Cures for Chance

Adoptive Relations in Shakespeare and Middleton

Erin Ellerbeck

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English

University of Toronto Press
01 May 2022

Theatre Studies; Theatre: individual actors & directors; Theatre management; Literary studies: plays & playwrights; Literary reference works

Cures for Chance examines how early modern dramatic representations of adoption test conventional notions of family and nature.

Adoption allows families to modify, either overtly or covertly, what is considered to be the natural order. Cures for Chance explores how early modern English theatre questioned the inevitability of the biological family and proposed new models of familial structure, financial inheritance, and gendered familial authority. Because the practice of adoption circumvents sexual reproduction, its portrayal obliges audiences to reconsider ideas of nature and kinship.

This study elucidates the ways in which adoptive familial relations were defined, described, and envisioned on stage, particularly in the works of Shakespeare and Middleton. In the plays in question, families and individual characters create, alter, and manage familial relations. Throughout Cures for Chance, adoption is considered in the broader socioeconomic and political climate of the period. Literary works and a wide range of other early modern texts

including treatises on horticulture and natural history and household and conduct manuals

are analysed in their historical and cultural contexts. Erin Ellerbeck argues that dramatic representations of adoption test conventional notions of family by rendering the family unit a social construction rather than a biological certainty, and that in doing so, they evoke the alteration of nature by human hands that was already pervasive at the time.

By: Erin Ellerbeck
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Country of Publication: Canada
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 159mm, Spine: 17mm
Weight: 410g
ISBN: 9781487508784
ISBN 10: 1487508786
Pages: 184
Publication Date: 01 May 2022
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction: Shaping the Family 1. Shakespeare’s Adopted Children and the Language of Horticulture 2. Animal Parenting in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus 3. Adopted Bastards in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside 4. Adoptive Names in Middleton’s Women Beware Women Afterword: In loco parentis Bibliography

Erin Ellerbeck is an assistant professor of English at the University of Victoria.

Reviews for Cures for Chance: Adoptive Relations in Shakespeare and Middleton

Ellerbeck offers a rich and wholly engaging account of the lexicons of belonging and their relationships to nature. Focusing on Seneca's wonderful description of adoption as a 'cure for chance, ' this beautifully researched book explores the family unit as a contrived intervention in the poetics of nature and the imperatives of culture. Juxtaposing the work of Shakespeare and Middleton, Ellerbeck shows how early modern drama engages with the reconstitution of the family as an ethical and economic duty rather than a biological expectation. Thoughtful and provocative, Cures for Chance celebrates the power of kinship and the politics of kindness. - Charlotte Scott, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London Erin Ellerbeck's elegant and sophisticated study explores the unstable concept of 'adoption' in early modern England. This non-biological category disrupted patrilineality and destabilized the very idea of the family in a culture organized primarily through blood-based lineage. Ellerbeck's insightful analyses of plays by Shakespeare and Middleton reveal how familial fault lines were staged, but not resolved. This important book illuminates the development of identity and the family in early modern culture. - William C. Carroll, Professor Emeritus of English, Boston University This informed and lively book shows that there were many kinds of adoptive kinship in early modern England and analyses how Shakespeare and his contemporary Middleton dramatize and critique some of them. Ellerbeck suggests their plays raise modern questions about how far revisions of the family and modifications of biological reproduction should go. - Marianne Novy, Professor Emerita of English, University of Pittsburgh