Clever Women: Folkloric Adaptation and Women's Transitional Moments in Early Modern Drama

This thesis makes a cross-disciplinary and two-part argument: it calls for the establishment of a Clever Women tale-type category in the widely endorsed folkloric classification system known as the ATU. Secondly, it shows that Clever Women characters are employed on the early modern English stage in ways that comment on contemporary beliefs and practices concerning women's bodies and social positions. Examining a social construction that I define as the socio-biological spectrum of womanhood, this thesis traces Clever Women narratives in early modern drama that show Clever Women characters who attain patriarchally accepted physical and social identities along that spectrum through a subversive compliance to accepted women's roles and a linear progression from maid to wife and then to mother.

This thesis establishes new methodological frameworks whereby scholars can collaborate with and employ the folkloric, philological, anthropological, and phylogenetic studies to subsequent projects. First, it shows that establishing a Clever Women folkloric category will place women at the forefront of tales that are overtly concerned with their bodies and social stations. Then, case studies put into dialogue early modern play texts, folkloric types and motifs with a genesis in Indo-European oral traditions, and contemporary legal, medical, and religious works as they pertain to a woman's body and purpose within English society. I demonstrate that a Clever Woman on the early modern stage achieves agency by navigating the liminal spaces of her body and statuses in ways that allow her to dictate her social and biological outcomes. In this way, this thesis demonstrates the importance of folklore as a source for early modern playwrights' exploration of female agency and empowerment.