to a mere woman, laughably at the mercy of her feminine appetite. An analysis of three early seventeenth-century comedies—Chapman’s The Widow’s Tears, Barry’s Ram Alley, and Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque—reveals how the theatre capitalized on cultural anxieties about remarrying widows and illuminates the compensatory function of the “lusty widow” stereotype beneath the plays’ scenes of aggressive courtship.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Comparative Drama home	Contact the Editors	Reproduction Permission
Subscriptions and Back Issues	Submission Guidelines	Links
Current Issue	Upcoming Issues	Essay and Contributor Index