Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England

by Lena Cowen Orlin

According to Holinshed's Chronicles, Thomas Arden was murdered by his wife, her lover, and several accomplices in 1551. Holinshed apologizes for including in his state history what seems to be "but a private matter," although at the same time he asserts that the "horribleness" of the act justifies public retelling. Alice Arden's crime was popularized in Arden of Feversham (1592), a play that initiated the genre of domestic tragedy and thrust private conflict onto the stage of public discourse.
Weaving a complex tapestry out of intellectual history and literary analysis, Lena Cowen Orlin examines how the private issues of contentious marital relations and household governance became public - through conduct manuals, sermons, political tracts, and philosophical treatises, as well as domestic tragedies - in the culture of post-Reformation England. Orlin first draws on rich archival evidence in telling the story of the Ardens. Although Arden of Feversham fulfilled the conservative project of confirming patriarchal authority in the home at a time of social upheaval, Orlin finds that later domestic tragedies such as A Woman Killed with Kindness and Othello were less predictable in their aims.
And while other forms of public literature provided blueprints for ordering the household, domestic tragedies continued to reveal the tensions lying under the surface inconsistencies in the prescribed role of women, contradictions within patriarchal ideology, conflicts between political and economic interests in the household, inadequacies in the old ideals of friendship and benefice, and anxieties about the control of material possessions.

309 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1994

About the author

Lena Cowen Orlin, Ph.D. (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1985; M.A., U.N.C., 1978; B.A., Oberlin College, 1974), is Professor Emerita of English at Georgetown University, former Executive Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library 1982–96, and past Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America. She taught previously at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she was named Presidential Research Professor.

She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Chair of the Board of Governors of the New Variorum Shakespeare, a general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series and the Arden Shakespeare State of Play series, and member of the editorial boards of Shakespeare Studies and Shakespeare Survey.

Reviews

[Katheryn Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an important book for anyone thinking about concepts of public and private on the early modern stage, and I think it is best read today (almost 30 years after it was written) in that context.

Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England is a conceptual history of the house, which reads domestic tragedies as bearers of cultural value and thus as engenders of cultural meaning. Orlin argues that, since archives only ever offer incomplete and provisional histories, fiction can be treated as an archive.

Many of the views in this book feel familiar, but often because this is where they originated. Although I didn't find this book as interesting as other, more recent, critical works, I feel much more grounded in my thinking for having read it.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm especially impressed with the first couple chapters of this book, where Orlin carefully disentangles the conventional view late-20th century critics have in relation to misogyny in Renaissance England. It was present, but other pressures need to be acknowledged before judging the time as wholly chauvinistic. For Orlin, most of those pressures revolve around the household. Political pressures, where James I sought to justify his monarchy by drawing on a presumed male authority over the household. And private pressures, where the man internalizes the expectations of his community to be the sovereign of his household. Though this doesn't excuse the misogyny and the irrational suspicions, it does further elaborate the situation.