‘Unfixed Virginity: Metaphor and Defloration in Early Modern Drama’. Completed at the University of Sussex in 2022

My thesis explored the relationship between metaphor and virginity in early modern culture, with a focus on Shakespearean drama. It argued that virginity was an inherently destabilizing and imaginative concept, and that writers, especially playwrights, capitalise on this instability in their plays. I develop an account of virginity as ‘unfixed’ by examining puzzling and paradoxical examples from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V, as well as Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling. My approach of ‘unfixed virginity’ reflects how virginity was circulating at a broad imaginative level across culture, a metaphorical concept produced within a patriarchal social context.