ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways in which the early Jacobean theater stages pregnant bodies by evoking historical precedents centered on pregnancy as a dangerous effect of the instability of women's bodies. By positioning a pregnant body as a node of meanings inviting interpretation and judgment, these plays evoke known precedents when women's bodies seemed to turn against their owners, when pregnancy put women in peril, and when the well-being of pregnant bodies was deliberately jeopardized. Danger and cruelty lying in wait for a pregnant woman were direct consequences of political, religious, or familial significances imposed on pregnancies at the time. Women thus could find themselves betrayed by their own bodies, and the theater foregrounded the tension between women experiencing their own pregnant bodies as joyous or dangerous.
