Abstract
This thesis considers the relationship between concepts of time and reproductive knowledge in early modern medical, theatrical, and cultural thinking. I argue that these concepts were mutually constitutive, helping early moderns to make sense of the practical mechanics of reproduction and also facilitating a contemplation of humanity’s embodied temporal existence. I therefore contend that scholarship should recognise onstage pregnant bodies as biological clocks: bearers of embodied human time and palimpsestic signifiers of traceable pasts, a transient present, and potential futures.Although the structure of this thesis largely follows the chronology of a pregnancy, it deliberately challenges linear readings of reproductive experience and urgers readers to interpret pregnancy, on and off stage, as multichronic and multidirectional. In Chapter One, I explore the timing of conception in medical thought and propose that critics should view unseen, theatrical conceptions as structuring absences which shape narrative trajectories. Focusing on the narratively obscured conception of Elizabeth I in Henry VIII (c.1613) I argue that the presentation of conception and birth within the play is used to reflexively bridge the biological and temporal gap between Elizabeth and her successor James I and VI. Chapter Two examines depictions of early pregnancy and the visual and temporal significance of quickening as a watershed moment of gestation. Through an examination of quickening’s narrative importance in ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore (c.1631) I argue that onstage pregnancies exert an unseen but palpable sense of temporal pressure upon narrative action by compressing and accelerating a sense of theatrical time. Chapter Three explores the (un)timeliness of gestation and birth in Richard III (c.1593) and argues that the jarring and overlapping sense of time in the narrative should be central to our interpretation of the play, as it stems from Richard’s own untimely origins. Chapter Four confronts linear readings of reproductive timelines by re-centring analysis on cultural, narrative, and temporal aspects of the periods of confinement and lying-in in The Duchess of Malfi (c.1613) and The Winter’s Tale (1611), stressing the importance of reading pregnancy and birth through a multiplicity of temporalities. Ultimately, this thesis argues for a new temporal framework and suggests that whilst gendered time has often suppressed temporal readings of pregnant bodies and experiences, critics can locate temporal agency by revaluating reproductive time, not as inconsequential to early modern drama, but a crucial means through which contemporary playwrights explore dramaturgical temporalities.
| Date of Award | 1 Aug 2021 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Lucy Munro (Supervisor) & Sarah Lewis (Supervisor) |