Hot Blood, Hot Thoughts, Hot Deeds: Marriage and Unmarried Sexuality in Early Modern Drama

Abstract

Today, we are seeing a drastic decrease in interest in sex and marriage—especially amongst young women—as a response to current environmental, financial, and political changes. The fact that young people do not seem to feel beholden to traditions and expectations surrounding sex and marriage implies a shift to bodily and social autonomy which is mimicked in the early modern plays that this dissertation discusses. This project maps the strange state of marriage—and the female characters’ unmarried sex that helps to untangle it—in four early modern plays: Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare, The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, and Galatea by John Lyly. These plays were written around the turn from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries, when England began policing premarital sex. Of course, this did not mean that people stopped having unmarried sex. Yet because of the strictures that were put into place (specifically surrounding fornication and which types of marriage counted as sanctified), unmarried sex had to change. These plays explore this fraught state of unmarried sex all while using unmarried sex to help us grapple with the equally fraught state of marriage in their fictional worlds. This study explores the ways in which young, unmarried female characters take control of their bodily autonomy: how they decide with whom they share themselves sexually, in what ways, how often, and for how long. These young women have sex outside the sanctity and protection of marriage, a form of sex that is not for consummation, not for procreation, but purely for sexual pleasure. And by doing so, by working around the confines of their plays’ strange states of marriage, they dictate the spheres of marriage, desire, and their own bodies.