Satire and anxieties concerning female sexuality and transexuality in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England

The thesis employs Marston’s Certaine Satyres, The Scourge o f Villanie, and Everard Guilpin’s Skialetheia to expose satiric portraits of late Elizabethan characters and vices which in turn reflect themes of gender and sexual perversions. These themes are traced throughout contemporary literary works to expose their literary tradition and the development of their treatment. The location and exploration of types in literary traditions and society reveals evidence of a greater overarching fear of the malleability of gender through sexuality and social change, a process of transexuality. The examination of attitudes and fears surrounding sexuality and the self preceding from an enquiry of Marston’s and Guilpin’s satires is completely original and diverges from the general consensus of literary criticism of the satires. The works analysed within the thesis are from a wide range of genres spanning the period from 1580 to 1630, including satire, epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy and pamphlets, with the additional support of an eclectic mix of cognate visual and cultural material. By exploring the literary representations and cultural treatment of figures of gender and sexual deviancy the study contributes a greater understanding of the anxieties concerning female sexuality and transexuality in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England.