The Virgin Not: Language and Sexuality in Shakespeare

Summary

'New plays and maidenheads', according to the Prologue of The Two Noble Kinsmen,

are near akin: Much followed both, for both much money giv'n If they stand sound and well. And a good play, Whose modest scenes blush on his marriage day And shake to lose his honour, is like her That after holy tie and first night's stir Yet still is modesty, and still retains More of the maid to sight than husband's pains.

(Prol. 1-8)

The endless renewal of the spoken word, the play whose every performance is almost but not quite the originary 'first night's stir', is comparable here to the virgin whose maidenhead is taken yet 'still is modesty', still seems 'more of the maid' than not. I want to take up here some of the ways in which plays and maidenheads are related, how Shakespeare's dramatic language represents sexuality. It will be necessary to narrow the focus considerably, of course - in terms of language and sexuality in Shakespeare, here, if anywhere, is God's plenty. My argument will therefore only concern female sexuality as a production of male discourse, and I mean to use the term 'sexuality' rather than 'gender' because I will examine the biological semantics at work in the plays. Some feminist theorists have argued that female sexuality is, in patriarchal discourse, unrepresentable - conceptually available only as lack, invisibility, or negation. I will pursue that position through the different, sometimes contradictory ways in which the language of several early modern writers, particularly Shakespeare, represented female sexuality and biology. Ultimately, I will examine some of the mystifications of the Tudor—Stuart discourse of virginity, the ne plus ultra, so to speak, of female sexuality — looking particularly at how certain modes of discourse registered the presence or absence of virginity.