‘Thus I set my printless feet’: Representations of rape and their circulation in early modern England, 1630-1634

Abstract

This thesis analyses three texts representing rape in the early 1630s: Milton’s masque Comus (1634), the legal documents of Margery Evans’s 1631-4 rape case, and the libels written in the wake of the Earl of Castlehaven’s execution for rape and sodomy (1631). Work previously done on rape in early modern literary studies outlines broad conventions by which raped women represented in literature or the legal system are portrayed as promiscuous, at fault for their own rape. However, literary studies has failed to draw on the local lens used to study rape by historians. This thesis aims to discern from these closely related texts a localised model for communicating rape, one that may do so without further harming the raped woman’s reputation.

The thesis begins by analysing Comus’s representation of the raped body as profligate, reproducing physically and metaphorically. The middle chapters look at how Margery Evans’s legal documents turn her body into a commodity in circulation, and how the travel of the Castlehaven libels makes the raped bodies they depict only more accessible. The final chapter uses these conventions of rape’s representation to identify means used by Comus and Margery Evans to mitigate such aspersions cast on the rape victim. These are the symbolic and actual powers of particular local places and/or figures. The thesis concludes that early modern representations of rape portrayed the victim as excessively promiscuous, in both their material and figurative constructions. However, local places or figures could be deployed to counter this impression. My conclusion considers the limited ability of local agents to protect the central rape victim even as the texts journey away from these localities.