Adventuring Men and Changeable Women in Early Modern Drama

202 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.Chapter 1 introduces the various and often contradictory early modern texts and contexts in which Western supremacy was produced, promoted, and/or contested in terms of white Christian masculinity. Chapter 2 investigates the collusion with patriarchy in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling , and explains how the play restores Alsemero from sea to landed establishment by utilizing and then displacing Beatrice-Joanna, a carrier of masculine transactions of landed properties, social statuses, and moral principles. The following Chapters likewise continue to explore the way in which the period's discourse on woman's changeability contributes to man's self-identity, but in an added context of racial difference. Chapter 3 reads Shakespeare's Othello in comparison with the other three plays, suggesting that the main factor in Othello's failure to establish himself successfully in Venice, his Other's territory, is his inability to claim whiteness. Chapter 4 and 5 deal with Massinger's The Renegado and Fletcher's The Island Princess, respectively. Both chapters examine the ways in which the white protagonists, Vitelli and Armusia, unlike Othello, successfully achieve power in their racial and religious Other's territories---Turkish Tunis and the Moluccas, respectively. The main focus in reading both plays is to see how the white men legitimize their superiority over the racial Others and their lands by administering alien women's sexual desire and converting the non-white women to white patriarchal Christianity.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD