Swetnam the Woman-Hater
Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women is a Jacobean era stage play from the English Renaissance, an anonymous comedy that was part of a controversy during the 1615 – 1620 period.
According to a contemporaneous doggerel,[2] The Red Bull Is mostly full Of drovers, carriers, carters; But honest wenches Will shun the benches And not there show their garters.
In 1617, the Queen Anne's company moved from the open-air, "public" Red Bull to the enclosed "private" theatre the Cockpit, which had a more "elite" clientele.
In the famous Shrove Tuesday riot of 1617, the 'prentices damaged the Cockpit badly enough to delay its opening, and the Queen's Men had to remain at the Red Bull until repairs were done.
The play was one item, and apparently the final one, in a controversy that erupted in 1615 with the publication of Joseph Swetnam's anti-feminist tract The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women.
[5] The pseudonyms are thought to represent other female authors, making this polemical response to Swetnam a rare cluster of early 17th-century works written by women.
It has been argued that the play also shows specific debts to earlier dramas, notably George Peele's The Arraignment of Paris and John Lyly's Endymion.
In the middle of the opening scene, news arrives that Lorenzo is missing after fighting in the Battle of Lepanto (1571), and is feared to be either dead or captured by the Ottoman Turks.
The king calls her "wanton, coy, and fickle too;" he decides to punish her by restricting her social access, and puts her in the custody of his senior courtier, Nicanor.
(The play's two opening scenes create an obvious conflict in chronology: the dramatist postulates a future, post-England Swetnam, but tosses him into 1570s Sicily.
Meanwhile, the missing prince, Lorenzo, has returned clandestinely to Sicily; he wants to spy out local conditions and corruptions, unhindered by his fame and high position.
The young couple are put on trial for violating the king's command; in the classic fairy tale tradition, the penalty they face is death.
When Lisandro sees a mock-up of her supposedly severed head, he stabs himself in a suicide attempt; his guards, fearing punishment, flee, and Lorenzo and Iago secure his wounded body and nurse him back to health.
The play's status as a pro-feminist, proto-feminist, or quasi-feminist text has earned it an ever-growing body of commentary, analysis, and criticism from modern scholars.
Some attention has focused on the degree to which the play is or isn't a feminist work; critics have noted that Swetnam subordinates its polemical concerns to its subplot, while the main plot deals with high-flown romantic love.
