Discourses of Resistance to Autocracy in Seventeenth-Century England

Wall-Randell, Sarah; Wall-Randell, Sarah

The seventeenth century in England, like the early twenty-first century in America, grappled with the threat of authoritarianism in government and the question of how to resist autocracy. Historically, English citizens took unprecedented action in the regicide and the republican experiment of the Commonwealth; in the texts examined in this panel, autocratic and counter-autocratic energies resonate through spheres of experience from the political to the domestic. This panel explores the ways in which seventeenth-century authors found analogues for autocracy in domestic and personal structures of power, in tragic, comic, historical, and closet drama as well as in poetry. Tyranny in the state, in marriage, and even within the warring impulses of the self are all linked in these papers. The presenters particularly spotlight gendered hierarchies, arguing that female characters and voices, because of their institutionalized subjugation by men throughout Stuart, Interregnum, and Restoration society, share a common purpose in resisting the abuse of power wherever it is found. This ethos of personal resistance, the presenters argue, can be extrapolated back outward to the civic level.

MacLeod’s paper on the apocryphally Shakespearean drama Edward III explores the play’s staging of different modes of autocracy wielded by three kings. In a direct act of tyranny, the play’s King Edward demands that a subject, the Countess of Salisbury, submit to him sexually. In her analysis, MacLeod shows how patriarchy is always aligned with tyranny, and is violently inflicted on women’s bodies. MacLeod also connects early modernity to present-day autocracy, with reference to a 2026 production of Edward III that she directed, which brought the US-led summary deposition of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro into dialogue with the early modem text.

Another turn-of-the-century play that dramatizes patriarchal tyranny over women, Dekker and Chettle’s Patient Grissel, is the focus of Sincox’s paper. Sincox argues that the play complicates the Chaucerian story of a husband who “tests” his wife by subjecting her to humiliations by juxtaposing their dynamic with that of a “shrewish” wife who resists the autocratic rule of her husband. If Edward III unstintingly reveals male tyranny, Patient Grissil goes farther, proposing a model of resistance.

Bucking traditional scholarship that separates Milton’s closet drama from plays written for the public theater, this panel features Samson Agonistes alongside Jacobean plays. Piduri’s paper takes these plays' questions of tyranny and resistance, in which the political is mapped onto the interpersonal, inside the individual. For Piduri, Samson is caught between autocracy and autonomy, each mediated by his own will. He is, paradoxically, least free when he has the most license, because he becomes the prisoner of desire. Only by annihilating himself, and giving up his will to God, does Samson escape the tyrannies of the state and of the self.

The final paper brings together these threads of the personal and the political, the human and the specifically female. Woods focuses on Aemilia Lanyer’s poems to powerful women, “To the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty” (for Queen Anna) and “The Description of Cookham” (for Margaret, Countess of Cumberland). Both these poems position women (poet and dedicatees alike) as particularly fit to challenge autocracy and oppression because of their disadvantage in the gendered hierarchy of society. Through these appeals to fellow women, Woods argues, Lanyer sidelines and subverts the principle of the divine right of kings, and, by extension, challenges autocratic rule more generally.

A great strength of the panel is the way it brings together texts which are not typically put into critical conversation because of their diverse genres. Additionally, the panel includes scholars from a wide range of positionalities, including gender, sexual orientation, race, and professional status. Woods is an extremely prominent senior scholar, a legendary feminist critic who is one of the foremost experts on Aemilia Lanyer, and a professor and proviost emerita at a liberal-arts college. MacLeod and Sincox are junior faculty at large public universities, while Piduri is a recent PhD at Brown. The panelists span criticism-adjacent disciplines: Woods, the definitive modern editor of Lanyer, brings the perspective of textual editing to the table, while MacLeod is a theater practitioner as well as a scholar.

This panel is thematically connected to another session organized by the LLC Seventeenth-Century English Forum, “Early Modern English Writing and/against Autocracy.” The two panels are complementary, and attendees at both sessions will find many threads of connection between them, but each also stands alone. The “Writing Against Autocracy” panel focuses on texts that anatomize the conditions and instruments of tyranny, whereas this panel centers diverse and gendered discourses of resistance.

41 Discourses of Resistance to Autocracy in Seventeenth-Century England: Calls for Papers