This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women’s sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She analyzes how playwrights employed visual and verbal clues to identify the sexual status of female characters to engage their audiences with popular concepts of women’s health; and how they satirized the notion of the womb’s insatiable appetite, suggesting that men who fear it have been duped. But the study also recognizes that, as these dramatists were fully aware, merely by bringing such material to the stage so frequently, they were complicit in perpetuating such theories.

• Contents 6
• L ist of Figures 8
• Acknowledgments 10
• Introduction 12
• 1. Troubled with the Mother 26
• 2. The Bugbears (1566–1570) 58
• 3. The Taming of the Shrew (ca. 1592–1594) 76
• 4. Romeo and Juliet (ca. 1594–1595) 100
• 5. Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare 118
• 6. Hamlet (1601) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) 124
• 7. The Maid’s Tragedy (1611–1613) and Parasitaster, or The Fawne (1604–1606) 152
• 8. A Fair Quarrel (1617) and The Hollander (1635) 174
• 9. Measure for Measure (1604) and Comus: A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (1634) 208
• Conclusion 226
• Appendix: Chart of a selection of plays representing women’s health in English drama 1540–1640 238