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

In the essay below, Bruster focuses on the mad speeches of the Jailer's Daughter, asserting that through the "mad language of this otherwise disempowered character" the power structure within the play is revealed, as are the social relationships and cultural changes in the Jacobean playhouse and Jacobean society.

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...