SOURCE: “‘Good queen, my lord, good queen’: Sexual Slander and the Trials of Female Authority in The Winter's Tale,” in Renaissance Drama, Vol. 25, 1994, pp. 89-118.

In the following essay, Kaplan and Eggert examine The Winter's Tale's relation to questions of female sexuality and authority during Queen Elizabeth's reign.

The legal history of early modern Englishwomen has not yet been written, though recent contributions suggest that scholars are beginning to rectify this oversight.¹ One productive point of entry into this important field is presented by defamation, generally defined in early modern England as an injury inflicted by the false and malicious imputation of a crime. The popularity of this charge and its redresses is registered in the records for both common law and ecclesiastical courts in this period, both of which evidence dramatic increases in slander cases. The value of slander for the exploration of early modern women's...