ABSTRACT
While critics have acknowledged the cultural importance of curtain lectures, the gendered dynamics of household governance, the curtain lecture has yet to receive a full analysis as a distinct genre. This chapter explores the ways that curtain lectures complicate our understanding of how women's speech was represented. Critics have long argued that early modern society found connections between women's verbal and sexual transgressions. In curtain lectures the internal audience receives the curtain lecture negatively, interpreting it as a sign of sexual impropriety, even though the text also partially defends the speaker against this charge. The chapter argues that Shakespeare uses the figure of the curtain lecturer and its associations with infidelity in his portrayal of two falsely accused adulteresses: Desdemona and Hermione. The lasting effects of the early modern association of influential wifely speech with the concept of curtain lecturing are illustrated best by the Oxford English Dictionary's (OED) entry for the term.
