Fainting and Gender on the Early Modern Stage

Abstract

This thesis examines the conflicting meanings of swooning in early modern drama, revealing the different ways that emotion, interiority and gender were understood and conceptualised. Drawing on a wide variety of texts, it demonstrates that ideas about fainting interact with a rich array of early modern discourses, from medical and cultural debates about the body, emotions and death, to Protestant concerns about predestination and literary models of passion and performance. Subject to a range of interpretations, swoons in the playhouse also expose and interrogate prevalent anxieties about women and men, illustrating how the meaning of a faint was often gendered.

Drawing on analysis of hundreds of staged faints with detailed readings of plays by Shakespeare, Marston, Heywood and Ford, this thesis tracks how attitudes towards passing out are shaped by the perceived cause of the faint and the character of the fainter. Whereas some early modern plays follow medieval texts that idealise male swooners for their emotional sensitivity, others present men who faint as emasculated, throwing light on the tension between conceptions of masculinity that prioritise self-mastery and those that emphasise sincerity and feeling. A woman’s faint can be seen as confirming either her virtue or her guilt and thus provides a way to explore the fraught process of deciphering embodied gestures and events. The fact that female characters could feign faints further destabilises their depiction, sometimes supporting misogynistic stereotypes about feminine duplicity and sometimes exposing fault lines in the early modern tendency to judge women from their outward behaviour. The first sustained analysis of gender and swooning in early modern literature, my thesis opens up an illuminating picture of gender roles in flux, arguing that late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century drama marks a significant transition in the ways that swoons are perceived and portrayed.

Date of Award	17 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Lesel D Dawson (Supervisor)