"Bamford's study provides a useful overview for students of Jacobean drama...a necessary and expansive look at an astonishing pattern in Jacobean tragedy..."--Shakespeare Bulletin
"This is a timely and well-researched monograph. . . The writing is refreshingly jargon-free, the main argument straightforwardly structuralist. . .the information in this book is both instructive and unsettling." --Seventeenth-Century News
"This is a timely and well-researched monograph. . . The writing is refreshingly jargon-free, the main argument straightforwardly structuralist. . .the information in this book is both instructive and unsettling." --Seventeenth-Century News
Book Description
The first book length study of its subject, Sexual Violence on the Jacobean Stage examines the representation of rape and attempted rape in a wide range of plays by Shakespeare, Fletcher, Heywood, Middleton, and their contemporaries. Situating the dramas' contradictory and powerful discourse of chastity in the context of Christian hagiography and classical legend, Bamford discusses the construction of sexual assault as sacrifice and spectacle, as threat and stimulus to male bonds, as redemptive and destructive of the victim's community.
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