“Youth is Drunke with Pleasure, and therefore Dead to all Goodnesse”: Regulating the Excess of the Erotic Early Modern Body

Steve Orman

doi:10.2478/texmat-2013-0027

Authors

Steve Orman Canterbury Christ Church University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/texmat-2013-0027

Abstract

This article investigates the erotic and youthful body in John Fletcher’s play The Faithful Shepherdess, written for The Children of the Queen’s Revels c.1607. For many early modern scholastic, medical, and conduct manual writers, the life stage of Youth was a particularly dangerous moment in an individuals’ life, a time where the body was in a constant state of flux and ruled by unhealthy bodily excess. Fletcher’s play presents an assortment of characters who are all ruled by or obsessed with their own youthful passions. This article engages with Galenic humoral theory, an area that has been neglected in scholarship on Fletcher’s play, to provide a close analysis of Youth and erotic excess on the early modern stage.

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Author Biography

Steve Orman, Canterbury Christ Church University

Steve Orman is a doctoral student and Associate Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. His research focuses on Youth culture and ideas of bodily excess in Early Modern England, specifically in the plays of the Jacobean boy actor Nathan Field. He aided Dr Peter Merchant with a critical edition of Sarah Fyge Egerton’s The Female Advocate, published by the Juvenilia Press in 2010. He is currently preparing a critical edition of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of the World for Valancourt Books.

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