Experimental Plays, Conventional Endings: Gender Normativity and the Female Spectator of Shirley’s The Doubtful Heir

Abstract

Critics have frequently argued about whether early modern plays like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night are ultimately subversive or conservative in their attitudes towards gender and sexuality. Stephen Greenblatt, for example, claims that Twelfth Night’s conclusion confirms the desirability of both heterosexuality and traditional gender roles, whereas Valerie Traub suggests that the play is more disruptive and unconventional than that, since its ending is undermined by the previous deconstruction of gender and sexual binaries and exposure of them as essentially ‘arbitrary’. The question, therefore, is the extent to which a conventional, heteronormative conclusion may or may not work to ‘shut down’ the potentially subversive energies of a play which otherwise explores the non-hetero and the gender nonconformist.

This paper explores these questions through a study of James Shirley’s c. 1638-9 tragicomedy The Doubtful Heir, and argues that this play’s ending is, in these terms, both conventional and subversive. Although, as in Twelfth Night, the last act of The Doubtful Heir works to reaffirm traditional gender roles, the effect of this is complicated or problematised by the way in which the play works to frame its hero, Ferdinand, as an object of desire for female spectators, and its encouragement both of the female gaze and of female fantasies of empowerment.