Reconstructing the Woman, Rediscovering her Discourse Anonymous College

In her article on English Renaissance Drama, Katharine Eisaman Maus asserts how “in the Renaissance theater, the generic spectator is male, the spectacle female, and in some sense sexually available” (Maus 577), and the play Volpone by Ben Jonson is no exception. Here, Maus problematizes the naturalization of appropriating the female body to pander to the needs of the patriarchal subject in the Renaissance theater. It is implied in her work that the representations of women are often skewed to fulfill a specific role or function within the patriarchal binaries of masculinity and femininity. Rather than being sovereign characters in their own right, women in drama are valued instead as objects of spectacle, mere tools which exist solely to drive the male-centric plot forward. Likewise, Howard Marchitell argues in his paper Desire and Domination in Volpone that “Volpone is Jonson’s most thorough exploration of…”paternity”: fathers, sons and literary creativity… [which] denies the place of women; his conception of creativity, subjectivity, and reproduction is empathetically paternal” (Marchitell 291). He exposes the inherently gendered nature of the play’s very conception, foregrounding patriarchal subjectivity as the governing...