SOURCE: "The Jailer's Daughter and the Politics of Madwomen's Language," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3, Fall, 1995, pp. 277-300.

In the essay that follows, Bruster explores the character of the jailer's daughter as "'a pivotal figure in Jacobean drama, " highlighting relations of power in the play and commenting on Jacobean culture and social change.

The jailer's daughter in Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) is a pivotal figure in Jacobean drama. More than any other character in Shakespeare's late plays, she embodies changes in both dramatic representation and the larger culture of early modern England. As if testifying to the social and dramatic difference of this important character (who is absent, it should be pointed out, in the source materials from which the play's more familiar main plot derived), Shakespeare and Fletcher work to isolate her from the rest of the drama's action and characters.¹ Grounded in a...