Materializing Confession: Allegory and History in A Warning for Fair Women

Nova Myhill, New College of Florida

In this paper, I will explore the relation between the historical and the allegorical aspects of crime and punishment in the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women, a true crime play centered on the murder of George Sanders by George Brown with the possible complicity of Sanders’s wife, Anne. My particular interest lies in the staging of interior states that can be made visible only through a series of presentational theatrical conventions—the aside and the allegorical dumbshow--and what this materializing of the invisible might mean in terms of Protestant notions of testimony and providence. The stage can show, can transform into actions, what the scaffold and the pamphlet can only tell, a distinction that becomes vitally important when Brown’s confession on the scaffold fails to confirm the court’s ruling that Anne Sanders is as guilty as the rest except in an aside. The presentational convention of the aside establishes the stage as a medium able to reveal the soul of the figure on the scaffold where the gallows can only reveal the body.

Works Cited:

Campana, Joseph. “Staging Allegory,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 55:2 (2015): 327-39.

Dolan, Frances. “Gender, Moral Agency, and Dramatic Form in A Warning for Fair Women.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 29 (1989): 201-18.

Owens, Margaret. Stages of Dismemberment, University of Delaware Press, 2005

Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

Quick Bio: I'm an Associate Professor of English at New College of Florida. Most of my work is on early modern audiences, which involved some work on martyrdom because of its consistent production of wildly differing interpretations from its spectators; I'm thinking about it as a representational rather than an epistemological problem, which means that I'm interested in physical staging issues. I've also been thinking a lot about asides lately. I'm trying to use this paper to think about felony executions in religious and performance terms.