Stages of Exception : Female Revenge and Sovereignty in Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedies

Byeon, Jayoon and Findlay, Alison and Oakley-Brown, Liz (2026) Stages of Exception : Female Revenge and Sovereignty in Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedies. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

Text (2026byeonphd)
2026byeonphd.pdf - Published Version
Restricted to Repository staff only until 27 January 2031.
Download (1MB)

Abstract

This thesis undertakes an examination of female representations in revenge tragedies written between 1558–1625, through the conceptual lens of exception and sovereignty. I explore female revenge in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as a site of exceptional and creative agency, operating outside and challenging the existing bounds of law, society, and gender. Together, the chapters demonstrate how women, when they lack the access to justice or retaliatory violence granted to their male counterparts, seek exceptional and inventive forms of revenge, ranging from acts that negotiate the limits of gender to acts of maternal and sovereign vengeance, proxy action, performance, and self-murder. The first chapter explores how female characters seek revenge by becoming exceptional in relation to traditional early modern gender roles, producing greater emotional satisfaction and entertainment for spectators than their timid male counterparts. The second chapter examines how maternal and royal revengers combine personal, political, and sovereign interests, using vengeance to assert power and challenge patrilineal structures. The third chapter considers the creative use of proxies and intermediaries, showing how women extend their agency and enact justice indirectly through human, material, and spectral means. The last chapter investigates self-murder as an expression of vengeance and sovereign power, where women transform death into both weapon and spectacle, asserting authority over their own lives and producing political and theatrical effects. Through oscillation, transgression, mediation, and death, female revenge becomes a form of art, with the stage serving as an exceptional space where women can transform constraint into creativity, absence into presence, and vulnerability into agency. Each mode of revenge shares a logic of exceptional sovereignty: the capacity to reclaim the right to act in spaces where they are structurally denied power, and to navigate creative and alternative forms of justice.