To browse Academia. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. This content downloaded from This essay analyzes the letters in light of their arguments as well as of the novel's editorial history, exploring the implications of a disconnect existing between the work and the readers in question, who, in reality, did not generally empathize with its protagonist's dilemma as presented by the Mercure, and moreover, who did not seem to have read the text.
This disconnect highlights a number of realities that a "history of reading" approach to late 17th-century literary culture can bring out. One is that, in the summer of its publication, the work was perhaps not accessible in the provincial towns that produced the new readers of this modern public and who wrote in to the Mercure. Second, literary demand in the late s, even as it was growing and touching new kinds of readers, expanded through a continuing interest in the didactic and romanesque genres of the ss, rather than the "modern novel" of Lafayette.
Some critics have argued that Middleton and Rowley's play The Changeling depicts a rape. This article engages that argument by re-reading the play, first in relation to Janet Halley's proposal that we "take a break" from the feminist project of "carrying a brief for" the feminine; and second in relation to recent historical research that deepens our understanding of the available ways of describing and assessing sexual coercion in seventeenth-century England.
Placing particular emphasis on Beatrice-Joanna's strategic, even exploitative, self-assertions, this article argues that the play does not depict rape as defined by statutes. Yet, as this article shows, the play participates in the history of sexual coercion and consent nonetheless. This is a history that motivates feminism. It is also a history from which we cannot take a break, however much we might wish to do so.
We can, however, take a break from trying to reach a verdict on Beatrice-Joanna's culpability in order to see how complexly the play depicts her agency. Through snowflakes that floated out of heaven's pale circle, she could hear voices crying. Soon they became the greetings of women; the shouts of noblemen; their children's' shrieks; the snorts and stamping of horse.
