TY - BOOK AU - Ellerbeck,Erin TI - Cures for Chance: Adoptive Relations in Shakespeare and Middleton SN - 9781487508784 AV - PR3069.F35 E45 2022 U1 - 822.3/3 23 PY - 2021///] CY - Toronto PB - University of Toronto Press KW - Adoption in literature KW - English drama KW - Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1600 KW - History and criticism KW - Families in literature KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 16th Century KW - bisacsh KW - A Chaste Maid in Cheapside KW - Middleton KW - Renaissance drama KW - Shakespeare KW - Titus Andronicus KW - Women Beware Women KW - adoption KW - alteration of nature KW - cultivation KW - early modern literature KW - family KW - reproduction KW - theatre N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction: Shaping the Family --; Chapter One. Shakespeare’s Adopted Children and the Language of Horticulture --; Chapter Two. Animal Parenting in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus --; Chapter Three. Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Adopted Bastards --; Chapter Four. Adoptive Names in Middleton’s Women Beware Women --; Afterword: In loco parentis --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access N2 - Adoption allows families to modify, either overtly or covertly, what is considered to be the natural order. Cures for Chance explores how early modern English theatre questioned the inevitability of the biological family and proposed new models of familial structure, financial inheritance, and gendered familial authority. Because the practice of adoption circumvents sexual reproduction, its portrayal obliges audiences to reconsider ideas of nature and kinship. This study elucidates the ways in which adoptive familial relations were defined, described, and envisioned on stage, particularly in the works of Shakespeare and Middleton. In the plays in question, families and individual characters create, alter, and manage familial relations. Throughout Cures for Chance, adoption is considered in the broader socioeconomic and political climate of the period. Literary works and a wide range of other early modern texts – including treatises on horticulture and natural history and household and conduct manuals – are analysed in their historical and cultural contexts. Erin Ellerbeck argues that dramatic representations of adoption test conventional notions of family by rendering the family unit a social construction rather than a biological certainty, and that in doing so, they evoke the alteration of nature by human hands that was already pervasive at the time UR - https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487538965 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781487538965 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781487538965/original ER -