ABSTRACT
Early modern English culture had a physiological understanding of the ways in which authority operates. Analogies connecting the human body to monarchy and such curious beliefs as the King’s Two Bodies suggest that the body was enormously significant in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century political discourse. This chapter explores the political resonances of the pregnant female body depicted in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, specifically the ways in which the Duchess’s great belly challenges the universalized male human body as the dominant figure for authority. As a site of sexuality, regeneration and doubleness and as a literalization of the two-bodies-in-one construction of absolute power, the Duchess’s pregnancies, Webster suggests, not only recast female authority as natural but also subvert the underpinnings of absolutist discourse.
