Female Characters on the Jacobean Stage Defying Type: When is a Shrew Not a Shrew?

This essay won the 2006 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Seventeenth Century Section. Within the dramatic conventions of the Jacobean period one of the stock female character types that would have been familiar to the audience was the shrew: a woman, usually a wife, who is outspoken and argumentative. This article examines two plays written early in the seventeenth century, John Webster’s The White Devil and William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale , and considers their presentation of female characters who manifest behaviour that might be considered shrewish. It argues that the plays contain passages that frame a sophisticated attack on such misogynist classifications of the female. The characters in question do more than fail to be confined by the traditionally limited female types, they seem to deliberately call into question the existence of such types, and highlight their nature as artificially constructed and imposed, and inadequate to define the possibilities of womanhood. Both plays challenge the convention that silence in a woman should be equated with virtue by presenting situations where a woman’s virtue demands that she speak. More particularly, they both mock the conventional Jacobean typing of shrewishness, the former by presenting good‐wife‐as‐shrew, the latter by presenting shrew‐as‐oracle.